Crane Brinton A History Of Western Morals

127225

CRANE

BRINTON

A HISTORY OF

WESTERN

MORALS

Harcourt, Brace and Company • New York

© 1959 BY CRANE BRINTON

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE

REPRODUCED JN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MECHANICAL MEANS,

INCLUDING MIMEOGRAPH AND TAPE RECORDER, WITHOUT

PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER.

FIRST EDITION

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER. 59-6426
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO THE CENTER AND THE FARM

Acknowledgments

I AM MOST GRATEFUL for the opportunity of spending a year as Fellow of the
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, Cali-
fornia, a most remarkable institution, already legendary in spite of its youth.
The legends describe it variously, as the "rest cure," the "country club," the
"think-shop," the "bee-hive"; for me, it has been the Abbaye de Theleme
and its motto truly "Do what thou wilt." Without this year of complete free-
dom, I could not have completed the book at this time, nor, indeed, have
written this book at all. In fairness I should list as those to whom I owe a
debt for help in this book all of my colleagues at the Center. There is nothing
vague about this debt, though it was incurred in the apparently fugitive
course of informal discussion, often mere conversation. I am sure that many
of these colleagues could hear the echo of their voices almost anywhere in
the course of this book. I am grateful to them, and to Ralph Tyler and the
rest of the most permissive "administration" — the irony always implied in
such quotation marks here carries no trace of malice — who made life so
easy for us all. I wish also to express my gratitude to the many in the Stan-
ford community with whom the Center lives in a fruitful symbiosis.

More specifically, I thank David Landes, who lias read large parts of the
original manuscript and made discerning criticisms, which I have tried hard
to take into account; Roy Willis, my assistant, who did much, much more
than mere leg work for me — though he did a great deal of that, and most un-
complainingly; Mrs. Jeanne Gentry and Mrs. Mary Hurt of the secretarial
staff at the Center, who struggled successfully with my untidy manuscript;

vii

J. Elliott Janney, who, along with Lecky, showed me the value of the con-
cept of the moral type or ideal; William Pullin, who set me at this difficult
task; my secretary in Cambridge, Miss Elizabeth F. Hoxie, whose help as
usual has been invaluable.

CRANE BRINTON

Cambridge, Mass.
27 October 195S

CONTENTS

I

INTRODUCTION
page 1

II

ORIGINS: THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST
page 30

III

ORIGINS: THE JEWS AND THE GREEKS
page 49

IV

GREECE: THE GREAT AGE
page 70

V
THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD

page 105

VI

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE JUDAEO-CHRISTIAN TRADITION

page 142

VII

THE MIDDLE AGES
page 176

IX

Contents

VIII

THE REFORMATION

page 212

IX
THE RENAISSANCE

page 242

X

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
page 268

XI

THE AGE OF REASON

page 293

XII
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

page 329

XIII
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

page 372

XIV

THE PROBLEM OF MORAL PROGRESS

page 413

XV

CONCLUSION: IN WHICH NOTHING IS CONCLUDED

page 445

SUGGESTED READINGS

page 481

INDEX
page 487

Introduction

IN SEPTEMBER 1957 there appeared in most American newspapers a news
photograph that showed a Negro girl in Little Rock, Arkansas, after a vain
attempt to enter a white high school, leaving the premises with a group of
whites trailing and abusing her. The face of one white girl was contorted in a
shocking way; the Negro girl looked dignified and self-controlled. Commen-
tators in the North were unanimous that the expression of the Negro girl
symbolized the good and the expression of the white girl the bad; and com-
mentators in the South were at least much disturbed by the picture, for they
could not help making the same specific classifications of good and bad that
their Northern colleagues did. My point here, however, is not so much the
fact that in a certain sense moral goodness and moral badness were in this
striking photograph made real, concrete, even "objective" or "universal."
My point is, rather, that, dismissing for the moment the great philosophical
problems lurking here, it is clear that no one could look at that photo-
graph in quite the way he could look at a diagram of the occupation of
Saturn by the moon that might well have appeared in the same issue of his
newspaper or news weekly as did the photograph from Little Rock. Even the
diagram of the occultation of Saturn might conceivably have stirred the emo-
tions of an occasional reader, for it might have acted as a trigger to release a
chain of thought-feeling about the vastness and impersonality of the astron-
omer's universe and the smallness and helplessness of man, a chain for which
much in popular contemporary culture supplies the materials. But the picture
of the good Negro girl and the bad white girl (some editorial writers preferred

A History of Western Morals

to call the white girl "evidently neurotic," a fact again good grist for the
historian of morals) roused very strong emotions indeed, emotions best de-
scribed as those of moral indignation.

One very obvious difference in the two cases cited above throws light on
the special conditions under which moral emotions are commonly felt. The
newspaper reader knew and felt at once when he saw the faces of the two
girls that "something should be done about it," that he himself might do
something about it, write a letter to the editor, to his congressman, join some-
thing, pay dues, demonstrate, at the very least express an opinion. To no sane
reader did the thought occur that he could do anything at all about the occul-
tation of Saturn; in that form, the thought probably did not even occur to the
reader who happened to be a devotee of the newspaper's daily column on
astrology.

Not very long ago, as historical time goes, almost everybody would have
felt that he could, by himself or with the help of priest or magician, do some-
thing about matters we now dismiss from our minds — and our adrenals — as
concerns of the astronomer, the meteorologist, or some other expert who
himself can do no more than follow Bacon's aphorism "Nature is not to be
conquered save by obeying her." Call it growth of natural science, or of
rationalism, or of common sense: something has pushed whole areas of our
experience quite out of what we take to be our power, our will, even out of
the customary field of action of any god or cosmic "force" capable of concern
for humanity.

A great deal, however, is left for us to do something about as moral beings
inspired by moral emotions. Any newspaper, any newscast, will supply all
that the most hopeful or the most indignant need for moral exercise. A group
of determined pacifists set out in true Western style as witnesses to the eternal
verities to sail from Honolulu to the banned area in the Pacific where Ameri-
can authorities are testing atomic weapons; their little ketch is duly stopped
only a mile or so from port by court injunction. A teen-aged girl stabs to death
her divorced mother's lover and is gently handed over by the court to the
custody of her maternal grandmother. Peruvian university students greet a
good-willing Vice-President of the United States with a shower of vegetables,
mixed with a few stones. The French government and people behave toward
the Algerians as the British government and people forty years ago behaved
toward the Irish. A Russian representative at the United Nations once more
asserts that the United States is striving to subject the whole world to its
capitalist tyranny; an American representative once more replies that it is the

Introduction

Russians who seek to subject us all to Communist tyranny. An Italian bishop
is sued in a secular court for libeling a freethinking couple married in a sec-
ular ceremony by declaring from his pulpit that the couple is living in sin.
American automotive engineers add ten more pounds of chromium and
twenty more unneeded horsepower to their next year's models, and the com-
pany business executives, who, as a liberal weekly points out, are the masters
of the engineers and the real villains in the case, add another two or three
hundred dollars to the price of their cars. A newspaper editorial points out
that Americans spend more money on cosmetics than they do on books. A
sociologist in an interview gives our society twenty years at most before its
final destruction.

I have in the above paragraph, which could be indefinitely expanded,
mixed the high and the low, the dignified and the undignified, quite without
ironic intent. It is surely a good rigged random sample. I should be aston-
ished if anyone could read it in this mid-twentieth century without experienc-
ing at least a trace of what I have called moral indignation. The reading, and
the train of associations set off by the reading, would surely also bring
to many at least a trace of moral satisfaction. The historian of morals in the
West, however, is pretty well forced to conclude from the record that there
is in this human world of ours more moral indignation than moral satisfaction,
that man as moralist is essentially a complainer. It is always easy to
recognize man the moralist: the sequence is clear to an observer, and can be
clear to the willing self-analyst. First the experience — another French cabinet
falls; then the emotion, which may run from tired annoyance to refreshed
anger; then the blaming, the censuring — these damn fool French, why can't
they . . . ; then the doing something about it — we ought to. ... Note
carefully that in this sequence there is little room for any attempt to "under-
stand" why that cabinet fell in the first place.

Yet this analysis of the moral process may well be itself — in fact, it is —
stained with our inescapable human nature, or at least with the nature of an
"intellectual." For the historical record is for the most part made by the kind
of people we must call intellectuals; and intellectuals live, succeed, shine, by
making us all aware of how much is wrong with the world. This statement
would appear to be particularly true of intellectuals in the twentieth-century
Western world.

Yet it will not do to exaggerate the gap between the intellectual and his
fellow men. There are many definitions of man, from the "forked radish"
and the "animal with opposable thumbs," to the "image of his Maker" and

A History of Western Morals

the "animal that knows it is going to die." Not the least far-reaching would
be simply: the moral animal. For though we may grant to the physiologist
that the emotions of man are bodily functions of a kind that go on also in
other animal bodies, it seems unlikely that any other animal is stirred to
fear, or anger, or contentment by any awareness of a difference between right
and wrong, justice and injustice. We may fashionably amend the old phil-
osophic tag to read, "Nothing in the intellect unless previously in the
endocrines," but there in the intellect stands, nevertheless, the moral inherit-
ance of our species, the bewildering, fascinating, unavoidable rights and
wrongs of our past — and present.

ii

It should be clear indeed that our subject is full of difficulties that have to be
called philosophic. The semantic grace that begins so many books in these
days seems especially needed in a history of morals. I shall try throughout
this study to make consistent use of three closely related words which I shall
now define, not as all readers would define or understand them — such
unanimity about the full meaning of words of this sort is wholly impossible in
the modern Western world — but not, I trust, in any erratic and private way.
At least they are all exceedingly common words, so common that not even the
pure in taste can object to them.

First, I shall use the word "conduct" to refer to the reported actions of
human beings, alone or in groups. The historian, of course, must almost
always deal with reports, usually written reports, of the actions or events with
which he is concerned; such reports vary in accuracy, but the historian has
at his command ways of testing their accuracy, ways not identical with those
of the laboratory experimenter but good enough so that he is justified in us-
ing to describe these actions the blessed word "facts."1 The actions that make
up what I shall call "conduct" cover the whole range of human capabilities,
from words to blows — and detonations of bombs. Perhaps the word "con-
duct" has some overtones of formality, even artificiality: "conduct in the bed"
is a phrase that hardly comes naturally. "Behavior" is certainly a very close
synonym, and may seem preferable to some. But in the form "behaviorism"
the word refers to a specific set of doctrines — or dogmas — in the history of

1 1 forbear further discourse on the nature of "facts," which we all know nowadays is
less obvious than our grandfathers thought it. To the interested reader I recommend
a meaty little essay of L. J. Henderson's, "An Approximate Definition of Fact," Uni-
versity of California, Publications in Philosophy, XIV, 1932, p. 179.

Introduction

formal psychology, to the work of a whole school which goes far beyond
reporting or describing human conduct, which does, indeed, try to explain and
control human conduct. I wish to use the word "conduct" as far as possible
in a descriptive, not an explanatory, sense. But the distinction between these
two words, which both denote human doing, is perhaps near to hairsplitting;
both "conduct" and "behavior" quite readily take those indispensable adjec-
tives "good" and "bad."

Second, I shall use the terms "ethics" or "ethical principles" to refer to
the statements men make about what their conduct, or the conduct of others,
or of both, ought to be. Only the very self-conscious semanticist will try to
pursue that word "ought" further; it is surely one of the clearest of words,
usually, one hopes, clearer to the individual using it than "is." Much of the
time I shall use the words "ethics" and "ethical" to designate some specific
part of the great and varied body of formal philosophical writing that com-
monly goes under that name and that is well-enough known in the United
States as the subject matter of college courses in ethics. Here a caution is
necessary. Philosophers have built up a tradition that, especially in the field
of ethics, commonly does not list as philosophers many writers who seem to
a layman to have philosophized. Nietzsche, for example, usually makes the
grade as a philosopher, perhaps because he was a German and left behind
him fragments of a book, The Will to Power, which he may have meant to be
what the philosophers call a systematic treatise; but Pascal does not often
make the grade, nor does Rousseau; and La Rochefoucauld almost never
makes it. These, it seems, are "men of letters," and members of a nation
known for its lack of philosophic depth. La Rochefoucauld, in particular, is
usually labeled a "moralist." I shall here pay little attention to such distinc-
tions, and shall treat as "ethics" all expressions of opinion as to how men
ought to behave, from the Mosaic code through folk proverbs and newspaper
columns of "Advice to the lovelorn" to the Ethics Mathematically Demon-
strated of Spinoza, which last is a singularly lofty flight of pure philosophy.

Third, I shall use "morals" and "morality" in a somewhat less obvious
sense, but one that seems to me to underlie the original Latin mos, moris and
its descendants in our modern Western languages. If "conduct" is used con-
sistently to indicate what men do, and "ethics" to indicate their appraisal of
the value of their actions, then "moral" may be used to sum up the whole
human situation involved in the existence of both conduct and evaluation of
conduct, of both the "is" and the "ought" in human awareness of past, pres-
ent, and future. Our moral awareness is a state of tension familiar to us all,

A History of Western Morals

no matter what our religion or our philosophy, a state of tension summoned
up in us all by the common-sense word "conscience." I realize that there are
all sorts of difficulties about this use of "morals." For one thing, such a use
implies that what I call "ethics" has some effect on what I call "conduct," and
even that what I call "conduct" has some relation to what I call "ethics"; both
these conclusions have been rejected by some thinkers, simplifiers, it is true,
and, like the solipsist, at the extreme or lunatic fringe of philosophic thought.
Most of us would agree that there is a relation between human thinking, even
about ethics, and human doing. About the nature of that relation there has
always in the West been great dispute.

Conduct, ethics, morals are not here used to stand for "real" entities, but
as instruments of analysis, that is, of convenience. To fall back as one must in
such matters on a figure of speech: conduct, ethics, morals are not like so
many separate islands in the sea; they are more nearly like, but not just like
chemical elements which combine in various proportions to make compounds,
elements moreover never or rarely found in a pure state in nature. In partic-
ular I wish to be firmly understood as not here maintaining that writers I have
classed as primarily concerned with ethics are therefore concerned with
"mere" words, with something therefore not quite real; nor do I maintain
that such writers are wholly concerned with the "ought," with standards of
value, and pay no attention to the "is," to the ways in which men establish
and employ standards of value. The great systematic philosophers, an Aris-
totle, an Aquinas, a Locke, have much to say about conduct as well as about
ethics, and about the resolution of these two in morals. Even in the sermon,
where the preacher is making a special use of human awareness of the
"ought," there is often a great deal of information for the historian interested
in the "is." There are, of course, degrees of possible concern with "pure"
ethics and with "pure" conduct. If you want to feel the difference between
the two extremes, read Kant's Metaphysics of Ethics, or his What Is Enlight-
enment?, and then turn to any clinical case history, from one by Hippocrates
to one by Freud or to the work of any good naturalist.2

We may indeed go further into metaphor. Morality is at once a part of
man's being and the whole of it. The easy metaphor is the familiar one of a
strand, a thread, interwoven with others in a fabric that would not be the
fabric it is without all the threads. But the part of morals in the human whole

^Emphatically not to naturalists who figure in most histories of literature, and espe-
cially not to Thoreau, who could never look at a bird without seeing the universe —
and Henry Thoreau.

Introduction

is not neatly separable by the mind's eye as a thread. In a less dignified
figure of speech, the moral is simply an ingredient in a mixture, a dish, in
which the ingredients as we experience them are inextricably melted or
mingled, not to be separated in this real world, but only in the unreal world
of analysis — at most, to be subtly distinguished one from another by our
moral taste buds.

Thus the moral in our human situation is not to be separated from the
rest of our universe; yet the good we seek as moral beings is not, under
analysis, the true we seek as thinking beings, nor is it the beautiful we seek
as emotional beings. Our conventional vocabulary separates these as well as
they can be separated. Our universe of moral discourse does not — I nearly
wrote the revealing "should not" — deal with terms like "truth," "common
sense," "reason," nor with terms like "beauty," "taste," "manners," "civil-
ity," but with terms like "good" and "evil," "justice" and "injustice," "strug-
gle," "victory," "defeat," "conscience," "guilt" As moral beings, we all
bear an uneasy burden from which most of us can hardly escape with
serenity by making truth, beauty, and justice quite synonymous — or by
separating them out in closed compartments of meaning. In particular, we
cannot avoid thinking about morals, yet we cannot, peace to Spinoza, think
about them, demonstrate them, after the manner of mathematics.

I shall try to adhere to the common use in matters of morals; "good"
evaluates conduct or ethical standards as morally desirable, "bad" evaluates
conduct or ethical standards as morally undesirable. Both words have also
a common descriptive use, nicely brought out in a casual remark about a
young professor who could never be relied on to keep appointments or serve
on committees or in general do the little drudgeries expected of him: "Is
Blank really good enough to be that bad?" Modern ethical philosophers have
been very conscious — justifiably so — of the semantic difficulties of these and
other words the moralist has to use: "right," "wrong," "just," "unjust,"
"duty," "conscience," and a great many more.3

The historian of Western morals must record a very wide range, a whole
spectrum of specific contents of recorded conduct and recorded ethics. He
must also note that there is a persistent belief in the West that in spite of this
range — in conduct, for example, from that of St. Anthony to that of the

3 The reader will find helpful here C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language, New Haven,
Yale University Press, 1945; Richard M. Hare, The Language of Morals, Oxford, Ox-
ford University Press, 1952; C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory, New York,
Harcourt, Brace, 1930.

A History of Western Morals

Marquis de Sade; in ethics, from the belief that war is always bad to the
belief that it is always good — there is really both in conduct and in ethics
a kind of center, norm, or average which does not vary much with place or
time. Here again, however, there is no full agreement as to -just where the
center lies, as to just what ordinary human nature and ordinary human
capacities really are. All this will be clearer as our story progresses.

But first I must, speaking as historian, as recorder, note that from the
very beginning of Western history in Greece and in the Ancient Near East
there have been constantly recurring problems in ethics that have not in three
thousand years been solved to the common satisfaction of all men. Can the
individual really choose between doing what he thinks good and what he
thinks evil? Is it right for the individual who happens to be born a Moslem
to have several wives, but wrong for the individual who happens to be born
a Christian? Does the kind of thinking you who are struggling with these lines
are now doing really affect your conduct? These are the old problems, indeed,
one may say the old chestnuts, of freedom of the will, ethical relativity, and
the place of reason in human conduct. Socrates and his friends threshed them
all out long ago; one may say that in the first book of Plato's Republic the
principal ethical positions Western men have taken are already clearly stated.
The voice of Thrasymachus, who said that justice is what you can get away
with, but said so rather more elegantly than this, has echoed down the ages;
but so, too, has the voice of Socrates, who said much nicer things much more
nicely about justice.4

Now there is a sense in which to say that these and similar problems have
not been solved, that men still give the sorts of attempted solution to them
given millennia ago, is to take a definite philosophical position toward them.
I have above tried to take refuge in my role as a mere historian, a mere
recorder, but something in me — perhaps, appropriately enough in a history
of morals, my conscience — compels me to admit that no refuge will do in the
end. The historian, like the scientist, can keep awareness of these and similar
problems out of his daily work; but both historian and scientist are human
beings, and ethical, indeed metaphysical, concern is part of the human con-
dition.

Some of the popularizers of a current of contemporary philosophy for

4 Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Glaucon, Adeimantus, and Socrates himself do not, of
course, exhaust the range of ideas on ethics, but they do sketch the outlines of what
would be the range of such ideas in the West, from confonmsm and traditionalism to
pragmatism, opportunism, and idealism; they set up the spectrum in its broad lines.

8

Introduction

which there is no good name, for "logical positivism" will not quite do, have
come close to a kind of skepticism, even nihilism, about ethical propositions.
Mr. Stuart Chase, who in his successful Tyranny of Words (1938) would
have us say "blah-blah" instead of, for example, "natural rights," comes close
to the proposition often attributed to the logical positivists: that if any kind
of statement cannot be tested by an "operation," essentially like that done
by a natural scientist seeking to verify a theory, it is "nonsense," and had
better never have been entertained in the mind. We cannot here attempt to
disentangle the many complexities of this semantic problem as it appears to
our age. Suffice it to note that there is, if only among popularizers, not among
true philosophers, a current tendency to put all statements not basically like
those the scientist makes ("empirically verifiable," if you wish, although
these, too, are weasel words) in one class of "nonsense," "drivel," somehow,
unfortunately, communicable almost as if it were rational sense.5

The "blah-blah" or "no-nonsense" school of popularizers are, no doubt,
extremists; and they do not, of course, by any means dismiss from their con-
cern— and that of their readers — the age-old, insoluble, unavoidable,
essential problems of philosophy they claim they are trying to get rid of
entirely. But they make us all a little more self-conscious about our attitudes
toward these problems, I feel that I owe the reader some account of my own
attitudes toward — most emphatically not my solution of — some of these
recurring problems of ethics, and, therefore, of morals. These attitudes are
so affected by my training as a historian that I shall hardly seem to the phi-
losopher to do more than beg the question, for I start with the assertion that
on these great problems many, perhaps most, thoughtful men in the West
hospitably accept and cherish simultaneously in their conscious, not just in
their unconscious, minds, logically quite incompatible conclusions. For the
modern Westerner exposed to any natural science, from popular to pure, it is
impossible not to believe in some sort of determinism; but it is also impossible
for him not to believe in some sort of freedom of the will. He therefore

5 One example among many. The discoverer of "Parkinson's Law" comments on the
famous passage in the Social Contract in which Rousseau states his problem as finding
"a form of association ... by means of which each, coalescing with all, may never-
theless obey only himself and remain as free as before" as follows: "There might be
no great harm in reading this piece of eighteenth-century rhetoric provided that the
antidote were to follow. The student who is advised to read drivel should at least be
warned that it is drivel he is being asked to read " C. Northcote Parkinson, The Evo-
lution of Political Thought, London, University of London Press, 1958, p. 10. Profes-
sor Parkinson's antidote to drivel turns out to be a mixture of prehistory, social
anthropology, and comparative history, taken in a fine mood of faith in a real world
of no-nonsense.

A History of Western Morals

believes in both, believes that he has a will, indeed is a will, not to be further
defined in physiological terms, which makes "free" choices, and also that there
is an unbroken and unbreakable chain of cause and effect in the universe, of
which he is part.6

It is true that there are various systematic ways of thinking by which a
Westerner can soften, disguise, or, if you prefer, reconcile, these logical
opposites. He may, for instance, believe in "determinism" but reject "fatal-
ism." Theology, metaphysics, ethics, common sense, all contribute to this
process of reconciling logical opposites, a process indispensable for almost
all of us. The Vulgdrpositivismus which declares that such activity of the mind
is quite unprofitable, mere nonsense, cuts itself off further from humanity
than does the most otherworldly of idealisms. Indeed, a system like the fa-
mous Hegelian dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, though no "operation"
approaching that of the natural scientist can be performed on it, is a kind of
recognition that human beings in this real world must eat their cake and have
it; all of us are common-sense Hegelians and common-sense Benthamites
when we need to be.

So, too, with the old problem of ethical relativity. It was impossible even
for the Greeks, sure as they were that their own ways of living were the only
right ones, to deny that their barbarian neighbors had different ways. The
first few generations of anthropologists, not unmoved by the pioneering sci-
entist's desire to expose the errors of accepted belief, were perhaps too insist-
ent on the respectability in Africa or New Guinea of conduct shocking to
nineteenth-century Western man: "The Wadigo regard it as disgraceful, or at
least as ridiculous for a girl to enter into marriage as a virgin."7 Indeed, it
has never been possible for a sane Westerner to deny that human conduct
showed unmistakable variations in different times, places, and even indi-
viduals, and, furthermore, that the justification or evaluation of such conduct,
that is, ethics in our sense, also varied widely and unmistakably. Yet again
it has been difficult for most Westerners to accept full radical ethical rela-

6 Denis de Rougemont has put with epigrammatic neatness what I have been trying to
say: in these "necessary tensions" (he cites "transcendence" and "immanence," "free-
dom" and "authority," and others, much like those I here bring up) "the two terms
are true, contradictory, and essential" Man's Western Quest, New York, Harper,
1957, p. 116. Italics mine. Also Arthur Koestler, "for we are moving here through
strata that are held together by the cement of contradiction." The Invisible Writing,
Boston, Beacon Press, 1954, p. 349.

7 E. Westermarck, Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, 2nd ed., London, Mac-
millan, 1917, Vol. n, p. 422, quoting from O. Baumann, Usambara (1891).

10

Introduction

tivism, that is, the doctrine that right and wrong are for each individual what
at a given moment he thinks or feels they are. The polar-opposite doctrine,
that right and wrong are absolute, universals unaffected by what we call time
and place, the same always and everywhere, has surely been at least as far
from ordinary Western acceptance. Nevertheless, some residual belief that the
distinction between good and evil is not one rooted solely in human conven-
ience and human history, but has something to do with the structure of the
universe, has in our world survived even among those who have given up the
Judaeo-Christian belief in a God who made both good and evil. Most West-
erners today would surely be reluctant to accept the concept of "evil" as on
a level with the concept of "weed," neither more nor less absolute, neither
more nor less built into the structure of the universe, neither more nor less
a matter of our convenience.8

Our third old chestnut of a problem, though it, too, is as ancient as the
Greeks, looks today a bit fresher, which is to say that the debate about it is
livelier than that about free will or ethical relativism. The unpalatable ex-
tremes are there: the intellectualist doctrine that at least potentially men
can reason logically, even, as Spinoza held, mathematically, about the dis-
tinctions between right and wrong, arrive at demonstrably correct and per-
fectly communicable conclusions about them, and, finally, make their conduct
conform to the results of their reasoning; and the anti-intellectualist doctrine
that reason is in these matters of conduct either quite helpless, or at most the
"slave of the passions," that all reasoning is rationalizing, that even if phi-
losophers could agree — and they cannot agree — as to standards of right and
wrong, even the philosophers, let alone the rest of us, would still follow drives,
urges, impulses, instincts, sentiments, species-specific acts, conscious and
unconscious. Though perhaps, in terms of metaphysical concern, this question
of the role of reason in morals is as insoluble as our others, the inevitable
compromises men make about it in their own minds are in these days at least
fairly obvious. Few of us can dismiss the work of two generations of psy-
chologists and go back to what really was the common belief of the eighteenth-
century Enlightenment, that is, that only bad environment, especially faulty

8 1 make the above statement in full awareness that it is infinitely debatable, and can
be misleading But I do think it is a statement that can help focus the problem of
ethical relativity. Thistles and roses sub specie aeternitatis— perhaps even sub specie
Linnaei — are not what they are to gardeners. But liars and honest men? Or even Hitler
and Lincoln? Surely in ethical matters are we not reluctant to think of ourselves as
mere cultivators of our gardens?

11

A History of Western Morals

education, mistaken religious training, and bad political and economic insti-
tutions, prevents all men from thinking alike on ethical matters, and from
adapting their conduct to the results of their thinking. We agree, if not with
the Freudians, at least with much of Freud, that the obstacles to clear think-
ing and to acting in accord with such thinking are much more complex and
persistent than our predecessors thought they were. We are alerted to the
presence everywhere of rationalizing, wishful thinking, propaganda, preju-
dice, brainwashing, motivational research, and other evidences that the world
is not yet the world Condorcet foresaw, nor even the world young H. G. Wells
foresaw.

Yet a chastened belief in the uses of the instrument of thought has sur-
vived modern anti-intellectualism. Indeed, in precisely the field of ethics
we are here concerned with, our century has seen the rise not, perhaps, of a
"school" in the old sense, but of a number of writers on ethics who — though
they might not like it put this way — seem to have as a common aim the
salvaging of a place for reason in the establishment of ethical standards for the
effective guiding of human conduct.9 It is no longer fashionable, and probably
was never quite possible, to "think with the blood." We shall, in short, here
concern ourselves with ethics, with "ideas" about good and bad, right and
wrong, with "values," with no worries lest we are dealing with "mere froth
on the surface of the waves," nor even with "mere superstructure." Morality
is a relation between ethics and conduct in human societies, a relation that
always includes what we may here unworriedly call "thinking," or, more self-
consciously, some sort of activity in the frontal lobe of the brain.

Whether this is a causal relation and if so what kind of causal relation are
most certainly questions of the kind we have above called "old chestnuts." In
its simplest form, one much influenced by popular, or, rather, pseudo-,
Marxism in our day, the question can be put: Do ethics — that is, ideas about
what a person's conduct should be — cause, or initiate, or at least affect that
person's conduct? I have elsewhere suggested that such questions, if not,
perhaps, to be dismissed as "meaningless," as the purveyors of popular
semantics like to do, can at least be bypassed with profit by the historian,
much as the engineer and, one suspects, a good many physicists bypass

9 C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language, is a good sampling, and through its notes and
references a good guide to recent work in the field. See also the list of "pertinent
literature" in Arthur Pap, Elements of Analytic Philosophies, New York, Macmillan
1949, pp. 64-65. '

12

Introduction

certain questions of an "ultimate" kind as to the nature of matter, energy, and
the like.10

A concrete case should be useful here to dismiss this problem, and pre-
pare the way for a somewhat different problem, our sources of information
about the conduct of men in the past, which will concern us in the next section
of this chapter. In the troubles over desegregation in the South of the United
States, troubles touched off by the Supreme Court decision of 1954 that seg-
regation in public schools is unconstitutional, it is quite clear, is, indeed, a
"fact," that a number of Negroes in many Southern towns and cities want
desegregation and are actively organized to try to get it. They are refusing
to accept a specific kind of social and political inequality. But that kind of
inequality is condemned as wrong in almost all the sources of ideas about the
nature of our society available to the educated or partly educated Negro.
Certainly there are other reasons for the conduct of these Negroes than their
training in American ethics (I am here deliberately using these terms as I
have earlier defined them) . But surely is it not absurd to expect that they can
be so trained, exposed in a society like ours to creeds and codes like the
preamble to the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the like,
and to the constant examples of the American drive toward many specific
kinds of social equality with which all our cultural life is filled, and then
calmly accept the status of an Uncle Tom?11 Surely can we not now reject

!0 In my The Shaping of the Modern Mind (New York, New American Library,
1953, p. 9), I suggest that the automotive engineer does not ask whether the spark
or the gasoline "causes" the motor to run, or whether spark or gasoline is more "im-
portant," or "fundamental." Applied to the present problem of the relation between
"ideas" and "interests," "drives," "material conditions," "sentiments," this analogy no
doubt presents all the shocking weaknesses of such imprecise uses of the human mind.
But T do not mean to suggest that the "ideal" is the spark and the "material" the
gasoline, nor vice versa. All I mean to suggest is that as for the engineer no internal
combustion engine without both gasoline and spark, or their equivalents, as in diesel
engines, so for the historian: he can fearlessly assert that nothing happens in history
without the presence of both ideas and material conditions. In concrete instances of
human conduct, it is no doubt useful to try to estimate the part played in such con-
duct by intellectual elements and the part played by emotional elements; but no for-
mula will work for an average or generalized case. Compare Stevenson, "To ask
whether beliefs in general direct attitudes in general, or whether the causal connection
goes rather in the opposite direction, is simply a misleading question." (Stevenson,
Ethics and Language, p. 5.)

11 1 had just come to review and possibly revise the above sentences when I found the
following: A Negro businessman in Montgomery, Alabama, comments: "We've got
the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the Bill of Rights, the United States
Supreme Court, American democracy and democratic principles and sentiment, Re-
publican and Democratic sympathy, national politics and world history all on our
side." New York Times, December 29, 1957, Section VI, p. 38.

13

A History of Western Morals

the despairing innocence of an Orwell? Even with constant repetition from
above, the Orwellian slogan "All men are created equal, only some are more
equal than others" will not always work on the underdog. Motivational
research has not yet quite eliminated, or explained, moral man.

It is tempting to go on to a much broader generalization that ideas about
human equality, the "dignity of man," and the like have played a part in
other risings of underdog groups, at least since with the Stoics and the
Christians such ideas clearly enter the record. But the record of what the
underdog thought and felt is so incomplete! We know that most members of
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People are aware
of the ideas of Thomas Jefferson on human equality, that they feel the kind
of pressures toward egalitarianism our culture exerts. But we have no infor-
mation as to what went on in the mind even of a leader like Spartacus in the
so-called slave revolt of the first century B.C. We know that he was a Thra-
cian, perhaps enslaved by force, and that he was clearly a leader, a "su-
perior." But had he ever heard of Stoic ideas on human equality, which,
though stated somewhat coldly and abstractly, are clear and far-reaching?
Had his followers any glimmering of such ideas? We just do not know. It is,
however, most unlikely that thousands of Spartacists could have held to-
gether as a fighting group unless some of them had "ideas" about what they
were doing there in their fortified camp in the crater of Vesuvius.

Even for the Middle Ages we do not have by any means the kind of in-
formation needed to be certain that Christian ideas on equality played a part
in risings of the underdogs. But there are intriguing straws of evidence, on
which the not-too-cautious mind can build. The well-known slogan of the
English Peasant War of the fourteenth century

When Adam delved and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?

would seem to be evidence that the Christian holy writings were playing then
the revolutionary role they have so often played — and which is so obviously
there, built into them. With the sixteenth century we do, however, begin to get
a great deal of the necessary information about what the active participants
in social and political movements wanted.

I have dwelt perhaps too long on this problem of the part "ideas" play in
human conduct; but I confess to harboring the hope that some of my readers
may at least worry it over a bit in their minds. For it seems to me that most
educated and interested Americans, or, at any rate, many such, do accept un-

14

Introduction

critically certain attitudes toward this problem, attitudes I find unrealistic and
perhaps unprofitable. Put negatively, there is the common American attitude
that "abstract" ideas in particular are mere disguises for real, hard motives;
put positively, there is the attitude that these real, hard motives are limited to
the kind of rational self-interest the economist takes as his starting point — and
ending point — that the great clue to all human conduct is in the old tag cut
bono, with the bonum very clear, very material, preferably hard cash. Now I
am willing for the moment to assume the correctness of the view of human
nature that lies behind these attitudes — a view rather oddly close to some
aspects of Christian pessimism and remote from the attitude of the Enlight-
ened— but I insist that in real life these basic drives or urges or what you will
emerge into actual human conduct only through a long process which involves
sentiments, emotions, symbols, "ideas," some of them very "abstract," like
the idea that abstract ideas have no activating part in human conduct. I dare
not here attempt any refutation of these great national beliefs of ours. For one
thing, I have been much snubbed by my countrymen for displaying my igno-
rance of the realities of life. Only a few months ago a ranger in the Craters of
the Moon National Monument crushed my suggestion that perhaps the In-
dians pitched their tepees in a particularly Dantesque spot in the monument —
pure devilish black lava — because men have always been fascinated by any
hell that moves them religiously; on the contrary, he insisted, they came there
because, in spite of the apparent desolation of the spot, it really was full of
game that came there to drink from pools accumulated in the contorted lava.
He may well have been right; but there are not always pools in the lava flow,

I submit, as a mere parting shot or so, that though the phrase "abstract
ideas" has in our contemporary culture a pejorative sense, we usually mean
by abstract ideas those we dislike, or do not share, or are somewhat ashamed
of confessing we entertain. I am not even wholly persuaded that American
G.I.'s in our last two wars were quite as contemptuous of the noble, the good,
and the true in our war aims as the investigators insist they were. There is a
long and dignified Western masculine tradition of concealing the nobler senti-
ments except in epic or dramatic moments. And as for the common American
belief in the economic interpretation of everything, this, too, is partly a pose,
and even more a habit of thought which has hopelessly ennobled economic
activity into a form of the agon, and thus quite removed from it the nice ra-
tionalism of self-interest with which economic theorists still tend to endow it.

There remain a few more introductory explanations about which I shall
try to be specific. I have already said that morals are not, under analysis,

Jf5

A History of Western Morals

identical with manners, nor even in quite simple discourse "related to," or
"a variety of," manners. The student of human conduct cannot, however,
hope to work effectively with the kind of precise systematic terms the taxo-
nomic biologist, for instance, must insist upon. Human thought and feeling
about manners and morals clearly do not separate them rigorously; "good"
and "bad" do the needed work in both realms of discourse. There is, indeed,
commonly among Westerners a feeling that morals are concerned with loftier
matters; that taste, at least in the fine arts, is concerned with less lofty but still
serious and important matters; and that taste in cookery and other not-fine
arts is a rather low thing, and manners in the sense of civility somehow
basically an artificial, ideally unnecessary, though actually important, thing.
Yet there is nothing like agreement in the West on such usage, and the above
sentence could hardly have been written save by an American. An English-
man or a Frenchman, though he might well agree that morals are at the top
of this particular order of rank, would surely rewrite the rest of the sentence
— and not in the same way. Everywhere there are individuals who, by the
test of what symbols arouse their indignation — we are here well beyond
simple animal rage — find matters of taste at least as important as matters of
morals. Even in the United States, where the finest of arts is not quite as
dignified a matter as morals, there are those who find crooners more evil than
gangsters.

Indeed, the kind of mind that likes to stretch words into great blankets
could claim that a history of morals is necessarily a complete history of all
human activity. In the sense I am here giving to "morals" — the relation be-
tween ethics and conduct — it seems clear that man is inevitably a moral
creature, and the only one. For man alone is capable of the kind of thinking
— "symbolic thinking," a now generally accepted phrase, will do well enough
here — which can produce an ethics. I certainly do not propose in this book
to consider, as so many treatises on ethics do, the moral sense in the higher
animals. I grant that a scolded dog can look guilty, but in my use of the term
the dog cannot have ethics and therefore cannot be moral or immoral, simply
because he is incapable of symbolic thinking. You can say "naughty dog,"
and your dog will "understand" you: but no two dogs ever discussed together
whether "naughty" is a relative or an absolute, or even whether in a given
instance the use of "naughty" was just or unjust.

I shall not here attempt to study in detail the morals of our prehistoric
Western ancestors directly or by analogy with the primitive peoples the
anthropologist studies; nor shall I, save incidentally, study the morals of chil-

16

Introduction

dren. These studies are of great importance. In the long reaction (which may
have passed its peak) against the late eighteenth-century belief in the power
of right thinking to change rapidly and completely the conduct of large
numbers of men, it has come to seem probable that human conduct is influ-
enced by our biological as well as our cultural inheritance from the millennia
before Plato and Isaiah, and by our immediate interpersonal relations with
our parents, siblings, and child companions, much, much more than by our
cultural inheritance from the last twenty-five centuries of Western history.
Moreover, all that anthropologists, prehistorians, and psychologists have be-
gun to find out begins to look rather fundamental, rather hard to change. But
such studies have really only just begun, and can hardly yet be incorporated
into a history of this kind. I am, furthermore, quite incompetent through lack
of training to appreciate critically the literature in these fields. I shall there-
fore begin in the old-fashioned way, after a hopeful nod to the anthropol-
ogists, with the peoples of the Ancient Near East and the Greeks.

I shall not attempt to write about the moral history of peoples other than
those generally understood nowadays as Western. Here, again, this limiting
choice is by no means a sign that I think the story of the ethics and the
conduct of the Chinese, the Japanese, the Hindus, the Aztecs, and all the rest
unimportant. It is a sign partly of my own ignorance and partly of my de-
liberate intention to keep this book within manageable limits of length, for
the reader's sake as well as my own. Furthermore, it seems to me clear that a
history of Western morals need not be greatly concerned with what, in
Toynbee's words, we know as "contacts between civilizations." The fact is
that in the time and places covered by the old classic school sequence of
Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, the "cultural narcissism" clear in the Greek
distinction between "Hellenes" and "Barbarians" has been the pattern for the
West. No doubt -within the West itself the narrow limits of the national or
racial in-group have never in historic times kept out for long "foreign" influ-
ences. Juvenal was, for a Roman satirist, reasonably accurate: the Syrian
river Orontes did flow into the Tiber, though in the long run it turned out to
be even more important that the Jordan, too, flowed into the Tiber. But
though there were faint contacts between Rome and China, though with the
Polos and da Gama and Columbus the West began its expansion, Europe and
the Near East did not really "learn" — and in particular did not learn morality
— from the peoples they subdued, traded with, and taught so much. Even
today, the Yangtze and the Ganges by no means empty into the Hudson — nor
does the Volga.

17

A History of Western Morals

III

The historian of morals must try to find out what the actual conduct of all
sorts and conditions of men has been. He encounters— or so it seems to one
engaged in the effort — even more difficulties than does the historian of pol-
itics, war, economic activity, and other human pursuits. Some of these diffi-
culties, both in getting source material and in organizing what he does get, are
worth brief attention here.

Especially for the conduct, but also for the ethics, of the ordinary man,
reliable information is hard to come by, and sometimes, as in the early medi-
eval centuries, almost wholly lacking. The problem is real enough for the
sociologist or the psychologist studying contemporary and recent societies.
It is perhaps sufficient to ask the question: How near the real truth of the
actual sexual conduct of representative or typical mid-twentieth-century
American men and women — let alone of the universal "male" and "female"
of his titles — did the late Dr. Kinsey get? But we do have such studies, and
since about 1750 increasingly elaborate and, to be fair, increasingly accurate
statistics about a great deal of human conduct, good and bad, of great value
to the historian of morals. We have no such wealth of evidence for earlier
periods. It would be rash indeed to entitle a book "The Sexual Behavior of
the Human Male in the Roman Empire." We know reliably enough that the
Greeks did expose newborn children, especially females, but we can hardly
pretend to give statistics as to what proportions were so exposed, or what, if
any, were the variations by class, city-state, or period of time.12

Nevertheless, there are sources from which with caution it is possible to
get rough notions of the actual conduct not only of the upper or ruling
classes, but also of ordinary men and women. The conclusions based on such
sources cannot, it must be insisted, satisfy anything like the going standards
of the social scientist concerned with the conduct of human beings in con-
temporary society; and if the precedents of the last few centuries of historical
investigation hold for the future, our successor will do better than we can hope
to do. Dire predictions that we shall not get any more facts about, say, well-
worked periods like the English Middle Ages have so far not come true.

The most important body of information for us surely lies in the great
body of Western literature. For the purposes of the historian of morals, almost

12 But for an interesting attempt to reconstitute something like statistics, using the com-
paratively objective and nonliterary source afforded by inscriptions, see W. W. Tarn,
Hellenistic Civilisation, London, Arnold, 1927, p. 87. The inscriptions are those of the
third and second centuries B.C.

18

Introduction

none of it is without value. Some of it, however, presents very great dangers
for the interpreter. These dangers are greatest in the writings commonly cata-
logued as dealing with morals. An extreme case often proves most illuminat-
ing. The Roman satirists, Horace, Martial, Juvenal, and the rest, were gifted
writers indeed. To judge from their writings, Romans, and, in particular,
upper-class Romans, spent most of their time in fornication, gluttonous eat-
ing, drunkenness, langorous hot baths, backbiting, informing, betraying (heir
friends, imitating and exceeding the example set by the corrupt Greeks and
Syrians — in short, setting something like a record in iniquity. Here is a good
sample:

Who now is loved, but he who loves the Times,

Conscious of close Intrigues, and dipt in Crimes;

Lab'ring with Secrets which his bosom burn,

Yet never must to publick light return?

They get reward alone who can Betray:

For keeping honest Counsel none will pay. . . .

The Barbarous Harlots crowd the publick Place:

Go, Fools, and purchase an unclean embrace;

The painted Mitre court, and the more painted Face.13

The pattern thus set has had many imitators in the West ever since. Yet it is
as certain as anything of the sort can be that Juvenal and his fellows cannot
be taken as reliable authorities for the actual conduct even of the Roman
upper classes who read their work. The sensitive, the indignant, especially
when they have literary gifts — the Orwells, the Koestlers — are untrustworthy
reporters.

The difficulty here is central and familiar to readers of newspapers — and
one hopes to their writers. The really wicked deed is much more interesting
than ordinary conventional behavior; it is news. In my brief service with the
federal government I had occasion to make an "evaluation" of the horrendous
reports of what French Resistance groups were doing to the occupying Ger-
mans in 1943. 1 began my report with the suggestion that it was dangerous
to generalize for all of France from the fact — if it was a fact— that a truck-
load of German soldiers on the way to a movie in Orleans had been bombed.
I suggested that even what the army called "intelligence" was subject to the
ways of journalism; the headline is "Banker found in love-nest," never "Ten
thousand bankers spend night at home." My analogy was found unsuited

is The reader will find the whole gamut run in this Third Satire of Juvenal's. I have
quoted from Dryden's good liberal translation.

19

A History of Western Morals

to the dignity that should mark government reports, but I assume that my
point was made.

To this basic fact, that the exceptional is more interesting than the
usual, and the exceptionally wicked especially interesting, there must be
added other facts about the literary that make some of the greatest monu-
ments of literature quite untrustworthy for our purposes. It is again an
observed and continually observable fact that the writer, as perhaps the most
characteristic intellectual, shows to the full a characteristic of the Western
intellectual tradition, the tendency to use the mind to exhort, to correct, to
complain, to do with the written word a great deal that has indeed to be done,
that is surely worth doing, but that is not reporting the results of accurate
observing so organized as to distinguish clearly between the exceptional and
the usual, and degrees in between. This last sentence was written heavily and
cautiously. I may risk more brevity: just man watching, a task much harder
than bird watching, is rare among moralists. Moreover, the writer in recent
times, and to a degree throughout Western cultural history, has felt himself
shut out from ordinary men by his superior sensitiveness, or superior bright-
ness, or some other superiority. Where he is not tempted to exhort or com-
plain, he is then often tempted to shine. The aphorist, La Rochefoucauld, for
example, or Nietzsche at his best, however admirably they say certain things
— "true" things, even — are particularly unreliable as reporters of what ordi-
nary people are like, and of what such people believe to be right and proper.
Or, to underscore the obvious, the introductory paragraphs of the New
Yorker do not do the job of man watching for our contemporary United
States. Even the Reader's Digest is probably a better man watcher.

Yet it must be repeated that the whole body of Western literature is a
priceless store of source material for the historian of morals. He cannot begin
to know this whole body, not even indirectly through literary histories. He
can but sample. On the whole, the most useful genre from our present point
of view is the novel and its analogues — Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, for
example, and even some of the epics — where the writer sets himself up as
observer and narrator rather than as moralist. The great histories, of course,
are useful, more so when they are the work of a restrained and conscientious
moral philosopher like Thucydides or a bright but not too Voltairian a story-
teller like Herodotus than when they are the work of a deeply injured moralist
like Tacitus, or a soured one like Henry Adams. There is a residue of obser-
vation of actual human conduct even in the work of writers whom the French,
who used to be masters of the genre, call moralistes. La Rochefoucauld's

20

Introduction

"There are those who would never have loved had they not heard love talked
about" is penetrating though clever; note that La Rochefoucauld wrote
"loved," not "made love."

With the beginning of printing in the fifteenth century and of journalism
in the seventeenth, the record of human activity of all sorts in the West begins
to be very complete; with the beginnings of statistics and of the behavioral or
social sciences in the eighteenth, it begins to be better organized. There are
still gaps and difficulties, but what the historian calls source material is for
these centuries almost too abundant. Moreover, the technological revolutions
of the modern West have also been revolutions in scholarship. The labors of
generations of scholars have unearthed a great deal of information about the
Western past, so that even though the past — especially the Greco-Roman
past — may be gradually pushed out of higher education, there is already on
our great library shelves an accumulation of "facts" about this culture that
would have amazed, delighted, and perhaps disillusioned a humanist of the
Renaissance.

The historian of morals will find in the work of social historians one of
his most valuable sources of material on what ordinary men and women have
done. Social history is often an amorphous mass of details, but it is a splendid
mine — or, rather, heap of tailings — in which the historian of morals will find
much good ore. It is not an altogether new kind of history; Herodotus was
a fine social historian. But it offered the nineteenth century a convenient re-
pository for much information about the past the scholars were digging up,
and which couldn't be fitted anywhere else. A work like Ludwig Friedlander's
Roman Life and Manners under the Early Empire, though it seems to have
hardly any structure and barely even a point of view, brings together in one
place an immense amount of fragmentary information about what the Ro-
mans were doing. There are many others of the sort.

The great problem remains: How can these odds and ends of facts be put
together? Is there a describable normal human conduct in a given time and
place? Certainly in the sense of a statistical mean or average, let alone a
distribution curve, there is not much use in the historian's attempting to
achieve anything of the sort. I have already noted as a warning the work of
the late Dr. Kinsey. We do, however, constantly try to form notions of the
typical, the normal, the "ideal," if you do not object to the word, where we
lack not so much facts for the mind to work on as a good, reliable guide or
tool for the mind to work with. The scientist has in mathematics such a tool.
The humanist will maintain that he has tradition-developed methods which,

21

A History of Western Morals

aided by intuitive familiarity with the human activities he is studying, and
supported by scholarly conscientiousness and, if possible, by a little common
sense, will enable him to draw not wholly invalid generalization out of even
imperfect or incomplete data. The humanist may well be right. I shall do my
best in this book to live up to his standards.

Our supply of material information in the field of ethics is abundant, even
for the earlier periods of written Western history. The historian of formal
philosophy must regret lacunae, such as the lack of works of the pre-Socratics,
or of whole texts of the two great founders of the rival schools of ethics,
Epicurus and Zeno the Stoic. It would be a great addition to our heritage
to have more, for instance, from the Heraclitus who could leave the brilliant
fragment "character as fate." Still, the historian of ideas can hardly complain
that he does not know what Greek and Roman formal philosophers thought
about the good life. Man is an incurably moral animal, and almost every
written record, and much of his other records, such as the fine arts, give some
hint as to what he thought good and what he thought evil. Formal philosoph"
ical ethics are probably a much less unreliable guide to what ordinary men
thought right and proper than it is fashionable in certain intellectual circles
even now to admit. But we can supplement the work of ethical philosophers
by much that unquestionably does touch the lives of ordinary men — codes of
conduct for religious groups, law codes, folk wisdom and its reflection in such
works as Franklin's Poor Richard, folk art of various kinds, and a great deal
of the literature I have mentioned above as a source of information about
the conduct of ordinary men. Special care, of course, needs to be taken in
special cases; the harsh criminal law codes of most Western European coun-
tries in the eighteenth century, for instance, are by no means a reliable indi-
cation of what anybody thought was right and proper at the time. Nor from
the fact that in popular literature at most times and places in the West the
cuckolded husband is a lamentable figure, the wife and the lover quite ad-
mirable ones, would it be safe to conclude that ordinary men and women
really felt adultery to be an ethical good.

But abundant though our information about what Westerners have con-
sidered to be ethically good and ethically bad may be, the problem of organ-
izing this information is at least as difficult as for actual human conduct. The
problem of the typical or normal, and of the nature and extent of variations,
remains a serious one for the study of the ideal as for the study of the actual,
as difficult for the study of attitudes as for the study of performance. Here
there can hardly be mention of statistical treatment. It would be wonderful

22

Introduction

to have the results of a properly conducted public-opinion poll of attitudes
in times past. What did the English think about "corruption" under Walpole
in 1734? What did Parisians think about the St. Bartholomew's massacre in
1572 (strongly approve, mildly approve, mildly disapprove, strongly disap-
prove, don't know)? What did they think about the same event a hundred
years later? Two hundred years later? Three hundred years later? Of course,
one cannot give even retrospective guesses in terms of figures. Londoners may
have disapproved more strongly of Walpole's regime of graft in 1834 than in
1734; there should have been more "don't knows" in 1834 than in Walpole's
own lifetime, for the British have the gift of forgetting the less noble parts of
their past. Parisians would probably have shifted from approval to disap-
proval of St. Bartholomew's Eve by 1772. In spite of the humane aspects of
nineteenth-century culture, it is possible that the poll in 1872 would show
some rise in approvals over the one in 1772, for the great French Revolution
had reawakened religious fears and hatreds. I feel pretty sure that even after
four centuries the "don't knows" of indifference or ignorance would not have
increased greatly in Paris, for the French feel fully the weight of their history.

But these guesses little befit so serious a matter as history, which can
hardly afford to indulge in the relaxation of putting itself in the conditional
mood. I shall try in this book to achieve by the methods of the humanist rea-
sonably good generalizations — not mere guesses — about the moral prefer-
ences of men in past times. In particular, I shall try to rescue this study from
the rag-bag incoherence of much social history by trying to describe as con-
cretely as possible the varieties of what men have held up as the admirable
human being — the moral ideal, to use a good, simple, concrete term.14

Word trouble looms here, of course. "Hero" is an obvious possibility;
but that word is stained by Carlyle's private misuse of it, and has, moreover,
much too specific associations with simple early societies and noble cultures
to do what is necessary here. Words like "type," "pattern," or some com-
pound of "figure," as in "father-figure," seem to me either too flat or too
closely associated with the vocabulary of formal psychology. As for the
"admirable," I shall not mind if you prefer the "enviable" human figure,
though I should think it better to add enviable to admirable, for admiration
and envy often go together, though one or the other may be a mere trace, in
the human soul. The word "ideal" has also the advantage that it at least

i4 W. E. H. Lecky in his introductory chapter to the History of European Morals from
Augustus to Charlemagne (New York, Braziller, 1955, Vol. I, pp. 153 ff.) has some
interesting remarks on what he calls "moral types" and "rudimentary virtues." (Two
volumes are in this edition printed as one, paged as two.)

23

A History of Western Morals

suggests that the admired figure is not any single human being. Of course, the
ideal can sometimes be "embodied" in a real living person, or in a fictitious
character who is quite as much a living person. Achilles embodies or person-
ifies much of the old Greek ideal. Abraham Lincoln does so for Americans.
But there remains a residue no one real figure can quite encompass. If it is at
all possible to make sensible generalizations about the American ideal — and
the old problem of accurate generalization is most acute in problems of
national character in our modern world — the final form or picture must be
a composite to which, in addition to Lincoln, Henry Ford, Jefferson, Wash-
ington, and even Emerson make their contributions. It is tempting to add to
this list Paul Bunyan, Babe Ruth, and Gary Cooper, with Marilyn Monroe
thrown in for good measure.

This last remark suggests a further difficulty. Even if you grant that with
due caution and by adding all sorts of variations for nationality, class, reli-
gion, even personality, one can arrive at a most complicated picture, there
will still remain the question: Is this what people really admired, or did they
merely say they admired it, thought it proper to admire it, but actually ad-
mired something else, something very different? Or in terms I have been
using in this book, is this a purely ethical ideal, wholly an "ought" without
any influence over the "is," and therefore not really a moral ideal in which
the "ought" and the "is" are organically related? There is a point of view
from which such a question is wholly unanswerable, and, indeed, presump-
tuous. No one can get inside another person, be another person.

But all science is presumptuous, as the Greek Prometheus and the
Hebrew Job learned long ago, with very different results, at the beginnings
of our story; the social sciences are even more presumptuous than the natural.
We shall have to go ahead with as little as possible of the pride that makes
presumption. In daily life we all encounter in others the contrast between
what is said and what is done, a contrast that in particularly glaring and un-
pleasant circumstances we call "hypocrisy." Now the hypocrite, who by defi-
nition knows he does one thing and says another and contrary thing, is much
rarer than is commonly supposed. For the most part, by a system the psychol-
ogist calls our "defenses" we actually manage to keep the inconvenient reality
which contrasts with the pleasant ideal altogether out of our minds, or, at any
rate, out of our consciousness. Not by any means always. The naive notion
occasionally professed in the West that all ethics is hypocrisy is nonsense.
Significantly enough, the complementary notions that all actual human con-
duct is of a piece, not to be judged as good or bad, but just taken as "mate-

24

Introduction

rial," or that actual human conduct really is as ethics states it should be, and
evil an illusion, have hardly ever been held here in the West. We do not in
daily awareness usually divorce what I call "ethics" and what I call "con-
duct."15

Once again, a concrete example should help. The Christian saint was one
of the ideals of the Middle Ages, an ideal that spilled over in part on just
ordinary churchmen. But in the contemporary French popular tales known
as the fabliaux, in the amusing wood carvings on the choir stalls which often
make fun of the monks who propped themselves up on them during the long
services, in the works of a Chaucer or a Boccaccio, in page after page of
the interesting miscellany of medieval documents assembled by the late
G. G. Coulton, there is unmistakable evidence of popular irreverence toward
the clergy.16 Priests and, more especially, monks, appear as fornicators, liars,
gluttons, drunkards, idlers, hypocrites. Did the medieval peasant and towns-
man then at heart reject the Christian ethical ideal? Was their true moral
preference for something a good deal more worldly, not to say fleshly, than
the saint? Did they perhaps most admire the outlaw, the rebel against con-
ventional standards, the Robin Hood? These questions I hope to struggle
with in their proper place in our story; here I pose them as examples of
difficulties that face us.

The difficulty here may be partly overcome by trying to distinguish be-
tween admiration and envy in particular instances, for admiration is, in
common usage, considered good, and envy bad. Neither good nor bad — this
is a clich6 1 have not yet permitted myself, but it is a sound and unavoidable
cliche — is often found in human conduct in the simple and mutually exclu-
sive state they are often found in ethics; they are mixed, though, again, almost
always in varying proportions, which can be, not mathematically weighed or
measured, but humanly weighed and measured. For the human ideal type of
a given culture, men almost always feel a kind of admiration not necessarily
unmixed with envy, but an admiration that makes them even in their secret
conscience unaware or at least unashamed of the tincture of envy present.
Thus the Greeks admired Achilles; thus we admke Lincoln. In our American

is I realize that there are in our Western tradition pantheistic and universalist philoso-
phies and theologies which get rid of evil completely — and sometimes of good also:
and I know that the followers of Mrs. Eddy find illusory much that the rest of us find
only too real. But I think that those who deny the reality of evil are much more
nagged by something inside themselves that rejects this world view than are those who
deny the reality, or, at any rate, the prevailing, of good. The pure pessimists seem
perversely to enjoy their metaphysics more than do the pure optimists,
i* Life in the Middle Ages, four volumes in one, New York, Macmillan, 193 1.

25

A History of Western Morals

culture the gangster hero is envied for his success, his wealth, his fame, but he
is not admired as a moral ideal. One good test is that failure ruins a gangster
with all but the most fanatically devoted of his "admirers"; there are no
martyrs save among the good.

The problem of the winning scoundrel is certainly a real one. I should not
question for a moment the common verdict that Satan comes out for many
readers as the hero of Milton's Paradise Lost. But Satan in this poem is by
no means what I mean by a "moral ideal" in the West. The old Latin tag puts
the matter more clearly: Video meliora proboque; deteriora sequor.17 Poor
Ovid has had a bad press. I think he really meant this, as I think another
rather spotted moral being, La Rochefoucauld, meant his basically identical
statement: Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.18 Our morals are as
real as our digestion; the good and bad no more and no less mysterious in
one than in the other.

There will be a long line of these ideal figures or patterns, none of them
to be treated without qualifications, without some question as to how uni-
versal their appeal, how real the esteem in which they were held by various
groups in the community. These figures will inevitably be varied and in one
sense disparate, since the degree of moral dignity, the extent to which they
seem to reflect conduct as well as ethics, and much else about them will not
be the same. We shall encounter the Homeric hero, the beautiful-and-good
of the Golden Age of Greece.19 We shall have to measure the Roman citizen-
soldier-country gentleman of the great days of the Republic, the Christian
saint, the Renaissance man of virtu, the French aristocrat of the best days of
Louis XIV, the English gentleman, the French philosophe of the eighteenth
century, the Prussian Junker, the Byronic artist, the pure scientist, the Ameri-
can frontiersman or "pioneer," and many others. They will not be as real as
the flesh-and-blood individuals who figure in narrative history, nor as varied
and as complex. But we can hope they will prove quite as interesting. And
they are even more important, for they are a distillation of men's hopes and
fears. They are the guides, the myths, the symbols, of which our hope-ridden,

if Ovid, Metamorphoses, VII, 20. (I see the better course and approve it; I follow the
worse.)

i*Maximes, No. 218.

!9 kalokagathia. This deceptively ordinary phrase has been the despair of genera-
tions of translators; it is, of course, untranslatable. So, too, are virtu and philosophe,
which also appear on this list. I shall try, as such terms arise, to make their meaning
clear in a translation which will be necessarily a periphrasis; but I shall often use the
original terms in the text, preferring exactness to good taste, these two being, unfor-
tunately, not always identical.

26

Introduction

fear-ridden age — or at least the prophets, publicists, and analysts of our age
— are so conscious.

This concept of a moral ideal will, I hope, help tie together in some kind
of unity the diverse materials of this book. I shall also make frequent use of
a unifying concept worth brief semantic notice here, for I do not find quite
the right word or phrase in common American usage: I am going to make
much use of the word "agon." Western men have always striven among
themselves, as individuals and as groups. Our own society likes to use the
term "competition," and, especially, the misleading term "free competition,"
which have for our purposes here much too narrow connotations from eco-
nomics. "Conflict" is a good and necessary word — and thing — but its use
might to some readers carry the suggestion that men commonly fight for
the sake of fighting, that they are "naturally" bellicose, competitive, instinc-
tively and masculinely inclined to mauling. So, no doubt, are many men. But
I prefer to emphasize by my choice of words what they fight, or compete, for;
this I hope to achieve in part by borrowing from the Greek the word "agon"
(dywv), which I shall translate, with an ironic glance at the social Darwinists,
as the "struggle for prize."

The agon was originally the formal religiously ritualized assembly of the
Greeks to witness their games, and only later came to mean any struggle, trial,
or danger, which, given overtones of harshness and pain, made the word
agorua (aywla) and our own "agony." But simply as agon, the word can carry
a great and complex weight of meaning — the desire of men to gain honor
and esteem by winning out in competition with their fellows, the need for
ritual recognition of such achievement, the need for rules of the game, for a
code, in short, for morality — since a genuine free-for-all, "nature red in tooth
and claw," is simply not humanly enjoyable, not even bearable, for long —
the reality of conflict, of bitter, heart-rending struggle even when it is so
regulated and moralized, the pain, the tragedy (agonia) of success as well
as of failure, the driving animal force of living that makes even "blessed are
the meek" a kind of battle cry, man's need of much, so unreasonably much.
No single word or phrase can carry all the weight of human nature; that is
why the struggle for life, the class struggle, competition, co-operation, the
lust for wealth, the will to power, the will to shine, the desire of the moth for
the star, cannot sum up what makes us what we are. I do not claim for "agon"
a magic I deny these other terms. I use it in this book largely because I think
that, especially for American readers, who are likely to have inclinations
toward a misleadingly innocent economic interpretation of human conduct,

27

A History of Western Morals

toward the often naive cut bono, it may help redress the balance toward
recognition of the great part ritual combat or competition, fully integrated
with religious and moral sentiments, has played in our Western past, and
still plays in our Western present. The agon, originally knightly and heroic,
has spread to the fuE range of human interests, from head-hunting to the
acquisition of honorary degrees. It seems, indeed, to have played a part in
that extraordinary phenomenon of our contemporary Western society the
rise in the birth rate among the comfortably off. To have many children is to
give proof of being fully adjusted; and adjustment, oddly enough, perhaps,
after all, democratically enough, has become a prize in the agon.

IV

This introduction must not swallow the book. We are all, in contrast to most
of our Victorian predecessors, so aware of the gaps between ethics and con-
duct, or, more fundamentally and specifically, so aware of the inadequacy of
the explanations of human nature and human conduct — and the consequent
anticipations of future human conduct — which the Victorians took over from
the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, that I am tempted to call here at least
part of the whole roll of questions at issue: What, if anything, does the term
"moral progress" mean? What is there in the old debate on "heredity versus
environment" for the historian of morals? Is there, perhaps, some foundation
for the vulgar modern notion that problems of morals are essentially problems
of sex, and is that notion exclusively modern or exclusively vulgar? How
important is the structure of classes in a given society and its distribution of
incomes for the historian of morals? Was Weber right about Calvinist ethical
justification for worldly wealth?

Many of these problems will come up in their due place in this study.
Here we must as a last introductory word note that for the historian of morals
and of ethics on the one hand and of religion and of theology on the other,
there arises another one of these intricate problems of breaking down in
analysis a relation so close as to be, in real life for real people, a felt unity.
The old debate as to whether religion and morals can be divorced ought at
least to be somewhat affected by what seems to me to be the fact that in
Western experience they never have been divorced. Such a statement does,
indeed, imply a definition of religion that by no means all Westerners will
accept. I consider that in addition to the classic revealed monotheisms of the
West, Jewish, Christian, and Moslem, and the classic polytheisms of Greece

28

Introduction

and Rome and the much less classic ones of Germans, Celts, and Slavs, there
has been a whole series of what the eighteenth century liked to call "natural"
religions for which it is difficult to find a good common term. I am being
quite fashionable today when I note modern Marxism as one of these religions
without a supernatural godhead. What the Marxist believes about the nature
of the universe — his religion — seems to me to have some relation to what he
believes about the nature of man and his place in that universe — his morals.
The same is true of the positivist, the rationalist, the member of an ethical-
culture society, and all the other varieties of what M. Raymond Aron calls a
"secular religion." Here again a final warning: I shall not assume either that
a man's religion "determines" his moral beliefs and practices or that a man's
moral beliefs and practices "determine" his religion. Once more, they are
mutually dependent.

But difficulties — difficulties of securing from all my readers that suspen-
sion of moral indignation I wish as a historian of morals to obtain as often as
possible — force me to use another pretentious term, one most offensive to
the purist in language. Since words like "religion" and "theology" applied,
say, to modern Western nationalism, or to Marxism, or to any form of En-
lightenment clearly do offend many Christians, I shall reluctantly fall back
at times on that horrid Germanism "world view" (Weltanschauung) . No the-
ist, I think, will deny that the Marxist, or even the Enlightened democrat, has
at least a world view; and we need not pay much attention to the Marxist or
other Enlightened when they say they have no such thing, but merely a way
of finding the truth — scientific truth. Everyone who tries to read this book
has a world view, or a set of world views; indeed, I suspect that world views
are held by those well down in that already old-fashioned order of rank we
call the I.Q.

We are ready, then, to embark on a brief survey of a phase of Western
history that with the imperialistic drive so natural to man I am here tempted
to call the most important, the most essential, phase of that history. But I will
settle for less: the history of morals is simply an important, difficult, and
relatively neglected part of that history.

29

Origins: The Ancient Near East

THE DISTINGUISHED AMERICAN EGYPTOLOGIST J. H. Breasted once wrote a
book about a phase of ancient Egyptian culture which he entitled The Dawn
oj Conscience^ Breasted's love for his subject led him to claim for the
Egyptians a priority that is hardly theirs. It is indeed quite possible that the
Jews found in earlier Egyptian writings the basis for much of the "wisdom
literature" of the Old Testament. It may even be possible to claim for the
Egyptians the first recorded examples of men thinking about ethical prob-
lems, though the specialist in Mesopotamian studies might maintain that the
creation myths of that area, which may well be at least as old as anything of
the sort we have from Egypt, show men definitely aware of moral good and
moral evil, and their implications for conduct.

We need not here take sides on this issue, for the actual dawn of con-
science— it must have been a very gradual one — is hopelessly lost in pre-
history. At a minimal definition, the notion of conscience demands an aware-
ness of a future. Homo sapiens must have had that awareness very early in
his evolution, if not from the very beginning. With that awareness there must
have come long, long ago the symbolic expression of a mood Robert Frost
put into our words just yesterday in his familiar poem "The Road Not Taken"
from Mountain Interval. The man of the Stone Ages must have regretted that
he took one road, not the other: this is surely the dawn of conscience. These
men were moral beings, and had a moral history, but that history will never
be written. The skeletal remains and the tools and other artifacts which give
i New York, Scribner, 1933.

30

Origins: The Ancient Near East

us all the information we are likely to get about these men and women simply
do not answer the kind of question the historian of morals must ask. It is
quite clear, for instance, that axes and arrows were used to kill human beings
as well as game, but we do not know how the killers felt about the Trilling.
It seems likely that some primitive ancestors of Western men did not fight
much; but were they moral pacifists? Anthropological studies of modern
"primitives" permit a very safe inference that at least within a specific in-
group the ethical concept enshrined in our word "murder" existed among
these men of the Stone Ages. We can on the same basis make a good many
inferences, such, for instance, as that they did not take sex in their stride; they
must have worried about it, talked about it, and would, if they could, have
written about it.

All our sound knowledge of recent and existing primitive societies does
remain inference when it is applied to Western prehistoric societies. It has
been of very great use in eliminating, or at least cutting down the general
acceptance of, certain misleading simplifications about human nature, and
hence, of course, about morals, that we have inherited, above all, from
eighteenth-century notions about an original "state of nature" in which men
were, to put it mildly, believed to have been very different from Westerners
in 1780. Indeed, what can be, not immodestly, called the cumulative knowl-
edge about human beings that the social scientists have gradually built up
does enable the historian of Western morals to start off with some broad
generalizations about the possible ways in which what went on during the
hundreds of centuries of prehistory help explain what went on in our brief
Western history — or, at the very least, to sketch out some limits of Western
conduct not always recognized as limits by those who set up Western ethical
standards.

We are, of course, on the unsettled ground of analogy. There are, for
example, good grounds, the biologists believe, for the statement that when we
fall we "instinctively" put up our arms because the "instinct" to do this was
part of the physiological equipment of our tree-borne ancestors. But this
action, which helped these very distant ancestors to grab the nearest branch
when they fell by accident, is of no help to us, and is likely to give us a
broken arm we should not have had were we able to fall with the instincts of
the cat, or like the trained actor in a death scene, loosening up generally.2

Now a parallel case might be found in an activity more obviously involved

2 The instance is from Fred Hoyle, Man and Materialism, New York, Harper, 1956,
pp. 25-26.

31

A History of Western Morals

in a history of morals than a physical fall. We are all subject to the kind of
emotion I have in my introductory chapter called moral indignation; indeed,
the news photograph of the good Negro girl and the bad white girl there cited
will do as our concrete example. A large number of Americans were certainly
made angry by the sight of that photograph. In the process that makes us
"feel" this anger, the body produces a flow from the adrenal glands, a flow
that in the primitive past of Homo sapiens moved him to anger or fear, and
hence to fighting or running away, either action in its proper place a response
useful to his survival. But the action of the adrenal glands we get from reading
the daily newspaper can hardly end in any such direct action; the letter to the
editor is no substitute for hitting someone hard — and quickly. It is possible
that this misdirected adrenal flow may have something to do with all sorts
of human ills now fashionably called psychosomatic.3

At the very least, it does seem likely that in civilization men face in the
relation between their thought-sentiment and their "rational" or "scientific"
thought a kind of problem that did not disturb prehistoric men. I should
guess that all the very real troubles of conscience — yes, conscience — sug-
gested to so many of us by terms like "prejudice," "wishful thinking," "a
priori," "unscientific" are recent indeed in the long evolution of mankind.
We cannot often make so simple a confession of the strength of our made-up
minds as the following, from an Englishman concerned with the horrid
dangers of Americanization:

I have long viewed with alarm the influx of American television programmes. It
is one of our biggest social problems. / have never seen the American programmes
but I am convinced, after considerable study, that they are a bad influence.4

Another broad generalization is even more hazardous than these last,
since it involves that dangerous and attractive intellectual device, the concept
of a social or cultural "organism." But it is worth our brief attention. From
the admirable studies of children made by Jean Piaget and his assistants, it is
clear that very young children go through a stage, roughly from four years
or so to nine, but varying with individuals, in which they regard the rules of
their games — the moral code of an important part of their lives — as absolutes,
as part of a reality wholly external to them. Moreover, since they are unable

3 For an interesting sketch of this problem in nontechnical but scientifically respectable
language, see Joseph Pick, "The Evolution of Homeostases," Proceedings of the Ameri-
can Philosophical Society, XCVHI, 1954, p. 298.

4 Quoted in Terrence O'Flaherty's column in the San Francisco Chronicle, September
27, 1957. Italics mine. The man who made this statement would probably explain that
his "study," though not direct observation, still gave him the "facts" that made up his
mind. We lack the courage of our prejudices.

32

Origins: The Ancient Near East

to distinguish among rules, laws, and "natural" events, their concepts of
agency, responsibility, and guilt are quite different from those of adults.5 Now
it is risky to appeal to the familiar biological notion of recapitulation — the
human fetus, for instance, briefly has something like gills, retracing, so to
speak, almost instantaneously the stage of our evolution when we were fishes.
The morals of Piaget's child subjects do bear striking similarity to the morals
of Western societies we think of as "young," say, the Greeks of the Homeric
epics or the Jews of the Pentateuch, not so much in their actual content, of
course, as in the moral attitude toward rules as absolutes. It is less risky to
say simply that, quite apart from any parallelism between biological and
cultural development, it may well be that our Western culture has preserved
over the last few dozen centuries strong traces of an ethical absolutism char-
acteristic of earlier Western societies.

Even more apposite, perhaps, is the recent work of the biologists and
naturalists who call their field "ethology." The work of Konrad Lorenz,
N. Tinbergen, and many others suggests that the higher animals develop cer-
tain elaborate forms of behavior they are not born with, in the old sense we
used to think of as "instinct," but which they do not have to "learn" either.
We moralists are perhaps too much influenced by the assumption that since
human morals can be and are so thoroughly verbalized, they must be wholly
learned, wholly the product of much symbolic thinking embodied and even
codified in "culture." It goes against the grain to thinfr of "releasers" and
"imprinters" that bring the human conscience into play — or work; but this
is a line of investigation that many believe will prove fruitful for the social
sciences. In the balance, surely, the Western turn in the Age of Reason was
a turn to excessive intellectualism and to even more excessive meliorism.6

Finally, there remain the much-disputed efforts to find leads — indeed,
whole theories — for sociology and anthropology from modern depth psy-
chology. Freud's own attempts in Totem and Taboo and in Moses and Mono-
theism, the application of Jung's concept of a "collective unconscious" to
actual social problems, the recent tendency within psychoanalysis itself to
study the social and cultural environment of the patient — all this work has
so far failed to attain general acceptance among students of human relations.
It is fashionable now to make fun of Freud's efforts, as a good Jewish non-
religious Jew, to find the origins of old Jehovah, not in a volcano, but in the

5 J. Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child, trans, by M. Gabain, New York, Ear-
court, Brace, 1932.

* The reader will find an interesting— and not at all ponderous — introduction to this
field in Konrad Lorenz, King Solomon's Ring, New York, Crowell, 1952.

33

A History of Western Morals

patriarch, the old bull of the herd. But the hope lingers on that we shall find
in the continued study of human behavior, and with the full collaboration of
the students of anthropology and prehistory, some clues to the reasons why
men so obstinately and firmly continue to behave like human beings, and not
like the happy, rational, natural MAN of the eighteenth-century Enlighten-
ment.

At the very least, we can conclude that the work of biologist, anthropol-
ogist, and sociologist — though not all of them would be willing to admit this
—does suggest that a great deal of our conduct is "determined" by what
happened to our ancestors, more particularly to our human and anthropoid
ancestors in the million or so years before written history began a mere five
thousand years or so ago. The biological aspect is clear indeed: no significant
change in historic times. Even for the subgroups the ethnologist studies, the
degree of mixture of different "races" within the West has probably not
changed significantly in historic times. The last few decades in particular
have certainly submitted some specimens of Homo sapiens to material en-
vironments wholly unprecedented. It is sufficient here to mention the air-
plane and the possibilities of space flight.

But such matters must be left to the final chapter, when we face such diffi-
cult questions as whether our total human equipment is good enough to stand
up against what science and technology have done for us and to us. Here we
need no more than suggest that, in many ways which we cannot fully under-
stand, our distant past may well be the most important thing in our lives. We
were all nomads ten thousand years or so ago, and our Celtic and Germanic
ancestors were nomads or seminomads much more recently than that. Clearly
men did make the transition from the life of hunting and food gathering to
the grinding toil of fanning, the disciplined sociopolitical life of village and
city, the simple staying put made necessary for the masses by the so-called
"neolithic revolution." Perhaps survivals of old nomad days have had a part
in the recurrent phases of cultural "primitivism" in the West, the last of
which, the eighteenth-century cult of Nature and the Noble Savage, is not yet
quite dead. Perhaps the nomad of 20,000 B.C. had some part in that very
modem miracle, the settlement of the American West.

One more very large topic will suggest the range and difficulty of these
problems. The human family is an old and universal institution. We find it at
the beginnings of history in all societies, and though the prehistorian can tell
us little about the family in our Western Stone Ages, it is inconceivable that
the family did not exist. A great deal of human conduct is tied up with the

34

Origins: The Ancient Near East

family — sex, child rearing, economic activity, law, and much else. The an-
thropologists, who have taught us so much, have told us that the Christian
monogamous family in its nineteenth-century Victorian form is not the only
successful form of the family, and they have, perhaps without always intend-
ing to do so, shaken the belief that this nineteenth-century Western family is
the best form of the family, the apex of moral evolution. Now, in the mid-
twentieth century, the prophets of doom find the family disintegrating — in
the United States, already disintegrated.7 The historian of morals, indeed the
historian tout court, can suggest that hundreds of centuries of the family —
granted, not quite in the Victorian tradition — make it extremely unlikely that
the family will disappear in our day, or even change its ways greatly. But he
cannot go much further than that He can note that over the ages, biology
and important phases of culture have combined to put women in a position
"inferior" in some sense to that of men in the West; he can even go further,
and suggest that some of the resistance men still make to complete equality
between the sexes is probably a survival from the distant past. And so for
many of our attitudes in matters of sex, incest, for example, or less shocking
forms of sexual abnormality; they go back to the beginnings of our record,
and presumably further, though by no means as constants in form and in-
tensity.

To take another and less serious instance, many of us feel special pleasure
in a fireplace or a campfire. It has been, indeed, a favorite literary device to
take this pleasure back through the ages to our distant ancestors basking in
the warmth and security of the safe, controlled little fire in the cave. Certainly
simple utilitarian explanations seem here inadequate. Modern American
houses are overheated successfully enough without a fireplace. Nor does the
motive of snobbery, a perfectly good "rational" motive, seem quite enough
by itself, for the usual development of snobbery in these matters in the
United States is in the direction of pride in the very latest thing possible. The
chimneyless house, however, has not taken hold.

The difficulty in this and our other instances is to set up a satisfactory
explanation of just how these attitudes were transmitted over thousands of
years. Our high-school course in general science set our minds straight about
the genetics of peas, and even of blue eyes in human beings. But it is hard
to believe that there is a gene which bears a love of fireplace fires, or even a
horror of incest. Certainly those particular genes have not been found. Yet

7 1 am exaggerating, but not much. For an example of such a prophet, see P. A. Soro-
kin, The American Sex Revolution, Boston, Porter Sargent, 1956.

35

A History of Western Morals

the concept of cultural inheritance remains vague, a vagueness well brought
out if you try to use realistically a term like "cultural genetics." Clues there
are, such as Walter Bagehot's happy phrase "unconscious imitation." In the
broadest sense, it is quite certain that the adult generation does "transmit"
attitudes to the younger generation, that the young reach adulthood "condi-
tioned" to these attitudes, which they then find difficult to change. But some
of them do get changed — or, obviously, there would be no history.

As always, there is a nagging metaphysical problem at the bottom here:
permanence versus change. As usual, the twentieth-century Westerner has to
settle as comfortably as he can on both sides. "Something" changes, but
"something" is relatively permanent.8 We must note the particular form the
problem takes here, since one of the great and unsolved questions of morals
in our own mid-twentieth century is how great and how rapid changes in
men's conduct — for example, in their conduct as members of existing "sover-
eign" in-groups known as nation-states — are possible. The problem has many
sides, but one important side involves the degree to which we are all impris-
oned in our past. If the disposition to do certain things has, so to speak, been
built into us by thousands of years of human social life, the normal assump-
tion would be that we shall continue to do, or try to do, those things. In
mid-eighteenth century, as we shall see, the enlightened Westerner believed
substantially that no such historically determined disposition, at least no such
disposition toward what he regarded as evil, existed in human beings as
individuals or in groups. In mid-twentieth century, such a belief is barely
possible anywhere in the West.

If the last two centuries of work in the social sciences by no means tell
us what part — if any — of our morals we owe to our prehistoric ancestors, it
has on the whole made it quite clear that those who make plans to reform
men and their institutions ought not to neglect human history and prehistory,
since only through such history and prehistory can they learn what kind of
materials — to use a deliberately provocative word — they are working with.
They may well have to learn that those materials are really limited, let us
say, like "natural" fibers; there are no possible human equivalents of the
synthetic "miracle" fibers. Moreover, these last two centuries of work in the
social sciences — in the wider sense, also the work of scholars, novelists, phi-
losophers, of all concerned with human conduct — have made it clear that

8 1 owe to my friend Albert Leon Guerard the very apposite tale of a doctor's oral in
which the badgered candidate was pushed into a more and more intransigent position.
One of his tormentors commented, "Well, Mr. So-and-So, you are an absolutist, aren't
you!" This time the candidate scored: "I suppose I am, sir, relatively."

36

Origins: The Ancient Near East

such conduct has long been exceedingly varied. Primitive men and primitive
societies studied in modern times have turned out not to be simple, not to
conform to any one pattern, and its seems hardly likely that our own Western
prehistoric ancestors were simple either. More particularly, the search for
some original forms of human personality and human society which we could
use in good practical propaganda and planning in our own society has proved
pretty fruitless. Over thousands of years and over the whole planet, there have
been communist societies and societies based on private property, there have
been really bewilderingly complex variations in kinship and marriage sys-
tems, there have been variously defined in-groups and out-groups, there have
been peaceful societies and bellicose societies, and there have even been soci-
eties other than our own postmedieval Western society in which individual
economic success was esteemed. Herbert Spencer's famous summing up of
the evolution of human society, from "homogeneity to heterogeneity," from
the simple to the complex, has to be amended into that formula so inevitable
in the sciences, so repugnant to us all as human beings, heirs of that confused
and confusing cultural evolution: with respect to A, yes; with respect to B, no.
The motorcar is more complex than the horse-drawn wagon. The division of
labor in modern Western society is more complex than it was in the Stone
Age. But grammatically, at least, our modern Western languages are far
simpler than earlier ones and our kinship system is simplicity itself compared
with those of many "primitives." In respect to the still-little-understood work-
ing of what we call memory, it is likely that the central nervous system of our
primitive ancestors was more complex than ours; it had to be, for a man's
mind was then his whole reference library.9

In sum, the thing we human beings are and have been, the "human na-
ture" we shall shortly see was first systematized as a master concept by the
later Greeks, is not universally and rapidly malleable; but it is extraordinarily

9 1 do not wish to be understood as suggesting in the above passage either that our
own contemporaries have abandoned all concepts of a "cultural evolution" of hu-
manity, or of Western humanity, or even that among such concepts of evolution they
have wholly given up the basic notion of some savage, earlier, and "lower" stages and
later civilized "higher" stages of the process; nor do I wish to imply on the other side of
the contrast that Herbert Spencer's contemporaries were all in agreement with him in
these matters. Nevertheless, the range of our contemporary theories about such cultural
evolution is great indeed, from the Marxist to the Toynbean and the Sorokinian; and
the more moderate ones, such as those of the anthropologist A. L. Kroeber and the
historian and sociologist of religion Christopher Dawson, are far from Victorian uni-
linear evolutionary concepts. And as for the Victorians themselves, though some of them
did reject all notions of evolution, biological as well as cultural, those who accepted such
notions were not very far apart— no further, let us say, than were Comte, Buckle,
and Spencer in their belief in unilinear "scientific'* evolution.

37

A History of Western Morals

varied and complex. We must reject the kind of metaphor that suggests that
planners or "cultural engineers" can do with this human stuff anything like
what the plant breeder does with his plants or the organic chemist with his.10
But we must also reject the kind of metaphor that suggests that this human
stuff is really just one thing, unchangeable — yet somehow corruptible. So
much, it seems to me, the historian of Western morals can risk concluding
even before he begins his story.

II

The story can appropriately begin with the ancient Egyptians, even though
we cannot accept Breasted's claim that they first knew what we call "con-
science." In particular, thanks to the remarkable achievements of several
generations of Egyptologists, we can for these people know a great deal about
a part of human life of the utmost importance for the historian of morals —
their religious beliefs and practices. For earlier peoples, such as the Magda-
lenians who made the famous cave paintings some ten thousand years ago,
we can only guess at their religion. The paintings of bison, the deer, the
outlined human hands, often with a finger missing, found on the walls of
caves can hardly have been merely the equivalents of our own contemporary
decorative or representational arts. The pictured animals were probably put
there so that the hunters could thereby somehow kill real animals in the hunt;
they probably were not god animals or totem animals, though it is not incon-
ceivable that they may have been. Archaeologists have also found in these
earlier times sculptured female figurines with buttocks and breasts greatly
exaggerated; the inference is obvious — they have some relation to a cult of
fertility. As for the mutilated hands, they suggest a possible form of ritual
sacrifice, perhaps even a substitution of a finger for an earlier total sacrifice.
But even with the aid of comparisons with known primitive peoples, inter-
pretation of these archaeological materials falls well short of a theology or a
sociology of religion, and tells us little about ethics.

For the Egyptians, however, we have a substantial part of all these latter.
We must therefore pause for a moment and examine the very thorny problem
of what we mean by religion and what religion has to do with morals. The
problem is thorny for us largely because a great number of educated West-
erners today consider that they have no religion but do have morals, and that
the separation of religion and morals is a natural, normal part of Western

10 We must reject it even when the metaphor is expanded into a book, as in B. F.
Skinner's Walden Two, New York, Macmillan, 1948.

38

Origins: The Ancient Near East

life. Historically speaking, this is simply not so; religion and morals have
been intimately related, though it makes little sense to say that either is the
"cause" of the other. It is thorny also because for the faithful Jew, Christian,
or Moslem, what he believes about God and God's ways to man can never
be wholly explained by a historical-naturalistic approach; even a term like
"sociology of religion" must, in view of the secularist origins of the study of
sociology, have for the faithful of a revealed religion some unpleasant over-
tones. The Western monotheisms make a place for history, and therefore for
uncertainty and doubt; but they are obliged to put God and God's work
ultimately outside history and beyond doubt. Finally, any sort of religious
belief, including most emphatically our own secular religions like nationalism,
Marxism, the various positivist or rationalist beliefs stemming mostly from
the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, gives our judgments on all forms of
religion an inescapable emotional bias.

Two closely related distinctions commonly made by students of com-
parative religion here make good guides in an attempt to sort out the com-
plexities of primitive religion and morals. First, the distinction between a
contractual view held by the believer as to his relation with his god or gods,
and a dependent worshiper's view of these relations. The former is nicely
summed up in a Latin phrase, do ut des — I give that thou mayest give. In this
view, the believer complied with certain ritual requirements his faith told him
the god insisted on, and in return the god did what the believer wanted him
to do; the relation was not unlike that of buyer and seller, with an implied
contract. The latter is summed up in such a phrase as "prayer of contrition."
The believer loves, fears, is in awe of a Being whom he would never dream
of approaching in the mood of a man seeking to make a contract. Second,
there is the related distinction between magic and religion, or "true" religion.
In magic the magician claims to have a special knowledge of the ways of the
gods, or of nature, by which he can produce results; he is a manipulator. In
religion the priest is the creature of the gods, at most a specially placed inter-
mediary between the believer and the gods, but wholly dependent on the gods;
he is, like the laymen from whom in many religions he is hardly distinguish-
able, a worshiper.

Now these distinctions are indeed useful; even one who believes himself
free of Western religious influences should be willing to grant that the attitude
of the prayerful worshiper is morally superior to that of the self-seeking
practitioner of contract or magic. But in applying these distinctions to the
stuff of history the gap between the real and the ideal opens clearly. On this

39

A History of Western Morals

earth, Christian life itself has shown varying admixtures of all these attitudes.
The familiar Christian opposition of faith and works is at bottom a form of
the first opposition noted above. Pure faith is pure worship; pure works are
certainly close to pure contract. Again, historical Christianity has never, for
the mass of believers, meant the practice of either pure faith or pure works.
But then, neither has the practice of the earlier polytheisms, one may hazard,
been purely do ut des. Above all, the historian is confronted with the difficulty
of finding out the attitudes in matters of this sort of the man in the street, the
average, the ordinary man. The saint, the noble soul stands out in history at
least as firmly as the wicked, the villainous. The good, which in the abstract
or even in the average flesh is perhaps less interesting than the bad, is in its
exceptional and heroic forms conspicuous indeed. Ikhnaton, the pharaoh who
tried, apparently, to purge Egyptian polytheism of its grosser elements,
stands out as a lofty idealist. But for the ordinary Egyptian believer, we tend
to assume that the formal structure of his religion, the named gods, the
sacrifices, the whole ritual is an index of his actual state of mind. All these
factors tend overwhelmingly on the side of polytheistic and magical beliefs.

Here, for instance, is an Egyptian mother protecting her child from the
powers of darkness.

Run out, thou who comest in darkness, who enterest by stealth. . . .

Comest thou to kiss this child? I will not let thee kiss him.

Comest thou to soothe him? I will not let thee soothe him.

Comest thou to harm him? I will not let thee harm him.

Comest thou to take him away? I will not let thee take him away from me.

I have made his protection against thee out of Efet-heib, it makes pain; out
of onions, which harm thee; out of honey which is sweet to (living) men and
bitter to those who are yonder (the dead) ; out of the evil (parts) of the Ebdu-ftsh;
out of the jaw of the meret; out of the backbone of the perch.11

The latter part of this invocation is obviously magic, and not at all lofty.
Let us put it beside another survival from the long centuries of Egypt.

CREATION OF MAN

Creator of the germ in woman,

Who makest seed into men,

Making alive the son in the body of his mother,

Soothing him that he may not weep,

Nurse even in the womb,

Giver of breath to sustain alive every one that he maketh!

11 Quoted in Breasted, Dawn of Conscience, p. 248. Chapters 13 and 14 of this
book give many more examples of magical formulas.

40

Origins: The Ancient Near East

When he descendeth from the body (of his mother) on the

day of his birth,

Thou openest his mouth altogether,
Thou suppliest his necessities.12

This passage from a hymn to the sun-god Aton, whom the pharaoh Ikhnaton
in the fourteenth century B.C. tried to establish as center of a universalist
monotheistic religion, is quite as clearly high-minded worship. Indeed,
Breasted quotes this and other passages from the hymn in the midst of parallel
passages from Psalm 104 of the Old Testament, a device perhaps a bit un-
fairly helped by the lofty mood which anything approaching the style of the
King James version automatically produces in the reader of English, but still
a fair parallel, no mere trick. Magic and religion here stand confronted; they
are not the same thing.

And yet something more needs to be said. In morals as hi taste the drastic
separation of higher and lower must seem to the observer trying to divest
himself of either morals or taste to hide sometimes a certain underlying set
of emotions felt both by the experiencer of the high and the experiencer of
the low. The Egyptian mother was not just muttering a spell; she was singing
a lullaby. All the first part of her song might well have been sung by a mother
any time since in the West. There is hi her song maternal love, maternal
concern over the helplessness of the infant, maternal fear of the unknown.
These are all emotions that in more dignified expressions we should accept
as humanly desirable; only yesterday, at least, the child psychologist would
have said that the existence and strength of such emotions in the mother,
even though they were accompanied by the use of magic, was much better
for the child than their absence or weakness in the mother, even though ac-
companied in the latter instance by the best external help our modern medical
technology can provide and by good intentions on the part of the mother.

Moreover, we must note here what seems to be a fact of human conduct,
however objectionable the mere recognition of this fact may be to many very
admirable partisans of the best in human life. Words, gestures, rites of all
sorts once firmly become custom lose the referential immediacy which the
mind freshly focused on them finds in them. The simple example is afforded
by the blasphemies of everyday Christian life, which are not blasphemies at
all, but merely emphatic grunts or groans where there is any real emotion,
and often no more than obsessively repeated sounds. The Egyptian mother
conceivably did not even bother to make the witches' brew to which her song
refers; and almost certainly her state of mind was one that the modern intel-

12 Breasted, Dawn of Conscience, p. 283.

41

A History of Western Morals

lectual apparently has difficulty in recognizing, a mood of serene and unthink-
ing acceptance of routine, of custom, of conditioning in almost the Pavlovian
sense.

Finally, to draw what we can from these two contrasting passages, it must
be noted that there is in the hymn to Aton a touch of what has to be called
rhetoric. It is a noble rhetoric, but it wipes no infant's nose. Whether you
will go on and infer that Ikhnaton and the courtiers and priests who helped
him in his attempt to purify Egyptian religion were perhaps not as good
parents as our mother with the spell depends a bit on how much of Rousseau
there is in you. The whole Aton movement, of which we know nothing like
the details we know for most Christian reform movements, may really have
been basically political in intent, an effort to centralize and unify a state and
society that often tended to break apart. It is also possible to see in Ikhnaton
himself an early example of a moral type we shall not infrequently meet in
these pages, the idealist of highest ethical standards, the intellectual too pure
for this harsh world of affairs, the martyr, for his reforms failed miserably;
and yet also a man by no means without the will to power and the will to be
admired, and capable, to gain his ends, of actions that look to outsiders
immoral. Again, we don't really know enough to judge him. I suspect that
he was an "unprincipled idealist."13

The firmest mark the ancient Egyptians have left in the history of culture
is their extraordinary awareness of — I am tempted to jargon, obsession with —
life after death. Some sort of belief in the survival of something of the indi-
vidual after the obvious death of the body known to common sense is very com-
mon in all sorts of cultures; and the least patronizing of anthropologists has to
link this belief with some relatively primitive notions about ghosts and the
like, and with simple human desires not to die. But the linkage of all this with
the conduct of the deceased in life on earth is far from universal. With the
Egyptians tne concept of a divine judgment weighing the good and evil of
a man's career and assigning reward or punishment after death is clear as
early as the third millennium B.C. For the upper classes, at least, there were
elaborate ritual forms involving this principle of moral judgment, as well as
the well-known efforts to insure at entombment for the dead a physical
existence as much like the earthly one as possible. The suppliant to the god
Osiris, the judge of the dead, is made to put the best possible case for his
innocence. The following passage from the Book of the Dead has a touch of
the earthly law court which is certainly not in the purest Christian tradition
13 This useful and penetrating phrase I owe to the late A. Lawrence Lowell.

42

Origins: The Ancient Near East

in these matters, and has a touch of pride offensive to both Jewish and
Christian developed tradition. Indeed, it must be noted that the Jew at Yom
Kippur does the exact opposite — he recites his sins. So, too, does the Chris-
tian under confession. Yet the moral code has surely more of the Western,
if not of the universally human, than the specifically religious psychology of
the sacrament itself would show.

Hail to thee, great god, lord of Truth. I have come to thee, my lord, and I am
led (hither) in order to see thy beauty. I know thy name, I know the names of the
forty-two gods who are with thee in the Hall of Truth, who live on evil-doers and
devour their blood, on that day of reckoning character before Wennofer (Osiris),
Behold, I came to thee, I bring to thee righteousness and I expel for thee sin. I
have committed no sin against people. ... I have not done evil in the place of
truth. I knew no wrong. I did no evil thing. ... I did not do that which the god
abominates. I did not report evil of a servant to his master. I allowed no one to
hunger I caused no one to weep. I did not murder. I did not command to murder.
I caused no man misery. I did not diminish food in the temples. I did not decrease
the offerings of the gods. I did not take away the food-offerings of the dead. I did
not commit adultery. I did not commit self-pollution in the pure precinct of my
city-god. I did not diminish the grain measure. I did not diminish the span. I did
not diminish the land measure. I did not load the weight of the balances. I did not
deflect the index of the scales. I did not take milk from the mouth of the child.
I did not drive away the cattle from their pasturage. I did not snare the fowl of the
gods. I did not catch the fish in their pools. I did not hold back the water in its
time. I did not dam the running water.14

For the rest, it is possible to find in the surviving fragments of Egyptian
writings a surprisingly representative range of moral attitudes, at least as they
are reflected in the writings of the moralists. The Maxims of Ptahhotep are
believed to be the work of a high official of the twenty-seventh century B.C.
It takes no historical imagination at all to confuse Ptahhotep with Polonius,
especially as the maxims are his advice to his son. Here is a sample, I trust a
fair one:

If thou hast become great after thou wert little, and has gained possessions after
thou wert formerly in want, ... be not unmindful of how it was with thee be-
fore. Be not boastful of thy wealth, which has come to thee as a gift of the god.
Thou art not greater than another like thee to whom the same has happened.

Be not avaricious in a division, nor greedy (even) for thy (own) goods. Be not

i* Breasted, Dawn of Conscience, pp. 255-256. The last sentences refer to tampering
with rules for the use of irrigation water, as wrong today in Arizona as it was thou-
sands of years ago in Egypt.

43

A History of Western Morals

avaricious towards thy own kin. Greater is the appeal of the gentle than that of
the strong.

Follow thy desire (literally "thy heart") as long as thou livest. Do not more than
is told thee. Shorten not the time of following desire. It is an abomination to en-
croach upon the time thereof. Take no care daily beyond the maintenance of thy
house. When possessions come, follow desire, for possessions are not complete
when he (the owner) is harassed.

If thou hearkenest to this which I have said to thee, all the fashion of thee will be
according to the ancestors. As for the righteousness thereof, it is their worth; the
memory thereof shall not vanish from the mouths of men, because their maxims
are worthy.15

Nor is there lacking in Egypt another moral attitude, one in much greater
credit among the Western literary, at least, than the admirable commonplaces
of Polonius. To some ancient Egyptians, as to James Russell Lowell, right
was ever on the scaifold, wrong forever on the throne. Here again one need
but sample:

THE CORRUPTION OF MEN

To whom do I speak today?

Brothers are evil,

Friends of today are not of love.

To whom do I speak today?

Hearts are thievish,

Every man seizes his neighbour's goods.

To whom do I speak today?

The gentle man perishes,

The bold-faced goes everywhere.

To whom do I speak today?

Robbery is practised,

Every man seizes his neighbour's goods.

To whom do I speak today?

There are no righteous,

The land is left to those who do iniquity.

Calamities come to pass today, tomorrow afflictions are not past. All men are
silent concerning it, (although) the whole land is in great disturbance. Nobody is

15 Breasted, Dawn of Conscience, pp. 132-137.

44

Origins: The Ancient Near East

free from evil; all men alike do it. Hearts are sorrowful. He who gives commands
is as he to whom commands are given; the heart of both of them is content. Men
awake to it in the morning daily, (but) hearts thrust it not away. The fashion of
yesterday therein is like today. . . . There is none so wise that he perceives, and
none so angry that he speaks. Men awake in the morning to suffer every day. Long
and heavy is my malady. The poor man has no strength to save himself from him
that is stronger than he. It is painful to keep silent concerning the things heard,
(but) it is suffering to reply to the ignorant man. . . .16

The very last passage, attributed to a priest of Heliopolis during the dif-
ficulties of a period of crisis often called a "feudal age" (second millennium
B.C.) has clearly the marks of a moralist in the midst of a "time of troubles."
The priest of Heliopolis is indeed worrying, complaining, but his complaints
are somehow more dignified than those of the author of "The Corruption of
Men." The priest, for one thing, appears to be puzzled, indeed to be thinking;
the author of "The Corruption of Men" is merely relieving himself.

It is hardly possible to conclude much about the moral ideal of the
Egyptians. Theirs is a long history, which research has shown to be by no
means one of frozen uniformity. It is true that there is an early period of
growth and consolidation, a comparatively long period, broken into peaks
and valleys of high artistic and literary creativity, and then some dozen final
centuries of marking time. In terms basically of ethical theory, there is a
definite development from earlier contractual relations with nature gods who
get blind obedience from men, to moral relations with gods who approve
virtue in their worshipers and condemn vice hi them, and thence to the
monotheistic worship of Aton and the self-conscious wisdom literature from
which we have just quoted. But there is also in the last millennium or so a
clear lapse into magic and conformity, a loss of freshness and originality. Even
at the height of the culture, however, we cannot from present available sources
outline an Egyptian equivalent of the Hebrew prophet, the Greek beautiful-
and-good, the European knight of chivalry.

It is, however, possible to discern some phases of what might be called
the national character, phases not unimportant for the historian of morals.
For all their reaching and overreaching toward another world — their monu-
mental art, their preoccupation with the mysteries of death, the touches of
not accepting the things we Westerners feel we know and accept so well from
our senses and our science — for all this, there is in the Egyptian record a
strong element of what has to be called "realism," the realism that believes
itself to be holding a mirror to nature. In sculpture, figures like that of the
10 Breasted, Dawn of Conscience, pp. 172-179.

45

A History of Western Morals

scribe are familiar; he looks busy, capable, and unworried.17 And in ethics we
can always summon up the figure of Ptahhotep of the maxims, maxims much
more like those of Franklin than like those of Vauvenargues or La Roche-
foucauld. Moreover, though they had a few brief moments of imperialist
expansion, though they were a "great power" in the earliest of Western
balance-of-power systems, the Egyptians were not very good at war, not
by any means a military people. Of course, a great hot fertile valley does not
breed warriors — this much we must concede to the "materialistic" inter-
pretation of history. It took invaders from harsher lands, settled in Egypt but
still remembering their past, to stir her to expansion. But again the material
on this earth always translates itself into the spiritual, or at least into the
habitual. The successful long-term militarist is no realist, no accepter of this
world and these human beings, but a heaven stormer who would shake us all
out of our senses. A military caste is so unnatural, even in the West, that it
needs, as we shall see, special educating and conditioning, special moral ideals,
to keep going. These apparently the Egyptians did not, over long periods,
develop.

They were also gifted inventors, skilled in the practical arts, characteristics
the American will list at once as signs of a realistic people. The Greeks, as
we know from Herodotus and others, though they were puzzled by the myste-
rious sides of what they thought was a priest-ridden society, were greatly
impressed with the practical side of Egyptian life, with what we should call
Egyptian know-how. Moreover, these skills were, in the balance, rather based
on the empirical tradition of the craftsman than on anything close to scientific
speculation. Astronomy and mathematics owe more to the Babylonians than
to the Egyptians; the latter were good at medicine, an art that goes naturally
enough with an acceptance of this world and an unwillingness to leave it long
for any other. All in all then, it looks as though we can find in ancient Egypt a
moral attitude, a moral type, very characteristic of the West, though it has
never perhaps quite set the moral tone anywhere. This is the firmly unheroic,
indeed not even athletic, unimaginative, undespairing, practical man of com-
mon sense. He is not quite Sancho Panza (though Cervantes has come close to
him), not quite Poor Richard (though Franklin himself has touches of him) ;
Moliere's M. Jourdain misses him as badly as does Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt.
In fact, the men of letters are not very good at getting at and reporting a
creature so different from themselves; the artist sometimes does better. Take
another look at that four-thousand-year-old Egyptian scribe.

17 See for example Plate 66 in The Art of Ancient Egypt, Vienna, Phaidon Press,
1936, or Elie Faure, Ancient Art, New York, Garden City Publishing Co., 1937, p. 33.

Origins: The Ancient Near East

III

It is hardly necessary here to pay great attention to ancient Mesopotamia.
To the general historian, to the historian of culture, there is much in the record
of great importance. The historian of Western morals can content himself
with noting that the creation myths of the Chaldeans got incorporated into
the Hebrew cosmogony — though he will, if he is, above all, concerned with
his own modern world, be even more interested to note the glee with which
nineteenth-century rationalist opponents of Christianity lighted on evidence
that God had not begun his work of creation with the Jews. He will note that
in the Code of Hammurabi (about 1800 B.C.) we have a very early and very
complete code of laws which, for the moralist, shows the violence and cruelty
of punishments one would expect, but which also shows clearly the legislator's
attempt to recognize degrees of guilt, a distinction that implies practical
recognition of men as independent moral beings, responsible for their acts —
just the kind of recognition Piaget's young children were unable to make.

Two peoples do stand out in the long and complex history of the Meso-
potamian state system in the kind of relief that interests the historian of
morals.

The Assyrians, who from the margin of the great Mesopotamian Valley
came to dominate it in a sudden rise in the eighth century B.C., are known as
militarists. They seem to have deserved thek historical reputation. Their art
is highly masculine, bullish and lionish. Their surviving literature is mostly
imitative of the Babylonian, for, though successful soldiers sometimes come
to admire literature, they do not often create it. There are surviving inscrip-
tions left by conquering heroes in which one of the abiding traits of the mili-
tary caste stands out in almost caricatural sharpness — their love of boasting
by hyperbole, so different from the intellectual's boast by litotes.

But we do not know about these warriors what the historian of morals
most needs to know: how they were keyed by education to the hard job of
professional heroism. It would be nice to know what the Assyrian equivalent
of the Prussian Junkers' cadet school was like — there must have been an
equivalent — but we do not have for them even the kind of information we
have on the education of the Greek warriors who took Troy. Perhaps the
Assyrians did not do a good job of military education; at any rate, they held
their empire briefly, going down to a revival among the Babylonians they
had conquered — perhaps evidence that the Babylonians were not quite as
corrupt as the Jewish prophets made them out to be. Here are two specimens
from Assyrian remains:

47

A History of Western Morals

At that time I received the tribute of the land of Isala — cattle, flocks and wine. To
the mountain of Kashiari I crossed, to Kinabu, the fortified city of Hulai I drew
near. With the masses of my troops and by my furious battle onset I stormed, I
captured the city; 600 of their warriors I put to the sword; 3,000 captives I burned
with fire; I did not leave a single one among them alive to serve as a hostage.
Hulai, their governor, I captured alive. Their corpses I formed into pillars; their
young men and maidens I burned in the fire. Hulai, their governor, I flayed, his
skin I spread upon the wall of the city of Damdamusa; the city I destroyed, I dev-
astated, I wasted with fire. . . .18

And now at the command of the great gods my sovereignty, my dominion, and
my power, are manifesting themselves; I am regal, I am lordly, I am exalted, I am
mighty, I am honored, I am glorified, I am pre-eminent, I am powerful, I am
valiant, I am lion-brave, and I am heroic! (I), Assur-Nasir-Pal, the mighty king,
the king of Assyria, chosen of Sin, favorite of Anu, beloved of Adad, mighty one
among the gods, I am the merciless weapon that strikes down the land of his
enemies. . . ,19

The Babylonians, especially after their final conquest of the Jews in the
sixth century B.C., do appear as the first example of the sensual, corrupt,
materialistic big-city men. Clearly, the Jewish priestly men of letters to whom
we owe our impressions of the Whore of Babylon were not engaged in an
effort at objective analysis of a culture. But we do know that the religion of
the Babylonians was a polytheism that goes with settled agriculturalists of
such early areas of civilization, with a fertility cult, ritual magic, and a gen-
eral lack of high-mindedness. The Babylonians seem to have been devoted
to business. We simply do not have the evidence in the scattered sources to
hazard a guess as to whether the merchant was in any sense considered an
admirable person, a moral ideal; probably not. But it is clear that the Baby-
lonians led the kind of life that stank in the nostrils of the puritanical Jews
of the Captivity, that the Jews felt toward them the righteous horror of the
monotheist for the polytheist, the kind of horror felt today by the Moslem
in India for Hindu beliefs and practices, mixed with the kind of indignation
Martin Luther felt in the streets of Renaissance Rome. The Babylonians,
alas, have left no good record of their own feelings about the Jews. One may
guess that they were not greatly afflicted with feelings of guilt.

18 D. D. Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, p. 146. Assur-Nasir-Pal — from the pavement slabs of the entrance to the
temple of Urta at Calah (Nimrud) .

19 Ibid. Pavement slabs as above, following the invocation to Urta.

Origins: The Jews and the Greeks

THE JEWS must bulk very large in any history of Western morals. The very
familiar notion that modern Western culture has two roots, one in Judaea
and one in Greece — its most representative statement is perhaps in the works
of Matthew Arnold — is one that must annoy the revisionist historian, and any
inquirer distrustful of formulas, anxious to qualify, to note variants, to avoid
nice big ideas that simplify what he knows to be reality. Nevertheless, the
formula keeps cropping up even in the mind that tries to reject it. We shall
have to return to it. Here we shall be concerned with the very difficult prob-
lem of what the morals of the Jews really were in the centuries before the
prophets, before the defeats which marked so deeply the minds of the in-
tellectual leaders of the nation. But the problem can be put more sharply:
other peoples in that cockpit of early international conflict, the great valleys
of Mesopotamia and Egypt and the connecting fertile crescent, were beaten,
lost their independence, were absorbed by their conquerors, died and were
forgotten, producing no Isaiah, no Jesus, no Maimonides, and, very definitely,
nothing like a Theodor Herzl or a Chaim Weizmann.

For the early Jews, our surviving record is, in a sense, no longer frag-
mentary. Yet for the historian the Old Testament is about as full of pitfalls
as a source can be. In the form we have, it was clearly edited by various
priestly hands and at various times, most notably after the great disasters
of the Jewish "national state" in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., but con-
tinuing on down to the second century B.C., commonly given as the date of
the Book of Esther, the latest of the Old Testament. It can be analyzed into

49

A History of Western Morals

constituent elements; indeed, scholars are nowadays in substantial agreement
as to its composition, subject to the usual scholarly debate over detail, an
agreement that should do much to refute the notion that there is nothing
cumulative in humanistic scholarly studies. There are elements of a cosmog-
ony which looks to be substantially a development of old Babylonian cos-
mological myths, including that much worked-over topic the Flood. There are
elements of what it is not unfair to call an epic of the heroic ages, the "Jew-
ish Iliad," with its echoes of the wandering days of the Hebrews before they
settled in Canaan, and with a fine central theme, the story of Moses and the
deliverance from Egypt. There are elements of a running historical account
(the Books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings) clearly not the work of
any "lay" historian like Herodotus, indeed, in a sense even more obviously
"clerical" and anonymous, than the work of medieval monkish chroniclers,
which is perhaps the best Western parallel familiar to most of us. There are
elements of what we are accustomed to call, simply, "literature" — the poetry
of the Psalms, the aphoristic wisdom of the Book of Proverbs, stories like
those of Ruth and Job, didactic, philosophical, poetic, patriotic, but, still,
stories. There are the books rather tamely called the "prophetic books,"
which — if you can forgive the kind of generalization that laughs at distribu-
tion curves — are the heart, the essence, of what the Jew has meant to West-
ern history. And, most important for us in this chapter, there are, especially
in the first five books, known as the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, Deuteronomy), a record of theological growth toward monothe-
ism, an elaborate set of liturgical and other priestly rules, which make up the
Law, and important ethical writings of which the heart is the Ten Com-
mandments.

The major difficulty for us is to discern the earlier Hebrews through the
later editing. No one seriously maintains that the editors faked, doctored, or
invented; bad as was the world for these Jews of the centuries of disaster, it
was not quite an Orwellian world. But there were no complicated techniques
of historical criticism known to them; these editors could not be what we
hopefully call "historically minded." They wrote with a present much in
mind. That present they reflected back as, for example, high ethical mono-
theism into an age when the recently nomadic Jews could hardly have con-
ceived of a single God, not even their jealous tribal god Jehovah.1

1 The Hebrew form is, of course, Yahweh, or, more pedantically transliterated, YHWH.
But I cannot quite give up a form sacred not only to Christians, but, as Ethan Allen's
famous use of it at Ticonderoga shows, to anti-Christians.

JO

Origins: The Jews and the Greeks

Yet it is quite possible that the general impression left by the last two or
5e centuries of Western scholarly work on the early Jews exaggerates the

between the Jews of Moses' day and those of the last few centuries B.C.
the English-speaking world in particular, anti-Christian debunkers, who
e been numerous and vocal, have enjoyed showing just how different the
gion of the Old Testament really was from what it appeared to be as seen
n the Baptist Sunday schools of Birmingham, England, and Birmingham,
bama. Jehovah appeared in the pages of these debunkers as a horrid tribal
mt-god, the Jews as primitives somehow nonetheless already endowed
i many of the traits modern anti-Semitism finds in them. They were al-
ly unnaturally clannish, unable to get on with their neighbors, addicted at
e to a particularly libidinous sex life in polygamy and to a kill-joy puritan-
, cruel and treacherous in war (the story of Judith, for instance), double-
ssers (Moses in Egypt, the tale of Joseph and his brothers), perversely
mious, as witness the complexity of their Law; in sum, rather worse than
st early peoples in their conduct, whited sepulchers, in fact, to quote a
:h later Jewish writer.2

Even when the animus of such accounts is allowed for, even when one
5 simply that the historical evidence makes it seem that the Hebrews were

of the nomadic tribes of Semitic origin in the arid or semiarid regions
and the Nile-Mesopotamian "cradle of civilization," who like so many
r so many centuries penetrated these areas and were absorbed by the
pies and cultures they found there, the basic question still remains: Why
the Jews and their history part of our lives today, while the many known

the many more unknown tribes that came out of the desert or the moun-
s to the valleys and the fertile crescent are at best part of specialized his-
zal scholarship?

A good answer, that God chose the Jews, is one impossible for me, and
jly for many of my readers, not all by any means necessarily in these days

e above is, I admit, synthetic, but I hope not a caricature. Almost all writers hostile
•thodox Christianity since the Enlightenment have seemed to enjoy insisting on the
es of early Jewish life most inconsistent with the spirit of the Beatitudes. The Nie-
lean H. L. Mencken will do as a sample. See his lively but too damned sensible
tise on the Gods, New York, Knopf, 1930, and Treatise on Right and Wrong, New
:, Knopf, 1934, both passim or as the indexes under "Jews" and "Yahweh" indicate,
following passage is typical: "The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into
aware, drips with blood; there is indeed no more bloody chronicle in all the litera-
of the world. Half of the hemorrhage is supplied by the goyim who angered Yahweh
3uting His Chosen People, and the other half issues from living creatures who went
i to death that He might be suitably nourished and kept in good humour." Treatise
<e Gods, p. 158.

51

A History of Western Morals

bad religious Christians or bad religious Jews. A sort of background for an
answer can be found in a familiar, if dangerously broad, generalization well
known to the contemporary sociologist of religion. The early settled agricul-
tural societies tended toward lush polytheisms based on a tamed "nature,"
reflecting the preoccupation of such societies with the comforts of the flesh,
with the need for vegetable and animal fertility, with trade, property, and
the like; the early nomads, closer to an untamed "nature" and to the ways of
preagricultural hunters and food gatherers, tended toward a more austere
polytheism of sky-gods and mountain-gods (among the latter, old Jehovah,
not just a mountain, but a volcano!) . As the chief or father god of these pas-
toral peoples grew in importance, he tended to become the sole god of mono-
theism, though originally the sole god of the tribe or people only, not by any
means a universal God.3

There is something in this distinction between the religions and morals
of agricultural peoples on one hand and those of pastoral peoples on the
other, especially if it is not held as a simple dualism. It becomes especially
misleading, however, if it is developed into a Spenglerian metaphor of West-
ern religion emerging from the shadowy desert "cave" of a Semitic Near East.
Perhaps Jehovah, the Father of Jesus, and Allah did start their careers in the
desert or semiarid country, but so, too, did many Semitic Baals who never
got beyond their own little shrines. The Phoenicians and their Carthaginian
heirs, also Semitic, continued, into their greatness, devotion to their Moloch,
their graven images, their by no means higher religion. Nor did the Aryan
and other invaders from the north, who, if they did not emerge from deserts,
were surely pastoral nomads originally, attain to high ethical monotheism.
Their sky-gods and other thunder wielders never became more than firsts
among equals. The most famous of them, Zeus- Jupiter, became, as befits the
king amongst his nobles after the nobles have acquired arts and letters, rather
less than that, to judge from recorded squabbles on Olympus.

There is no single broad explanation either of Jewish survival as a people
or of the Jewish achievement of a religion that is a base of Christianity — the
two achievements being, indeed, related. The foundations were surely laid
before the Babylonian Captivity began in 586 B.C., and some of them go back
to the desert, back to Abraham and the other patriarchs. What was built up
in the earlier centuries and in the successful establishment of Israel was a

3 On this contrast of the gods of settled agricultural and wandering pastoral peoples, see
a good resume in Christopher Dawson, The Age of the Gods, Boston, Houghton Mifflin.
1920, Chap. XL

52

Origins: The Jews and the Greeks

society extraordinarily knit together in self-consciousness. The phrase the
bluff Menckens have had such an ironic time with — the Chosen People —
deserves to be taken in full sociological seriousness. Here it is in all its clarity
from the Pentateuch:

... the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself,
above all people that are upon the face of the earth. The Lord did not set his love
upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for
ye were the fewest of all people: but because the Lord loved you, and because
he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers, hath the Lord
brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you out of the house of
bondmen, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.4

It will not do to assume that the feelings behind this passage were limited
to the priestly intellectuals who wrote it. The Hebrew religion as it developed
spread these feelings to the common people. Moreover, the Jews were, in
spite of their quarrels among themselves, their frequent backslidings into
idolatry — the "familiar spirits, and the wizards, and the teraphim, and the
idols and all the abominations" — one of the great religiously and morally dis-
ciplined peoples of history. Most of the well-known analysis that Polybius
and, after him, Machiavelli give of the role religion played in the disciplining
of the early Romans applies to the Jews. In addition, the Jews had, in the
Biblical account of creation, in the great epic of the exile and the exodus, in
all their early national literature, an emotionally and intellectually satisfying
justification for the discipline to which they submitted — no, "submitted" is
here the natural and wrong word of a culture-bound twentieth-century Ameri-
can; let us say "which they embraced." Finally, there is the possibility that
Moses was a great man, not just a myth, and that in the very critical years
when the Hebrews were becoming the Jews of Israel they were well served
by a series of good leaders.

Above all, however, it will not do to assume, as we of this day of national-
ism and racism are inclined to, that the Chosen People felt themselves chosen
unconditionally, by themselves and for themselves, to satisfy individual pride
in the pooled pride of the in-group. The conscientious Jew from the time of
the exile on, at least, and, we may assume, from much earlier, felt that the
Jews were chosen for something, chosen as witnesses for God's will toward
men, chosen to set the example of a moral life. The Jew — and, here, the
pagan-loving, Greek-loving critic who dislikes the Jewish element in our tra-
dition as "repressive" or "puritanical" is not without some justification in fact

4 Deuteronomy 7:6-8.

55

A History of Western Morals

for his attitude, though he usually neglects this same side of his beloved
Greeks — this Jew did go through life worrying about his righteousness, did
submit himself to extraordinary ritual tasks which carried specific moral
implications, did, in the matter particularly of sex relations, spell out for
himself a code that fully took account of the grave complexities and diffi-
culties men and women have with that obstinately "unnatural," that is, moral,
phase of human conduct. The Jew, clearly, did not grow up in the South Seas,
nor in the pages of an Enlightened eighteenth-century devotee of nature's
simple plan. Our real feelings and our customary behavior in matters of sex
continue to bear firmly the mark of Jewish experience.5

Thus endowed in the course of the centuries, of which the Pentateuch
and the early historical books are a record with an unusually closely meshed
cosmogony, theology, liturgy, priesthood, and received historical epic culmi-
nating in the concept of the Chosen People, with a moral code and moral
habits in turn closely meshed with the above and culminating in a tight na-
tional discipline, with a national culture hero like Moses, the Jews became
the people of Israel. But — and this is most important — they never became,
like the Romans, a successful expansionist people. Even at its height, the
kingdom of Solomon was, beside such great powers as Egypt, Assyria, or
Babylonia, a minor state. The Jews could keep the kind of discipline that is
always lost in a successful imperialist expansion. Their history had prepared
them for their extraordinary feat of survival.6

In the face of this survival, the harshness of early Jewish culture is not of

5 On Jewish moral puntanism, I suggest the reader not directly familiar with the sources
go to them, if only briefly for such a good sample as Deuteronomy, chapters 21-28. If
in this reading he finds only absurdities, irrationality, superstition, unnatural restraints,
if he thinks himself superior to all this, then I suggest he had better not bother to go
on with this book. He has shown himself too enlightened in the narrow rationalist
sense to profit from the record of the long centuries of the unenlightened.

6 An American can perhaps best get some feeling for how the Jews, molded by a
consciousness of being chosen, by a firm belief in theologically explained history, by
a discipline strengthened by the resistance of neighboring peoples, by a moral code that
set them off from their neighbors, and by gifted leadership, survived as a people if he
will reflect on the achievement of the Latter-day Saints. In the midst of an American
democratic society that presses and persuades to conformity, that "assimilates'* at least
as rapidly and completely as any early civilized society could, the Mormons have
for a century maintained themselves as a peculiar people. I am not suggesting that
the Mormons are not at all like other Americans, but merely that they have preserved
a corporate identity of their own. Nor do I suggest that they will preserve even that
as long as the Jews have theirs. But, for the present, I submit that not even the firmest
devotee of the explanation of history by geographical environment or by any other
simple "materialistic" factor can get at the moral difference between those two geo-
graphical twins Utah and Nevada or those older ones Israel and Phoenicia.

54

Origins: The Jews and the Greeks

great importance. A cultivated, artistic, peaceful people, a people smilingly
accepting a world in the balance to be enjoyed — such, for instance, as from
their artifacts alone we perhaps mistakenly picture those delightful Minoans
— could not have done what the Jews did in Israel. You need at least an island
for such a delightful culture, a Crete if not a Bali. There is a streak of austerity
in these early Jews, not an ascetic turning away from the delights of the flesh
(the Song of Solomon is surely concerned with sex in a way well short of
sublimation) but, rather, a certain heaviness of spirit. The laughter of the gods
is not there, nor even the smiles of men.

The great moral code of the Jews is still taught most Westerners in their
childhood. Here are the Ten Commandments:

1. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any
thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the
water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve
them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the
fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that
hate me; and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and
keep my commandments.

3. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will
not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do
all thy work: but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it
thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy man-
servant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within
thy gates: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all
that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the
sabbath day, and hallowed it.

5. Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land
which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

6. Thou shalt not kill.

7. Thou shalt not commit adultery.

8. Thou shalt not steal.

9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neigh-
bour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass,
nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.7

This is not the code of pastoral nomads, and it could not have been de-

7 Exodus 20:3-17. I number in the common Protestant tradition. Roman Catholics
and Lutherans combine 1 and 2, and separate 10 into two by distinguishing between
wife and goods as objects of covetousness. Thus, allusion to, say, the "sixth com-
mandment" is in itself misleading; it may refer to adultery or murder.

55

A History of Western Morals

livered to a historical Moses at the time and place described in Exodus. Its
feeling for private property — such as "thy neighbor's house" — even the Sab-
batarian provisions of the fourth commandment and its firm monotheistic
theology, are the work of a people already settled, and could hardly have come
directly out of the desert. In spite of the harshness of the second command-
ment— that phrase "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children untc
the third and fourth generation of them that hate me" has long been par-
ticularly offensive to modern Western liberals of all sorts — the code as 2
whole is not a cruel, harsh, or "primitive" one. Granted that it is in form an
imposed and absolutist code, it has nonetheless been able to survive with
honor among modern peoples who do not really feel it as either, but as some-
thing springing from the experience of the race.8 The code has quite simply
been part of our lives, not something outside us, nor outside nature. It seems
likely that over the long centuries some men and women have halted on the
brink of theft, or perjury, or even adultery, have "resisted temptation," be-
cause they had been "brought up on" the Ten Commandments — or so it must
seem to all but disastrously naive deniers of the power of the Word.

The Ten Commandments of course by no means exhaust the ethical
teachings of the Old Testament. The books of the Pentateuch, variously
edited as they were, contain a really extraordinary variety of ethical precepts
and commands. Leviticus itself, the most priestly of the books, has not only
ritual precept after ritual precept, on diet, cleanliness, sacrifices, and the
like, the Law as duly spelled out under the authority of Moses; it has also
a great many ferocious laws on matters sexual, prescribing death penalties
for a great and specific range of spelled-out misconduct from adultery to
sodomy and incest. It has much on keeping the Sabbath, and on preserving
the in-groupness of Israel. But it also has, among many prescriptions that
are essentially concerned with social and political relations — part of the
fields and the gleanings shall be left "for the poor and the stranger," for in-
stance— a sentence that the evangelists were to echo word for word: "Love
thy neighbor as thyself."9

*W. T. Stace makes a common, but also misleading, distinction, to which I shall re-
turn, between the two sources of European [Western] ethical thinking which he calls
the Palestinian "impositionist" — that morality is imposed on man from outside human-
ness — and the Greek 'Immanentist" — that morality grows out of humanness. The
Destiny of Western Man, New York, Reynal and Hitchcock, 1942, Chap. I.
9 Leviticus 19:18. See also Matthew 19:19; Luke 10:27. Chapters 19 and 20 of
Leviticus are a good cross section of these priestly ethics. There are also some fine
''primitive" prescriptions in Exodus 21 following immediately after the Ten Com-
mandments.

56

Origins: The Jews and the Greeks

Not even from the body of the Old Testament we are in this section con-
cerned with (the books from Genesis to Isaiah) is it quite possible to draw
an embodied Jewish ideal person. Moses was, as we have noted, a culture
hero, but it does not seem as though the Jew of those years would quite dare
to think of himself as being "like" Moses in the way an American might want
to be like Lincoln. It is not that early peoples were incapable of conceiving
what I have called the moral human ideal; as we shall see in the very next
section of this chapter, such an ideal emerges very clearly from the pages of
Homer. Nor are the elements lacking from which some generalizations can
be made; they just do not fit neatly together. Job's final surrender to a God
beyond any possible formal and logical theodicy is surely too complete to be
Western, or, even in the ordinary sense, Jewish. The wisdom of Proverbs
and, still more, that of the Protestant-rejected Ecclesiasticus seem to err too
far on the other side from that of the Book of Job, that of irony, worldly
wisdom, intellectual disgust with the ways of man (and, perhaps, of God?).
The Book of Psalms is probably the best source for the moral "tone," and
the moral "style," of conventional Jewry before the downfall of the two
kingdoms. It is grave, pious, conventional, not heaven-storming, but fully
aware that the Way and the Law are not easy to keep. The figure of walking
— "uprightly," "in the way of the Lord," "righteously," and the like— is
common in both the Old and the New Testaments. It is a good figure, sug-
gesting effort but not strain; above all, carrying with it no menaces, no com-
mands from above. Here is the beginning of the Fifteenth Psalm:

Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle?

Who shall dwell in thy holy hill?

He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness,

And speaketh the truth in his heart.10

Yet, to point up our difficulties in generalizing about the moral tone of
early Jewish life, this very same psalm turns at once to the negatives, to the
denials — unaccompanied, it is true, by any threats beyond the very common
Old Testament coupling of "Lord" and "fear," but still negatives, still threats:

He that backbiteth not with his tongue,
Nor doeth evil to his neighbour,
Nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbour.
In whose eyes a vile person is contemned;
But he honoureth them that fear the Lord.

10 Psalm 15: 1, 2. And see C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, New York, Harcourt
Brace, 1958.

57

A History of Western Morals

He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not.

He that putteth not out his money to usury,

Nor taketh reward against the innocent.

He that doeth these things shall never be moved.11

There is an easy test of the tone of the Old Testament. Take any con-
cordance to the Bible, and glance at the entries under the neighboring words
"laugh" and "law" and their various grammatical forms. "Laugh" is snowed
under by "law"; if you subtract from the instances under "laugh" those in
which the authors of the King James version translated by "laugh to scorn"
a single Hebrew word perhaps better translated "mock," and if you also
subtract the ironic use of "laugh" in the wisdom literature, you have very
little real and joyful laughter left.12 Such a test must not be taken to mean
that the Jews spent their time in lofty misery, that they never enjoyed them-
selves simply and thoughtlessly. The Old Testament is, after all, a product of
the literary, the priestly literary, and not a piece of social-psychological re-
search into attitudes and mental health. Moreover, it is all we have. It is
arresting to reflect that if all we had for the early Greeks was the Works and
Days of Hesiod, we should have to conclude that their hearts, too, were over-
whelmed with the harshness of this world.

Yet even a fragment of the accepted great literature of a people is not
altogether misleading as to their moral ideals and even as to their conduct. A
later age that found of all American writings only, let us say, a copy of
Walden would by no means understand what we had been like, not even what
the old Yankees had been like; but if the age were still Western, still inter-
ested in history, it would not be wholly without understanding of us. It would
in Thoreau's work have a good clue to the exaggerated, almost, but not
quite, unlivable form the eternal coexistence of Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza takes with us Americans. The first twenty books of the Old Testament,
as we have noted, are a great deal more than a fragment; edited and com-
posed as they were, they are less and more than an anthology, a "course" in
Jewish cultural history.

From them there stands out clearly a feeling of need for discipline, for
the Law, an acceptance of the need to struggle against men and nature, an
attitude the New Testament often reflects: "Because strait is the gate, and

11 Psalm 15: 3-5.

12 Examples: **The virgin the daughter of Zion hath despised thee, and laughed thee to
scorn" (II Kings 19:21); "Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful; And the end of
that mirth is heaviness" (Proverbs 14:13).

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Origins: The Jews and the Greeks

narrow is the way. . . ,"13 Some of these feelings are those of any early
people struggling for a living in a harsh environment. Canaan flowed with
milk and honey only in comparison with the desert. The Jews did not have it
easy. But however you care to explain them, those feelings are there, so put,
so preserved, that they have guided — some of the time, and for some of the
people — lives in lands that flowed with richer stuff than milk or honey.

To conclude, there is need to make briefly a few cautionary remarks. The
early Jews had the concept of an afterlife, and of a heaven and a heU; but it
was not a firm concept, let alone a preoccupation, like that of the Egyptians —
and that of the early Christians. The Jewish sheol, or hell, often seems no
more than that of their Babylonian neighbors, a colorless limbo, a threat, but
not a vigorous one. They had a firm notion of sin, a word that bulks large in
these early books of the Old Testament. But even a hasty reading confirms
the commonplace; sin is, before the prophetic writings, no Calvinistic or
Freudian horror within a man, but a simple transgression of a clear law, a
crime against the ordinances of the City of God, disarmingly illustrated in
the words attributed to Moses: "And I took your sin, the calf which ye had
made, and burnt it with fire, and stamped it, and ground it very small, even
until it was small as dust."14 Again, there is not much use trying to revise the
commonplace: up to the time of the prophets, Jehovah (the Lord, God) is
indeed the sole god of Israel. There is no solid evidence that the Jews be-
lieved the gods of their neighbors to be nonexistent, or in any way fakes.
These gods quite literally did not compete with Jehovah, had nothing to do
with him, except indirectly as their adherents tried to tempt the Jews to go
whoring after other gods. It seems to me probable that these early Jews did
not even think of Jehovah as "superior" to other peoples' gods, for they
could hardly have yet had the modern national habit — at its extreme, ap-
parently, today with us and with the Russians — of thinking always in terms
of a kind of big-league international competition in everything. Finally, it
need hardly be said that these Jews differ in many important ways from
their modern heirs. They were still farmers and herdsmen, the merchants
among them much less important than those of the Babylonians, for instance.
The history of their kingdoms is the history of political rivalries and political
crimes; these Jews were no lotus-eaters. But they do not seem, to use a
current word of social psychology, a very competitive society; or their
society is by no means the ritually combative society we find among

is Matthew 7: 14.

i* Deuteronomy 9:21.

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A History of Western Morals

the Greeks. Nor are these Jews notably hard workers, that is, they work no
harder than their rough land and primitive technology make necessary; there
is no Calvinistic cult of work, and the famous text "Go to the ant, thou slug-
gard; consider her ways, and be wise" is rather out of line.15 Finally, not
even in the wisdom literature is there much trace of two attitudes, two per-
sonalities, we know in modern Jewry: the witty, cynical, sentimental Heine
and the rationalist, optimistic, enlightened, reforming Eduard Bernstein.
True, these types belong to a much later and in some ways more advanced
and more complicated society. But is it not also possible that the two are
European, indeed German, types, not Jews at all?

II

The Greeks, too, were a people of the Book. Their Bible was Homer. We need
not here concern ourselves with the problems, interesting though they are,
which have long occupied scholars: Was there an individual Homer who
composed these epics, or are they the work of, to us, forever anonymous pro-
fessional bards over many generations? If there was a Homer, did he compose
both the Iliad and the Odyssey? Have the two poems perhaps quite different
sources? There are many more questions. Scholars are agreed that both poems
were handed down in oral form by professional bards for several centuries;
they are reasonably well agreed that the written version of the Iliad the
Athenians used and which has come down to us was brought to Athens in the
sixth century B.C. and may even have been given something like its final shape
in Ionia by a "Homer" of the ninth century. There is great debate as to how
much interpolation, how much editing the texts of both poems underwent
before they were reasonably fixed by writing, as to how good "history" (in
contrast to "poetry") they are, and as to just what society and what culture
they came out of. It would seem pretty clear that the poems were not nearly
as much altered by later and interested emendations as were the books of the
Old Testament which record the Jewish epic; and it is not very risky to use
them, with due caution, as documents "reflecting" the moral life of the Greek
aristocracy of the Mycenaean Age just before the last or Dorian wave of
Greek invasions or no later than just after those invasions, that is, of the
thirteenth to the eleventh centuries B.C. Achilles was, roughly, a contempo-
rary of Moses.

15 Proverbs 6:6.

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Origins: The Jews and the Greeks

We may find it difficult to realize that the poems of Homer, and, more
especially, the Iliad, which to us are "literature," certainly better, greater,
than Hiawatha, but, like that poem, "literature," were as much "religion" to
the Greeks as was the Bible to the Jews. But the educated Greek of the great
ages, and right on to the triumph of Christianity in the West, was brought up
on Homer. Plato himself, not, for reasons of principle, an admirer of poets,
though he was, of course, one himself, called Homer the "educator of
Greece."16 It is true that the poems were composed to amuse and elevate,
and certainly to hold the attention of, audiences of nobles, squires, and re-
tainers who were presumably in no mood to be preached at, let alone indoc-
trinated with a theology. The priestly touch unmistakable even in the most
straightforwardly historical books of the Old Testament, bloody and warlike
though they are, is not in these poems. Indeed, Oswald Spengler insists that
Homer was what we should call an antisacerdotalist, a fine, free, noble
warrior-spirit contemptuous of the weak, womanish, priestly intellectual, in
fact, an anticipation of Schopenhauer-Nietzsche-Spengler, as masculine as a
Mediterranean man could be.17

One may suspect that even the bards of the Greek heroic age, however,
were modern enough, intellectuals enough, even human enough, to wish to
improve the morals of their audience. There is, incongruous though the
notion may seem, a good deal of the didactic in Homer; Homer knew well
how a gentleman ought to behave, and he keeps reminding his audience of
what they, too, well knew. Of course, he was not directly concerned with
problems of cosmogony, theology, or even of that most universal element
of all religions — including the Marxist, which passionately justifies the ways
of the god Dialectical Materialism to man — that is, a theodicy. Yet it is
equally clear that Homer was no more making a purely literary use of the

is On this see H. I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans, by G. Lamb,
New York, Sheed and Ward, 1956, Chap. I. This work is a great deal more than a
narrow and conventional interpretation of its title would indicate. It is, in fact, an
excellent history of morals in antiquity — as a history of education should be. Herbert
J. Muller, The Loom of History, New York, Harper, 1958, Chap. Ill, is very good on
Homer.

i? Q. Spengler, The Decline of the West, New York, Knopf, 1950, Vol. II, p. 281.
Alas, "Homer," like these Germans, probably never cracked an enemy's skull. Still,
the purely literary fighter, his mind berserk, his bottom quietly chaired, is, I think, in
the West a product of the post-Christian and, in our modern world, increasingly sharp
conflict between the two aristocracies of the sword and the pen. I do not think Homer
felt any contrast between the world of the gods and the world of Achilles and his
peers; in fact, I do not think he was much like Spengler.

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A History of Western Morals

Olympian gods than were the authors and amenders of the Pentateuch so
using Jehovah. Perhaps that last is not put sharply enough. Homer believed
in Zeus and Athena and the rest.

Of these Greek gods of Olympus, it is often said that, especially in
Homeric times, but to a degree right down through to the end of Greco-
Roman paganism, they were just like human beings, only more powerful,
that the world of Olympus was simply a mirror image of this world, even a
kind of huge realistic folk novel, in which the gods conducted themselves as
human beings do in our realistic fiction — that is to say, rather worse than in
real life. This is largely true, but it must not be interpreted as meaning that
the Greek Olympian religion "taught" its believers that men could and should
imitate the ways of the gods. The early Christian apologists were very fond of
using the argument that the pagans could hardly help lying, cheating, whoring,
and the like, because the gods did so.

Nor is it difficult to show why the worshippers of the gods cannot be good and
just. For how shall they abstain from shedding blood who worship bloodthirsty
deities, Mars and Bellona? Or how shall they spare their parents who worship
Jupiter, who drove out his father? . . . how shall they uphold chastity who wor-
ship a goddess who is naked, an adulteress, and who prostitutes herself as it were
among the gods. . . . Among these things is it possible for men to be just, who,
although they are naturally good, would be trained to injustice by the very gods
themselves?18

It was no doubt a good argument, and like most such arguments more
consoling to the already converted than actually useful as a means of convert-
ing unbelievers. But it was poor history, poor social psychology. The devotees
of these early Western polytheistic faiths were by no means as inclined to try
to make their own conduct godlike as are the believers of our modern higher
religions. The central Greek concept of hubris, to which we shall return,
warned men firmly that the gods punished such presumption as prideful
indeed. The magic world of charms, incantations, and the like existed in
Greece as the world of astrology, fortunetelling, and similar charlatanries
exist with us, definitely below the accepted religion of dignified worship.

*8 Lactantius, Divine Institutes, in Works, trans, by W, Fletcher, Edinburgh, 1871,
Vol. I, p. 316. I admit that our Western training makes us feel that Lactantius must
be substantially right. I would not wish to overdo anti-intellectualism by denying
that there is any connection between what men believe about the supernatural and
their actual conduct But I feel sure that Lactantius is wrong about those who are
"naturally good"; the quiet, faithful Roman wife even in the Late Empire was not
driven by her ideas about the gods to an imitatio Veneris.

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Origins: The Jews and the Greeks

True, lovers might appeal to Aphrodite — but not quite at the purely magic
level of the philter. Lovers later were to appeal to the Virgin Mary.19

In this whole problem, the intellectualist error — that the Greek thought
cheating a moral good because his god Hermes was a slippery customer (or,
as we shall note shortly, because his hero Odysseus was one also) — is indeed
an error. But so, too, is the anti-intellectualist error that the kinds of gods,
the kinds of heroes, a man believes in has no effect on bis morals or his
conduct, no relation with them. Unfortunately, there is no neat mathematical
formula for striking a mean between the intellectualist and anti-intellectualist
position, which mean is an accurate account of reality. There is a relation
between what men think the gods are like and what they think good and evil,
but it is a relation that varies with time, place, and persons. It is no doubt a
variation within limits; the ideals of both good and evil tend clearly to exceed
the limits of all but the most newsworthy real. And always there is that
pressure — rather, that suasion — of ritual, habit, custom, institutions whereby
the ideal gets short-circuited out of the human conscious, where it is a
stimulant, and into less noble parts of the mind, where it is a sedative.

There is, indeed, in the relations between mortals and gods the element of
contract: do ut des. But there is more. Odysseus is a favorite, a protege, of
Athena, who intrigues for him at court, struggles with Poseidon, whom
Odysseus has offended, exults in his successes, mourns his misfortunes.
Athena is the patron saint of Odysseus; but Odysseus has to deserve her sup-
port, not just by ritual acts, but by being the kind of man Athena approves,
wise, resourceful, by Christian ethical standards often unscrupulous, but
never stupidly unscrupulous, persistent in the face of setbacks, courageous in
combat. The reciprocal relation of contract is a moral one; men must merit
the support of the gods, and the gods must merit the support of men.

They are both aristocracies. Homer is not really concerned with the
common people, the demos. Eumaeus, the faithful swineherd in the Odyssey,
is the only conspicuous commoner in the epics; and he is there to point up,
it is true in almost heroic degree, the standard virtues of the commoner in a
noble household. The warriors who fought the Trojan War were officers and
gentlemen, among themselves, as such, equals, and meeting in council to
make important decisions. Their leaders are the characters we know by name,
Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus, and the rest, older, wiser chieftains, but

19 1 do not write the last sentence with intent to shock. I do not equate Aphrodite
and the Virgin — they are very different But part of their provinces in human terms
do overlap.

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A History of Western Morals

hardly, even in the later medieval European sense, monarchs. And, above all,
there is the young Achilles, the hero, in no mere literary sense, of the Iliad.

Achilles is the man all of Homer's listeners would like to be, the man of
arete. The untranslatable word comes out in the dictionaries as, among other
things, "virtue," but "honor," even "proper pride," come closer. Achilles
is young, handsome, the conspicuous and admirable person, the athlete
of grace. Agamemnon, leader of the expedition against Troy, in order to ap-
pease an offended Apollo, is forced to take a series of steps culminating in a
mortal offense to the honor of Achilles. Military ethics forbids Achilles to
challenge the old leader to a duel, so Achilles simply withdraws. In his ab-
sence his dearest friend, Patroclus, is persuaded to impersonate him in a ritual
combat with the Trojan champion Hector, and is killed. Achilles — though
he knows from a prophecy that he will die — now follows what arete in such
a case demands of the hero. He fights Hector, kills him, drags his body in
triumph from his chariot — but dies from a wound in the heel by which his
mother had held him when she dipped him as an infant in the waters of the
Styx, an immersion she had intended to make him proof against wounds.

Now the arete here brought to a tragic peak is very far from Christian
virtue, and almost as far from modern secular, utilitarian morality. It is no
trouble at all to outline the story of Achilles in terms, for most of us at least,
of strong moral condemnation. The initial offense that outraged the hero was
Agamemnon's taking away a concubine from Achilles in a kind of politico-
religious deal with Apollo. The hero withdraws, thus endangering the cause
of his fellows, his country, the whole expedition, out of jealous pique. He is
roused to fight again by a purely personal matter, the death in fair combat
of his friend Patroclus, with whom he may have had pederastic relations. He
takes a vainglorious revenge on the vanquished Hector. He is moved through-
out by vanity; he is about as moral — and as human — as a fighting cock.

The above is, of course, unfair. Homer is setting forth in the framework
of the customs of his time a heroic agon, a struggle in which a man who has
become what his fellows most admired goes deliberately to what he knows
must be his death — to keep that admiration. More nobly put, Achilles sacri-
fices his life for an ideal, an ideal that has never ceased to be part of Western
moral life, though fortunately not often at the frenetic intensity of the Homeric
hero's life. We are back again at arete.

It is the virtue of the man, always measuring himself against others, who
is determined to do better than they the things they all want to do. In Homer's
day those things were the things young, athletic fighting men of a landed

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Origins: The Jews and the Greeks

aristocracy wanted to do and be. But the element of agon, the ritual struggle,
could and would be later in Western history transferred to many other kinds
of human activity, a fact that Americans hardly need to be reminded of. The
ideal of the Homeric hero can be put pejoratively. He is the obsessively
competitive man, always aware of his place in an elaborate order of rank —
indeed a human peck order — always trying to move himself up and push
someone down, the jealous egalitarian who somehow manages to treat with
appropriate differences those above and those below him, the man who must
be a success. Perhaps only the archaic dignity of Homer's poetry and the
excellence our educational tradition has always found in the Greeks really
make the difference between these Homeric competitors and the vulgar big
shots of our vulgar business world today. The ultimate prize in the Homeric
agon, however, is not mere success, not mere leading the league, any more
than it is in business with us. Honor, in a curious way, is its own reward.
Achilles followed his father's most Homeric advice, aw apurrdcw icat virdpoypv
c/jyicvat aXXov, to a martyr's death.20

Homer is an admirable source for the ways of the Greek fighting aristoc-
racy of the first few centuries after these northern wanderers settled down in
the Aegean world and appropriated for themselves, after the fashion of such
conquerors, the benefits of the civilization they found there. It is already an
established aristocracy, in many ways reminiscent of the early feudal aristoc-
racy of Europe, whose bards have also left us a great epic, the Chanson de
Roland. The arete of the Homeric hero will reappear, altered indeed, in the
perfect gentle knight of chivalry. But Homer tells us very little about the rest
of the Greeks, who clearly were not even in this stage, before the city-state, or
polis, quite simply divided into warriors and serfs. For a period of a few cen-
turies later, however, still well before the great age of Athens in the fifth
century, we do have in the works of Hesiod, and in those attributed to him,
information about aspects of Greek life not developed at length in the
Homeric poems, the more practical, day-to-day wisdom of the didactic poet,
and some reflection of the ways of the Greek farmer. Hesiod himself was no
nobleman, but also no serf or slave. He came of what we might call yeoman
farming stock in Boeotia, a region that later Greek literary tradition was to
label slow-witted, boorish. He probably wrote the Works and Days, a series
of didactic poems dealing with the life of the small farmer, though most

20 'To be always among the bravest, and hold my head above others." Iliad, VI, 208,
trans, by R. Lattimore, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1951; I should like
to translate unpoetically: "Always to be best in masculine excellences and come out
on top of the others."

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A History of Western Morals

critics now think he did not write the Theogony the later Greeks attributed
to him. "Hesiod," at any rate, formed with "Homer" the staple of Greek
education right down to the end of pagan days* Hesiod clearly supplied the
common touch lacking in Homer.

The Theogony is the first surviving attempt to systematize what the
Greeks had come to believe about their gods; it is a kind of canon of their
Olympian religion. There is in this straightforward account none of the
prettiness, the literary savoring, the playing with a mythology which is found
in so much later Greek and Roman writing, and which is at its worst perhaps
in the Metamorphoses of Ovid. Hesiod surely believed in the Olympian gods,
and not self-consciously. The line between the life of the gods and that of men
was clear, but it was not for Hesiod and surely not for most Greeks of his
time a line between what we should call the supernatural and the natural.
Within a century or so in Ionia we may believe that the first "philosophers"
on our record were to begin to make this distinction, and to push the bound-
aries of the natural toward the point where the existence of any supernatural
is denied; Thales, the earliest name in the long history of Western philosophy,
is said to have predicted an eclipse in 585 B.C. This, it may be noted, is one
year after the fall of Jerusalem and the beginning of the Babylonian captivity
of the Jewish elite.

These early Greeks certainly did not expect a dramatic supernatural
interference by an Olympian in the routine of their daily lives; but it seems
unlikely that they commonly felt the distinction between the everyday pre-
vailing of the kind of regularities the scientist discovers and the rare, direct,
miraculous intervention of the deity in the affairs of men. Whatever else it
was, the Olympian faith was an immanent one. Perhaps an ordinary West-
erner today can best understand the distinction as the Greek felt it if he will
try to think of the distinction between the rulers and the ruled in the old
monarchic sense, where the ruled have no direct voice in choosing their rulers,
but do know the difference between good times and bad, good rulers and
bad, and feel, however obscurely, that some actions of theirs may somehow
get home to their rulers and influence them. The Greek was even capable of
cursing a god who failed to respond satisfactorily to what the petitioner felt
was a ritually correct demand; and this must not be thought of as blasphemy.

Yet one must not assume that these Greeks were unduly familiar with
their gods. They would not at this early date — and, save for a minority of
rationalist intellectuals, would not at any time — have understood the common
phrase in our history textbooks that the ancient Greek gods were like men

66

Origins: The Jews and the Greeks

except that they were immortal and much more powerful. Both immortality
and power, for one thing, would have had more absolute reality for them
than for us. The Greek did have the feelings we still can associate with the
word "blasphemy," if we take the trouble. More particularly, if he did not
get what he wanted from his petition — let us say frankly, prayer, for there are
many kinds of prayer — he could feel that either he had failed to carry out the
prescribed ritual forms as they should be carried out, or that he had made not
so much an unreasonable demand of the god as a presumptuous one, one
that would, after all, offend the god's immortal majesty. The former was per-
haps no more than an error, but the kind of error in carrying out a rational
process that can still upset the scientist when he makes a similar one; the
latter was a sin, which we shall again meet in the great days of Greece, the
sin of hubris.

For the rest, the works collected under the name of Hesiod, together with
a few fragments of gnomic wisdom from various sources, do give us some
notion of what Homer had to omit, the daily moral life of ordinary Greeks.
They expect to work, indeed to toil. They know they should honor the gods,
take care of their families, tell the truth, and keep their word. They do not
look forward with anything like Egyptian awareness to reward or punishment
in a future life; they would appear to have some sense of individual immor-
tality of the soul, but not an operational one. They do not have any concept
of "moral progress," or of historical progress. Indeed, in this cosmogony we
get the first clear notion of human collective life as a decline from a Golden
Age to an Iron Age, with no relief in sight. In short, the tone of these works
and fragments is pessimistic, a pessimism not really far from the classic
phrase of the Book of Job: "But man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly
upward."21 Again it must be insisted that from writings like these one must
not conclude that Greek lives were spent in unrelieved unhappiness; but it
must also be insisted that these Greeks were not the happy, smiling children
of the Mediterranean sun, their lives clouded only by a few interesting pas-
sions, that they seemed to some Victorians to have been. The Greek common
people could never be sure enough of tomorrow — let us be clear and color-
less and say, could not have anything like enough economic security — to be
optimists. There is this much truth in the doctrine of dialectical materialism;
it took the steam engine to produce Pollyanna.

211 incline to believe that not until the eighteenth century in the West^did large
numbers of human beings come to feel the antithesis of this, that "man is born to
happiness, as the sparks fly upward."

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A History of Western Morals

in

There is not much point in dwelling in a history of this sort on the West
European equivalents of the archaic or heroic early periods we have been
dealing with in this chapter; or, rather, consideration of the Germanic and
Celtic, perhaps also the Slavonic, myths and heroes should come only under
the nineteenth-century heading. Though Moses and David, Achilles and Odys-
seus have never ceased to play an important part in the moral history of the
West, Wotan, Siegfried, and the druids of eld went underground several
thousand years ago, with the advent of Christianity, and stayed underground
until quite recently; and it is very hard to trace them underground. In the
sense that I discussed in the very first section of this chapter, your conduct
and mine may well be in part "determined" by what went on among our
Celtic, Germanic, or Slavic ancestors long, long ago, but I do not see any way
in which the historian can establish the nature and importance of such an
effect, if it exists. Historians, men of letters, and at least one very distinguished
composer of operas did in the nineteenth century combine to inform the
Germans, for instance, that they were braver and more profound than ordi-
nary people because Siegfried had gone even Achilles several better in heroics.
Some, indeed, went so far as to prove that Achilles himself had in fact been
a German. We cannot leave Siegfried, nor even the druids, out of a history
of Western morals, because they, through their legends, figure in some of the
great modern religions of nationalism. But they do not belong here, at this
moment.

As a matter of fact, and in spite of the often successful efforts of scholars
to reconstitute objectively as much as possible of these cultures, we know
the moral and religious elements of the culture of the ancient German and
the Celtic peoples through a double refraction, that of medieval redactions
like the Arthurian cycle and the song of the Nibelungs and that of the modern
romantic nationalists which begins with eighteenth-century figures like James
McPherson and Justus Moser, Each of these groups reflects more clearly the
concerns of its own age than the nature of the past ages it was trying to bring
back to mind. The peoples of Northern and Western Europe simply did not
record in writing what they thought and felt until after they had come into
contact with the Roman Empire or Christianity. The Greek and Roman
writers of later times do give us valuable bits of information about the bar-
barian tribes who were breaking into the empire, but the most skeptical

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Origins: The Jews and the Greeks

toward what our modern social sciences have achieved will have to admit
that our standards for such information are vastly higher than those even of
an Ammianus Marcellinus, who had no ax to grind. The best known, and in
many ways the best, of Roman accounts of the Germans is the Germania of
Tacitus, a man with a very sharp ax indeed against his fellows of the Roman
ruling classes of the late first century A.D. Tacitus was certainly a stern mor-
alist, and in this little tract he is using the "primitive" and unspoiled Germans
as a foil to the civilized and very spoiled upper-class Romans of the Flavian
Age. But he does bring out the fact that the Germans were addicted to
drunkenness, brawling, outbursts of temper, and knightly honor, as well as to
preserving the chastity of their women and to maintaining the simplicity of
honest rural life.

It would be useful if we could be sure that certain tendencies toward
conduct of a specific sort in peoples of Northern and Western Europe today
could be traced back to the ways of their ancestors of the first millennium B.C.
Take the German tendency toward disciplined obedience to orders from their
rulers, their feeling for what they call Obrigkeit (not quite our "authority").
This tendency, which cannot be described with perfect exactness, would prob-
ably be accepted as "real" by all save the hopeless nominalists who refuse
to admit that there is anything at all that can be described as a national trait,
a national character. Does this feeling for Obrigkeit go back to Arminius and
beyond, or is it, rather, the product of the last few centuries of Prussian and
Hohenzollern success? Even the assumption that the older such a tendency is
the more firmly embedded in a people's habits it is, and, therefore, the less
likely to change or be changed, may not be correct; but if it is, we must regret
fhat we know so little about just such aspects of the early history of these
peoples. Perhaps the problem of the source of a trait almost the opposite of
this Germanic sense of Obrigkeit, the fiery unruliness and irresponsibility
attributed to the Celts, is no longer important, since even in Ireland the fire
seems almost extinct. Yet for the sake of Franco-American relations it would
be good to know whether the reluctance of the French to obey our behests
is the fault of Vercingetorix, or merely of Louis XIV and Napoleon. And of
course it would be good to know whether the "Slavic soul" really was formed
in the Pripet Marshes, or was invented by nineteenth-century Slavophile
intellectuals. But unfortunately we cannot know (his, and much else of the
sort we should like to know. We shall have to get back to (hose remarkable
Greeks of the fifth century B.C., about whom we do know a great deal.

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Greece: The Great Age

MODERN HISTORIANS are very aware of the problem of what, in space and
time, constitutes a valid "unit" of history. Mr, Arnold Toynbee keeps telling
us that it is impossible, or at least immoral., to try to write the history of so
parochial a group as the modern nation-state. Others have so far pushed
back in time what as schoolboys we knew as the "Renaissance," and dated
even in Italy as beginning with the mid-fifteenth century, that Renaissance
and Middle Ages seem to melt together. In all this critical revision, however,
the old-fashioned concept of a Great Age of Greece, beginning in the eighth
century B.C., culminating in the fifth, and ending neatly with the fourth and
Alexander the Great, has stood up pretty well. The Greeks were no longer
in this age recent invaders under tribal chieftains and a warrior aristocracy
of landholders, as they had been in the Homeric Age. They had already
formed the characteristic Greek society, the polis, or city-state. These small
states were established through the Aegean, in Asia Minor, the Greek main-
land and islands, and in the colonies scattered on coasts of the Mediterranean
and Black seas not held by those other colonists the Phoenicians. Note that
this city-state was not confined to what Americans know as their "city limits,"
nor even to their city and suburbs, but, territorially considered, was nearer
to an average American county with county seat and surrounding small towns
and farms. The Greek city-state, even Athens, which was a manufacturing
and trading city, had its farming population. There is no great distortion
involved if you will think of it as a small-scale equivalent — especially as to

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Greece: The Great Age

the emotional allegiances of its members — of the modern Western nation-
state.1

These city-states, big (relatively big, of course) , middle-sized, and small,
formed a kind of system, an "international society" within which there were
wars, sports (the original Olympic games and the like), diplomatic relations,
trading, travel, immigration in varying degrees of freedom, and, again in
varying degrees of freedom, interchange of ideas. Their wars among them-
selves culminated in the supremacy of a marginally Greek tribal state on the
north, Macedonia, and the spread of Greek armies and culture eastward
under Alexander. After about 300 B.C., though Athens, Sparta, and the other
major city-states took a while to realize it, the classic city-state gave way to a
differently organized Mediterranean world, the world of "Greco-Roman" cul-
ture we shall study in the next chapter. That world owed a great deal — did a
great deal as it did, thought and felt as it did — because of the world of the
Greek city-state we are about to study. So in their turn did the Greeks of the
Great Age owe much to their ancestors of the Homeric Age. But as periods,
ages, cultures, and suchlike devices that the historian must use to cut his
cloth go, these are all three — Homeric, Greek, Greco-Roman — justifiable,
perhaps even "real," and genetically related.

If historians are fairly well agreed that there was a Great Age of Greece,
they are, as might be expected in mid-twentieth century, by no means agreed
on what the age was really like. Indeed, the history of the reputation of the
Greeks is itself a fascinating one. Over the last 2,500 years it is safe to say
that, to those in charge of Western formal education and to almost all mem-
bers of the Western intellectual classes, these Greeks seemed to have set the
highest standards men have ever set in manners, taste, and morals, in art,
letters, and philosophy. There has been over the centuries a remarkably stable
set of evaluative notions — let us carefully not say "myth," "legend," or even
"pattern" — about the Greeks of the Great Age, which, since I cannot here
dwell on it at book length, I shall rashly try to summarize in a sentence. The
Greeks, more especially the Athenians of the Age of Pericles, who represent
in the tradition the topmost peak, enjoyed and admired physical health and
"classic" beauty, as embodied in their statues; were temperate and sensible
individuals for whom these enjoyments never became obsessions; had a highly

i The pattern is not, of course, perfect. Some parts of Greece itself, notably the
northwestern sections north of the Gulf of Corinth, were even in the fifth century
organized tribally on an earlier pattern. Where Greek colonies were planted in lands
inhabited by alien peoples, there were always special problems of relations between
the urban Greeks and the surrounding "natives," who probably were mostly fanners-

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A History of Western Morals

developed sense of duty to the state but also a determined sense of individual
rights and freedom; admired and practiced the use of what men still call
"reason," but were not narrow rationalists, since they had a lofty, even tragic,
awareness of man's middle state between beast and god; had a firm sense of
right and wrong, but no nagging, puritanical worries about sin; had, in fact,
the best of this world and the next, with no hell, no torments of the damned;
had psyches singularly unlike the psyches charted by Sigmund Freud, good
Greek psyches in which the unconscious, if it were there at all, was as
serenely temperate as the conscious. The Pericles of the famous funeral ora-
tion was in this tradition a realist:

Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others.
We do not copy our neighbours, but are an example to them. It is true that we are
called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of
the few. But while the law secures equal justice to all alike in their private disputes,
the claim of excellence is also recognised; and when a citizen is in any way distin-
guished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as
the reward of merit. . . . For we are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our
tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness. Wealth we employ,
not for talk and ostentation, but when there is a real use for it. To avow poverty
with us is no disgrace; the true disgrace is in doing nothing to avoid it.2

Perhaps Walter Savage Landor was a realist, too:

Tell me not what too well I know
About the bard of Sirmio . . .

Yes, in Thalia's son

Such stains there are ... as when a Grace
Sprinkles another's laughing face

With nectar, and runs on.3

This view of the happy Greeks of the Great Age and their cultivated
Roman imitators has twice been severely attacked. First, to the Fathers of
the Christian church the Greeks were pagan idolaters, and what the world
most admired in them was to the Christian simply sinful. We shall see in a
later chapter how far early Christianity did in fact set up ideals the polar
opposite of the beautiful-and-good. At any rate, with the reception of Aris-
totle in the medieval West through the Arabs, some part, at least, of the
culture of the Greeks returned to high honor. With the Renaissance in Italy

2 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans, by B. Jowett, Oxford, Clarendon Press,
1881, Book H, §§37-40, Vol. I, pp. 117-119.

3 "On Catullus," in Poetical Works, ed. by Stephen Wheeler, Oxford, Clarendon Press,
1937, Vol. H, p. 413.

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Greece: The Great Age

the whole Greek model was raised to the highest point it has ever attained as
a model. Only with the French "Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns"
and the British "Battle of the Books" in Western Europe -at the end of the
seventeenth century did a group of intellectuals, in spirit on the whole on the
defensive, dare suggest that "classic" cultural achievements might be equaled
or even in some fields surpassed by contemporaries. The modernists did not
really turn to the attack until the nineteenth century, when the more ardent
devotees of science and technology, the more confident heirs of the Enlighten-
ment, began to suggest that things Greek had been rather petty— the English-
man Richard Cobden said they were "Lilliputian" — and that it was really
shocking that young men all over the West should spend the best years of
their lives in formal education, learning the dead languages and the dead
cultures of the Greeks and Romans. Herbert Spencer put it neatly:

Men who would blush if caught saying Iphigenia instead of Iphigenia, or would
resent as an insult any imputation of ignorance respecting the fabled labours of a
fabled demi-god, show not the slightest shame in confessing that they do not know
where the Eustachian tubes are, what are the actions of the spinal cord, what is
the normal rate of pulsation, or how the lungs are inflated.4

What we may call the utilitarian attack has not yet been as successful as
was the first wave of Christian attack; but then, Western higher education
has not, in spite of the gloomy predictions of the humanists, broken down as
did Greco-Roman pagan education after the fourth century A.D. The Greeks,
even if only in translation, are still in high honor among us. They are — and
this is surely characteristic of our multanimous age, as yet very far from mass
uniformity — very variously interpreted. There are the individual crotchety
interpretations. Samuel Butler, the Victorian rebel against a Victorian father,
wrote a book to prove that the Odyssey was written by a woman. To
Nietzsche, Socrates was almost as guilty as St. Paul in bringing about the
perversion of the Greek warrior ideal. More seriously, modern anthropo-
logical studies have focused interest on sides of Greek life in the Great Age,
such as the cults of Demeter and of Dionysus, in which the initiates behaved
more like Holy Rollers than like sober devotees of sweetness and light. Social
and economic historians have called attention to the always precarious mate-
rial basis of Greek culture, political historians to the disastrous struggles
among the city-states by which they destroyed the very independence each

4 Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical, New York, Appleton,
1890, p. 43.

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A History of Western Morals

one cherished so greatly.5 The late Gilbert Murray, one of the most distin-
guished of classical scholars, even suggested a major heresy in interpretation:
the Greeks of the Great Age were perhaps not even classicists in the sense of
being poised, gentlemanly, reasonable followers of the Golden Mean, but
were at bottom romanticists, rebels, undisciplined yearners and mystics who
very much needed to praise, and even to set up ethical and artistic standards
of self-restraint, just because they were such wild men at heart. Traces of
these romanticists still remain, as in much of the work of Euripides, but,
Murray suggested, generations of schoolteachers and conventional moralists
have probably worked to mold the heritage of the Great Age in accordance
with their schoolmasterish "classic" tastes, a task made possible by the scarcity
of manuscripts in days before printing.

The classical view of the classic Greeks, however, still persists. One of the
most esteemed of American commentators on the Greeks, Miss Edith Hamil-
ton, whose The Greek Way has had wide distribution in paperback form, still
sees them as the Renaissance saw them, as quite simply the best yet, as
Apollos incarnate — and in something like the Christian sense of an incarna-
tion. So strong still is the acceptance of the Athenians of the fifth century and
of all Greeks of the time as incarnations of the humanist's virtues, that the
historian is strongly tempted into revision, if not into actual debunking. It is
certainly a temptation I shall rather note here than wholly resist.6

ii

The ideal of the beautiful-and-good, the /caAoK<rya0ta, as it stands out from the
very considerable body of art, literature, and philosophy that has survived is
attractive, one must say, to most Westerners not predisposed by other devo-
tions— or perhaps by some inner resistance to the human lot — to find it re-
pelling. The Athenian gentleman who strove to attain this ideal was a member
of an aristocracy new in the West. With undue but useful simplification, we
may say that throughout Western history — and, one suspects, Western pre-
history, at least from the Neolithic times — two groups of gifted, specially
trained, and privileged human beings have stood out from the masses. We

5 On this whole topic, nothing more is necessary for the general reader than the ad-
mirable The Greeks and the Irrational by E. R. Dodds, Berkeley, University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1951, now available in a paperback edition, Boston, Beacon, 1957.
sin strictness, I suppose one should be careful not to use "Athenian" and "Greek"
interchangeably; but it is difficult to avoid some such usage. At any rate, the great
tradition does take Athens as typical, Sparta as atypical. This usage is not without
justification.

74

Greece: The Great Age

may call these, with Spengler, the warriors and the priests, and symbolize
them by heart and head, or sword and pen. The neat dualism of course breaks
down in concrete application: individuals display various admixtures of both,
and additions of something that is neither, and this is true whether we classify
them in terms of the roles they play or of their temperaments, their person-
alities. Above all, for our present purpose, ruling or upper classes themselves
are often mixed, a class of warrior-priests, a monarchy headed by a priest-
king. Yet often, if only roughly, the division holds, and the relation between
the warrior class and the priestly class and the prestige of each in the eyes of
the other and of the common people are extremely useful facts for the his-
torian of ideas and of morals.

Now the point about the Athenian aristocratic ideal is this: the beautiful-
and-good man is both a warrior and a priest — or, if the last word throws you
off a bit, let me use a current, shop-worn, but not, I hope, too misleading
word, an "intellectual." It is, however, in many ways a most unsatisfactory
word, for it can start a powerful flow from the adrenal glands. Americans
often think of "intellectual" as meaning "intelligent," and not "one who
preaches, teaches, writes, acts on the stage, paints, designs, or who is chiefly
concerned with appreciating the results of such activities." Physicians, who
are in our United States rarely intellectuals in this sense (though they may
have an intellectual's hobbies), are usually very intelligent, very well-edu-
cated, and aware of so being. When they read about intellectuals in my sense
of the word, they know they are not intellectuals, and they think they are
being excluded from the class of the intelligent. This makes them angry.7

At first sight it may well seem that these two, warrior and intellectual, are
in happy and useful balance in Athens, each respecting and influencing the
other, the warrior refined but not softened in the intellectual, the intellectual
toughened but not stultified in the warrior. So, at least, the ideal has appeared
in the great tradition. And the record of the lives of these gentlemen is there
to show the ideal was not wholly unrealized. The warrior is no vain, boastful

7 See S. M. Lipset's 'The Egghead Looks at Himself," New York Times, October 17,
1957, Section VI, and especially a "letter to the editor" signed "Robert Zufall, M.D."
a fortnight later, December 1, Section VI, p. 31. The letter is worth quoting as a
documentary: "I am moved to comment on Professor Lipset's article. It upsets me
greatly to see any group of people call themselves The Intellectuals,' as if they had
some sort of monopoly on brains. Webster defines 'intellectual' as 'much above the
average in intelligence.' The Professor defines it as anyone who depends for his liveli-
hood on 'culture,' including, obviously, a lot of people who aren't even intelligent at
all. It strikes me that this assorted group of singers, dancers and ivory-tower types
would get a bit more respect from the rest of us if they stopped calling themselves, so
ridiculously, 'the smart ones.* "

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A History of Western Morals

Homeric fighting chieftain; he is Xenophon, recording not only the successful
fight against great odds of the Anabasis, but the conversations of Socrates and
the admirably balanced education, or paideia, of young Cyrus. Or if, as it
must be admitted the Achilles of Homer seems to have, the hero must have
his interesting complexities, these complexities are now, as in the charming
Alcibiades, ambivalences worthy of the modern novel. So, too, starting from
the side tradition lists as primarily that of the intellectual, we know that
Socrates himself was an Athenian soldier, that Aeschylus was proud of his
part in the Persian Wars.

Was he prouder of this, perhaps, than of his work as dramatist? Com-
mentators have often noted that in the famous epitaph in the Palantine An-
thology there is no mention of the plays:

Aeschylus son of Euphorion the Athenian this monument hides, who died in
wheat-bearing Gela; but of his approved valour the Marathonian grove may tell,
and the deep-haired Mede who knew it.8

It will not do, however, to question the genuineness of the admiration which
the Athenian gentleman of the Great Age felt for the work of the mind. If, in
a culture that so prized bodily strength and beauty, a culture still held so
much in thrall by the spell of Homer, one feels that the warrior primes the
priest-intellectual, it is still true that the balance between the two was remark-
ably even. What a closer examination does reveal is not so much a failure of
balance — Athenians could in the Great Age hardly have understood the situ-
ation aptly put by Bernard Shaw for his England as the contrast between
Horseback Hall and Heartbreak Hall or have sympathized with Kipling's
very mixed feelings toward his "flanneled oafs and muddied fools" — but,
rather, that the agonistic warrior ideal we saw as one of the keys to the moral
ideal of the Homeric Age took almost complete possession of the intellectuals
of the Age of Pericles.

We confront another useful but dangerous dualism, that between competi-
tiveness and co-operativeness in human nature and human society.9 Certainly
a complete opposition, the warrior and the warrior class always for competi-
tion, the priest and the priestly class always for co-operation, warriors always

8 Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, trans, by J. W. Mackail, London, Long-
mans, 1938, p. 48.

9 The subject is of major importance for the historian of Western morals, and I shall
return to it. The reader who wants a clear, forceful — and exaggerated — statement of
the contrast should read P. A. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution, New
York, McClure, Phillips, 1902.

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Greece: The Great Age

pouring oil, priests always pouring water, on the fires of human aggressive-
ness— such an opposition is very misleading indeed. Even for Christianity, the
observation dear to hostile rationalist critics is true enough: no rivalries more
bitter than those inspired by hatred theological Yet it is certainly true that
the Christian ideal, as we shall see in Chapter VI, if not by any means pacifist
(it does have pacifist elements), nonetheless exalts brotherly love, self-abne-
gation— co-operation, in short — and severely condemns just those physically
agonistic elements of human life the Greeks of the Great Age so admired.

Their admiration was no merely theoretical one, but was translated into
almost every sphere of the good, the dignified, the aristocratic life. The Greeks
not only competed in the Olympic and other athletic contests, but they com-
peted in all the arts and letters, and not merely in the possibly ambiguous
competition of the market place and the coteries, from which the wounded
author of our day can always — well, almost always — salvage some kind of
succes d'estime. The Greek creative artist engaged in a firmly ranked compe-
tition from which he emerged as clearly placed — and as widely known — as a
major-league batter in the United States. The dramatists of Athens entered
their plays, which, if accepted, were staged and performed at public expense,
in a competition and came out ranked first, second, third, and also-ran.
Sculptors, painters, architects all submitted to this sort of athlete's competi-
tion. Politicians, it need hardly be said, had to win votes, though the complex
machinery of Athenian political institutions did not make for such clear
numerical ranking as we Americans are used to in our elections. Pericles him-
self was a boss rather than a direct people's choice. But the agonistic element
in Greek politics and war hardly needs emphasis.

This everlasting competition, as yet not softened by humanitarian and
egalitarian sentiments, was far more ferocious than it appears to most modern
lovers of ancient Greece to have been. It was at its most intense in the con-
stant wars that culminated in the great Peloponnesian War at the end of the
fifth century. Actual fighting among human beings is clearly never a gentle
pursuit, but there is, nevertheless, a remarkable range between the extremes
of stylized and not very murderous fighting, as in the knightly combats of the
later Middle Ages, and all-out fighting like that of our own wars and those of
the Greeks of the Great Age. It does not become us, whose culture has pro-
duced Auschwitz, Katyn, and Hiroshima, to reproach the Greeks of the Great
Age with Melos and Corcyra. But read — and no one concerned at all with
public affairs today should fail to read — the pages of Thucydides in which he
describes what went on at Melos and Corcyra. Here, certainly, that ambigu-

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A History of Western Morals

ous and perhaps meaningless commonplace that a sufficiently great difference
in degree can be a difference in kind does not hold. In numbers of victims, our
outrages exceed those of the Greeks a thousand to one; morally they are
identical.

Quite outside war and politics, one gets the impression that competition
in Greek life, save perhaps in "business," was at least as extensive as in ours,
and somewhat more extreme. The old Homeric theme, which can be trans-
lated into good American as "winner take all," still prevailed. One aimed
always for the very top; only the championship counted. There were no sec-
onds or thirds in the Olympic games and no team scores. It is, incidentally,
enlightening to note that when the games were revived in a very different
world in 1896, the planners, quite aware of Greek history, refused to admit
team scores by points; the press, and especially the American press, pro-
ceeded to work out "unofficial" team scores which counted placing down
through fifth.

Moreover, though there were certainly rules for all these competitions,
intellectual and athletic, in ancient Greece, though as in all aristocracies the
concept of honor was a very real one, there are indications in the literature
that the kind of unscrupulousness certainly not condemned by Homer in his
wily Odysseus persisted into the Great Age. We are dealing with intangibles;
but it looks as if the standards of "fair play" both in ethics and in conduct
of these Greek aristocrats fell rather below that of later aristocracies at their
best. Aristophanes, Thucydides, and Plato together cover a lot of ground.
They share little, perhaps, but a common feeling (hat their Athens is going
wrong — morally wrong. The first two in particular are good observers as well
as good moralists. From them all there emerges the sense of a society in
which the desire to win, to excel, to shine, to rise, is breaking down the con-
ventional restraints of morality, the rules of the game.10

The Greeks of the Great Age were then engaged in an agon that often
looks like a mad scramble. But their ideal of the beautiful-and-good was by
no means without influence on the goals, at least, of the competitors. The
Greek aristocrat of the Age of Pericles would not have cared to succeed as
Rockefeller succeeded, nor as St. Francis succeeded, nor as St. Simeon Stylites

10 These are war and postwar writers, and I should grant that they and their society
reflect the deep wounds such wars make, especially on intellectuals. But I do not
think one can find a more golden and moral age in the years immediately preceding
431, not even among the men who fought at Marathon. Themistocles turned traitor;
Demaratus, king of Sparta, took refuge with the Persian enemy. Alcibiades was not
the first.

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Greece: The Great Age

succeeded. All three of these men would have seemed to the Greek to have
pursued unworthy ends — money, mystic poverty, self-castigating austerity;
indeed, the latter two would have been, probably, quite incomprehensible
pursuits to a Xenophon. But here Rockefeller gives us a better start. The
Greek of the Great Age did not disdain wealth; it was for him an indispen-
sable moral good. The poor man could not, in this ethics, be a good man.
The pursuit of wealth, though, was beneath this aristocrat, as we shall soon
see. He would have counted Rockefeller out of the moral community of the
beautiful-and-good merely because he was a businessman. But he would also
have thought that Rockefeller — like the Croesus of his own legends — had
simply too much money, indecently too much, even had it been inherited.

|5Ve are at perhaps the most familiar part of Greek ethics, the concept of
the Golden Mean, of nothing in excess. Aristotle has in the Nicomachean
Ethics given it classic expression. Courage is a virtue, for the beautiful-and-
good one of the very highest virtues. Cowardice, which is insufficiency of
courage, is a vice; but so, too, is foolhardiness, rashness, the caricatural
"courage" of the show-off, which is the excess of courage. This kind of anal-
ysis can be applied to a great range of human conduct. Prudent care of one's
money, good stewardship, is a virtue; the spendthrift is a bad man, but so, too,
is the miser^

We may here note that there has been a good deal of hostile criticism of
this ideal of the Golden Mean, criticism no doubt basically directed at the
implications for conduct of the ideal, but framed as criticism of the logical
implications of its wording in specific cases. Does a term like "excess" of
courage make sense? Has foolhardiness any relation to courage? Or, to take
a modem instance, the rationalist J. M. Robertson writes that a pickpocket
could "claim to observe the mean between robbery with violence and the
spiritless honesty which never steals at all, and to be thus, on Aristotelian
principles, a virtuous man in that respect."11 The phrase "in that respect,"
which the reader does not notice and is not supposed to notice, no doubt
saves Robertson's logic in this particular piece of casuistry, a somewhat sus-
pect but often useful way of thinking about moral problems. To Aristotle, of
course, the instance would have been pointless; pickpockets are just not
allowed to compete for the prize of the beautiful-and-good.

The real objections to the ideal of the Golden Mean are more deeply
rooted in human attitudes toward this world and the next than casuistry, at

11 John Mackinnon Robertson, A Short History of Morals, London, Watts, 1920, p.
120.

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A History of Western Morals

least on the surface, usually reveals. The ideal of these Greek gentlemen
seems to most of those who dislike it to be commonplace, pedestrian, dull,
unheroic. It seems to seek compromise where the truly good man ought to
fight to the death. It is earth-bound, wingless. We are here at our first clear
confrontation with another of the inevitable dualisms we shall have to deal
with throughout this history, one we know best as the contrast of the romantic
with the classical, a contrast that has as much meaning for the historian of
morals as for the historian of art and letters, a contrast we can by no means
summarize here. An old pair of symbols will have to do: the romantic is the
soaring Gothic cathedral; the classical, the confined Greek temple, clinging
to the ground.12

Now it is the romantic to whom the ideal of the Golden Mean is unac-
ceptable. To the classicist, it has been, ever since it was first so clearly stated
by the Greeks, one of the foundations of his view of life. And the views are
certainly different Where the romanticist sees in the Golden Mean an ignoble
contentedness with the easy, the ordinary, the average, the classicist sees in it
a difficult striving, quite as heroic as any ascent to heaven or descent to
hell, to attain on earth something by no means there for all to snatch; above
all, no average, no compromise, such as mere common sense takes those terms
to mean, but a standard, an ideal; no product of statistics, but, rather, of the
very human drive to transcendence the romanticist likes to claim as his sole
property. There is nothing ordinary or average, the classicist will insist, about
the Venus de Milo, nor Pericles, nor the Parthenon. He is likely to go further,
and maintain that basically the ideal of the beautiful-and-good is for the
moralist not unlike what the ideal of health is for the physician, only more
difficult to attain, and rarer. We must return to this theme when we come to
Christianity.

Still another set of attributes needs to be added to this Greek ideal of the
Golden Mean, attributes that have a moral as well as a more obvious aesthetic
character/The Greek admired restraint, spareness, simplicityTjHere, too, the
"classical" canon, as it has developed, no doubt distorts and exaggerates.
Those calm, now weathered Greek statues were once gilded, painted in bright
colors. Greek joy was often unrestrained. Greeks of the Great Age employed

12 Spengler's antithesis of Faustian (romantic) and Apollonian (classical) remains one
of the fullest and most interesting developments of this theme. See the Decline of the
West, Vol. I, pp. 183 if. I suppose to the old-fashioned nominalist, who often dis-
guises himself today as a scientist — especially a social or behavioral scientist — all this,
and the very concepts "romantic" and "classical," is nonsense. But it is singularly use-
ful nonsense, indeed indispensable nonsense, for the student of human affairs.

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Greece: The Great Age

hyperbole — witness Aristophanes — as well as litotes; both words and things
are Greek. Yet surely no one would use the word "lush" of fifth-century
Greece; indeed, the connotations of "lush" are overwhelmingly romantic,
Faustian. Morally, there is more than a trace of the Stoic in Greece even
before Zeno taught on the Stoa.

The ideals of the agon and the Golden Mean are very specifically ideals
meant in their Athenian fifth-century origin to be valid only for an aristocratic
minority. Work, undignified, necessary work, as the world knows it, makes
the good life impossible.13 The smith has to develop his muscles to a point
well beyond Apollonian symmetry; the bookkeeper bending over his accounts
starves both his body and his soul. Workers of any sort are bound to be
specialized professionals; and the beautiful-and-good was as firmly an ideal
of the amateur, the all-around man, as was the ideal of the modern British
upper classes, who used to be, of course, brought up on a nice version of
Greek culture. For the activities that disqualify for the attainment of true
virtue, the Greeks had a word which sometimes attains unabridged English
dictionaries in the form "banausic," though we do not have much use for it.
Banausic are most of the activities which engage us all today, for few of us
can even try to live up to the letter of the Greek ideal of the beautiful-and-
good.14 Many modern commentators on the ancient Greeks have seemed to
feel a need to apologize for the very concept "banausic." Yet the ideal lives
on, as it did in Athens itself, in a society committed to democratic egali-
tarianism.

The ideal of the beautiful-and-good man is not as selfish as it must seem
from the foregoing, not as individualistic as we today usually take the term
to imply — that is, in something like the frame of reference of Spencer's The
Man versus the State. There is no need here to take back the remarks I have
made above concerning the extreme competitiveness of Greek life among
these gentlemen. But, to qualify a bit, it was a competitiveness that had as a
balancing force, even in Athens, the soldier's acceptance of discipline, the
citizen's acceptance of law and custom, the believer's acceptance of the pieties
of religion, even a touch of the old patriarch's sense of responsibility for the

13 The familiar brief statement is: "No man can practice virtue who is living the life
of a mechanic or laborer." Aristotle, Politics, Book HI, Chap. 5. The word translated
''virtue" is, of course, the untranslatable arete. It is sometimes translated as "ex-
cellence "

14 It is interesting to consider how many of our stereotypes would have made no sense
to the Greeks of the Great Age. What would Socrates have thought of Edison's
"Genius is one per-cent inspiration and ninety-nine per-cent perspiration"?

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family. Another commonplace of the manuals is here essential: the Greeks,
even again the Athenian, were, in the oft-cited phrase of Aristotle, political
animals, men made to live in a polis; and the man who showed some signs of
setting himself up as a rugged individualist to the neglect of the conventional
duties of the citizen was known by a word which has become our word
"idiot." Again, a needed complementary consideration, the strong element of
the Homeric hero and his drive to compete, and win, which survives in the
fifth century, a really frenetic competitiveness, was limited to activities, shall
we say, not banausic — to art, letters, sports, to the life of the country gentle-
man. Unbridled competitiveness in matters of business was never what it was
to be in the nineteenth-century West — a truly important matter. It is perhaps
unfortunate that war and politics were not also thought banausic in Athens;
here the spirit of the agon quite gainsaid, with disastrous results, the ideal of
the Golden Mean.

Though much of the ideal of the Great Age was real, and realized, the
gaps between real and ideal began opening widely with the Peloponnesian
War. The shades again are subtle. But what with Pericles sounds as lofty as
the Gettysburg Address begins with the later Isocrates to sound faintly like
George Babbitt, to have a touch of that vulgar "pooled self-esteem" that the
sensitive detect in modern patriotic loyalties. Pericles, as reported by Thu-
cydides, is certainly proud of Athens, "an education to Greece"; but his tone
is not that of Isocrates, who boasts, "Our city was not only so beloved of the
Gods but so devoted to mankind . . . that she shared with all men what she
had received." There follows the Rotarian touch, "service of mankind."15
Pericles at least spoke before Mytilene, before Melos, before Syracuse;
Isocrates spoke after Athenians had given in these places somewhat paradox-
ical evidence of their devotion to the "service of mankind."

Perhaps the gap between ideal and real in Athens had never been a small
one, even in the best days of Pericles. Yet it was certainly smaller than it
became in the days of Cleon, or the Thirty Tyrants, or the restored democ-
racy of the fourth century. There is the possibility, hopeful or discouraging
as you may feel it, that the failure of Athens was at bottom the failure of a
democracy to live up to an aristocratic set of goals, choosing a Cleon rather
than a Pericles or an Aristides, perhaps even choosing a Cleon in the belief
that it was choosing a man like these. This is an oversimplification, no doubt,

15 Isocrates, Panegyricus, 28, trans, by George Norlin, London, Heinemann, Loeb
Classical Library, 1928, Vol. I, p. 135.

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Greece: The Great Age

like the parallel notion that Christianity, which also sets most aristocrat!
standards, has kept alive only by not trying to apply those standards to th
conduct of the many.

Yet we need not add to the long list of those who, from Plato on, hav
blamed the ills of Athens on the spread of egalitarian and democratic ways
Sparta, where these ways never were followed, failed as miserably and a
quickly as did Athens in the dog-eat-dog military competition among th
Greek city-states. Sparta, too, has left her mark on the moral history of th
West. Among the ancients, the Spartan tone and the Spartan achievemen
were admired perhaps more than were the Athenian. It was the Italian Renais
sance that set Athens up so firmly as the symbol for the Greek achievemenl
Florence, even the Florence of Savonarola's brief triumph, could never hav
felt an affinity for Sparta.

We know about Sparta chiefly through the writings of Athenian contem
poraries of the Great Age, men like Plato, Thucydides, and Xenophon, whi
were shocked by what seemed to them the democratic indiscipline of Athen
and sought in Spartan virtues a cure for Athenian laxity, and through late
writers like Plutarch, whose sources were hardly better than ours. Yet th
main facts about Sparta are clear enough. The inland plain of Lacedaemoni
was settled by one of the last bands of Dorian invaders, who subjects
earlier inhabitants to an inferior but not fully servile status. Sparta seems a
first to have gone the normal way of Greek city-states, fighting with he
neighbors, but also nourishing a vigorous artistic and intellectual life. Thei
there came, within a generation or so, what looks in the Spartan society lib
a kind of transformation we know well enough in the personality of the ran
individual — the sudden turn that made Francesco Bernardone into St. Franci
of Assisi, for instance — but that we do not expect in a whole society evei
from what we call a "revolution." Sometime in the seventh century B.C.
Sparta — all Spartans — gave up poetry and music, save as aids to militar
ardor, gave up talking — always a Greek delight — gave up even the privat
and normal forms of family life to become an aristocratic communist city
state and society.

The Greek ideal of the beautiful-and-good gets twisted almost, but no
quite, out of recognition in the great barracks that Sparta became. The idea
of bodily health and strength is focused on the toughness of the soldier, on
superhuman endurance of hardship and pain. The agon is there, but amon
the Spartiates it is narrowed to a competition in military prowess, and, eva
more than in the rest of Greece, channeled, controlled, into a collectiv

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A History of Western Morals

effort to keep Sparta first among the Greek city-states. The old Odyssean
note of admiration for successful cunning and deceit is there, it, too, oddly
contorted in this barracks air. Perhaps the best-known tale from Sparta is the
one made familiar by Plutarch of the Spartan lad, trained to thieve but with
the proviso he must never get caught in theft, who stoically, Spartanly, en-
dured a stolen fox gnawing at his vitals under the folds of his cloak rather
than admit his guilt. The restraint is there, now made austerity, if not insanity;
the Spartan would not even permit himself the luxury of speech. He spoke
laconically.

The Golden Mean has quite vanished. The Spartan had no use for the
middle of the road, for compromise; for him the Greek folk wisdom of
"nothing in excess" did not hold. He could not have too much discipline,
could not be too literal-minded in obeying commands, could not remain too
much aloof from the undignified business of managing his estate, could not
banish art and letters too completely from his life. No major society in the
West, perhaps, ever tried so thoroughly to transcend the limitations of Homo
sapiens as did the Spartan. It was an extraordinary attempt, and it succeeded
for a few generations. We cannot here attempt to trace the decline of Sparta
and the failure of the attempt to perpetuate so inhuman a way of life. But a
few of the contributing factors must especially interest us. For one thing, it is
clear that Spartan contempt for the intellectual life coupled with their devo-
tion to tradition, to doing what always had been done, made it difficult for
them to solve problems involving new factors. Even in their specialty, war,
they could not change fast enough to cope with the Theban innovation of the
phalanx, and went down in defeat. The Spartan Thermopylae surely deserves
its place in a noble tradition that has helped men to find a courage they never
cease to need. And yet, was it that much better than the charge of the Light
Brigade, on which we now surely accept French Marshal Bosquet's verdict;
C'est magnifique, mats ce n'est pas la guerre? True, Tennyson now sounds
empty, silly.

Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

And Simonides has still the perfect word:

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Greece: The Great Age
O passer-by, tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here obeying their orders.16

The Greek spell is hard to break, hard, above all, for the chaste realist to
break, who has no trouble with the Loreleis and the belles dames sans merci
of mere romance.

Again, the fine Spartan soldierly contempt for economic matters, and the
curious communistic life the adult males spent in barracks and on campaigns,
meant that their wives and stewards got control of property, with results
disastrous to the necessary economic basis of equality among the Spartiates.
Finally, the Spartiates in the fourth century simply began to die out, to fail to
propagate, a result probably linked with their long absences from home on
campaigns, and the exaggerated military communism which actually made it
hard for them to sleep at all with their wives. But most narrow aristocracies
tend not to perpetuate themselves by natural births, and have to recruit new
members one way or another. Spartan excessive exclusiveness made this way
impossible; one had to be born a Spartiate, and fewer and fewer were born
such.

The historian of morals must ask the obvious question: How did Sparta
happen to develop so unusual, so "unnatural," a society? The occasion is clear
enough. In a first war at the end of the eighth century, Sparta conquered
neighboring Messenia, but instead of merely exacting a tribute and a few
border settlements — in the Greek, as in the later Western world, there were
international decencies — she proceeded to outrage these decencies and annex
Messenia and make Helots, or serfs, of the Messenians. Almost a century
later, a ferocious revolt of the Messenians, crushed with difficulty, seems to
have alarmed the rulers of Sparta, who then put through an extraordinary set
of reforms which made the Spartiates the military communists we meet at
Thermopylae and many another field. But surely Messenia was but the pull
on the trigger. The gun was loaded. The real problem is why the Spartans
responded as they did to a problem other peoples had solved quite differently,
by assimilating the conquered, by compromises of all sorts, even by retreat
from a difficult position, the favored solution among the wicked imperialist
powers of today. The answer can never be certain, but it looks as if there
were perhaps a certain analogy with the experience of the Jews. The Dorian
band or bands that settled in Laconia may well have been especially hardened

16 Tennyson, 'The Charge of the Light Brigade," in Works, Boston, Houghton Mif-
flin, 1898, p. 226; Simonides, "On the Spartans at Thermopylae," in Select Epigrams
from the Greek Anthology, trans, by J. W. Mackail, 3d ed. rev., New York, Long-
mans, 1911, Section m, No. 4.

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A History of Western Morals

by their wanderings. In their early years in Laconia even their art bore a
stamp of warlike energy of stubborn weight. Tyrtaeus, while Spartans were
still poets, could write so symbolically Spartan a line as

So let each man bite his lip with his teeth and abide firm-set astride the ground.17

In the critical years of decision, a man or group of close-knit leaders almost
certainly swung the balance. Lycurgus, to whom legend attributed the great
reform, may be in strict historical rigor as shadowy, if not as mythical, a
figure as Moses. But some one or some few surely did — and in a crisis — what
Lycurgus is supposed to have done.

in

The beautiful-and-good, then, even in its Spartan caricature or perversion, is
the moral ideal, the concept of the admirable and enviable person the Greeks
of the Great Age of the polis cherished. Presented and preserved in an art and
literature that has survived the praise of its many admirers, it is still a living
ideal in the West. We must, however, try further to probe what kind of moral
lives these ancient Greek admirers of the Golden Mean really led. As almost
always until very recent times, we can tell very little of how the masses lived.
Certainly for Athens of the fifth century it seems pretty clear that this culture,
moral as well as intellectual, spread downward to most of the actual urbanized
population. Sources like the pamphleteer known as the Old Oligarch, who
complains that the very slaves in Athens do not respect their superiors, Aris-
tophanes, above all, give us a glimpse — the first in Western history — of a
lively, slick, "sophisticated" city people, quick to imitate and, if you like,
vulgarize the tastes and ways of their betters. We get again a glimpse of the
fact that the sober country folk, only a few miles away in Attica, thought the
city dwellers morally loose and untrustworthy. This remains a pattern even in
contemporary America, where technological advances have almost eliminated
material differences between city and country. Like most such patterns, it has
elements of truth; the Athenian, like the later Parisian and the Cockney, was
no slow, steady, wordless follower of established routine. But one element in
the pattern, the belief that these bright talkative city people lacked stamina,
endurance, manliness, was probably as untrue then as aerial bombardment
proved it to be of great Western metropolitan centers in our day. The
Athenians did not lose their great war through any failure of nerve among

if Elegy and Iambus, trans, by J. M Edmonds, London, Heinemann, 1931, Loeb
Classical Library, p. 71.

86

Greece: The Great Age

the common people, nor through a lack of public spirit among them. Here
Arnold Toynbee seems to be right: their betters led them into a series of
only outwardly successful conquests which did violence to the habits and
ideals of the polls.

Two things need to be kept in mind in any attempt to judge the moral
level of Greek life in the Great Age. First, the Greeks were very few genera-
tions removed from a relatively primitive tribal society. The notion embodied
in what used to be called the "miracle of Greece" has been abandoned. Study
of the Aegean civilization centering on Crete, which had been highly devel-
oped before the Greek bands came down on it, has made it clear that the
Greeks did not create their mature civilization out of nothing, and in a few
hundred years. Still, however much they may have taken over from their
predecessors, the fact remains that their poleis were new institutions. If old
tribal habits do survive, if there is such a thing as cultural lag, we should
expect the Greeks to show signs of them. Second, the Greeks were always
poor. Their land was mountainous and rocky, their soil thin. The wealthiest of
the poleis — Athens, Corinth, the cities of Ionia — depended on commerce and
production of pottery and similar work of craftsmanship. The rich by no
means attained the kind of luxury that was to be made possible later in the
Greco-Roman world; the poor were poor indeed, and numerous.

With this background, it is not surprising that this Greek world should be
a world of violence, a world in which death, disease, human suffering of all
kinds were accepted in something like the way we accept the weather. Care is
necessary here: I do not mean that the Greeks took suffering callously; nor
do I mean to imply that our own is a culture that is without violence. Our
recent wars have killed on a hitherto unequaled scale; our technological prog-
ress, and especially the internal-combustion engine, has meant that what we
call accidents are relatively far more frequent than they were in the ancient
world. But we rebel against such suffering, and try, however unsuccessfully,
to do something about it; the Greeks of the Great Age, though they felt deeply
the extent of human misery, seem not to have believed that the group, society,
"reforms," could do much to lessen it. Plato, who was in almost all the modern
connotations of the word an idealist, accepted in his Utopia, the Republic, war
as a normal function of the perfect state. In all the literature that has come
down to us from the Great Age, you will find it hard to note anything you
could classify as an expression of what we should call desire for humanitarian
reform. There is, indeed, pity, compassion, eloquently expressed, though
mostly in the tragedies, which do not deal with the lives of ordinary people.

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A History of Western Morals

In Euripides, this pity seems at times to direct itself to the oppressed, th
underdog, but even in Euripides there is really no trace of what we might ca
a "social gospel." We shall return to this theme with the Middle Ages.

Acceptance of violence and insecurity in ordinary daily life is the norm*
human lot until almost our own day. But later Greek ethical systems, and th
Christian ethic, did at least introduce a concern for victims of violence
injustice, and misfortune, which really is hard to find in the Great Age. Sparta
exposure of infants who did not measure up to the high physical standards se
for males — and females, too, for the Spartans were among the earliest euger
icists — is hardly surprising in that abnormal society. But infants in the res
of Greece, exposed to poverty and overpopulation, were very commonl
exposed. As a good British reformer of our own day puts it, "Socrates (son c
a mid-wife) is made in Plato's Theaetetus to speak of putting away the ne>
born infants as he might of the drowning of kittens."18

Slavery was an accepted part of the society of Greece. The slaves wer
for the most part prisoners of war, or victims of some other misfortune. The
were not in these early days of a very different racial background from that c
their masters. Their condition varied greatly from city-state to city-state, an
within a given one, in accordance with what work they did. The Helots c
Sparta, serfs in formal status rather than chattel slaves, were nonetheless ver
badly treated and were greatly feared by their masters. The familiar tale
from Plutarch are revealing. The Spartan leaders would at intervals get
Helot drunk and exhibit him to the young Spartiates as an object lesson;
special secret police was organized to spy on the Helots and scent out plans f o
revolt. The state slaves who worked the silver mines at Laurium in Attica ha<
a hard life indeed; on the other hand, the police at Athens were commonl
Thracian slaves, and a policeman's lot is not usually an unhappy one. It i
perhaps true that an Oxford philhellene like the late Sir Alfred Zimmer
makes the position of the slave in Athens a bit too good; "fellow-worker"—
a term that sounds like an American corporate personnel manager a fe\
decades ago — is no translation for SoJlAos. "Slave" is the word. Yet, with th
exception of Sparta, the Greek world of the free polis was not one in whic]
slavery appears at anything like its worst. Emancipation was easy, and no
uncommon; the slave could actually earn money and buy his freedom. Bu
there is almost no protest against the institution itself; and Aristotle's opinioi
that a slave is likely to be by nature a slave is no doubt representative enougl

18 Robertson, Short History of Morals, p. 91. The reference is to the Theaetetus, §§14S
151.

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Greece: The Great Age

to deserve its position in the history manuals. The slave is simply not a free
moral agent. Plato, in the Lam, has the physician to slaves dictate without
explanation, the physician to freemen make the patient understand the disease
and treatment.19

The state of the family is no doubt correlated with the moral state of a
given society. Yet the correlation is nothing as simple as our contemporary
American worriers about the divorce rate like to make out. In earlier Western
societies one expects to find the family ties strong, and the father of the family
powerful. The family in the Greek polis was such a family. It should be noted
at the start in a society entirely without any provision for "social security,'*
either through state laws or through private insurance, the family was the
one possible form of old-age insurance. The Greek expected his children to
take care of him in his old age; the children expected to take care of their par-
ents. In Athens, before a man could become a magistrate, evidence had to be
produced that he had treated his parents properly. A man who refused his
parents food and dwelling lost his right of speaking in the assembly. It must
be noted that ordinarily laws of this sort are meant to take care of the excep-
tional case, the case that makes the news. We need not conclude that Athenians
commonly let their parents starve.20 These were firm sentiments, the kind
Pareto called "persistent aggregates/' and they were strong even in Athens,
the least traditionalist of the poleis. Greek literature from the earliest days
is full of evidence of the strength of these family ties. Again, only in Sparta
in its final decline is there evidence of the kind of dissolution of the family,
including loose behavior of upper-class wives, that is found at certain later
stages of Roman history.

This was no society for the feminist. The "subjection" of Athenian women
in particular was one of the phases of life in that much-to-be-admired society
that called for most regrets from Victorian liberal philhellenes. The Athenian
wife in the upper classes, and, indeed, rather far down the social scale, was
held firmly to her domestic duties of supervising the household and educating
her daughters and young sons; she did not go abroad unattended, nor take any
part in public life, nor in the social life of her menfolk, the dinners, symposia,
chattings in the market place. Yet the gynaeceum was not quite a harem, and
even the Athenian wife was hardly in an Oriental seclusion. There is in the

!9 Plato, Laws, §720, in Works, trans, by B. Jowett, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1892, Vol. V, pp. 103-104.

20 E. Westermarck, Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, Vol. I, p. 536, quoting
L. Schmidt, Die Ethik der alien Griechen (1882).

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A History of Western Morals

surviving literature little sign that she was discontented with her lot, which,
after all, was for those days a secure one. The remarkable Euripides, who can
usually be trusted to anticipate the nineteenth century, does show traces,
notably in the Medea, of what, if you do not mind anachronisms, you can call
feminism. But there is little else. Masculine supremacy was taken for granted
in the Greek, and in the Greco-Roman, world, a fact amusingly reflected in
the universal assumption that the queen bee was a king.21 Demosthenes could
say almost incidentally of the Greek male — always, of course, of the upper
classes, for poverty makes monogamy quite bearable — "Mistresses we keep
for the sake of pleasure, concubines for the daily care of our persons, but
wives to bear us legitimate children and to be faithful guardians of our house-
holds."22

We come at last to sex relations, a topic which, to the pain of sensitive
moralists, does seem to be in contemporary vulgar English and American the
first, if not the only, thing suggested by the word "morals." It is a topic of
major concern to the historian of Western morals, and one to which we must
recur. Here a few generalizations may help to guide us through the thickets
that lie ahead — and they are thickets, of clinical reports, of pornography,
sermons, theological writings, poems, novels, faits divers, in all of which the
clinical and the pornographic are almost always inextricably mixed — for no
one can take sex in stride, not even the historian, who, according to Lytton
Strachey (who should have known), tends to be not very strongly sexed.23

First, human sexual activities would seem to be an especially clear and
often extreme example of the fact that the word and the deed are not neces-
sarily very closely united in human life. It may even be true that Homo
sapiens spends more time and energy fantasying, thinking, talking, and writing
about sex than in doing anything about it. In the frank language of our era —
or, at any rate, of our novels — there is a great deal of paper tail in the world.
One doubts whether Don Juan actually enjoyed — no, not enjoyed, for we all
know now that the Don was a neurotic incapable of genital satisfaction, but one
doubts that he had at all — those famous 1,003 Spanish ladies. In the West
generally, and especially after the introduction of Christian prohibitions added

21 See Vergil, Georgics, IV, 67. Of course, Vergil's use of "kings" in this passage may
be no more than metaphor. But the ancients could not have understood the sex life of
the bees.

22 Demosthenes, Private Orations, trans, by A. T. Murray, London, Hememann 1939,
Loeb Classical Library, Vol. n, Neaera, pp. 445-447.

23 L. Strachey, Portraits in Miniature, London, Chatto and Windus, 1933, "Essay on
Macaulay," p. 177.

Greece: The Great Age

zest to fornication, men and women have found in sexual conquests a great
reinforcement of their egos, a real sense of achievement. Moreover, from the
very fact that love-making is almost always conducted in privacy, it is easy in-
deed to claim a conquest never in fact achieved. Again, in a great many periods
of Western history, not just in our own, verbal frankness about sex has been
fashionable. There are no doubt many other, and deeper, roots for this con-
duct. The upshot of it all for the historian of morals should be clear: Do not
conclude, and especially not for brief periods, such as, say, from 1880 to 1920
in our day, that because there is a change in the way men talk and write about
sexual matters there is a corresponding change in their conduct.

Second, it may be possible to go even further and entertain at least the
possibility that in routine matters of private morality — sex relations, personal
honesty, family loyalties, in short, much of the moral realm of the Ten Com-
mandments— there is for the inarticulate many something like a rough con-
stant of conduct over long periods, that in the whole of our short Western
history there has been relatively little change in this respect. I suggest this
very tentatively. I do not mean to deny that there are times and places, and
especially social classes or other groups, of great moral looseness, and others
of great moral strictness, in terms of the great Western moral codes. But I think
it possible, for instance, that if we could construct a kind of Kinsey report on
the sexual behavior of the Western male since 600 B.C., we should find varia-
tions much less striking than those we find in our literary sources. I feel very
sure that we should find nothing remotely like the simple development Mr.
Sorokin traces from an "ideational" period in which men are wholly innocent
and continent in matters of sex relations to a "sensate" period (we are right in it
now) in which men are wholly guilty and heroically incontinent in such mat-
ters. We must recur to this problem of "cyclical" changes in conduct and
morals, and in the end to the wider one of moral dynamics or evolution. It is
a very difficult one, hardly to be solved with our present analytical means.
But it can only be further befuddled if we assume that changes in taste, man-
ners, and in what the imperfect historical record tells us about what men have
said about their conduct are in themselves proof that ordinary men and
women have in fact changed their conduct. The upper classes, for one thing
because they can afford change, may be expected to change more rapidly than
the lower classes. The degree to which the lower classes trust and admire and
imitate the upper classes — if you dislike this way of putting it, say "ruling
classes," or "elites" and "ruled" or "followers" — is certainly subject to great
variations. Morale — not in English identical in meaning with morals — is also

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A History of Western Morals

subject to change. To all this we must return in a final chapter, but it will be
well to keep these problems in mind throughout.

The Greek in the street of the Great Age seems to have been sexually nor-
mal enough, if that word has any meaning in relation to sex. His religion held
up to him no warnings that the gods objected to love-making — quite the
reverse, for Zeus outdid Don Juan, and seems, on the whole, unlike the Don, to
have enjoyed himself in the process. On the other hand, there is no evidence
that the Greek in the street was notably promiscuous; he had trouble enough
providing for his family. He seems not to have been greatly addicted to ro-
mantic, or obsessive, or any other vicarious sexual satisfaction of the kind we
symbolize by the word "Hollywood." It is true that we do not have the
sources we need to have to be sure of this. But we do have the Old Comedy of
Aristophanes, much of which is clearly directed to the tastes of the many, of
the "pit," who must, the suspicion lingers in the mind of all but the blindest
lover of old Athens, have often found Sophocles and Euripides hard going.
Now Aristophanes is often obscene, but there is in him no trace of boudoir or
Palais Royal sex, let alone of Hollywood sex. When he actually brought the
bed onto the stage in Lysistrata, the audience must have been so interested
in the high comedy — and high politics — involved in the situation as to have
suffered no sexual stimulation at all. Aristophanes seems to find sex amusing,
an attitude often by no means unfavorable to comparative continence in
actual conduct.

There is, however, evidence in the Greek literature of high seriousness,
of an attitude toward sex very different from ours. In a familiar passage at the
very beginning of the Republic, Plato has the aged Cephalus, who appears
as a thoroughly conventional old gentleman, remark:

How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question,
How does love suit with age, Sophocles — are you still the man you were? Peace,
he replied; most glady have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if
I had escaped from a mad and furious master.24

Hesiod, too, thought of love in terms not of modern romance:

24 The Republic of Plato. § 329, trans, by B. Jowett, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1921. Jowett made this translation in High Victorian times. I cannot, as a historian of
morals, resist the temptation to cite the version of this passage that the late A. D.
Lindsay made in Georgian times: 'Take the poet Sophocles, for example. I was with
him once, when someone asked him: 'How do you stand, Sophocles, in respect to the
pleasures of sex? Are you still capable of intercourse?' 'Hush, sir/ he said. 'It gives
me great joy to have escaped the clutches of that savage and fierce master.1 " The
Republic of Plato, trans, by A. D. Lindsay, London, J. M. Dent, 1923, p. 3.

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Greece: The Great Age

. . . and Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs
and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men with them . „ ,25

Sex, in short, is a nuisance, or at best an appetite likely to interfere with the
conduct of life according to the Golden Mean. This, be it noted, is very dif-
ferent from the attitude that sex is a form, if not the form, of original sin. We
cannot know whether most Greek gentlemen agreed with the aged Sophocles;
the guess is that they did not. This view of love as a misfortune is almost cer-
tainly an upper-class intellectual's view, a part of that complex, and by no
means wholly sunny, ideal of the beautiful-and-good.

Sex figures in that ideal in a form even stranger to us, a form that has
greatly disturbed modern lovers of Greece. In Voltaire's Dictionnaire philoso-
phique the topic is treated under the heading "Amour Socratique," a phrase
that at least avoids the misunderstandings of one like "Greek homosexuality."
The Greek warrior-gentleman and his young man were indeed lovers in the
physical sense; of that we should not be led into doubt even by the reluctance
of ancient authors to approach clinical details, nor by the idealization with
which Socrates, as reported by Xenophon as well as by Plato, surrounds the
relation. But it was not the furtive homosexuality of an unfortunate few born
into abnormality, and, above all, it was not usually a homosexual relation in
which one of the partners assumed a female or passive role. Both the younger
man and the older were assumed to play psychologically a masculine, and,
therefore, noble, role, the older man essentially teaching the younger, preparing
him for his future part in this world of heroes, fighters, competitors, men,
still in so many ways of the spirit of the world of Homer.26

The sociologist can hardly avoid seeing in Greek pederasty a by no means
unprecedented form of a relation common among warriors. At the simplest
level, sexual relations among males are supposedly common where there are
no females available, notably among sailors in the days of long voyages. No
such complete isolation existed among the early Greeks, but with them war-
fare was endemic and seasonal, and it did involve long periods in camp and in
sieges and expeditions where women were not accessible. Some have main-
tained that the Greek relegation of women to housekeeping and childbearing,

25 Hesiod, The Creation, quoted in W. H. Auden, The Portable Greek Reader, New
York, Viking, 1948, p. 52.

26 The whole subject is treated with masterly compression and full command of ther
sources — and with a quite mid-twentieth-century attitude — in Marrou, A History oj
Education in Antiquity, Chap, m, entitled "Pederasty in Classical Education." M. Mar-
rou even permits himself the statement that "paideia found its realization in paider-
asteia" a statement a bit too sweeping and a bit too clever, but basically accurate.

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A History of Western Morals

the semi-Oriental exclusion they suffered, was itself the "cause" both of
pederasty and of the growth of that very Athenian form of professional female
prostitution to which Demosthenes refers, the hetairai ("mistresses") who
bring pleasure because they are bright and attractive. The Greek gentleman,
in this notion, turned to boys and hetairai since his wife, because of her faulty
upbringing, could not keep up with him in conversation. This seems a some-
what overintellectualized reason. In fact, the actual situation among the Greek
gentlemen of the Great Age seems to be an admirable example of the inter-
action of mutually dependent variables. The warrior-established relation
worked to increase the undesirability of the wife; the wife's relegation and,
presumably, resignation worked to increase the desirability of the young male
beloved, the eromenos.

Greek pederasty, however, got well beyond the sociology of the family and
into the sociology of knowledge, if not rather into the sociology of religion,
for in the Great Age V amour socratique became a means of symbolizing,
turning into a faith, an ideal, the act and fact of love. The pederast became the
seeker, the transcendentalist, the mystic, soaring far above the gentlemanly
limits of the beautiful-and-good. No doubt with most of these pairs of lovers
the relation was one in which this earth was no more than decently, moder-
ately, briefly, left for a better one, as when we are moved to hope for better
things. The older man and the younger were partners in an effort to rise above,
but not too far above, the common-sense acceptance of an untranscended
world that does play an essential part in the beautiful-and-good. Certainly,
generations of commentators have tried to show that Socrates himself, and
even his rapporteur Plato, meant by "Eros" in those famous dialogues that
deal with love nothing really Faustian, northern, and indecently, wildly mys-
tical, but no more than "the joint attainment by lover and beloved of self-mas-
tery."27 It remains true that for the small group of aristocrats who practiced
it, this love became what conventional love between men and women did
not become in the Great Age, a subject for poet and philosopher, an inspira-
tion for the artist — many of the Athenian vases are dedicated to a male lover
— no mere habit, however pleasant, but a goal. Whether that goal was, in fact,

5TThe phrase is from Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans, by
Montgomery Belgion, New York, Pantheon, 1956, p. 61, note. M. de Rougemont
compresses in a brief note this contention that in the Phaedrus and in the Sym-
posium Socrates is putting a bridle on Eros, not applying the spur. He adds, what most
commentators would accept, I suppose, that whatever Socrates-Plato may have meant
originally, subsequent interpreters have made the Eros of the dialogues into "bound-
less desire," that is, something transcendental, romantic, "Faustian."

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Greece: The Great Age

a "romantic" one — that is, an unattainable goal — is a question that canno
be firmly answered. Even here, however, one must doubt that the Greek of th
Great Age could ever quite sympathize with Shelley's

.... where we taste
The pleasures of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.28

IV

With Socrates we have come to that body of writings that for so many gen
erations has stood for the greatness of the Greeks. There is no need, perhaps
to repeat here warnings against assuming that even so varied and wide-rangin;
a body of writing as what we may call the Greek canon tells the historian o
morals all he wants to know about the Greeks of the Great Age. But it doe
tell us a great deal, and especially for Athens, where we know the many wen
at least attracted by the standards of the few, it does not leave us wholly ii
the dark even about the moral attitudes of the average man.

The canon is varied and inclusive. There is, first of all, the not very forma
theogony of the Olympians, the gods themselves, not yet as much embroi
dered as it was to be in the Greco-Roman world. Then there are the tale
of the mortals of old, who had commerce with the gods, and who sometime!
from heroes became gods; these are the tales, the "myths," of which th<
tragedies of the Great Age are made. Then, woven of the same stuff, but j
very different thing in the end, there are the "mystery cults" of Dionysus anc
of Demeter, religious beliefs in which a modern Westerner can recognize i
communion, an emotional experience he has difficulty recognizing in th<
formal Olympian faith. Finally, there is already by 300 B.C. a very substantia
body of what might be called "lay" literature, philosophy, lyric and gnomi<
poetry, history, even the Old Comedy, in some of which the gods and heroe;
are treated in a skeptical and realistic temper that can hardly be classified a
in any sense one of the varieties of religious experience.

As to the formal Olympian faith, I need add little to what I have sai<
above (p. 62ff.) . The gods are indeed in a sense and in part like mortals, sav<
for their power and their immortality. The believer does negotiate with them
make a contract with them, he does not seem to pray, to worship, as we un
derstand those words. Yet it must be said emphatically that there is no goo<
evidence that the Greek in the street, as long as he believed in them at all, eve
felt that what the gods are permitted to do he was permitted to do. The Gree]

28 Shelley, "Julian and Maddalo," line 15.

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A History of Western Morals

moral code — the usual code that condemns dishonesty, greed, adultery, that
backs up law codes — does not come directly from Olympus as the Hebrew
code comes from God on Sinai; but there is such a code, a part of the nature
of things, in a sense antedating the Olympians, even superior to them. The
Olympians themselves may often violate it with impunity, especially in such
matters as adultery, much, perhaps, as the conspicuous people on earth, the
people whose doings history records, seem to violate it. But for the ordinary
man, the gods themselves act as moral agents, their authority reinforcing cus-
tom and law. Even for Alcibiades, imitation of the doings of the Olympians
is a risky piece of hubris; for the plain man, it is unthinkable. This attitude is
a difficult one for contemporary American intellectuals in particular to under-
stand; it is probably much easier for John Doe, reading in his tabloid about
the goings on of "cafe society," to understand.

It must be noted that the leaders of Greek thought had long anticipated
the Christian complaint to come; a Zeus who conducts himself as immorally as
does the Zeus of the Olympian faith cannot be a good god, and, therefore, can-
not be a god at all. Either Zeus lives up to the best that has been thought and
said here on earth or he does not exist. Plato has Socrates say something like
this often, and had clearly arrived himself at an idealistic monotheism that
really dismisses the whole Olympian theogony and most of Greek "mythology"
as unprofitable and often downright wicked storytelling. Euripides, too, often
criticizes the view of the Olympians we have attributed to the man in the
street.29 Here, in fact, would seem to be the beginnings of an important and
never really greatly narrowed gap between what the educated, the ruling
classes as well as the pure intellectuals, of the Greco-Roman world made of
the formal, organized religion of their society and what the masses made of it.
This was the gap through which Christianity and its great rivals, Mithraism,
the cult of Isis, and the' like, were to enter Western society.

The gap was in the Great Age only partially filled by the mystery cults.
Our sources for understanding the nature of these cults, and in particular for
understanding their effect on the morals of the masses, are, of course, defec-
tive. For one thing, they were cults about which their initiates were sworn to
secrecy; for another, the intellectuals who made and transmitted the great
tradition of the beautiful-and-good were apparently rather ashamed of the
emotional abandon of these rites. Even Euripides, whose Bacchae is the

29 For Socrates-Plato, the last few pages of Book H of the Republic will do as an
example. Note that Jowett regularly translated 6e6s as God with a capital letter. For
Euripides, see the Iphigenia in Tauris, line 391.

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fullest great literary source for the worship of Dionysus, can hardly be said
to approach the subject in the frame of mind of the calm observer. Neverthe-
less, thanks to the labors of generations of scholars, we can be quite sure of
the most important facts about the mystery cults. The worshiper took part in
a sacrament by means of which he communed directly with a god, indeed
became through theophagy a part of a god, and hence immortal. In both
Demeter and Dionysus there lives the old Western belief in an earth-god or
-goddess who dies and is born again. At the height of the ritual the worshipers
underwent an experience that exalted them into the kind of mystic transport
which, whether it be violent frenzy or quiet rapture, is quite unintelligible, if
not indecent, to the rationalist temperament.30

. As to the moral consequences of participation in these mysteries, we have
no substantial evidence. The rationalist is likely to feel about them, as about
their modem equivalents, that they are at best comparatively harmless psy-
chological outlets for needs the really mature person ought not to have, at
worst debauches that may lead to immoral conduct. The Christian mystic
must feel that these Greek cults were too much manifestations of mass feel-
ings, too public. The American observer can hardly help comparing them to
revivalist camp meetings, Holy Rollerism, and suchlike manifestations of com-
municable excitement. At any rate, the cults in their original form did not
survive the rival excitements of all sorts of other Eastern cults in the later
centuries. Their very existence is, however, an important and necessary
modification of the oversimple view of the Greeks of the Great Age as univer-
sally calm and dignified embodiments of the ideal of the Golden Mean. The
Greek in the throes of communion with Dionysus could not have looked much
like those serene statues of the Parthenon.

There are still more exceptions to this textbook pattern of the Olympians
and their human followers. If the mystery cults suggest an emotional in-
continence unworthy of- the "classical" ideal, the Sophists, as reported to us,
it is true chiefly by their enemy Socrates-Plato, are quite as clearly extremists
in another direction. Their famous "man is the measure of all things" has been
variously interpreted, but it does seem inconsistent with deep religious feeling.

so As an example of the difficulties of interpretation that face the historian interested
in human conduct and motivation, the dispute over the Eacchae will do very well.
Interpretations range from the view that in this play Euripides is the rationalist show-
ing by example the horrors of religious intoxication to the view that he is here the
wise humanist showing by example the dangerous narrowness of the matter-of-fact
rationalist. The play itself, duly and romantically translated by Gilbert Murray, is of
major importance in any scheme of "general education." See the well-known A. W.
Verrall, Euripides the Rationalist, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1913.

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A History of Western Morals

It must be repeated that Socrates and his pupils may have completely mis-
represented Protagoras and his. I should guess it much more likely that these
Sophists were in fact the first large and well-developed group of the kind
most familiar to us in the philosophes of the eighteenth century, no-nonsense
rationalists who held that properly directed thinking could answer all ques-
tions worth asking and guide men's conduct alike for the individual and the
general good. No doubt the individualism they taught could act as a dis-
solvent of old traditional morality, as Aristophanes shows wittily in the
Clouds, but they probably sincerely believed, as the philosophes did, that the
new rational morality would lead to a better commonwealth, not to unprin-
cipled struggle among "anarchistic" and selfish individuals.

On the other hand, Plato himself clearly goes beyond the limits set by
the ideals of the beautiful-and-good, the Golden Mean, the human super-
humanity of the sculptured Apollos and Aphrodites; or perhaps it would
be safe to say merely that the accumulated weight of centuries of interpreta-
tion of Plato's writings pushes him over to the side of the mystics, the other-
worldly, the seekers, or, mildest of words here, the idealists. Plotinus and the
other neoplatonists in a later age most certainly heightened Plato's transcen-
dental flights — or, if you see things this way, made his nonsense even more
nonsensical. But surely the Plato who in the familiar parable of the cave
decides that the world of human sense experience as interpreted by common
sense is somehow not the "real" world belongs among William James's
"tender-minded," not among his "tough-minded." More riskily, perhaps, one
may list him as a Faustian, not as an Apollonian.31

Plato's metaphysics, however, need interest us here only as they add to
the complexities of the "classic" view of life, as they cast doubt on the view
that the Greeks of the Great Age were too gentlemanly to display their met-
aphysics. As a moralist he almost always speaks as Socrates, and here, too,
he presents us with a problem: Does he deepen and widen the ideal of the
beautiful-and-good, but still within the tradition of his countrymen, or does
he twist it into an unearthly, and un-Greek, striving for the annihilation of the
flesh? His Socrates does arrive at the formula "Knowledge is virtue"; and this
formula was Greek enough so that many of his critics at the time seem to have

31 Aristotle, who is usually classified as more worldly, nearer the conventional Greek
tough-mindedness than Plato, nonetheless arrives at an ethical ideal, theoria, which
has firm overtones of some kind of transcendence of this practical and inconvenient
world, a sort of quiet, soulful, thoroughly decent ecstasy, far removed from Bacchic
intoxication, but still an ecstasy, no mere detached philosophic calm. The more you
look at these Greeks, the less they look like the Elgin marbles.

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confused him with his opponents the Sophists. But for the Sophists knowledge
was apparently instrumental, utilitarian, "practical" almost in our modern
sense; and for the Socrates of Plato knowledge was the intuitive appreciation
of God's ordering of the universe, the things his daimon told him were true,
the things the poor captives in the cave could not really see in their half-light.
We are almost at the German distinction between Verstand and Vernunft —
the Sophists with their prudent, indeed banausic, bookkeeper's reason (Ver-
stand), Socrates with his profound insights (Vernunjf) into a world where
there are no bookkeepers, and no books.

Plato does, especially in the Republic and in the Laws, come down to
concrete cases. Yet it is precisely in these details of what he regards as the
good life, and in the spirit behind them, that he seems most clearly to deviate
from the Greek, or at least the Athenian, way, the way of Pericles's funeral
speech. Plato's Utopia is, in fact, an aristocratic communist society, divided
on lines of caste, though not without possible careers open to approved talent,
ruled firmly by a chosen few, and pervaded by an austere discipline under
which the ruling classes, at least, would appear to have to give up the very
Greek delights of poetry, music, the arts of living, even family, and to have
to embrace poverty, virtue, the higher life. There are echoes of Sparta and
a foresight of Christian monasticism, the monasticism of the Teutonic knights,
perhaps, rather than that of the Benedictines.32

The Athenian tragedies of the Great Age are no doubt a fairer reflection of
what the Athenian gentleman thought about the good life than are the works
of the great philosophers. Yet here, too, there must be a warning. Tragedy —
Greek tragedy, at any rate — is loftly, serious, dignified. A great deal of living,
even for the best of us, must be a matter of routine, of trivial matters, relieved
by absence of high thinking, if not actually by lightheartedness. Still, the work
of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, supplemented by that of Thucydides,
and even of writers like Herodotus and Xenophon, can take us intimately
into Greek concern with matters of high seriousness. The ideals we have
sought to summarize under such words as the beautif ul-and-good, the Golden
Mean, the agon, are conventional, loftily so, aristocratic, but still a con-

32 1 am aware that the above is a one-sided interpretation of Plato. He is, in fact, a
kind of litmus paper for separating the "realists" from the "idealists." (You may put
this dualism, which is, I think, almost as clear-cut as that between sheep and goats,
in your favorite terms.) Jefferson, for instance, a realist, reacted violently against
Plato. See his letter to John Adams, July 5, 1814, and Adams's reply July 16, 1814.
Correspondence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, selected by Paul Wistach,
Indianapolis, Bobbs-MerriU, 1925, p. 107.

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ventional moral idea; and the high philosophic mysticism of Plato, the mad-
ness of the mystery cults, are simply out of line. We get a more just sense
of what the sensitive Greek of the Great Age felt about man's fate from Greek
dramatic literature.

This Greek came nearer the view of the world as a vale of tears than many
later Hellenists like to admit. He had as yet little of Job's final resignation —
that will come later with the Stoics, though not by any means in identical
form — but he was not very far from Job's feeling that man is born to trouble.
Even granting that tragedy as a literary genre has to deal with somber mat-
ters, even granting that the Greeks held that tragedy, through what Aristotle
called "catharsis," purged the soul through pity and terror to leave it filled
with courage, perhaps even with hope, granting that Greek tragedy by no
means leaves in the spirit the gnawing, rather nasty despair the modern
'^problem play" leaves, it is still true that, once more, this is not the sunny,
ligjhthearted, untroubled Greece of the Apollonian smile. The world of the
tragic poets is not a world designed for human happiness; or, if you prefer,
man is, for the tragic poets, born with a flaw that prevents his attaining the
happiness he wants, a flaw as real to the sensitive Greek as the flaw of
original sin to the sensitive Christian. This flaw is hubris (fyfyts), still best
translated as pride, which is also the great Christian sin.

The parallel with the Judaeo-Christian moral tradition can be carried
further. Greek hubris is the overweening individual's rebellion against the
ordering of the universe; Adam's sin, which is ours, is also rebellion, dis-
obedience. There are obvious and important differences, at bottom the dif-
ferences between Prometheus and Adam as rebels. Prometheus is a hero, for
the Greek could not quite believe his gods loved men; the Jew does really
believe his God loves men. Not even in Aeschylus, the earliest and simplest
of the three great Greek dramatists, is there rebellion against a personal god,
but against an impersonal necessity, and therefore a rebellion clearly heroic,
justified, perhaps; and only in Euripides is there a trace of the complaining
against the rest of the world that is the mark of the romantic Ibsen. Adam
is not in the canon a hero, and the tradition hardly motivates his disobedience
in ordinary human ways; it is just stupid sinful disobedience. Again, both
the Greek and the Hebrew traditions are rooted in early concepts of hereditary
guilt Of the Greek house of Atreus, the dark tale of which was a favorite
topic of classic tragedy, the words of the fourth commandment can certainly
apply: visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, upon the third
and upon the fourth generation.

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On the moral base for Greek tragedy, on such problems as how far neces-
sity (dvay/o?) is a blind force ruling the universe with no concern for man,
how far hubris itself in a man is the product of his own free will, of his blind-
ness to the warnings from the gods, to the "facts of life," how near to our own
conceptions of guilt that of the tragic poets is, are questions on which genera-
tions of interpreters have not agreed. To us, at least at first glance, Oedipus,
who killed his father and married his mother all unknowing, seems a victim
of mere accident. He did kill a stranger in a crossroad row, which can seem
to us as crudely motivated as a fight in a movie Western. But this scuffle it-
self is an example of the normal violence of Greek life, a violence I have al-
ready noted (see p. 87); it seems to me difficult to read into Sophocles's
text any idea that this initial act of violence by Oedipus is, in fact, the act
of hubris, the beginning of the stain. It is perhaps fairer to say that Oedipus's
whole career, up to the point where fate overtakes him, seems to have been
the career of a fortunate but insensitive man, a career open to talents not
quite tuned to the subtleties of the beautiful-and-good, a tragic career at
once guilty and innocent.

However you interpret these tragedies, and the complex of tales out of
which they are built, you can hardly deny that they display men struggling
against something not men, something hostile or indifferent to men, yet
something that has to be reckoned with, adjusted to, in the kind of tension
we call "morality." That morality is not an easy, "natural," "immanent"
thing, the true human nature, to be contrasted with the harsh and unnatural
dictated code of a Jehovah. Necessity seems often to be as harsh and distant
a master of man as any ever have conceived. Only slowly, and surely only
among an intellectual elite of a somewhat later age, does the full force of
the Heraclitean fragment come home: character as fate. This was perhaps
the final lesson of Greek tragedy. These Greeks by no means saw and felt
the universe as did the optimistic enlightened of the eighteenth century, our
own closest spiritual fathers.

* One major element in the moral history of the Greeks remains to be
noted: their civic morality, their feelings about the relation of the individual
to the polis. Here there is no need to question the accepted verdict that
the Greeks, who made the word "democracy," also made the thing. The
spotted reality was, of course, quite different from the ideal as set in the
funeral speech of Pericles or in the writings of modern romantic philhellenes.
There is no need to bring up the slavery, the coups d'etat, the horrible in-
ternecine wars among the poleis; nor is there need to insist that democracy

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A History of Western Morals

s not invented by, say, a Solon or a Cleisthenes much as an Edison in-
ited the phonograph. Spartan democracy — for among the Spartiates
mselves there was a kind of democracy — still looks a good deal like the
I tribal war council out of which it developed. But Athens about 400 B.C.
>ks modern indeed, in spite of slavery, a society of great freedom of dis-
ision, of party rivalry, of decisions made by some kind of balancing, and
preat deal of talking, among conflicting interest groups.
Of the individual — the free adult male individual — in such a society, we
ist note, first of all, that he was a "citizen," a word one would hardly use
a Jew, an Egyptian, an Assyrian. He felt, if he were a good citizen, strong
ligations toward the society; he was a citizen-soldier, and a taxpayer, and
roter; he took full part in politics, not always a very "moral" part. Above
, he did feel that in his relations with the agents of his society — its "govern-
>nt" — he was no slave, no subject, not even an obedient product of social
aditioning (these last terms would have been wholly incomprehensible to
n). He felt that in obeying the laws he was obeying himself. I am aware
it these are idealistic terms, and I by no means believe that the Athenian
the street went through a process of thinking out high philosophical prob-
ns like this in the manner of Rousseau's Contrat social. But he felt some-
ng of the sort, and we have ample evidence of it. Here is a small but sig-
icant fragment: Simonides's epitaph on the Spartan dead at Thermopylae
usually translated as "We lie here, having obeyed their [the Spartan lawful
ers] commands," but the word 7rei0oju,evot is the passive of the verb best
instated "persuade," and the passage is literally close to "having been per-
aded to comply with their commands." Again, there is a famous passage in
arodotus, often quoted by lovers of Greece. Demaratus, exiled Spartan king,
at the court of the invading Persian despot Xerxes; he is there, be it noted,
a result of one of those rough political adjustments, well short of the best
•Meal morality, that occur in the practice of Greek democracy, and is, in
:t, a traitor. But when Xerxes doubts that the tiny Spartan group will fight
3 host, doubts that they will fight against such odds even if they were on his
le, and threatened with the whip, Damaratus replies:

likewise the Lacedaemonians, when they fight singly, are as good men as any
the world, and when they fight in a body, are the bravest of all. For though they
freemen, they are not in all respects free; law is the master whom they own;
I this master they fear more than thy subjects fear thee. Whatever he commands
y do; and his commandment is always the same: it forbids them to flee in

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Greece: The Great Age

battle, whatever the number of their foes, and requires them to stand firm, and
either conquer or die. . . ,33

The Greek would have fully understood Henry de Bracton's phrase nan
sub homine, sed sub Deo et sub lege, a government of laws, not of men. Once
more, the tough-minded cynic can insist that law is simply what men have
made, and are making, it, but he misses the point that is clear in the moral
logic of the sentiments. The Antigone of Sophocles is here the locus classicus.
Antigone resists Creon, himself as king a legitimate source of commands,
because his command that her brother, for willful, and unsuccessful, rebel-
lion, be buried without proper funeral rites is to her an arbitrary act, an
act contrary to religion, an act he had no "right" to command. Here, surely,
is the essence of the moral history of the West, perhaps of mankind: this is
the Promethean gesture of human defiance of not-man in the guise of other-
man, conscience asserting that higher and lower for the moralist are not
what they are for the physicist; this is Luther's ich kann nicht anders. Is this
perhaps hubris, a sin become a virtue, the final victory of Dionysus over
Apollo?

Greek moral life, like all moral life, was not perpetually keyed to the
intensity of tragic poetry. Indeed, through all Greek history to the present
there runs a sly little thread of a most pedestrian, if not immoral, dye. From
Odysseus on through the clever and handsome young men of Athens, the
brilliant sophistic manipulators of the new logic, the exiled traitors, the
Graeculus esuriens of Juvenal, on to the traditional Levantine — a word no
one now dare use — of the nineteenth century, the Greeks have had a reputa-
tion for untrustworthy sharpness. No doubt the Roman and the British ex-
amples are "race prejudice," the lion's eternal contempt for the fox. But the
tradition, the reputation, are there, in their way, facts also.

Yet the sum total of what the Homeric Greeks and their successors of
the Great Age of the poleis have meant to us for two millenniums is over-
whelmingly on the side of sweetness and light, on the side of the good, not
the bad. The beautiful-and-good, the Golden Mean, the agon, hubris, Neces-
sity, arete, democracy, above all, perhaps, the effort to state clearly what these
concepts mean in the daily round of life, the effort to set up communicable
standards of human nature, the effort to think about man's fate, at bottom to
alter man's fate, all this we owe the Greeks. To them, more surely than to
that other source of our moral traditions, the Jews, for whom God was much

33 The History of Herodotus, trans, by George Rawlinson, New York, Tudor Publish-
ing Co., 1928, pp. 387-388.

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too invested with earthly concreteness to arouse worry over transcendence
or "idealism," we owe the characteristic Western tension between acceptance
of the world of the senses and transcendence of such a world, between con-
formity and rebellion, between — but the polar dualisms could fill pages. The
Greeks by no means established a fine, healthy, normal middle way in all
these tensions. But they did experience them all, and have left us an extraor-
dinary record of their experience. Above all, they sought at the height of their
cultural blossoming to combine the two excellences — the two great prides,
the two great snobberies, if you are Christian enough, or democrat enough,
to want to put it thus — of the warrior and the priest, the athlete of the body
and the athlete of the soul. They did not wholly succeed in combining these
excellences; what success they had did not last long. But they have drawn
from this attempt their haunting hold on the imagination of the West.

Yet perhaps we should be most grateful to these Greeks for the fascinat-
ing, complex, almost always clearly and beautifully expressed account of
the varieties of human experience we have in their theogony, their mythology,
their literature, art, and philosophy. Looked at as no more than a great clini-
cal record of human conduct under the spur of human hopes and aspirations,
this record of Greek achievement is invaluable. It is complete, finished, and
yet never-ending. Even if it is no more than a clinical record, that record
is ours, still.

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The Greco-Roman World

IT WAS THE ROMANS who put an end to the wars among the Greek city-states
and who finally united all the Mediterranean world. It is through the Roman
Western world that the cultural inheritance of the Greeks came to our West
European ancestors, at least until with the Renaissance men tried to get
back directly to the work of the Greeks themselves. We cannot, in fact, get
away from that awkward hyphen; what we have is Greco-Roman. The
Roman component is a major one.

For several centuries after the legendary date of the founding of the
city, 753 B.C., the little agrarian and trading city-state on the Tiber grew
slowly in the obscurity of its remoteness from the then Greek center of the
Western stage. The Roman ruling classes were later to become very conscious
of their place in the now widened world, and of their need for a Homeric
past. They had their own religion, their own "mythology," their own political,
legal, and moral traditions, but they hardly had a true "heroic age," or, if
they did, it is lost forever to men's memories. We can, with the help of
archaeology, work our way through the prose lays of ancient Rome that
Livy left us, the noble, moving, but very self-conscious, epic past that Vergil
gave his countrymen, the Tocquevillean study that the Greek Polybius made of
his strange captors, and a great deal of miscellaneous materials, laws, formal
records, and the like, to some firm notions of the moral and psychological
base from which the Romans started.

It was a solid base indeed. The old Romans were a people of steady
habits, disciplined, good citizen-soldiers, distrustful of the arts of the intellect,

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hard-working, and — the cant term will not be kept down — "practical." They
have something in common, in terms of social morality, with all peoples
known for their cohesiveness, their devotion to routine and discipline, the
piety of their religious practices — not, be it noted, for the intensity of their
religious emotions — for their firm attitude of no damned nonsense — in short,
for their apparently successful and unneurotic suppression of much we today
think of as essential to the human lot. The Romans have something, at least,
in common with the early Jews, with the Spartans, with those children of
Calvin and a stony soil, the Scots and the early New Englanders.

Here at the very start we encounter in the concrete a factor of great
importance in any account of what the Romans have meant to the world:
their persistent, direct borrowings from the Greeks, who attained the prestige
of cultural ripeness several centuries ahead of the Romans, and toward whom
educated Romans even into the late Empire always had most mixed feelings
of admiration, envy, distrust, and contempt.1 The Romans had a polytheistic
religion of their own, though no doubt built up from many sources in their
distant Indo-European past and from borrowings from the Etruscans, with
named gods and goddesses of specific attributes. The early Roman, how-
ever, seems to have had a fairly simple and even dull pantheon. When their
intellectuals ran up against the dazzling Olympian pantheon of the Greeks,
they did their best to fit the two together. Mercury and Hermes, Venus and
Aphrodite, and the rest were paired, and gradually the whole body of Greek
theogony, myth, and fable took over and swamped the Roman.

It is likely, however, that for the early Romans the major gods of their
pantheon were less important than the host of intimate gods and goddesses of
the hearth, the bed, the field, the market place. To the Roman, as Polybius
pointed out, religion meant a sober, steadying, ritual approach to the tasks of
living in a world in which a man always needed steadying, always needed to
feel that the nonhuman could be brought to help him, or at least to be less
hostile. This Roman faith is indeed — and the phrase is Latin — a religion of
do ut des. But the warning we have made already in noting that many prim-
itive polytheisms — and even monotheisms like the early Jewish worship of
the tribal Jehovah — bring man and god together in a contractual relationship
needs to be repeated here. The very word "contractual," the whole attempt
to state the relation in our modern languages, especially since the eighteenth-
century Enlightenment, distorts and falsifies the moral facts of the relation.

1 Juvenal's Third Satire (see above, p. 19) is here the locus classicus, especially
lines 58-125.

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The early Roman who did his duties to the gods, who displayed pietas, was
in a state of mind and heart equally far from a man making a business trans-
action and from a man "going through the motions." He was trying to do
what he "ought" to do as a moral agent, trying to adjust, or, better, to mold
his conduct to the scheme of things cosmic his faith outlined for him. Now
"mold," unlike, say, the contractual term "adjust," does suggest the disci-
plined, moderate, obedient citizen-soldier the Roman was; it does not, of
course, suggest the self-abnegation of the mystic, which the Roman was not.
"Contract" also connotes for us something like a relation between equals.
But no pious Roman could ever feel himself an equal even in his relation with
his household gods. The steady moral ways of the Romans of the Republic
were sanctioned by commands from above. Again, though we can find in
these early years little sign of the humble contrition of a believer overwhelmed
by the feeling still conveyed to us in the Judaeo-Christian tradition by the
word "sin," we can be sure that the Roman knew that if he did wrong he
would be punished, punished in an afterlife. Polybius, who lived at just the
time the educated Romans were cutting themselves free, very free, from the
restraints of the old-time religion, remarked:

For this reason I think, not that the ancients acted rashly and at haphazard in
introducing among the people notions concerning the gods and beliefs in the ter-
rors of hell, but that the moderns are most rash and foolish in banishing such
beliefs.2

Indeed, it should be noted at this point that the accepted notion that the
formal religion of the Greeks and Romans had very little place for the doc-
trines of the immortality of the soul and of judgment after death needs some
qualifying. Our tradition makes too much of the famous passage in the
Odyssey in which Achilles complains of the dullness of the afterlife; Dante's
hell and even his paradise are a good deal sharper. But the fact is that the
immortality of the soul had a definite place in the Olympian faith, and one
that should not be minimized. We may reasonably believe that for the ordi-
nary man, even down into the end of the pagan culture, the kind of moral
sanction such a belief carries with it does exist. Even for the literary, there is
a kind of wistful reality in the other world. In a famous passage in the Aeneid,
Vergil describes the crowd coming to Charon's ferry, perhaps not as if he
really saw the shades, but at least in an elegiac, not in a rationalist and
rejecting, mood:

2 Polybius, The Histories, trans, by W. R. Paton, London, Heinemann, 1923, Loeb
Classical Library, Book VI, §56: 12.

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To the bank come thronging
Mothers and men, bodies of great-souled heroes,
Their life-time over, boys, unwedded maidens,
Young men whose fathers saw their pyres burning,
Thick as the forest leaves that fall in autumn
With early frost, thick as the birds to landfall
From over the seas, when the chill of the year compels them
To sunlight. There they stand, a host, imploring
To be taken over first.3

We cannot make explicit and symbolic the ethical ideal of these Romans
of the first centuries of the Republic; we cannot quite set up the equivalent of
the Homeric hero, the Periclean beautiful-and-good. But we can get hints
of what the Roman gentleman — the word is not perfect, but it will have to do,
for it is better than "noble" — thought proper and admirable. Livy unques-
tionably was writing deliberately to encourage old-fashioned virtues that he
thought, quite correctly, were dying out among the Roman ruling classes of
the Augustan Age. Still, the tales he records, or perhaps even invents, are
almost certainly "genuine" in the sense that tales like those of Alfred and the
cakes, Bruce and the spider, even that of Washington and the cherry tree are
genuine parts of a national tradition. These Roman tales emphasize courage
against odds, soldierly obedience, individual heroism, simplicity of manners,
gravitas, dignity, high seriousness, and pietas, loyal, respectful feelings to-
ward the established moral order; here are Horatius at the bridge, Lucretia's
chastity, the patriotism of her avengers, the Iroquoian fortitude of Mucius
Scaevola, Qncinnatus at the plow; all the long list makes for a firm, even
rigid, sense of moral obligation. Sparta, of course, comes to mind, but there
is here a note by no means so clearly sounded in Sparta, a note of straight-
forward honesty, of piety in the old Roman sense. If you read together the
early books of Livy and the Lycurgus of Plutarch and some Spartan speeches
in Thucydides, you will feel at once a difference in the moral tones of early
Rome and Sparta.

Moreover, the Romans had a very different attitude toward the uses of
the human mind than had the Spartans. This fact, indeed, might be deduced
— if the historian dare indulge in deduction — from the given fact of Roman
success in creating the One World of their empire. The Spartans could not
adapt themselves to any change, could not summon the minimum diplomatic
and governmental skills necessary for successful expansion. The Romans,
though it is not unfair to say that there runs through their whole history a

3 Book VI, 305-314, The Aeneid of Vergil, trans, by Rolfe Humphries, New York,
Scribner, 1951, p. 154.

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certain distrust of the speculative intellect, and, at the very least, a certain
excessive if not awkward seriousness among their intellectuals, nonetheless
made excellent use of their minds to adapt their resources to the drive toward
expansion. They were, as we all know, good lawyers, diplomatists, engineers,
administrators. Their civic life was by no means an unprofitable adherence
to custom; on the contrary, out of the struggle of patricians and plebeians, out
of the wars with their neighbors, they acquired the skills with which, luck
aiding, they were to conquer what was for them almost the known world.

Cicero, a conventional person on the defensive in a time when many of
the old ways were vanishing, is throughout his numerous writings a good,
platitudinous authority for the old Roman moral outlook. Here he is at his
average pace:

But when with a rational spirit you have surveyed the whole field, there is no
social relation among them all more close, none more dear than that which links
each one of us with our country. Parents are dear; dear are children, relatives,
friends; but one native land embraces all our loves. . . ,4

Yet the ideal seems warmer and more sympathetic in the fragments we have
of less deliberately improving literature, notably in the inscriptions, which
are no doubt not without contrivance, but which often ring true. Here is an
epitaph from one of the lower trades, that of butcher:

Lucius Aurelius Hennia, a freedman of Lucius, a butcher of the Viroinal Hill.
She who went before me in death, my one and only wife, chaste in body, a loving
woman of my heart possessed, living faithful to her faithful man; in fondness
equal to her other virtues, never during bitter times did she shrink from loving
duties.5

But the Romans could not keep intact the morality of their earlier and
simpler days. The old Roman qualities of gravitas, pietas, virtus — all subtly
but very definitely different from what the English words derived from them
suggest to us — never wholly disappear, if you look for them, in Roman his-
tory. But they do not, after the conquest of Carthage and the East, make the
style, the tone, of the Greco-Roman culture. The loss of the close-knit disci-
pline, the virtues of the simple life, and the cohesion of the patriarchal family
can be noted in the very articulate effort of high-minded reformers to revive
them. These moralists, from the elder Cato, who caricatures the early Ro-
man type, to the Augustan generation, including emphatically that tardy strict

* Cicero, De Officiis, trans, by Walter Miller, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University
Press, 1951, Loeb Classical Library, 1.17(57).

5 E. H. WarmiBgton, Remains of Old Latin, London, Heinemann, 1940, Loeb Classical
Library, Vol. IV, p. 23.

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moralist Augustus himself, certainly exaggerate the completeness of the loss.
The historian, however, if he must have a general rule in such matters, will
find the folk wisdom of "where there's smoke there's fire" a bit safer than the
folk wisdom of the tale of the boy who cried "Wolf, wolf!"

Livy's own diagnosis was oversimple. As he makes clear in his preface, he
blames the loss of the old virtues chiefly on increasing wealth and luxury.
He writes, for instance, of the first part of the second century B.C.:

At that time the cook, to the ancient Romans the most worthless of slaves, both
in their judgment of values and in the use they made of him, began to have value,
and what had been merely a necessary service came to be regarded as an art. Yet
those things which were then looked upon as remarkable were hardly even the
germs of the luxury to come.6

Cato, though he blanketed his whole age in blame, and thought the younger
generation was going soft, was especially bitter against the rising intellec-
tualism of education, and the admiration for those slippery creatures the
Greeks. The censors in 92 B.C. issued an edict against the new schools of
rhetoric which is typical enough:

Our fathers determined what they wished their children to learn and what schools
they desired them to attend. These innovations in the customs and principle of
our forefathers do not please us nor seem proper. Therefore it appears necessary
to make our opinion known to those who have such [newfangled] schools and
those who are in the habit of attending them, that they are displeasing to us.7

One may believe that earlier when the censors said "displeasing" the
word was strong enough. In the later years of the Republic not even vigorous
edicts of prohibition worked. The Roman housewife of the early days seems
to have been in a position not unlike that of the Athenian housewife, or, at
any rate, if not so secluded, held to rigorous standards of quiet obedience.
Her emancipation is a clear index of the disintegration of the early Roman
moral world. Yet already in the Republic one finds efforts to keep the ladies
good by edict, as, for instance, by forbidding them to drink wine. In a similar
frame of mind the Roman authorities early in the second century B.C. sought
to suppress not only in Rome but throughout Italy the celebration of the
newly imported Bacchic rites. This "persecution" was based on much the
same arguments that were later to be used against the Christians: the rites

*Livy, trans, by Evan T. Sage, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1936,
Loeb Classical Library, Book XXXIX, vi, 9.

7 Quoted in N. Lewis and M. Reinhold, Roman Civilization, New York, Columbia
University Press, 1955, Vol. I, p. 492.

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were held to lead to all sorts of vile practices, and to make the worshipers
untrustworthy citizens.8

We here encounter clearly for the first time another persistent theme in
the moral history of the West, and one that confronts the sociological histo-
rian with some difficult problems: sumptuary, prohibitory, "blue law" legis-
lation accompanied by official or semiofficial educational propaganda toward
a return to "primitive" virtues. There is no simple formula available, certainly
no extreme statement that such efforts are always in vain, always efforts to
go against the tide, always an indication that a given society is in fact already
completely corrupt, decadent, "loose," doomed. The historian must try to
judge each case separately, in the hope that effective comparisons may even-
tually permit some generalizations. On the whole, what the old republican
reformers sought to preserve was indeed lost in the later Rome, where, as we
shall shortly see, the ruling classes and the urban masses in Rome itself and
in the great metropolitan Eastern centers have left in history an indelible and
surely not wholly undeserved reputation for conduct below not only the best
Western standards of ethics, but below the actual standards of conduct in
most Western societies.

Yet the Rome that seemed to be about to go to pieces in the second cen-
tury B.C. did survive and even grow for many more centuries. The Roman
Empire was by no means what we think of as the welfare state, but it was no
Oriental despotism, and it could not have been held together by cowardly
soldiers and corrupt administrators. Even at the top, the balance is not wholly
on the side of Nero, and wholly against Marcus Aurelius; at the level of the
now nameless men who did the work, the Empire was served by civil and
military administrators with high, if not precisely Platonic or puritanical,
standards of morality. And we can be pretty sure that all over the Empire, in
the soft East as well as in the hard West, there were at all times thousands of
country gentlemen as conscientious, as sober and hard-working, as civilized,
in the best sense of the word, as was Plutarch, who lived in Boeotia at the
turn of the first to the second centuries A.D. At the very end of the Empire
we come across a work of the Gallic poet Ausonius, Roman consul in 379, the
Parentalia, in which he describes several generations of his family in Au-
vergne and Aquitaine in a spirit of old Roman piety and realism. The men are
not in the least like the vile plotters of Tacitus, nor the women like the
scandalous ladies of Suetonius. In fact, we seem to be in nineteenth-century

8 Livy, Sage, trans., Book XXXIX, viii-xix; Lewis and Reinhold, Roman Civilization,
Vol. H, pp. 600-601.

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A History of Western Morals

Lyons, or Edinburgh, or Boston, with one of those sober dynasties of pillars
of society so characteristic of these centers of virtue.9

The competitive spirit survived to the last, certainly at the very top. The
struggle for the imperial purple is among the most ruthless on record. Even
in an age of violence, one would suppose that a rough statistical awareness
that the odds were against an emperor's dying a natural death might deter
candidates, which it clearly did not. Huizinga suggests that the baths, theaters,
halls, and other public works given by wealthy donors all over the Greco-
Roman world were not inspired by feelings of charity, nor even, as they really
do seem to have been in Athens of the great days, by public spirit, but by the
desire to show off, by what he calls the "potlatch spirit."10 Certainly the
Trimalchio of Petronius was moved by the potlatch spirit; he constantly
boasts to his guests about the cost and rareness of their food, and has the
wine brought in with the jars labeled conspicuously Falernian Opimian one
hundred years old.11 Vergil, as usual, puts it nobly in the old heroic way. The
crews are waiting for the signal to start a boat race:

They are at their places, straining,

Arms stretched to the oars, waiting the word, and their chests
Heave, and their hearts are pumping fast; ambition
And nervousness take hold of them. The signal! . . .

Considunt transtris; intentaque brachia remis:
Intenti expectant signum, exsultantiaque haurit
Corda pavor pulsans, laudumque arrecta cupido.12

The key phrase is laudumque arrecta cupido, which I have seen translated
"and the wild thirst for praise." Humphries's "ambition and nervousness,"
whether you think it Vergilian or not, is a fine description of the eternal
Western aristocratic agon.

II

Rome at almost any time after the end of the second century B.C. has long
been a symbol for moral looseness, for evil, not only in public but in private

9 1 expect the convinced primitivist will argue that Ausonius's family came from an
as yet uncorrupted provincial region, and cannot be taken as typical. This point can-
not be decisively proved or disproved. But Ausonius did move in the highest circles
at Rome itself. See Samuel Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western
Empire, London, Macmillan, 1910, Book II, Chap. HI, pp. 167-178. Also pp. 158-159
for Ausonius's advancement under Gratian, and pp. 402-403 for his influence in in-
creasing the salaries of teachers.

10 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, Boston, Beacon, 1955, p. 178.

11 Petronius, Trimalchio' s Dinner, trans, by Harry Thurston Peck, New York, Dodd,
Mead, 1908, p. 85.

12 The Aeneid of Vergil, Rolfe Humphries trans., pp. 117-118, Book V, 136-138.

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life. As usual, our sources deal almost wholly with the doings of the small
group at the top of the social pyramid. We may then begin by fixing our atten-
tion on these people, fully aware that at the very least, since the masses could
not afford the luxuries of the rich, they could not practice their vices, certainly
not as extensively and as intensively. But we cannot assume that there is no
relation between the conduct and ethical standards of the few and the conduct
of the many. Like the related problem of how far sumptuary and other moral
legislation to restore primitive virtues is really effective, a problem briefly
noted just above, the historian has to do his best to judge each case as it
presents itself. A corrupt aristocracy and a sober, steady, virtuous populace
seem hardly to go contentedly and in equilibrium together, but the historian
cannot close his mind to the possibility that they may, at least in the short
term.

There must be made the caution once more that our sources for the horrid
conduct of the ruling classes of the late Republic and, subject to some irregu-
lar cycles of good emperors and bad, of the Empire in the whole period of its
nearly five hundred years of life certainly do not do much whitewashing. We
have so far passed the days of complete reverence for whatever was written
in classical Greek or Latin that it may be permissible to assert that Suetonius
and some of the lesser historians of the Augusti had tabloid mentalities. And
Tacitus, a great historian and no doubt a good man, displays that preoccupa-
tion with wickedness characteristic of the high-minded reformer as well as of
the good newspaperman.

Yet the wickedness is certainly there. To begin with a simple and in a
way constant or endemic form of misconduct, there is always sex. The ex-
ploits of Messalina, third wife of the Emperor Claudius, are still familiar in
our best homes. Her lovers were legion, chosen from all sorts and conditions
of men. Her sexual endurance — one lover after another all night — challenges
belief even in such a record-conscious age as our own. The normal vocabulary
of sexual abnormality — nymphomania, erotomania, and the like — pales be-
fore her achievements. Is she a legend? Perhaps to a degree she is, but
there can be no doubt that the Empress was a very loose woman, and a palace
plotter and unscrupulous participant in the murderous competition of high
politics. There can be no doubt that Augustus's own womenfolk, his wife,
Livia, and his daughter, Julia, let this restorer of virtuous living down rather
worse than Napoleon's promiscuous sister, Pauline, let him down in a some-
what similar attempt to make a renewed aristocracy respectable in the eyes
of the world. But there is no need to insist further on this point; all but the
most bowdlerized of history books will give you the details.

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The literary confirm the sexual looseness of the ruling classes. The corpus
of Greek and Latin writings together, of course, form the first and still one
of the major sources of pornographic pleasure available to the Western reader;
for not until quite recently have men dared to read pornography into the Old
Testament. We shall come again to the complexity, the range, the modernity
of this society of the One World of the Roman Empire. In the field of actual
physical exercise of the sex organs, after all, by no means the richest and
most complicated field open to human activity, it may well be true that the
Greco-Roman experience pretty well exhausted the possibilities, that we have
since invented little really new. The clinical record, though it was hardly
composed in a clinical spirit, is there, for the normal as well as for the abnor-
mal. Indeed, most of the actual terms in sexual abnormality are of Latin, old
Latin, or Greek, not new medical, coinage — cunnilinguis, fellatrix, tribades,
and the like. Nor, at least among the literary, is there a lack of the stepped-up
psychological tortures of the erotic competition, of what we might fashionably
call the meta-erotic. Catullus and his Lesbia, Propertius and his Cynthia, are
evidence that the Roman could build up as complicated a relation between
the sexes as any modern French novelist. Catullus in particular can range
from the frankly indecent through the pleasantly romantic and the gently
cynical to the depths of self-analysis in love, as in the famous and exceedingly
modern:

Odi et amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.^

The vices of less complicated self-indulgence are there as well. The
Roman upper classes have left a reputation for luxury that still echoes —
delicate foods imported from all over the world, warm baths, warm houses, a
comfort not attained by European upper classes again until our own time,
and not always then, hosts of slaves waiting on every movement, town house
and country house, in short, all that very great wealth can bring. Already in
the last years of the Republic, Lucullus, no mere idler, but a distinguished
soldier and politician, was to establish such a reputation for what Veblen
called "conspicuous consumption" that the Lucullan banquet has endured as
a cliche right down to the present, when Latin cliches have almost vanished.
Lucullus was a gentleman, and — though no Greek would admit it of a Ro-
man, any more than a Frenchman today of an American — may be assumed
to have some sense of security in good taste. Closer to what inspired Veblen

is Carmina, LXXXV. Literally, "I hate and I love; should you ask me why, I do not
know, but I feel it, and I suffer exceedingly."

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to his wrath, the Romans, too, had their newly rich. The tasteless excesses
of conspicuous consumption in which these arrivistes indulged themselves
and their retainers have been duly reported by the intellectuals who witnessed
them, and doubtless, after their fashion, enjoyed them. Petronius, in his
satirical novel, of which we have but fragments, tells in detail about a feast
given by the fabulously wealthy freedman Trimalchio (he did not quite
remember where all his estates were) : toward the end, Trimalchio, in his
cups, tells about a funeral inscription he has devised for himself.

HERE LIES

GAIUS POMPEIUS TRIMALCHIO
MAECENATIANUS

Elected to the Augustal College
in his absence. He might have
held every civil post in Rome;
but he refused. A worthy citizen,
brave and true. A self-made man,
he died worth 30,000,000 sterling.
Yet he had no college training.

Farewell to him — and thee.14

It should hardly be necessary to note that the Roman imperial upper
classes pursued many of the conventional activities of an upper class, activ-
ities the censorious moralist lists among the vices. Gambling was high among
these, and, as almost always, was by no means limited to the upper classes.
Nor, of course, were the gladiatorial games and the chariot races so limited.
Aristocrats, emperors themselves, "descended" into the arena, usually with
a degree of safety not granted to the professional gladiators; that this was a
moral descent was certainly the general opinion of the solid responsible
people we shall shortly study as the Stoic gentlemen of the civil and military
services. Actually, these Roman aristocrats did not have the outlet for per-
sonal athleticism the medieval knight and the nineteenth-century English
gentleman — and the Americans, too — had in field sports, organized games,
hunting with the horse, jousting, and the like. The horse is important in
Rome, but in war and work and in the professional horse racing of the circus,
not in the hunting field. We must come again to this sporting side of Roman
life. Meanwhile, it is sufficient to note that some of the vices of the upper
classes of the Empire were a reflection of their exclusion from many ordinary

14 The Satyricon, trans, as Leader of Fashion by J. M. Mitchell, London, Routledge,
1922, pp. 104-105.

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aristocratic physical games of agonistic competition. They, like all aristocrats,
wanted to make records; they made them in vice.

This was a society so firmly built on great social and economic inequal-
ities that the good intentions of the virtuous moralists among the upper
classes must seem ludicrous to us, who take our egalitarian faith with increas-
ing seriousness and literalness. Seneca, a conscientious Stoic not untouched
by a mild moral primitivism of the kind that attacked the French aristocracy
just before 1789, begins one of his contrived "letters" on the virtues of the
simple life:

My friend Maximus and I have been spending a most happy period of two days,
taking with us very few slaves — one carriage load — and no paraphernalia except
what we wore on our persons. The mattress lies on the ground, and I upon the
mattress. There are two rugs — one to spread beneath us and one to cover us.
Nothing could have been subtracted from our luncheon; it took not more than an
hour to prepare. . . ,15

Seneca, a philosopher whose part in high politics by no means confirms
Plato's hopes for his philosopher-statesmen, reminds us that, in the actual
business of ruling, these Roman privileged classes indulged in one of the
most ferocious struggles for power on record, one in which plotting, spying,
informing, bribery, treason usually work up to murder or suicide. With cer-
tain interludes of stability, the best known of which is the period of the "five
good emperors" from 96 to 180, in which Gibbon thought any man would
elect to have lived if he could, imperial Roman history at the top is a record
of instability and violence. Perhaps we note it more conspicuously than as
bad a record, say, among the Merovingians or among the Turks — or even
Latin Americans and Soviet Russians — because in the back of our minds we
expect better of the law-abiding Romans of old. But the reality of this shock-
ing instability of the throne and of palace politics is unquestioned, and it sets
for the historian of morals another of his many unsolved problems: murder,
slander, lying, bad faith, all the role of evil so eloquently, and basically accu-
rately, called by a Tacitus are morally far more wicked than the fleshly vices
of gambling, eating, drinking, and promiscuous love-making we have noted
above. (Do not let nineteenth-century anticlericals persuade you that in the
Judaeo-Christian tradition the mere vices of the flesh are ranked as deadlier
sins than the great evils of pride, bad faith, cruelty; as we shall shortly see,
this is not so.)

15 Epistolae Morales, trans, by Richard M. Gummere, London, Heinemann, 1920, Vol.
n, Ixxxvii, 2.

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Is there, however, such a relation between the vices of the flesh and the
sins of the spirit that, as with, for instance, the Roman ruling classes of the
Empire, one can say that given their luxurious self-indulgence, their more
serious vices follow in consequence? Almost certainly there is here no direct
causal sequence. A murderous struggle for power went on among the Italian
upper classes of the Renaissance, accompanied by great luxury and self-
indulgence; such luxury and self-indulgence among the upper classes of West-
ern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not accompanied
by unusual political violence and the immorality of power. Moreover, it must
never be forgotten that almost always in Western history the ferocious com-
petition that results in unrestrained abandonment of moral decencies and the
self-indulgence of an exceedingly rich class go on among the very few, and
that just beneath them there is a larger group of administrators, professional
men, even intellectuals, whose conduct is usually vastly better. The Victorians
and the Marxists have persuaded us that the middle class and middle-class
morality are consequences of the industrial revolution, and did not exist in
earlier societies; actually, something very like this solid group has long played
a part in Western society. Finally, even in the Roman upper classes at their
worst, there were always men and women who strove to lead the good life
their cultural tradition made clear to them. We must not forget those five good
emperors in a row, topped by Marcus Aurelius.

in

If the violence and corruption of the imperial aristocracy make one of the
darker, and naturally more interesting, pages of Western history, the ideal of
moral excellence that emerges from this very aristocracy and from the groups
just beneath it in the social pyramid has ever since been one of great prestige
in our tradition. The Greco-Roman Stoic ideal, embodied in many a soldier,
scholar, and gentleman who did the work of the Empire and left no trace on
history, is recognizably a successor to the old Greek ideal of the beautiful-
and-good. It treasures the past that had produced that ideal. It retains a
respect for the body, a moderation, a temperateness, reminiscent of the Aris-
totelian Golden Mean. In this real world, it still retains some flavor of the
Greek sense of an order of rank in which the mechanic cannot be truly virtu-
ous and the slave is marked by nature as an inferior. In ideal, of course, these
Greco-Roman gentlemen were firm believers in the equality of all men.

The formal philosophical tag Stoic is not altogether fortunate here, but

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I have sought Li vain for a brief phrase to describe this moral ideal as effec-
tively as does the beautiful-and-good for the old Greeks, and for an embodied
hero who incorporates and makes tangible this ideal as does Achilles for the
Homeric Age. The truth is that we have now arrived at a late age and a most
complicated society for which it is difficult to find a neat symbol of the
dominant tone or style. Yet there was such a style or ideal among the upper
classes. And it was this tone or style that stood for centuries as the major
cultural heritage left to later times by the Greco-Roman world. Only since
the Renaissance has Periclean Athens seemed more typical of classical antiq-
uity than the Rome of Augustus or of the Antonines.

Stoicism goes back in the genealogy of ideas to the successors of Plato
and Aristotle in the formal schools of Athenian philosophy. Zeno, the founder
of what one easily falls into calling a "sect," taught in the Stoa, or porch, in
Athens at the beginning of the third century B.C. He was an almost exact con-
temporary of Epicurus, the founder of a rival sect, the Epicureans, which can
easily be made to come out much like the Stoics. Both philosophies, though
they of course have metaphysical and epistemological implications — often
made explicit in the course of their long histories — are chiefly concerned with
ethics. Indeed, it is not misleading to say that they arose in the world of the
disintegrating city-state to give hope, faith, and guidance to men for whom
the old Olympian faith had become impossibly naive, and who could no
longer simply find their moral place as citizens in a world of competing
superpowers.

There is a sense in which the now often used term "secular religion" or
"surrogate religion" as applied to communism, positivism, "humanism" —
the kind that comes out of Yellow Springs, Ohio, not the kind that comes out
of Florence — and other modern cults may be applied to Stoicism, Epicurean-
ism, and their variants. The Painted Porch of Zeno and the Garden of Epi-
curus were both retreats, closets of the philosophers, from which, nonetheless,
there emerged a form of faith, aristocratic, never widespread among the
masses — Epictetus, the slave who was one of the masters of Roman Stoicism,
is simply one more example of the eternal Western career open to talents —
but a great deal more than an academic philosophical doctrine.

Stoicism finds its highest ideal in ataraxia (drapa&'a), "impassiveness,"
clearly a derivation of the Aristotelian theoria, and equally clearly one of the
many forms of a Western ideal of mystic serenity, of nonstruggle, which the
West and these same Stoics rarely attain in practice. Ataraxia is a state of mind
untroubled by the petty cares of this world, unaghast at its many horrors,
above the melee, the Western sage's approach to the Buddhist nirvana. But the

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Roman — and the Greek — Stoics by no means fled the world and its responsi-
bilities, and they are not much like even the Buddhists of the Mahayana, who
nobly forsook their own nirvana to lift others nearer to it; and they are cer-
tainly not in monastic retreat from the world. One feels about the Roman
Stoics that their ataraxia was a singularly unreal abstraction, a gesture toward
the philosophic origin of their faith. There is even a Stoic contempt for this
world of the flesh; but contempt led the Stoic to no desert, to no monastery.
He would not bow to the world in so extravagant a gesture as that of the
monks. Ataraxia visibly meant no more than calm, dignity, self-control, the
traditional gentlemanly virtues, held a bit self-consciously.

The Stoic held firmly to his earthly station and its duties. There is even
a touch in someone like Marcus Aurelius of the pride of the martyr, the man
who deliberately does what is difficult and unpleasant because clearly he
wants to do it, gains stature with himself by doing it. For the most part, how-
ever, the Stoic seems as serene as he says he is, aware that his world is a
harsh one, that he cannot make it much better, but that he can hardly avoid
trying to make it such. His self-control curbs even his moral indignation.
Seneca even "declares his belief that the contemporaries of Nero were not
worse than the contemporaries of Clodius or Lucullus, that one age differs
from another rather in the greater prominence of different vices."16 He is not,
in short, a moral innovator, a meliorist; but neither is he a despairing or
simply lazy and indifferent spectator of life. He does his duty. He keeps at
the job of cleaning the Augean stables, with no illusion that he is Hercules.
He is, in fact, quite incapable of the engineer-inventor's skill by which Her-
cules solved his problem. The Augean stables that faced the Greco-Roman
soldier and administrator were never really cleaned.

The Stoic held firmly a philosophical doctrine of necessity, which, as it
consistently has in our Western history, seems to have sharpened his sense of
the badness of much of the necessary, as well as his desire to change the
necessary. It is true he would not like the matter put this way, true that the
textbooks sometimes accuse him of fleeing the world. But his actions are
unambiguous; the Stoic was a fighter. Seneca's rhetoric is firm indeed:

All things move on in an appointed path, and our first day fixed our last. Those
things God may not change which speed on their way, close woven with their
causes. To each his established life goes on, unmovable by any prayer.17

i« Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, New York, Macmillan, 1905,
p. 10, paraphrasing Seneca, De Beneficiis, 1.10.1.

IT Seneca's Tragedies, trans, by F. J. Miller, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University
Press, 1953, Vol. I, Oedipus, 987-992.

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But this is rhetoric, not analysis or description. Marcus Aurelius was the
slave of Duty, not of Necessity.

The Christians were later shocked by the Stoic — in fact, generally, Roman
— feeling that suicide is legitimate, even praiseworthy under certain condi-
tions. One doubts very much whether at the moment of slashing his veins, the
Stoic seriously went over the doctrine of necessity in his mind and decided
that some will not his own was guiding the knife. Even the Stoic's approval
of suicide (how approve the inevitable?) was not unconditional: the suicide
must not involve any harm to others, directly or indirectly.18

The Stoic did not "believe in" the gods of the traditional Olympian pan-
theon, but neither did he reject the gods — at least, he did not reject them in
the ferocious mood of the modern "materialist" and atheist rejecting Chris-
tianity. There is some trace of the attitude that a gentleman does not openly
practice a disbelief that will be imitated with disastrous results to their morals
by the masses, who do not have the gentleman's sense of noblesse oblige. But
in fairness to what we may believe to be the ordinary, inarticulate Stoic
gentleman, it may be said that he conformed religiously out of patriotism,
out of respect for the past, perhaps out of a feeling that, though the gods were
not what the vulgar thought them to be, still, there was in the Olympians
what we should nowadays call a symbolic value. The Stoic was no skeptic,
though he does have a touch of the modern Christian existentialist.

He was not wholly a rationalist either; that is, he did not suppose he had
an answer to all problems of the universe. But what the lonians had started
had by Greco-Roman times so grown as to penetrate into ordinary lives. The
Stoic's reason told him a great deal that common sense could hardly have
told him. One of his central doctrines was that all men are created equal, that
the differences of race, status, and conduct so conspicuous to the unreflective
observer are superficial and artificial. Cicero put it baldly in absolute if also
abstract terms: Nihil est unum uni tarn simile, tarn par, quam omnes inter
nosmet ipsos sumus (Nothing is so like another thing, so equal to it, as we
[human beings] all are amongst ourselves) ,19 Slavery could not be reconciled
with principles such as these, and the Stoic writers insist that the slave is a
fellow human being, endowed by nature with basic human rights, and that
fate and human injustice have made him what he is. The great law code which

18 Westermarck, Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, Vol. II, p. 248 ff ., gives a
good brief outline of classical opinion and practice of suicide, with many references to
the sources.
" Cicero, De Legibus, 1.29.

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sums up so much of Roman ideals as well as Roman experience puts it quite
clearly: slavery is "an institution of the Law of Nations, by which one man is
made the property of another, in opposition to natural right."20

The same Seneca we have just now seen contenting himself with a single
carriage load of slaves was one of the most articulate in his moral condemna-
tion of slavery. I do not wish to give aid and comfort to the naively cynical
anti-intellectual who maintains that men always keep their ideals and their
conduct in separate compartments of their being, but it does seem as though
some of these Greco-Roman gentlemen carry the thing too far. Their real
world was, in fact, one of extreme inequalities of all sorts, one in which
slavery formed the economic base of the labor force, one in which there was
a true urban proletariat — the word itself is Latin — in the great cities, one in
which there was surely no less than the usual suffering and deprivation that
has gone with the human civilized lot. Yet they talk and write about the
equality and dignity of man, about the law of nature so superior to our petty
particular laws, about that state of self-mastery they call "ataraxia," so diffi-
cult for most of us to attain on an empty stomach. They are cosmopolitans,
above the narrow patriotism of the city-state; yet do these Roman gentlemen
really feel they are no better than the motley set of peoples they rule? Was
not Pontius Pilate perhaps at heart an anti-Semite?

It is not easy to answer these questions from our very miscellaneous
sources. There are signs that the attitude put neatly in Juvenal's Graeculus
esuriens never wholly left the Roman gentleman; he must have felt himself
superior to the painted Britons as well as to the already somewhat Levantine
Syrians. Yet we, who are so used to great systems of moral values based on
theories of race or other form of group superiority, Nordic, Latin, Anglo-
Saxon, American, Slavic, must be struck by the absence of any such system-
atic concepts among the Greco-Romans of the Empire. The Stoicism we
are dealing with here takes, as we have seen, just the opposite view, that racial
differences among men are superficial and unimportant.

One part of the answer to our difficulty here must lie in the fact that the
One World of the Empire was one only at the top, among the officers, civil
servants, lawyers, financiers, landlords, and intellectuals (these categories are,
of course, not mutually exclusive), Greek, Roman, or bilingual in language,

20 Institutes, i.3.2. quoted in Westermarck, Origin and Development of the Moral
Ideas, Vol. I, p. 693. Westermarck on pp. 689-694 of this work gives a good summary
of Greek and Roman ideas and attitudes toward slavery, with many still-useful
references.

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Greco-Roman in education and culture, who ran the Empire. Even among
the masses there was no doubt in that very modern world a great deal more
actual moving about, physical as well as social mobility, than we culture-
bound moderns, who feel that no one ever moved much or far before the
steam engine, can readily admit. Christianity, which was not, as was Islam,
at first spread by physical conquest, could hardly have spread as it did in a
world of compartmentalized territorial units. Still, in the sense that we expect
a nation-state today to have a certain homogeneity of culture, right down to
the bottom of the social pyramid, it is clear that the Roman Empire had noth-
ing of the sort, save at the top. The Stoic gentleman was by no means isolated
from "reality," by no means living in an ivory castle, but he did not have the
facts of life among the masses constantly nagging at him, could generalize,
rationalize, in the company of his equals, in a long serene tradition that no
vulgar concern for immediate practicality, and certainly little concern with
what we know as science-cwm-technology, could disturb.

Yet, you may observe, the Romans were a "practical" people, great engi-
neers and builders, civilian as well as military. Surely they never talked about
ideal sewers, or entrenchments that only seemed to be different, but were in
accord with natural law identical, did they? The answer here, I should think,
would be, first, that the Romans did succeed in keeping the practical and the
ideal nicely separated, a separation made easier, perhaps, by the fact that
the ideal was imported from the Greeks. The later Romans who wrote on
practical matters, Pliny, Varro, and the rest, do not attempt to philosophize
abstractly about farming, stock raising, estate management. Again, there
lingered in their education much of the old Greek feeling about banausia;
technical skills, even engineering skills, were certainly necessary to the
gentleman-officer. But he learned them by apprenticeship and practice, not in
formal schooling. Civilian engineering seems generally to have been the work
of craftsmen of great skill, but not members of the ruling classes. This sepa-
ration of the real and the ideal is no hypocrisy; it is merely a habit, a consola-
tion. Here, as so often, Marcus Aurelius, fighting the Marcomanni on this
earth, meditating eternal peace in the next, is typical enough.

Epicureanism may seem to the determinedly pragmatic mind to counsel
in real life much that Stoicism counsels, indeed "to come out at" much the
same thing. Epicurean apraxia (aarpa&a)9 "not acting," like Stoic ataraxia,
was a withdrawal from the petty struggles of an active life, the attainment of
a balanced serenity, but still no full retreat into seclusion. Epicurus and his
followers did, however, insist on a "materialist" cosmology, and they did use

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The Greco-Roman World

that dangerous word "pleasure" (^SovjJ, hedone, whence hedonism) to de-
scribe the good life. In vain — and this is clear in the few fragments we have
from Epicurus himself — did they protest that true pleasure is not swinish
behavior, not the coarse indulgence of the senses, but quite the opposite, the
difficult mastery of the low senses by the higher ones, and the cultivation of
the higher arts — not so much self-indulgence as self-denial. At the very least,
this is the Aristotelian ethics of the Golden Mean; but in keeping with the
general high seriousness of Hellenistic and later Roman ethical thinking, and
with the pessimism common among intellectuals of these centuries, Epicu-
reanism developed into a most austere and existentialist ethics. Its best repre-
sentative is the Roman Lucretius of the last years of the Republic, whose long
philosophical poem On the Nature of Things must owe its preservation in
part to the admiration even his religious and philosophical opponents have
felt for it. Indeed, after two thousand years, no one has yet succeeded in
investing the bleak world view of atomistic materialism and rationalist resig-
nation in the face of necessity with the emotions appropriate to the religious
spirit as does Lucretius. The poem has remained a consolation, a sursum
corda, to many a rebel against conventional Christianity in the modern world.
Yet the old tag "a hog from Epicurus's sty" has stuck to Epicureanism
and to hedonistic ethical systems of all kinds ever since — even, to the despair
of the least sensual and sensuous of thinkers, John Stuart Mill, to the Eng-
lish Utilitarianism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.21 No doubt
Lucretius is a most stoical Epicurean, far out toward the immaterial, the
spiritual, on the spectrum of definitions of "pleasure"; there is no doubt in
the balance that conventional Epicureanism did lean toward a softer life,
toward abandonment of the struggle with himself that the Stoic so enjoyed.
Still, the historian of morals must record that the bitterness of the attacks on
the preachers of swinish self-indulgence who set up pleasure as an ethical
standard seems, in view of the most unswinish nature of the pleasure most
ethical hedonists preach, to be most unjust. It is, however, not unreasonable,
for ethics even more than other branches of formal philosophy does seep
down to the average educated person; and "pleasure" in all our Western
tongues does to the unreflective mean . . . well, something closer to what
"immoral" means to him than what "moral" does. We must return later to
this obvious theme that our supposedly materialistic and practical West has
never widely professed a purely hedonistic ethics.

21 Horace, "Epicuri de grege porous," in Epistolae, Book I, No. 4, line 16. This light-
hearted piece of irony has been taken in earnest.

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Still another current of Greco-Roman thought mingled with Stoicism
and Epicureanism in various ways, and contributed to the world view of
these centuries. For this current the best word is still "rationalism." It is a
current clear in what we know of the earlier Sophists, but in the Greco-
Roman world this current developed to a point as extreme as any it has yet
reached. The rationalist must always admit that some men — indeed, he
usually thinks that most men — sometimes behave irrationally, do things
that reason can show will not in fact attain the end the doer aims at, give
reasons for acts that are not real reasons, believe in the existence of super-
natural beings reason shows cannot exist, and so on; but the rationalist also
holds that there is always a rational explanation for the irrational, that he
can correct and ultimately eliminate the irrational, at least among the
enlightened few. These Greco-Roman times produced a characteristic figure
of this sort, one whose name still sticks to the effort to root the unreasonable
in reason, or, at least, given early ignorance, in a "reasonable" error*
Euhemerus, a Greek who flourished at the beginning of the third century B.C.,
sought systematically to explain the gods and goddesses of the Olympic pan-
theon as heroes and heroines of olden times transmuted into supernatural
beings by folk imagination. We have only the barest fragments of his work,
but his reputation grew, and the term "euhemerism" is still used for the effort
to explain mythologies by naturalistic-historical methods at their simplest. It
is a method that tends to be revived in any rationalistic era; many philosopher
in the eighteenth century simply could not believe that those admirable
unprejudiced Greeks and Romans, happily free from the superstitions of
Christianity, could have had their own superstitions and irrationalities, save as
heirs of sensible but uninformed "primitive" ancestors.22

These rationalists occasionally express clearly another position that recurs
in the eighteenth century, the view that for the unenlightened masses atheism
is a dangerous thing, since they need the moral policing religion, in spite of
its superstitions, gives them. Strabo observes that

It is impossible to lead the mass of women and the common people generally to
piety, holiness and faith simply by philosophical teaching; the fear of God is also
required, not omitting legends and miraculous stories.23

You will note here the implication that women even in the privileged classes

22 On this see the forthcoming The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods by Frank E.
Manuel, Cambridge, Mass , Harvard University Press, 1959.

23 Strabo, quoted in L. Friedlander, Roman Life and Manners under the Early Em-
pire, Vol. Ill, trans, by J. H. Freese, London, Routledge, 1909, p. 85.

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are not to be trusted as rational creatures. This is one of the constants of West-
ern culture, certainly not weakened by the advent of Christianity, and not
unknown even in our own day.

Rationalism turned on the dissection of the classical pantheon becomes
religious skepticism — not, be it noted, necessarily full philosophical skep-
ticism. The controlled, or incomplete, rationalism of the Socratic tradition
rejects the anthropomorphic gods of Olympus but insists on a spiritual reality
superior to this world of the flesh and the senses, and not to be approached
by mere prudential and instrumental thinking. There is a strong strain of this
pagan monotheism — its god is a bit less remote than the god of eighteenth-
century deism — in so representative a man as Plutarch.24

The Epicureans took another and more clearly deistic tack. This is the
position, eloquently put by Lucretius, that the gods are indifferent to the fate
of mankind. A fragment of an early Latin poet, Ennius, puts very clearly the
basis of this distrust in a simple question of theodicy: the gods cannot care
about men, for if they did the good man would be happy and prosper, the bad
man unhappy and fail, which is not so.25

It is not far from this grave doubt to lighthearted doubt, or at least to
whistling in the dark. We have from the second century A.D. abundant writings
of a Greek rhetorician, satirist, and popular lecturer, Lucian of Samosata. It
is certain from these writings that Lucian was very clever, very gifted verbally,
and that he was fully aware, as most of his sort are, that the clever rarely are
entrusted with the work of the world, even though they know so well how to
do it. What is not at all clear, since we know little in detail of his life, is
whether he accepted this badly run world or rejected it. He has been compared
to Swift, a superficial comparison indeed, for there is little trace in Lucian of
the moral horror Swift has for the world. He is at least as witty as Voltaire,
and more fanciful, but it is hard to thinV of Lucian fighting for the rehabilita-
tion of a Galas. You can argue that Lucian was just a good entertainer, that
the spectacle of human folly amused rather than outraged or elevated him.
He is certainly irreverent. One of his dialogues, "Zeus Cross-examined," is
a fine sample of the lighthearted rationalist playing with some old metaphys-
ical problems. The central issue is one familiar to Christians: how to reconcile
determinism with any system of rewards and punishment for human exercise

24 For example, Plutarch's Moralia, De Iside et Osiride, 78.

25 Nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod non est. Quoted in Albert Grenier,
The Roman Spirit in Religion, Thought, and Art, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trub-
ner, 1926, p. 125.

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of free will. Zeus grants the difficulty at once, but he will by no means give
up determinism. The dialogue is bright and charming, more like the work
of a Diderot than a Voltaire, and most reminiscent of the French eighteenth
century. Lucian was much surer that God and the gods were dead even for
the mass of mankind than the philosophes could be. In "Timon the Misan-
thrope" he has Timon act, one guesses, as his own mouthpiece in addressing
Zeus:

Mankind pays you the natural wages of your laziness; if anyone offers you a victim
or a garland nowadays it is only at Olympia as a perfunctory accompaniment of
the games; he does it not because he thinks it is any good, but because he may as
well keep up an old custom.26

The most difficult problem Lucian presents to the historian of morals is
this: How far does he represent a state of mind common to at least an impor-
tant minority in his world? Lucian does not urge his listeners to go out and
lead immoral lives — immoral by the relatively constant standards of Western
ethics. But he does not preach, and he does report without censoring it directly
an immense amount of trickery, backbiting, pretense, irresponsibility, down-
right vice and evil. There is a quality in Lucian that must seem to the very
serious-minded moralist about as repugnant as any human attitude can be,
actual amusement over the spectacle of human wickedness. And it would
seem that a society wholly composed of Lucians would be at least as bad
as a society wholly composed of Messalinas, and, fortunately perhaps, even
more impossible. But the historian of morals, in contrast to the moralist, can
hardly entertain such hypotheses. Lucians did not exist in large numbers.
Lucian himself was certainly listened to, supported, but by a fashionable
minority of intellectuals and would-be intellectuals. He is, granted, inconceiv-
able in early republican Rome, in Judaea at any time; the Victorians had their
doubts about him. There is a problem, to which we must return in a final
chapter, of the relation between fashionable skepticism, devotion to the
clever and the cutting, contempt for conventional morality as dull, and so on,
and the morale of a whole society, its ability to keep on going. Here we may
note that the popularity of Lucian and his like is an indication that some part of
the literate classes of the Roman Empire at its height did admire fashionable
cleverness and a degree of skepticism.27

26 Lucian, Works, trans, by H. W. and F. G. Fowler, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1905, Vol. I, p. 32.

27 A minor problem from our point of view, but an interesting one, is set by the very
survival of the manuscripts of Lucian's work He should have been about as objec-
tionable to the early Christians as any pagan author. One suspects that at crucial points

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We have already noted, however, that probably even more of these literate
classes of the Empire were high-minded Stoics, serious men who took their
responsibilities seriously. There are even signs of a continuing pagan ortho-
doxy, no doubt on the defensive, but not despairingly so. The minor historian
and moralist Aelian, who flourished in the early third century A.D., finds even
the philosophers of virtue dangerous, and believes the old gods are still good
gods. He tells the exemplary story of Euphronius, who did not believe in the
gods, but who, having fallen seriously ill, dreamed that he must burn the
writings of Epicurus, knead the ashes with wax, and apply the whole as a
poultice to his belly in order to recover. He was so impressed with this dream
that he became a pious believer and a good influence forevennore. In a pas-
sage in his Various History, Aelian "praises the barbarians, who have not
become alienated from the faith by excessive education like the Greeks;
amongst the Indians, Celts and Egyptians there are no atheists like Euhe-
merus, Epicurus, and Diagoras."28

Finally, there were in this One World of the Empire a very great many
pagan cults and beliefs, surviving forms of the older pagan mysteries, impor-
tations of sacramental faiths from Egypt, Syria, Persia, and, of course, the
rising Christian faith. Among the intellectuals for whom Stoicism was too
austere, rationalism and skepticism quite unsuitable, there flourished an
elaborate amalgame of philosophy and theology known as Neoplatonism, of
which the chief exponent was the third-century Greek writer Plotinus. We can-
not here possibly go into the twists and turnings of this very cerebral set of be-
liefs, which, as Gnosticism, once threatened to take over Christianity. It is
otherworldly, mystic, eternity-seeking, but also very verbal, and, in the primary
sense of an overworked word, sophisticated. Its adepts, whatever else they
may have been, were certainly no skeptics, no materialists. We have no evi-
dence that they led low lives of self-indulgence; but we have no evidence that
they led simple lives of altruistic devotion. The odds are firmly against the
latter. They seem to have been few in numbers, but most articulate. Some of
them were certainly charlatans, exploiting the need of a privileged and edu-

in the lives of various manuscripts some of the good Christian fathers yielded to the
temptation to play with the forbidden Also, of course, Lucian made formal pagan
religious beliefs ridiculous indeed. The historian will note that W. H. Auden in his
Portable Greek Reader refuses to include any Lucian in his anthology, on the grounds
that Lucian is not fit reading for us today, "haunted by devils" as we are. See his
comment in his preface, p. 7.

28 L. Friedlander, Roman Life and Manners, Vol. HI, pp. 97-99. Aelian's own words
are: He told all that he had heard to his nearest relatives, who were full of joy, be-
cause he had not been rejected with contempt by the god. Thus the atheist was con-
verted and was ever afterwards a model of piety for others.

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:ated but often idle and irresponsible upper class for a faith, an interesting
aith, a privileged faith, and one that does not demand much real or symbolic
jweat or worry — a theosophy, in short. Lucian has fun with them, a fun that
jeems for him almost bitter. In his "Sale of Creeds," Hermes as auctioneer
)uts up for sale "Pythagoreanism" — Pythagoras was the pre-Socratic founder
rf the first of these sects of illuminati and long a good butt for common sense
—and goes into his spiel:

"•low here is a creed of the first water. Who bids for this handsome article? What
gentleman says Superhumanity? Harmony of the Universe! Transmigration of
iouls! Who bids?29

Yet out of all this welter of beliefs — among which, as I have insisted, it
seems fair to conclude that a kind of moderate Stoicism was in fact the
accepted faith of the great majority of the working ruling classes of the Empire
right down to the end — a history of Western morals must emphasize the ripen-
ing of a way of thinking about ethical problems that transcends the actual
specific content of these many creeds. Here there comes out fully what had
been begun far back in Ionia, the concepts of nature, of natural law, and of
human nature, concepts in which the "is" and the "ought," the descriptive, the
explanatory, and the evaluative are mingled — it is not unfair to say, often
confused — in a characteristic Western manner. The "natural" is, in this
classical tradition (definitely not in the romantic tradition), what the cor-
rectly thinking thinker discovers as the uniform element in the apparently
diverse and changing phenomena which his sense experience, as organized by
unthinking common sense and habit ("conditioning"), presents to him. The
natural is thus the regular, the predictable, in contrast to the sporadic inter-
vention of an unpredictable supernatural. Thunder is natural, the result of the
working out of regular meteorological forces; Zeus hurling his thunderbolts
when the mood strikes him is unnatural, and in fact nonexistent, a "myth."
The specific prescriptions and penalties in actual law vary from people to
people, in earlier days from town to town; but the student of jurisprudence
who will examine with this tool of rational analysis which is his mind these
diverse laws will be able to classify them in accordance with what they have
in common. He will note that for a valid contract there will be certain minimal
requirements everywhere; he will thus arrive at the concept of a universal law,
the law of nature. Finally, the man who simply looks at his fellows in the street
without thinking will see them as so many separate individual beings, tall and
short, handsome and ugly, Roman and Syrian, slave and free, and so on
2& Lucian, Works, Fowler trans. Vol. I, p. 190.

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indefinitely; the thinker will see in these varied individuals man, the human
being who is everywhere the same beneath these apparent differences.

This last statement may be misleading. The familiar statement that human
nature is everywhere the same did not mean to the Stoics and the other think-
ers of the Empire that differences in individuals — say, in bodily build or in
disposition or temper — are nonexistent, but, rather, that they do not exhaust
what can be said about human beings; from their point of view it was even
more important to note that there are limits to the range of variation in
individuals, that all have certain minimal bodily functions in common, fhat
all have minimal spiritual characteristics in common. What is in common, the
regularities and the uniformities that the discerning mind sees are not just
what we should call statistical averages, any more than the Aristotelian
Golden Mean is a statistical average or mean. The regularities are nature's
plan, what men ought to be.

By an easy transition the man thinking along such lines slips from analysis,
classification, the search for uniformities that will allow prediction, into
moral purposiveness, into a search for uniformities that will provide goals
toward which other men can be persuaded, or forced, to strive to mold their
conduct. In the purest tradition of modern natural science this transition is a
kind of betrayal, a piece of intellectual dishonesty. To the historian, it is one
of the abiding ways Western men think and feel, which in practice has proved
to be an effective means of changing, above all, of widening, the economic,
social, and political organizations in which men live. This paradoxical use of
the concept of Nature as what ought to be so as to bring about changes in the
unnaturally natural of the given moment has really worked. Remote as some
of the more extreme and abstract concepts of what this Nature, and human
nature, were — those of the Stoics, for instance, or those of the eighteenth-
century philosophes — from the "facts of life," there remained this curious
intellectual and, therefore, moral link with these same facts, an inescapable
link. The classical tradition of "reason" has never quite been able to deny,
escape, transcend, suppress the vulgar here, now, and imperfect. Even Plato
is not a very good mystic, not in the sense that St. Teresa or St. John of the
Cross are good mystics; Plato cannot help arguing.

It is this never-quite-severed Greco-Roman link with the world of our
sense experience — shall we say, the "minimally organized world" — that makes
the real basis for the commonly exaggerated distinction between the He-
braic and the Hellenic in our Western moral and intellectual tradition. Mr.
W. T. Stace, as I have noted above (Chapter in, p. 56) puts the distinction

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A History of Western Morals

in morals as one between a Hebrew imposed code and a Greek immanent
one, a Hebrew supernatural and authoritarian source and sanction for morals,
a Greek source and sanction flowing from within human beings, inside human
"nature." Now the Nature that advised Cicero or Seneca seems to me about
as remote from this world as the God that commanded Moses and David, and
actually rather more remote than the God that inspired Isaiah. No doubt
Spengler is giving way to his anger against the classical tradition when he
writes that "Nature [the concept of nature] is a function of the particular
Culture."30 Still, the curiously hypostatized concept of nature as moderation,
regularity, order, decency — the list could be long, scandalously not composed
of logical synonyms, but with a strongly consistent affective tone — the con-
cept of nature which gets fully developed in the later Empire can hardly seem
to most of us today to describe, let alone flow "immanently" from, nature
as it appears in geophysics, meteorology, biology, or human nature as it ap-
pears in formal psychological studies.

Such a Nature as that of Cicero or Seneca must seem rather the ideal of a
privileged class in a culture that no longer sought to apply its ideals to all of
its members. It is an ideal that still attracts, perhaps because it is at least as
unattainable and, therefore, attractive to Western man as any boundless de-
sire. Martial, whose life, to judge from most of his poetry, did not much
resemble the ideal, has left a fine statement of it.

Martial, the things for to attain
The happy life be these, I find:
The riches left, not got with pain;
The fruitful ground; the quiet mind;
The equal friend; no grudge, nor strife;
No charge of rule nor governance;
Without disease, the healthful life;
The household of continuance;
The mean diet, no delicate fare;
Wisdom joined with simplicity;
The night discharged, of all care,
Where wine may bear no sovereignty;
The chaste wife, wise, without debate;
Such sleeps as may beguile the night;
Contented with thine own estate,
Neither wish death, nor fear his might.31

3° Spengler, Decline of the West, Vol. I, p. 169.

3i Martial, Book X, No. 47. This poem of Martial's has been often translated. I give

in modern spelling that of the sixteenth-century Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. The

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The Greco-Roman World
IV

All told, we know quite a bit about the condition of the masses, the common
people, of the One World of the Roman Empire. We do not by any means
know enough to risk comments on the general level of sobriety, of steady ways,
of chastity in contrast to the more lurid vices in all parts of this great territory.
We may believe that the country folk were simpler, perhaps more honest,
though probably not much more chaste, than the city folk. Such, at least, was
the common belief of most intellectuals of the time, as it was to be at later
periods of European cultural life when great cities give the moralist something
to complain about. But at least for Rome we have evidence that here were
some million human beings living, on the whole, in one of the moral troughs
of Western history.

More particularly, we know a great deal about one of the pursuits of the
urban masses that has almost always shocked later commentators — the glad-
iatorial games. It should be clear that we are here dealing with a special and
peculiar phase of moral history, a case, like that of Greek pederasty in the
Great Age, not a common phase of human moral development. There are
recurring examples of crowds of men and women witnessing with interest and
pleasure the physical suffering of their fellows. The histories all bring out the
hangings at Tyburn in London right down almost to Victorian times; Huizinga
devotes a whole chapter to the fascination people in the Middle Ages felt for
the spectacle of human suffering.32 But these are relatively sporadic and iso-
lated instances, not organized and regular mass displays for public amuse-

reader may be amused to see what the twentieth century makes of it Here is Mr.
Gilbert Highet:

To bring yourself to be happy

Acquire the following blessings:

A nice inherited income,

A kindly farm with a kitchen,

No business worries or lawsuits,

Good health, a gentleman's muscles,

A wise simplicity, friendships,

A plain but generous table,

Your evenings sober but jolly,

Your bed amusing but modest,

And nights that pass in a moment;

To be yourself without envy,

To fear not death, nor to wish it.

Latin Poetry in Verse Translation, ed. by L. R. Lind, Boston, Houghton Miffim, 1957.

pp. 272-273.

32 J. Huizinga, Waning of the Middle Ages, London, Arnold, 1927, Chap. I.

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A History of Western Morals

ment, as at Rome. And such horrors as the French Reign of Terror, the
mass murders by the Nazis, those of the Yezhov period in Russia, are
obviously very different things indeed, in no sense part of the daily delights
of their participants. The Spanish bullfight of our own day does have its anal-
ogies with the Roman games; automobile racing probably holds some of its
fans by the attractive possibility of witnessing sudden death. Let us content
ourselves with observing that in the West there seem always to be numbers
of people who do not find it repugnant to witness the public display of
cruelty to men and animals, or at least to await the dramatic possibility of
violence. The fact remains that only in Rome has this been an organized and
widely approved public pursuit. Undergraduate American editorials that
equate our football with the gladiatorial games are wide of the mark.

The shows were many and varied. The bloodiest were the various forms
of individual and group combats to the death, and the combats between
beasts and men and among beasts, Mercy could be shown, as we all know,
for a beaten fighter who put up a good show; but "thumbs up" could hardly
apply to mass combats, and there is no evidence that the Roman crowd was
a kindly one. Even where blood was not deliberately planned to flow, the
circuses, the chariot races, the spectacles were expensive, full of accidental
violence, and by no means demanding on intellect or taste. Rome with its great
Colosseum and its Circus set the pace, but in the West of the Empire, at
least, the provincial centers aped the metropolis, though they could not afford
the lavishness of display and bloodshed the emperors and other donors felt
obliged to give the Romans. Crowds were large even by our modern standards;
the Colosseum held about 45,000 spectators.

The games are by no means without precedent in earlier Roman history.
Though bigger and better after Augustus, they go back to republican days,
before Rome was a world power. The first triple duel among gladiators on
record was in 264 B.C.; there had been single fights earlier. The fights do seem
to go with the Roman character or disposition. Another modern notion about
the games is wrong: the crowds were by no means limited to the lower classes.
Many of the emperors enjoyed the games; others came even if they did not
enjoy them, because they were part of the ceremonial and ritual that symbol-
ized the Empire. The people expected to see their rulers do their public duty
by presiding at the arena. Many individuals among the upper classes clearly
delighted in the games, followed the gladiators and the charioteers in public
eye, mixed with them socially, kept their own "stables," human as well as
animal, behaved, in short, about mass sports as the nonintellectuals of West-

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The Greco-Roman World

ern aristocracies generally do when civilization deprives them of the relaxa-
tion of serious fighting. The world of the arena and the race course was truly
a world of consuming interest for all sorts of Romans. There are all the signs
one would expect to find in mass spectator-sport — statistics of records, wor-
ship of the successful athletes, wide publicity. At Pompeii some of the in-
formal transcriptions found scribbled in public places tell us the Thracian
Celadus, probably a gladiator, was a "man the girls yearned for"; an inscrip-
tion tells us that Crescens, a Moor, a Blue charioteer, drove a four-in-hand
at the age of thirteen, and between A.D. 115 and 124 ran 686 races, getting
first prize forty-seven times, second, 130 times, and third,! 1 1 times, winning,
in all, 1,588,346 sesterces.33 Martial wrote, perhaps not altogether without
the intellectual's envy of the attention the athlete gets, an epitaph for Scorpus,
dying young:

I am that Scorpus, glory of the shouting circus, thy applauded one, Rome, and
brief delight; whom a jealous fate cut off at thrice nine years, believing, having
counted my victories, that I was already an old man.34

Juvenal says in clear indignation that a successful jockey of the Red gets
a hundred times what an advocate gets.35

The Roman stage furnishes another example of a decline in taste, a
vulgarization as its audience gets increasingly unable to discriminate between
the amusing and the titillating. Terence and Plautus wrote plays in imitation
of Menander and other Greek playwrights of the New Comedy, plays in which
the wit is partly, at least, a matter for the mind. By imperial times what takes
place on the Roman stage is hardly more than stylized exhibition of mimes,
often very obscene, and clearly far from subtle in content, though the art of
the individual actor was very highly developed. The people of the stage, like
those of the arena and the circus, were interesting and enviable persons in the
eyes of the urban masses and of many of their patrician hangers-on, but they
were definitely not respectable. Indeed, the moral disrepute of the actor, the
professional athlete, the denizen of the underworld of amusement is first clear
in the West in this Greco-Roman society. We Westerners admire, envy, and
scorn those who amuse us, as we admire and scorn our best friend, the dog.
This worldly underworld of the Romans is a vast Bohemia, as yet without
romantic overtones.

33 L. Friedlander, Roman Life and Manners, Vol. IT, pp. 51, 23.

34 Martial, Book X, no. 53,

35 Juvenal, Satire VH, lines 112-114.

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A History of Western Morals

Yet, save from the Christians, there is not much vigorous condemnation
of the games. There is, though, not much defense of them either. Pliny the
Younger has a famous passage in his panegyric of Trajan in praise of the
contempt for death the spectacles teach; but the rhetoric of the piece makes
it hard to guess whether Pliny really thought the games toughened the spec-
tators up in good Hemingway style.36 But for the most part what strikes one
is the naturalness with which the games were taken. Symmachus, a late fourth-
century pagan whose contrived letters seem by no means those of a harsh
person, reports the suicide of some Saxons he was having groomed to fight
in the arena; he clearly is very sorry for himself, but not at all for the Saxons.37

The Stoics included the mob in that world they sought to rise above. They
were no crusaders; they were willing to leave the populace to its own bad
ways. The rulers knew they had to provide bread and the circuses, and that the
circuses were more necessary than bread. Trajan, writes the historian Pronto,
knew that

the goodness of government is shown both in its earnest aspects and its amuse-
ments; and that while neglect of serious business was harmful, neglect of amuse-
ments caused discontent; even distributions of money were less desired than
games; further, largesse of corn and money pacified only a few or even individuals
only, but games the whole people.38

The world of the Roman Empire was a varied, lively, interesting world,
not very sensitive, not at all simple, from which the anecdotist can draw on
a vast range of human conduct. Aulus Gellius, the source for the well-known
tale of Androcles and the lion, finishes his story with a touch usually omitted
in the retelling: Androcles, manumitted after the touching episode in the
arena, went the rounds of the taverns leading his lion by a leash; the cus-
tomers threw money to Androcles, sprinkled the lion with flowers.39 St.

3« Pliny, Panegyricus Trajano, Chap. XXXm. "You [Trajan] provided a spectacle, not

of the sort that softens and weakens the spirit of men, but that serves to harden men

to bear noble wounds and be contemptuous of death." That pulchra vulnera is quite

untranslatable, but very much part of the agon of a noble warrior class. It just does

not go with the Roman games of the Empire, where the wounds must have been most

unlovely.

37 Epistolae, Book II, 46, quoted in L. Friedlander, Roman Life and Manners, Vol.

H, p. 55.

3SFronto, Preamble to History, quoted and translated in L. Friedlander, Roman Life

and Manner st Vol. II, p. 3. See the Loeb Classical Library edition of the fragments of

Fronto, trans, by C. R. Haines, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1955,

Vol. H, p. 217.

39 Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, trans, by J. C. Rolfe, London, Heinemann, 1927, in Loeb

Classical Library, Book V, 14, Vol. I, p. 427.

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Augustine reports, on the authority of Seneca, that women used to sit on th
Capitoline by the temple of Jupiter, believing, probably on the strength o
dreams, that they were beloved of the god.40 Suetonius notes that each spring
after the death of Nero, flowers were laid by an unknown hand on his grave
This is the charisma exercised by the captivatingly wicked; one suppose
that it is an ever-present element in Western society, but clearly it is usu
ally repressed in a society of simple ways — or at least, in such societies
the wicked are Robin Hoods, not Neros or Capones.41

In Rome a good many thousands of the urban proletariat did live off th<
state dole. They needed the circuses, if only to make their idleness bearable
and they seem to have got something like one day in three as public holidays
They certainly did not make a sober, steady, soldierly people; they were no
virtuous; but they could hardly afford the expensive vices of their betters
Theirs was no doubt the short and simple fornication of the poor, the vicarioui
satisfactions of the arena, the stage, the spectacle of the wickedness of thei
rulers, the melodrama of high imperial politics. The masses of the great citie;
of the East, Antioch, Alexandria, and the rest, were probably less dependen
on state handouts, but clearly were poor, crowded, restless, and aware o
their plight. Theirs is the strange world of superstitition, vagabondage, big
city fashionable alertness, and moral laxness we begin to get glimpses of ii
Hellenistic times, and which is nicely reflected in one of the few almost
novels we have from antiquity, the Golden Ass of Apuleius, who flourishec
under the Antonines.

And always there was slavery, an institution to which even the triumphan
Christianity of the fourth century was to adapt itself. Slavery in the Greco-
Roman world was not by any means throughout a harsh and thorough sub-
jection of the slave. One can even make a good case for the assertion that or
the whole the Greco-Roman was one of the milder forms of slavery. Rank-
and-file prisoners of war, often forced to fight against hopeless odds in the
arena, were victims of the violence normal to the West throughout most of ifc
history. Galley slaves had an especially grueling task. Apuleius has a grue-

40 St. Augustine, City of God, Book VI, Chap. 10. "But some sit there that think Jov<
is in love with them: never respecting Juno's poetically supposed terrible aspect.**

41 Suetonius, Nero, 57, quoted in Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius
p. 16. Suetonius says, "Yet there were some who for a long time decorated his tomt
with spring and summer flowers. . . ." Some gangsters do have their faithful afte]
death. In fact, I think I perhaps have underestimated hi the text the strength through
out Western moral history of a folk worship of the exciting, picturesque, romanticallj
wicked. Not only in the United States of the 1950's have the Becks and the Hoffas beer
heroes to their followers.

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A History of Western Morals

some passage about some unfortunate slaves.42 And W. E. H. Lecky writes
that

numerous acts of the most odious barbarity were committed. The well-known
anecdotes of Flaminius ordering a slave to be killed to gratify, by the spectacle, the
curiosity of a guest; of Vedius Pollio feeding his fish on the flesh of slaves; and of
Augustus sentencing a slave, who had killed and eaten a favorite quail, to cruci-
fixion, are the extreme examples that are recorded. . . . Ovid and Juvenal de-
scribe the fierce Roman ladies tearing their servants' faces, and thrusting the long
pins of their brooches into their flesh.43

Yet much can be set against this black picture. The inscriptions show
many instances of manumitted slaves who did well in craft or small business,
and left enough to get proper funeral inscriptions. Freedmen rose high in
the service of the emperors — scandalously high in the opinion of the old
Romans. The career open to talents was not shut to the capable slave, for
whom his handicap could sometimes act as a stimulus in competition. No
doubt the slaves who did the work of the great estates, which, especially in
Italy, but to a degree elsewhere, took the place of the yeoman farms of the
early Republic, had the lot usual with plantation slaves. The bright ones
might manage to get into the household of the master, and eventually into
the city and on the road to manumission. The masses of the slaves were at
least spared the worst by increasingly great legal protection from bad mas-
ters, and by the economic good sense of the ordinary master. Varro, a conr
temporary of Cicero, who wrote on agriculture, has much to say on the
treatment of slaves. He sounds very sensible, almost as if he had studied
nineteenth-century economic writings. He counsels humane treatment on
prudential grounds, and advises special concern to encourage efficient fore-
men, themselves slaves, by "incentive pay," possibility of eventual freedom,
and so on.44

On slavery as an institution, as I have noted briefly above, the fashionable
rationalist philosophy was driven to the conclusion that if the mind finds men
equal, it can hardly find slavery natural. Cicero, Seneca, and many others
register their disapproval; Epictetus, himself a slave, sounds more sincere:

What you avoid suffering yourself, seek not to impose on others. You avoid

42 Apuleius, The Golden Ass, DC, 12.

43 History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, Vol. I, pp. 302-303.

44 Varro, Rerum Rusticarum, Vol. I, p. 17. Lewis and Reinhold, Roman Civilisation,
Vol. I, pp. 446-448. On legal protection, Westermarck, Origin and Development of
the Moral Ideas, Vol. I, pp. 691-692, gives many examples.

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The Greco-Roman World

slavery, for instance; take care not to enslave. For if you can bear to exact slavery
from others, you appear to have been first yourself a slave.45

But there is no record of a Roman Society for the Abolition of Slavery. Of
course, in the bureaucratic Empire there was no place for what we call pres-
sure groups. Still, the protests of the literary and the philosophic against
slavery seem more than usually remote from the habits and conduct of
ordinary men. We must conclude that slavery was an accepted part of this
great society, exhibiting the widest range from cruelty to gentleness, from
economic exploitation to legal moderation, and from melodramatic gestures
of psychopathic origin to the daily routines of convenience. We may perhaps
go a bit further, and conclude that the kind of anecdote Lecky has culled from
the sources is no sounder social and moral history than any other case history
of the monstrous, the psychopathic.

One final topic: it is possible for the later Empire to list for the first time
some "intellectuals" among the many, if not quite among the masses. At least,
we know from our sources that there was a relatively large public for whom,
in the absence of a printing press and other marvels of modern mass com-
munication, there existed professional lecturers, schools at which tuition was
paid, and which indulged in a certain amount of what we call adult education
— in short, a public with leisure enough to talk about "ideas." This public
was served by a motley group of rhetoricians and "philosophers" who have
had a thoroughly bad press. Some of them do smell of the ancient equivalent
of Grub Street, if not of still lower reaches of ill-paid masters of the word.
Lucian, who at one time in his life was perhaps one of these, has left some
very stinging satire on them. They numbered charlatans, poseurs, hawkers of
all sorts of salvation. They deliberately made themselves up as philosophers.
Epictetus, a true blue himself, wrote indignantly of these pretenders:

When people see a man with long hair and a coarse cloak behaving in an un-
seemingly manner, they shout, 'Look at the philosopher': whereas his behavior
should rather convince them that he is no philosopher.46

Even when this intellectual life was not downright charlatanry, it was pitched
at a somewhat low level of casuistry. Here is a topic on which the young
rhetoricians exercised themselves:

45 Epictetus, Moral Discourses, trans, by Elizabeth Carter, London, Dent, 1910, Frag-
ment 38.

46 IV, 8, 4, quoted in L. Friedlander, Roman Life and Manners, Vol. HI, p. 237.
Friedlander's Chapter in of this volume on "Philosophy as a Moral Education**
gleans many interesting details from the sources.

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A History of Western Morals

In this case the law is that if a woman has been seduced she can choose either
to have her seducer condemned to death or marry him without bringing him any
dowry.

A man violates two women on the same night. One asks for him to be put to
death, the other chooses to marry him.47

Something has certainly happened to "philosophy" since the pre-Socratics!

I have hitherto restrained myself from making the obvious comparisons. When
the million and more sesterces of the charioteer Crescens's prize money came
up, I said nothing of Eddie Arcaro; nor did I suggest that Celadus, the
suspirum et decus puellarum of the Pompeian graffiti had anticipated Elvis
Presley by two thousand years. But we cannot here sensibly dodge the much-
discussed topic: Are we now somewhere in our own modern Western version
of the Greco-Roman world? From Spengler through to Toynbee and the latest
appeal to history as a clue to the future, our time has seen dozens of versions
of the parallel between the Greco-Roman world and our own. A history of
morals in the West can by no means be extended into an attempt to examine
all sides of this problem; but neither can such a history wholly avoid con-
sidering this problem, if only because for the moral temper of our own age
this appeal to history, or to historicism, is most important.

Toynbee and his fellows have made the cyclical form almost as much the
accepted form of our thinking on these matters as unilinear evolution was for
our grandfathers. It is difficult today to avoid thinking of all sorts of human
group activities as subject to ups and downs, growth, decay, and death, spring,
summer, fall, winter, and other such conceptual schemes or figures of speech.
From business firms through sports clubs to nations and civilizations, we have
before us what we must thinlc of as the fact of cyclical processes. We under-
stand thoroughly none of them, can control fully none of them, not even the
business cycle. It is probably true that the wider the net of human activity
we gather together to study as a cycle, the less accurately we can analyze
it. The Spenglerian civilization, the Toynbean society, are so great, so compli-
cated, so much a series of cycles within cycles within cycles, that we cannot
possibly use them to place our own society in a single position analogous to
these. We cannot say the West is now just where the Greco-Roman society
was in such and such a year, or century.

Any attempt to analyze the varied human activities from which the master
47 Seneca, Controversiae, I, 2, quoted in H. I. Marrou, Education in Antiquity, p. 287.

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cycle of the whole society is usually constructed shows at once that we can-
not really fit the parts together. If one takes the relations among the independ-
ent states making up a given society — international politics — one can see
with Toynbee a certain parallel between our day and the Greco-Roman day
of about 250 B.C. The superpowers Rome and Carthage become the super-
powers U.S. A. and U.S.S.R.; one or the other will give the "knockout blow"
and there will be a new universal state, American- or Russian-inspired. In-
deed, Mr. Amaury de Riencourt has already decided that the Americans are
the Romans of the modern world. If one takes morals in the vulgar modern
sense, with emphasis on luxury, "sensate" self-indulgence, sophistication at
the top, and some effort at the bottom to keep up with the top, in short, if one
is Mr. Sorokin, then we now appear to be, not in 250 B.C., but three hundred
years later, along with the contemporaries of Martial and Juvenal, along with
all the shocking conduct we have just above briefly and decently reviewed. If
one takes over-all economic productivity, the application of any cyclical
theory is impossible, because so far there has been no secular trend in modern
Western society, since the end of the Middle Ages at least, save upward. The
horrors of twentieth-century destructiveness have not, statistically speaking,
destroyed; two world wars and a great depression have left the West richer
in things of this world than it has ever been.

If we cannot then apply cyclical theories to our own society with diag-
nostic success, can we, perhaps, consider the whole development of the Med-
iterranean world in "classical" antiquity as a kind of case history? If we take
"case history" seriously, as at least an effective working tool of the sort the
clinician in medicine uses, clearly the answer is no. The clinician who con-
cluded anything at all from one case history would be thought ill of by his
colleagues. Even if with Toynbee and others we judge that history gives us
something to work with for maybe a dozen or so civilized societies, these are
few indeed; and, more important, they are perhaps so different as to be useless
for the diagnostician, for we may be comparing the incomparable, and our
actual knowledge of their histories is often slight. We do know the "classical
world" quite well, too well, if we are sensible, to suppose that what has hap-
pened there is going to happen here. All that we can do with the history of the
Greco-Roman world is what we can always do with any history — treat it as
a record of human experience which we can add with due caution to what
we know of our own times. We can draw all sorts of generalizations from that
sort of experience, but no master generalization about man's fate, human
destiny, "whither mankind?"

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There remains, however, the old chestnut about the causes of the fall
of the Roman Empire. Surely the historian of morals cannot decently side-step
that question, though he cannot pretend to answer it completely. He will not
in mid-twentieth century go along with any variants of naive materialistic
determination which rule out morals from the variables to be considered. The
fall of Rome was not simply a moral fall, but it was in part a moral fall. One
cannot even say that, given the conduct our sources report for these centuries,
a society in which men and women conducted themselves as did the Greco-
Romans was corrupt, decadent, bound to collapse under attack from the out-
side if not under revolt from the inside. One can make the rough generaliza-
tion that at least in the ruling classes and its hangers-on the kind of conduct
that we most readily label "immoral" — the vices of self-indulgence and dis-
play— tend to diminish somewhat after what was perhaps their peak early in
imperial times. This is by no means a sure generalization. It may be that our
sources for later periods lack the moral intensity of a Tacitus. The later
historian Ammianus Marcellinus has two good passages of moralistic attack
on the weaknesses of the upper classes, but they are not very vehement or very
extensive, and are perhaps no more than the conventional scornful feelings of
the soldier toward the rulers back home. The society reflected in the Saturnalia
of Macrobius is, as Samuel Dill points out, simpler than the luxurious one of
old, with no fantastic foods, no dancing girls, no extravagant display.48

The tough-minded may infer that the comparative poverty of the last
years of the Empire explains this comparative chastity and decency; the ten-
der-minded will remind us that Christianity ought to have had some effect on
the conduct of those who espoused it. Certainly the Christian writers found
no improvement in the morals of the many. Salvianus of fifth-century Aqui-
taine found his fellows living in one vast whore house, found no one chaste —
except, one hopes, himself.49 Even after the gladiatorial games were finally
suppressed early in the fifth century, the mimes continued to carry on with
the usual indecencies, acting out Leda's loves, and the like. So reports Si-
donius, a provincial of Gaul, and thus an early Frenchman, perhaps already
saddled with the French national obligation to note these matters saltily.50

Still, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the moral tone of life at
Rome itself, and to a degree throughout the Empire, was not one in keeping

48 Ammianus Marcellinus, XIV, 6 and XXVIII, 4; Dill, Roman Society in the Last
Century of the Western Empire, p. 161.

49 Dill, op. cit., pp. 140-141, quoting Salvianus, On God's Governance, Book VII, 16.

50 Carmina, Book XXffl, 286-288, quoted in Dill, op. cit., p. 56.

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The Greco-Roman World

with the maintenance of a state and a society able to stand off its enemies. This
is surely true if one is concerned with the civic virtues, those of the citizen-
soldier, the citizen participant in community political life. Even in the upper
classes, there was a sharp division between the workers in war and administra-
tion, the admirable Stoic gentlemen who manned the Empire, and the corrupt
aristocracy of Rome and high politics. There was the horde of Romans on
the dole, a people no longer good for war or peace. There was the slave prole-
tariat, and the many tribes and peoples of this huge political entity, none of
them really sharing in the common thing of the Empire. The commonplace is
unavoidable; even with the final spread of Roman citizenship in a legal sense
throughout the Empire (slaves were never, of course, full citizens), even with
the development of emperor worship as some kind of symbolism to remind
ordinary people that there was an Empire, this huge state never really was
more than a congeries held together by its armies and its bureaucrats, and by
sheer habit.

I do not wish to be understood as maintaining that the civic virtues at
their best in fact — let alone at their best in words, as in worship of Swiss can-
tons or New England town meetings — are an essential to a going state. I mean
merely that with all the variables allowed for, including by all means the eco-
nomic weaknesses of the later Empire, the "lack of Romans," the taxing away
of the responsible middle class of curiales, even, perhaps, the malaria and the
sunspots, all the long, long list of "causes" of the fall, a moral weakness, not
so much a matter of the picturesque vices as one of softness, lack of civic
responsibility, lack of drive toward a shared earthly betterment of material
conditions, perhaps even, toward the end, a vague feeling of despair, must be
on the list.

Softness? Despair? Is this the old tale of Gibbon once more? Am I about
to list Christianity as at least partly responsible for the fall of the earthly Ro-
man Empire? I am indeed, though not in a spirit of gloating irony. It may well
be — I think it is — true that no men and no institutions we can realistically
imagine in a restrained exercise of history-in-the-conditional could have held
the congeries of the Roman Empire together. Let us grant Toynbee that the
Empire was in a sense born dead. Still, it would also seem true that the kind
of virtues that are indispensable to an imperial ruling elite were not those of
early Christianity, and that for the many what early Christianity brought was
by no means a set of civic virtues they had previously lacked. We must turn
now to the moral implications of the Judaeo-Christian tradition as it grew in
the Greco-Roman world and embodied itself in the Roman Catholic Church.

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The Beginnings of the Judaea-Christian Tradition

THE TAXONOMY — to say nothing of the genetics — of morals is a difficult busi-
ness. What I have in this chapter heading called the "Judaeo-Christian" tra-
dition is perhaps better called, in spite of the unwieldiness of the phrase, the
"Judaeo-Helleno-Romano-Christian" tradition. Certainly as to ethical con-
cepts there can be no doubt that as early as St. Paul himself Greek ways of
thinking and feeling, with difficulty, if at all, to be discerned in previous Jewish
culture, come into Christian thought and feeling. Nothing is easier than to
draw from the works of Greco-Roman writers from Plato on expressions of
ideas that seem clearly Christian. I shall shortly give a brief sample of this
familiar procedure of finding classic Greece in Christianity. But in the balance
it still looks as if so much of what made Christianity different from Stoicism,
or Neoplatonism, or any of the actual cults of the Empire, those of Mithra or
of Isis, for example, does come from the Jews that the term "Judaeo-
Christian" is justifiable. Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Jesus must, even to the
natural historian of morals — and most certainly to the Christian believer —
mean more than Plato, Zeao, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus, and all the rest of the
pagans put together.

From the disasters that overcame the Jewish independent polity and cul-
minated in the fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity at the beginning
of the sixth century B.C., the intellectual leaders of the Jewish people were
stirred to a heart searching out of which came the prophetic books of the Old
Testament, and what looks like a revolutionary shift of Jewish theology into
a universalistic monotheism, and into much else new. These results of loss of

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The Beginnings of the Judaeo-Christian Tradition

political independence are in themselves remarkable. Carthage was destroyed
— and rebuilt eventually — with no such results. The loss of independence by
the Greek city-states, if more gradual and unaccompanied, as a rule, by
razing of temples and deportations of intellectuals, was still a real loss, and
one that produced no moral renewal. From the point of view of an engaged
intellectual, the blows that have fallen on France in the twentieth century are
certainly heavy, and they have in the existentialist movement produced some-
thing in high culture; but though some of our French existentialists sound at
moments like Jeremiah at his worst, the comparison is for the natural historian
of morals pretty silly. Not even a relatively intense modern nationalism of the
sort prevalent in France seems to produce the reaction to defeat produced in
Jewish nationalism by the downfall of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel.

The kind of secular "nationalism" we can understand is clearly not quite
what filled Jewish heads and hearts. The Jews by the sixth century B.C. had
been molded into a community of extraordinarily disciplined cohesion. They
were already a, but not yet the, Chosen People. Jehovah had laid down the
Law for them: the Jew who followed the Law could be certain, morally cer-
tain, that Jehovah would take care of him. We are here at a most delicate
point. Christian terms like "salvation," "grace," and even "heaven" are not
right here; and thougji there is something shocking in the suggestion that the
Jew who followed the Law was "well-adjusted," free from anxiety, full of ego
satisfaction, yet if these phrases of our time are taken freely and not too
naively, they may be useful in understanding why the fall of Jerusalem upset
so much.

Disaster shook this certainty, but it did not shake the moral and intellec-
tual habits on which the certainty was founded. Above all, it did not lead the
Jews to doubt Jehovah, and certainly not, in the pagan Greek manner, to curse
hiTn for letting them down.

Thou, O Lord, abidest for ever;

Thy throne is from generation to generation.

Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever,

And forsake us so long time?

Turn thou us unto thee, O Lord, and we shall be turned;

Renew our days as of old.

But thou has utterly rejected us,

Thou art very wroth against us.1

The prophets were sure that it was the Jews who had let Jehovah down.

1 Lamentations 5:19-22.

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They were articulate, and managed to record a great number and variety of
sins and backslidings. Some are the kind of sin we have noted before — whor-
ing after strange gods, lapses in following the Law — but many are lapses in
conduct of the sort Western tradition generally recognizes as immoral. The
prophets do write in a figurative and lofty style of a kind likely to throw off
the modern realist; but it seems possible that often when they talk of whoring
they mean it unfiguratively. Here, at any rate, is a sampling from Jeremiah:

Why then is this people of Jerusalem slidden back by a perpetual backsliding? they
hold fast deceit, they refuse to return. I hearkened and heard, but they spake not
aright: no man repenteth him of his wickedness, saying, What have I done? every
one turned to his course, as a horse that rusheth headlong hi battle. Yea, the stork
in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the swallow and
the crane observe the time of their coming; but my people know not the judgment
of the Lord. How do ye say, We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us?
But, behold, the false pen of the scribes hath wrought falsely. The wise men are
ashamed, they are dismayed and taken: lo, they have rejected the word of the
Lord; and what manner of wisdom is in them? Therefore will I give their wives
unto others, and their fields to them that shall inherit them: for every one from
the least even unto the greatest is given to covetousness, from the prophet even
unto the priest every one dealeth falsely. And they have healed the hurt of the
daughter of my people lightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.
Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? nay, they were not
at all ashamed, neither could they blush: therefore shall they fall among them
that fall: in the time of their visitation they shall be cast down.2

The logic would be neat indeed: Jehovah is punishing the Jews, not be-
cause they transgressed the Law as of old understood, but because their very
concept of Jehovah and the Law as theirs and theirs alone was a sin against
the one true universal God of all men. I do not think that even Isaiah thought
explicitly in this way — there are those who hold that he was mainly concerned
with international politics, being pro-Assyrian and anti-Egyptian — and yet
somehow he did make the leap from the tribal to the universal.

Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen: that ye
may know and believe me, and understand that I am he; before me there was no
God formed, neither shall there be after me. I, even I, am the Lord; and beside
me there is no saviour.3

2 Jeremiah 8:5-12. The first few chapters of Jeremiah are a good specimen of pro-
phetic moral writing, less lofty than Isaiah, but still hardly earth-bound. Eric Hoffer
has dared suggest that the prophets were the first revolutionary intellectuals. The new
labor-saving device of the alphabet, he argues, produced a new class of intellectuals who
could not find employment, and who were thus "alienated" and turned to attack on,
not support of, existing ways. Pacific Spectator, Vol. X (1956), p. 7.

3 Isaiah 43: 10-11.

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The Beginnings of the Judaeo-Christian Tradition

Here, however, the next turn is clear. This one universal God has chosen
the Jews in a different sense from the old way of Jehovah, chosen them to
lead the other peoples to Him.

For Zion's sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest,
until her righteousness go forth as brightness, and her salvation as a lamp that
burneth. And the nations shall see thy righteousness, and all kings thy glory: and
thou shalt be called by a new name, which the mouth of the Lord shall name. Thou
shalt also be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the
hand of thy God. Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land
any more be termed Desolate:4

There is no use insisting on the obvious: we are not here in the midst of
the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and its cosmopolitan rationalist theory.
Isaiah's God was, at least during the process of adjustment after this victory,
going to behave toward these now momentarily triumphant gentiles much the
way jealous old Jehovah behaved toward backsliders.

And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers:
they shall bow down to thee with their faces to the earth, and lick the dust of thy
feet; and thou shalt know that I am the Lord, and they that wait for me shall not
be ashamed. Shall the prey be taken from the mighty, or the lawful captives be
delivered? But thus saith the Lord, Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken
away, and the prey of the terrible shall be delivered: for I will contend with him
that contendeth with thee, and I will save thy children. And I will feed them that
oppress thee with their own flesh; and they shall be drunken with their own blood,
as with sweet wine: and all flesh shall know that I the Lord am thy saviour, and
thy redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob.5

Here, then, are already the broad foundation lines of the Christian inter-
pretation of man's fate: one universal righteous God, sinful and disobedient
men who transgress God's ways, God's plan to set up a minority as an ex-
ample of men who do not so transgress, and who will be rewarded for setting
this example, not only by winning the world, but by winning eternal salvation
in the next world. I have deliberately and I dare say successfully put this last
flatly and with no spark. It was, as we all know, put in splendid language
that did justify God's ways to man. Cherished and developed in the Jewish
communities within the world of Greco-Roman culture we have just studied,
given added intensity by the concept of a single earthly leader, the Messiah,
who should do what the prophets had said would be done, the Word seems
already clear: it is a universalist high ethical monotheism.

4 Isaiah 62- 1-4

5 Isaiah 49:23-26.

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The successors of the Babylonian exiles did come back to Jerusalem.
David and Solomon had no heirs, but Jewry was not yet wholly dispersed.
Babylonian gave way to Persian hegemony, Persian to Greek, Greek to
Roman, but the Jews lived on in Palestine, a Palestine increasingly made part
of this Levantine One World of trade, war, politics, increasingly subject to
inflow and outflow of men and ideas. The Jews responded variously. A few
of the ruling classes accepted assimilation to Greek and later Roman ways.
The best known of these is the Herod who ruled at the time of the birth of
Christ, a kinglet who formed part of the elaborate chain of Roman control of
the East. Jews had already begun, not the forced later migration known as
the Diaspora, but individual migration to the great cities of the Empire, still
chiefly in the East. Of these, many learned, as did Saul of Tarsus, a great deal
of Greece and Greek ways, without ceasing to think of themselves as Jews,
and without ceasing to follow the Law. At the opposite extreme there were
groups that lived apart in intensified and perhaps quite altered Jewishness.
The recent discovery of the so-called Dead Sea scrolls — a discovery that by
the wide interest it has aroused throughout the West at least casts some doubt
as to the worrier's complaint that we have all quite forgotten the Bible — has
focused attention on the Essenes. These seem to have been communists who
lived together in brotherly sharing and simplicity in quiet places, rejecting
the worldly ways of the Greco-Roman Levant, yet contemplating a better
world that might yet be the world of the prophets. From these and other
"advanced" groups, perhaps through Persian and Hindu influences that they
would for the most part have denied indignantly, there came into Jewish
religious life a much more strongly emphasized concept of an afterlife, of
sin, repentance, and cleansing. There came, also, a heightening, or at least a
broadening into wider circles of the Jewish people, of the prophets' concep-
tion of a Saviour, a Messiah (the anointed one, in Greek, Christos), a
conception that still arouses scholarly debate over its origins, development,
and degree of acceptance among the Jews before the birth of Christ.

There were also people whose place and reputation in Jewish history is
very different from the place they occupy in our New Testament. The Phari-
sees carry through Western history a quite undeserved reputation for wicked-
ness. They were old-fashioned religious conservatives, upholders of the de-
cencies of the Law, distrustful of innovation and of what the eighteenth
century called "enthusiasm" in religion, but surely not more wicked, not more
insensitive, not even more self-satisfied than such folk (who come out badly
in the history of ideas in the West) usually are. They were probably no more

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The Beginnings of the Judaeo-Christian Tradition

hypocrites than are any other high-minded routine conservatives. Jesus
shocked their sense of decency, and, perhaps even more important, seemed
to them by his conduct to be making for Roman armed intervention. Let us
note that heroism in a satellite nation can have consequences most unpleasant
for the many who are not heroes.

ii

There were, then, Jewish beliefs, attitudes, and experiences which anticipate,
make possible, prepare the way for, Christianity. The Greco-Roman world,
too, found much of Christianity familiar. Something like monotheism was
well established, at least, quite well known, among the educated classes, in
both East and West. It was indeed a deistic or pantheistic, and not very
fervent, belief in one God, and it was hardly worship — merely poetry and
philosophy. Lucan has Cato the Stoic say:

All that we see is God; every motion we make is God also. Men who doubt and
are ever uncertain of future events — let them cry out for prophets: I draw my
assurance from no oracle but the sureness of death. The timid and the brave must
fall alike; the god has said this, and it is enough.6

Still, such beliefs are a long way from pagan polytheism. Even closer
parallels with Christian ethics can be found. The motto of Epictetus, "Suffer
and renounce," is Stoic, but also Christian. Nietzsche, at least, might find
what he thought the perverse Christian pride of the humble in Epictetus's
"How do I treat those whom you admire and honor? Is it not like slaves? Do
not all, when they see me, think they see their lord and king?"7 Long ago
Plato had Socrates say in the Crito that "we ought not to retaliate or render
evil for evil to anyone, whatever evil we may have suffered from him." It is
true that he went on to add, "this opinion has never been held, and never
will be held, by any considerable number of persons." Is this last, too, per-
haps not wholly incompatible with the facts of Christian life?8

Such parallels, it must be insisted, are abundant. Their study is often
interesting and even useful, but a listing of them is no more an explanation of
Christianity than a listing of Shakespeare's sources is an explanation of
Shakespeare. We cannot here go into the many problems of early church his-

6 Lucan, The Civil War, trans, by J. D. Duff, London, Heinemann, 1928, Loeb Classi-
cal Library, Vol. IX, p. 580.

7Epictetus, Discourses, iii. 22. Quoted in L. Friedlander, Roman Life and Manners
under the Early Empire, Vol. m, pp 272-273.
» Crito, 49, The Dialogues of Plato, trans, by B. Jowett, New York, Macmillan, 1892,

VOL n.

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A History of Western Morals

tory, the sources of Christian theology and ritual, and much else essential to
the study of Christianity.9 From the point of view of the outsider, Christianity
is in all its aspects, from the purely theological through the ethical to the
details of liturgy and church government, a syncretic faith; the elements are
all there, ready to hand. But the putting together was a remarkable achieve-
ment in making something new.

On what the triumph of Christianity meant for the moral life of the West,
there has, at least since with the Renaissance anti-Christian sentiments could
come out in the open, been warm debate. We may simplify a bit, and distin-
guish two kinds of attack on Christian moral achievement. The first, typically
that of modern high-minded rationalism of the Enlightenment, takes the
position that, though most or even all of Christian ethics is good, Christianity
has failed dismally to make them prevail in the real world, largely because of
its wicked priesthood, who developed and spread its absurd theology. The
second, that represented, but by no means exhausted, by Nietzsche, takes the
position that Christian ethical principles are in themselves bad — low and
ignoble — but seem, unfortunately, to have been sufficiently successful to pre-
vent the prevailing of the true good. We shall have to return to both these
positions in later chapters, for they form an important part of Western moral
history. Here we need but note them briefly.

The late J. M. Robertson, a kindly and fervent freethinker, will do well
to point up the first attitude.10 Robertson works hard to show that established
Christianity by no means made the morals of the Roman Empire any better
than they had been under the pagans, indeed, made some human conduct
worse. Slavery was not abolished; what there was of improvement in the
workings of the institution was due to pagan philosophers and pagan lawyers.
The Christians did not stop the gladiatorial games, in spite of the noise the
Fathers made about them; the games withered on the vine as the economy of
the Empire declined to the point where they could not be supported. In an

9 1 have dealt summarily with some of these matters in Chapter V of my Ideas and
Men (New York, Prentice-Hall, 1950), and have made reading suggestions on p. 567
of that book. See also M. Hadas, "Plato in Hellenistic Fusion," Journal of the His-
tory of Ideas, Vol. XIX, January 1958, p. 3.

10 "Freethinker" is not the perfect word, but apparently there is no single word to
gather together the materialists, positivists, rationalists, deists, "humanists," ethical
culturalists, Unitarians, agnostics, believers in natural science as a religion, anticlericals,
Marxists, and the rest. You may say that these all stand for different beliefs; yet the
variations among them are hardly greater than among Christians who have broken with
Rome, and for these we have an accepted blanket word: "Protestant." I propose gener-
ally throughout this book to use for these groups from eighteenth-century deists to
twentieth-century Marxist-Leninists the blanket word "Enlightened," duly capitalized.

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The Beginnings of the Judaeo-Christian Tradition

analogous way, slavery itself declined in the Middle Ages— not because of
Christian doctrine. Sex morals were not improved. The insanities of early
monasticism actually meant worse, more perverse, sexual conduct. This all
leads up to the familiar attack by Gibbon: Christian contempt for this world
led to the disastrous failure of civic morality and of military capacity, and to
the fall of the Empire.11

Those who claim to reject Christian ethics entirely are wilder men. Some,
indeed, are no more than admirers of what they think those admirable Greeks
of the fifth century B.C. were like; in the opinion of these classical humanists
from the Renaissance on, Christianity destroyed the ideals and the practice
of the beautiful-and-good. But more recent attackers go far beyond this, and
find that Christian ethics is the prevailing of the weak over the strong, a flying
in the face of Darwin, "slave morality," an exaltation of Mediterranean vices
above Nordic virtues, and more, too much more, to the same effect.

It is hard for anyone in the West, Christian, anti-Christian, or, if such
there be, skeptic, to write about Christian morals without being influenced at
all by the long controversies that have been the life of Christianity. I shall do
my best, with a few further words of warning. First, the inevitable problem
of effective generalization from varied concrete instances comes up sharply in
any use of the word "Christianity." Since for centuries all Westerners were in
a formal sense Christian, the actual conduct of men called "Christians" has
run the gamut of Western capacities, which are many and varied, and seems
to have been fully exploited. It is at least clear that many different beliefs,
many different human personalities, many different kinds of conduct — some
of them in conventional logical use actually antithetical — have been given
"Christian" as an attribute. There are those, some of whom would claim to
be Christians, who find an antithesis between Jesus and Paul, at the very
beginnings of Christian history. I shall rarely mean by Christian all men
known as Christians. I shall try to make clear when I am dealing with most,
many, or even average ordinary Christians, when I am dealing with excep-
tional Christians, and when I am trying to set up a Christian type, or ideal, or
pattern.

Second, Christianity began as an apolitical movement, indeed, as a quite

ii Robertson, Short History of Morals, Part IV, Chap. I. Gibbon himself was not
above the effort to have his cake and eat it: "The religion of Constantine, achieved,
in less than a century* the final conquest of the Roman Empire; but the victors them-
selves were insensibly subdued by the arts of their vanquished rivals. "The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. by J. B. Bury, New York, Macmillan, 1914, Vol.

m, p. 227.

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A History of Western Morals

literally unworldly, even antiworldly, movement of protest, and became
within a few generations an established church, with its own government, its
own property, its own hierarchy, increasingly and in the end inextricably
woven into the whole texture of organized, governed, working Western so-
ciety. Perhaps just because its original ethical tone, still clearly put in many
a New Testament passage for all to read, is so completely unworldly — or
millennial, or Utopian, or spiritual — later Christian adaptation to this world
has seemed a particularly glaring instance of the gap between word and deed.
Christian attitudes toward wealth make a familiar instance, especially dear
to Enlightened anti-Christians of the eighteenth century and after; these critics
were more than willing to admit that the church had indeed achieved one
miracle — many a camel had gone through the needle's eye since Christ had
advised the rich young man to give up his wealth.12

Yet Christians — a St. Francis, and many another — have said quite as
harsh things about a church that enjoyed wealth, power, display, pride, that
gave by its whole existence the lie to the good news of the gospels, a church
that seemed to accept this world in all its ethical imperfections. You will not
understand the Christian tradition, nor the twist the Enlightenment gave that
tradition, if you do not realize that the violent — yes, violent — repudiation of
the wickedness of ordinary human nature and of the society in which ordinary
human nature has full and free play has never quite been suppressed in
Christianity. The threat, or the promise, of a newborn, millennial society is
always there. Christianity has never, for long, ceased to be a revolutionary
faith for the few; nor has it, for long, ceased to be a consoling, conservative,
routine faith for the many. But even that routine has not for long lapsed into
moral depths like that of Renaissance Rome without provoking rebellion.

Finally, the good Christian has always had, at least until quite recently,
still another spur to activity, to something more than routine acceptance of
whatever exists. Christianity is a monopolistic faith in that, like the later
Judaism and Islam, it claims to be the one true faith, a faith destined to pre-
vail for all on earth. The Christian wants to spread Christianity and he has
often spread it with the sword; moreover, he wants the right kind of Chris-
tianity, his own, and he will insure the prevailing of the right kind with an
Inquisition. Another glaring repudiation of all that Jesus came to say and do?
Another use of religion to cloak what really makes the missionary spirit, the
desire for wealth and power? Again, the anti-Christian — and the uneasy, the
rebellious, the saintly Christian, surely often his brother under the skin —
12 Matthew 19: 16-24.

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distort and oversimplify our human dilemma, our human tragedy. Christian-
ity is an uneasy, a tragic, an impossible faith, in high tension between the
real and the ideal, the "is" and the "ought" — that is one of the sources of its
strength; above all, that is how it came to spawn its long string of heretics,
from Tertullian to Marx and Lenin.

It is perhaps easier, though more dangerous, to begin with the general
than with the particular. Christian concepts of ethics are related to how the
believer thought and felt about the universe; and such thought and feeling
are related to the temper of the Greco-Roman world in the first century A.D.,
to the conditions of living, not just to the "mode of production," in that
modern, troubled time. We are dealing in big, vague, imprecise terms; but it
looks as though there was in the first century A.D. a need for Christianity, in
as rigorous a meaning for that somewhat disputed word "need" as the social
psychologist can give it.

The commonplaces, once more, are unavoidable. Christianity brought
consolation to the unhappy, satisfaction — some of it, through communistic
sharing, material satisfaction — to the poor and deprived, meaning and excite-
ment to the bored, adjustment, if I may speak the language of our time, to the
maladjusted. Christianity was in its origins a proletarian movement, a religion
for the humble, for the weak, but, notably, as Nietzsche himself, I suspect,
really knew, for the fiercely rebellious humble, the violent weak. It became
very rapidly, as we have just noted, also a religion for the strong, even for
the proud, with no more of paradox or of inconsistency than is the way of this
world. Individuals, many of whom sincerely felt themselves to be Christians,
have enjoyed wealth and power and conducted their lives in ways the man
watcher has to note as logically irreconcilable with the ethics of the Sermon
on the Mount. Yet many Christians at all times have clearly been aware of
the origins and the spirit of their religion. Christianity, to revert to the ab-
stract, has never ceased to do what it set out to do, to give to the meek their
inheritance of the earth, the poor in spirit their kingdom of heaven. Chris-
tianity is indeed, as Marx should have known, since he was so representative
a Judaeo-Christian revolutionary, the food of the people. It has filled, nour-
ished, quieted them; but it has also at times stimulated them just because it
fed them, prodded them on in the eternal, impossible Christian endeavor.
We are back at the Sermon on the Mount.

The need for religion in the early years of the Roman One World is cer-
tainly not to be established statistically, nor by any retrospective poll of
opinion. We do know that there were at the time a great number of competing

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cults, a welter of cults, a variety worthy of our own day. This fact alone
would establish the need. But we can perhaps go a bit further in defining the
need. Some of it, surely, was the need of the deprived, the physical suffering
of the poor, the starving, the beaten slave, the slum dweller of the great cities,
cities of hundreds of thousands almost without what we call public utilities
and with hardly more of what we call social services. For them the Christian
communities, as we shall see, gave concrete material aid. We cannot be sure
that there were relatively more of the physically deprived in this Greco-
Roman world than, say, in the world of Hesiod, or of earlier agricultural
communities. Since nothing like our own industrial revolution and use of
power-driven machinery added to the total economic productivity of this
Greco-Roman society, it may be that the poor really did become poorer as the
Greco-Roman One World developed after the second century B.C. But we
can be quite sure that many of the social supports, the traditional steady ways,
the routine, unthinking acceptance of the human as well as the natural en-
vironment, which go with small rural communities, and which are the real
and natural "opium of the people," were lost to the slum dweller of Alex-
andria, Antioch, Corinth, and Rome.

Nor did the physically adequately nourished in this society always have
the equivalent of those traditional comforting supports. We Americans, unfor-
tunately, are likely to be naive believers in a crude economic interpretation
of history; in spite of the evidence about us, we believe that collective human
action of a revolutionary sort — and early Christianity was such revolutionary
action — must spring from a sense of purely physical, purely economic, depri-
vation. But what millions of at least adequately fed and housed human beings
in the Greco-Roman world seem to have suffered from was spiritual depriva-
tion. They could not wring religious meaning out of the Olympic pantheon;
the gods were not really any better off than they were; they could not feel for
the Empire, nor for the no-longer-free polis, nor for any political entity,
satellite or the like, the emotions men need to feel. Stoicism was enough
for some; but, unorganized, with no ritual, no communion, not indeed, a
religion at all, less so than the least sacramental and communal of our own
contemporary secular or surrogate religions, no more than a philosophy,
Stoicism was not a faith for the many. This was a big, busy, still-growing
society, unstable certainly at the imperial level, a society in which men moved
about a good deal, a society in which, had there been sociologists and social
psychologists, there would have been a good deal written about social mo-

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bility, rootlessness, lack of inner direction, frustration, lack of community,
and even, I feel sure, about the obvious alienation of the intellectuals.

I shall insist on what I have just written; minions of rich, moderately
well-to-do, and just ordinary men and women suffered in those days from
spiritual deprivation. But if a reader cannot find meaning in that word "spirit-
ual," I am willing to use the language of the hard-boiled. Millions of such
men and women suffered from anxiety, from a feeling of insecurity, from
sheer boredom. Theirs was a society in which the established groupings of
human beings, which were also rankings, assignments of accepted status, were
in part, and in very significant part, especially in the cities of the Mediter-
ranean coasts, breaking down and leaving the individual, a human being, al-
most identical, as Cicero said, with other human beings. Theirs was, in our
language, a society with a strong egalitarian and individualistic drive, a society
in which individuals felt they were not born to a place, but had to make a
place for themselves.

I exaggerate deliberately. There were many, many spots, not all, by any
means, backwaters, in the Greco-Roman world where the old reassuring
steady ways continued. Many men and women, even in the great cities, must
have gone on quietly doing, believing, being, what their ancestors had done,
believed, and been. They crop up to the end, even among the literary, an
Ausonius, a Sidonius, an Ammianus Marcellinus. But read — and it is fine
reading — those few specimens of the social historian's treasured source, ap-
proximations to the novel, which we have from those days, the Satyricon of
Petronius and the Golden Ass of Apuleius, and add for good measure some
skits of Lucian's. You will, I think, conclude that this was a world in which
ordinary men and women did feel uprooted. Poor Trimalchio, for all his
self-won wealth, if not, indeed, because of it, was at least as insecure as any-
one Arthur Koestler ever drew.

To the poor, the bored, the unhappy, and, let us never forget, to the men
of good will, to the ambitious, to those extraordinary men the professional
revolutionary leaders, those organizers of disorganisation, as well as to their
successors, the reorganizes of organization, and, in a sense most important
of all, to the minions who did what others did, the joiners, the conformists,
the accepters of fashion (without whom there would be no fashion) — to all
of these Christianity brought meaning, and opportunity. H. L. Mencken puts
it neatly: "Try to imagine two evangelists on a street-corner in Corinth or
Ephesus, one expounding the Nicomachaean Ethics [of Aristotle] or a homily
by Valentinus the Gnostic and the other reciting the Sermon on the Mount

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or the Twenty-third Psalm; certainly it is not hard to guess which would fetch
the greater audience of troubled and seeking men."13 Christianity — I must
repeat that I am writing from a historical-naturalistic point of view — in its
first days satisfied the needs and gave scope for the gifts of many different
kinds of men — Christ himself, John the Evangelist, Peter, Paul, the many
now unknown who must have contributed to the canon of the New Testament.

An ethic is always closely related to an attempt to understand the uni-
verse, to a theology, a cosmology, or, at the very least, to water such great
concerns down as much as they ever can be, a Weltanschauung, or world
view. Christian ethics could hardly be what they are and have been had
Christianity not given the kind of answers it did to the problems that troubled
the men and women of the first century A.D. Of first importance for under-
standing the extreme flnriworldliness of early Christianity is the doctrine of
the Second Coming. The first Christian Jews, as we have noted above, were
prepared for a Messiah, for a leader who would carry out the word of the
Hebrew prophets. As Christianity spread to the gentiles, the doctrine of the
Messiah who was to restore Zion was transmuted into the doctrine of the risen
Christ who was to return shortly indeed at the end of this world, at the final
judgment day, when the saved should enter on an inheritance of eternal bliss,
the damned on one of eternal misery. Christ himself is authority: "Verily I
say unto you, there be some of them that stand here, which shall in no wise
taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom."14

Now to many of us, perhaps born tough-minded, but certainly molded by
a culture in which such dominant strains as philosophic rationalism, instru-
mentalism, and the practice of natural science are most unfavorable to Mes-
sianic beliefs of just this sort — that is, to beliefs based on a supernatural
Saviour and an interruption of the ordinary natural regularities — the doctrine
of the Second Coining is incomprehensible nonsense.15 Yet if you really

*3 Treatise on Right and Wrong, p. 181. I have no space for the interesting subject
of what the competing cults brought, and why Christianity won out over them.
Broadly, Christianity brought everything they did, and more, notably a more im-
mediate, concrete promise of salvation and a much better-served, better-organized,
better-loved Church Militant. I refer the reader to the books I suggest on p. 567 of
Ideas and Men and on this topic especially to two of the older ones, Franz Cumont,
The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism, and T. R. Glover, The Conflict of Re-
ligions in the Early Roman Empire.

14 Matthew 16:28. The Synoptic Gospels are in agreement on this point

15 The above was written not with irony, merely with caution. Messianic, or at least
Utopian, beliefs of another sort, based on eighteenth-century belief in the natural
goodness and reasonableness of man, still survive the twentieth-century intellectual
climate, though I think they are wilting a bit.

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thought and felt, were really sure, that to secure, even to desire, what your
appetites seek vigorously in this world — food, drink, sexual satisfaction, right
on through the long list of satisfactions of the flesh, and of the spirit guided
by the flesh — were to mean eternal pain, very soon and very surely, you would
not be much attracted by the doctrine of the Golden Mean. You could not
tell yourself comfortably that you were avoiding in matters of sex, for instance,
the neurotic extremes of Don Juan on one hand and of St. Anthony on the
other. You would almost certainly do your best to imitate St Anthony.

We know that even in our own world, in which it is still easy and fashion-
able to be worldly, there are men and women who reject the world. Our
psychiatrists tell us that — to continue the specific, concrete example of mat-
ters sexual — some individuals they, and we, consider abnormal find that the
act of sexual intercourse is repugnant, impossible, hateful. All that is needed
to get back to the early Christians is to add "immoral." The problem of under-
standing the origins of Christian ethical extremes of repudiation of "normal"
and "natural" satisfactions of appetite is not one of finding individual ascetics.
The Stoics, even the Epicureans, furnished plenty of such individuals. It is
to explain why such extremes got incorporated in a great universalist faith,
became fashionable, to use an accurate word with no derogatory intent. One
can give a vague sociological answer of the sort I have tried to give above:
in a sophisticated egalitarian world the very fact of luxury and self-indulgence
in a small privileged class cast discredit on the flesh, bred a contrary asceti-
cism. St. Anthony is a delayed response to Messalina; the decencies of ordi-
nary Christian self-control are healthy human reactions against the self-
indulgence of the masses with their "bread and circuses."16

Yet the historian must not quite dismiss the accident of greatness. In
these earliest formative years Christian asceticism or antiworldliness may
have taken on its extreme form in part because of the personalities of the men
who made it so much more than another Jewish splinter group. It may even
be that Christianity has had such heavy but on the whole remarkably success-
ful going with some of the facts of life because that extraordinary revolution-
ary tamer of revolution, St. Paul, held that it is better to marry than to burn
— and held, also, that even those who desired to speak with tongues should
do so decently and in order.17

16 Anthony is, of course, much later. Reference books date him hopefully 2507-350?
By this time the belief in an immediate Second Coming had probably lessened greatly;
earlier ascetics would not have felt the need to go to the desert, in their view as im-
permanent as Alexandria itself.
17 1 Corinthians 7:9 and 14:39, 40.

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The first Christians were not — at least, many of them were not — respect-
able people, above all, not tame, moderate, controlled bourgeois. The per-
petual indignation with which, during the last few hundred years, idealistic
Christians and idealistic anti-Christians have proclaimed and deplored the
obvious fact that most Christians are respectable and even, in the West,
bourgeois has surely a justification and explanation; Christianity is in origin
a religion of protest against the ordinary life of men on earth, against I'homme
moyen sensuel and all his works. Some of what St. Paul reproaches the con-
gregation at Corinth with is the disorderly enthusiasm, the emotional running
amok, the Holy Rollerism and camp-meeting frenzies we Americans know
so well. We know it so well that we still have the folk belief that many a child,
not always a legitimate child, has been conceived in the pious excitement of
camp meeting. Men — and saints — like Paul, who prize order, know well that
other men need curbing. They know that sex is a strong and potentially
dangerous appetite that can lead to jealousy, fighting, disturbances of all
sorts. They know that man really is not what the hopeful made of Aristotle's
famous phrase, a "political animal" in the sense the philosophic anarchist
gives the words, an animal whose appetites, desires, impulses, lead him auto-
matically to the ethically and communally good. Christian ethics do repress,
surely in part because the early Christians, perhaps a bit more than the run
of mankind, needed repressing.

In our day, when Christianity, even among the seekers, is most respect-
able, the violent rebelliousness of early Christianity needs underlining. Many
of these Christian men and women, in spite of the ethics of gentleness clearly
present in their canons of belief, were firmly, ferociously, unparadoxically
tough. They were not, even at their gentlest, "liberals," rationalists, humani-
tarians, not, let me underline and repeat, not respectable. They could hate
as well as love, and both fiercely. The first ascetics did not go to the desert
as a social service; they went there because of a great disgust. It took a long
time to transmute that disgust to love, love for one's fellows as they are. There
are those who hold that the transmuting has never been complete in Chris-
tianity.

Nietzsche, of course, felt this profound early Christian revulsion against
things as they are, above all, against men as they are, and sympathized with
it more than he liked to admit. Established Christianity was to spread its
net as widely as Western life at its fullest and most varied. Nietzsche was no
historian, and he was quite wrong in identifying all Christianity with what
he called "slave-morality," the revolt of the weak against the strong. But the

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element of revolt is there, unmistakable, irrational, as mad a transvaluat
of values as any the West has experienced. One little detail: the "poor" of
famous phrase we know as the "poor in spirit" is, in New Testament Gre
the word TTTCOXOS, ptochos, or cringer, hence beggar, a damning word inde
not the more usual Tre'v^s, penes, the working poor man, a word no m
scornful than most such by which we in the West commonly reflect our &
disagreement with the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. But the good m
remains literally: blessed are the cringing, the cowering, the beggars, in spi
The Goodspeed "American translation" makes this "blessed are those ^
feel their spiritual need." Talk about bowdlerizing! Liddell and Scott cc
ment on TH-O^OS, "the word . . . always had a bad sense until it was
nobled in the Gospels." They are right, and Nietzsche wrong: the ITT&>XOI
Trveu/xart, become the poor in spirit or even those who feel their spiritual ne
have indeed been ennobled. But they seem hardly cringers any more; they
Bernard of Clairvaux, Innocent HI, Loyola, Calvin, Jonathan Edwards. Tl
are not even any longer near those mystical quietist goals, theoria, atarcu
nirvana.18

in

I have in the preceding pages done violence to the modern principle tl
"facts" should first of all be established before they are discussed. Actua
the facts of early Christian asceticism, otherworldliness, revulsion agai
pagan license are well-established. And they are extremes, heroic extremes
so heroic that calmer leadership soon got to work to tame them. St. Sime
Stylites will do as one example, up there on his pillar sixty feet high in i
Syrian sun (the top does appear to have been railed in) eating, drinki
sleeping, defecating — all very little — and preaching a great deal year uj
year. The excesses of the monastics suggest, indeed, that the old Greek sp
of the agon had been transferred to a sport that would hardly have appea
to the Greeks of Pericles's Athens.

The ideal of antiworldliness in conventional Christianity is hard enoi
for the innocent rationalist to accept; monasticism even in its tempered la
Western form with the Benedictines must seem to him regrettable nonser
We should have no difficulty understanding why the amazing feats of

is The verse is Matthew 5:3. The Goodspeed New Testament: An American Tran
tion, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1923; Liddell and Scott, Greek-Eng
Lexicon, 8th ed., revised, New York, Hampers, 1897, s.v., TTTUX°S, P- 1342.

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A History of Western Morals

earlier monks and hermits disgusted historians like Lecky, formed without
benefit of Freud.

There is, perhaps, no phase in the moral history of mankind of a deeper or more
painful interest than this ascetic epidemic. A hideous, sordid, and emaciated
maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, passing
his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before
the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain, had become the ideal of the nations
which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero and the lives of Socrates and
Cato. For about two centuries, the hideous maceration of the body was regarded
as the highest proof of excellence. St. Jerome declares, with a thrill of admiration,
how he had seen a monk, who for thirty years had lived exclusively on a small por-
tion of barley bread and of muddy water; another, who lived in a hole and never
ate more than five figs for his daily repast; a third, who cut his hair only on Easter
Sunday, who never washed his clothes, who never changed his tunic till it fell to
pieces, who starved himself till his eyes grew dim, and his skin "like pumice and
stone," and whose merits, shown by these austerities, Homer himself would be
unable to recount.19

Lecky himself goes on recounting instance after instance. They have the
accuracy, and the misleading quality, of any modern series of faits divers and
horror stories. It is unfair, and unsound psychologically, to equate St. Simeon
Stylites and Kelly the flagpole sitter, the record-breaking monk with the
record-breaking sophomore. Yet there is a simple residue of truth in such
comparisons. Early Christian asceticism does display this element of paradox,
the obvious willingness of the man who flees the world to accept the wonder-
ing attention of the world. These mortifiers of the flesh look in the long per-
spective of Christian experience to be dangerously close to the great Chris-
tian sin of pride. They are, however, in some sense victims of the thirst of the
masses for wonders and wonder-workers.

Yet the outsider may be safer if he notes simply that historical Christi-
anity has always produced men, women, and movements that reach out and
over the bounds of any disciplined good, even the good of humility, into the
wilds, the depths. At any rate, there is no use in our adding to the rationalist
horror of the philosophes at the spectacle of the filth-covered anchorite the
smug satisfaction of popularized psychiatry at so evident a display of its
rightness. It does not seem enough to appeal to any of the catchwords, not
even to "psychosis." At most, we may concede to modern intellectual fashion
that the anchorites who fled the world were maladjusted in that world, per-
haps that their flight was a sublimation of drives frustrated in that world.

19 W.E.H. Lecky, History of European Morals, Vol. II, pp. 107-108.

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Later, more disciplined monasticism may even look to some of us a morally
better sublimation for frustrated virtue and consequent great moral disgust
than, shall we say, writing a newspaper column.

The rush to the desert — it really was almost a rush — must seem in part a
fashion, a minor mass movement in which many took part because men are
imitative animals. But the leaders would have been sure that God had sent
them to the desert that they might bring home to their fellows how sinful the
world had grown, how much in need of no mere reform, no mere preaching,
no mere conferences, but of root-and-branch destruction of the cancerous
growth of worldliness. Perhaps we can leave it at that.

Of course, not even at the height of the movement to the desert were the
masses of Christians involved. For us it is perhaps more important to try
to estimate what degree of personal asceticism, of repudiation of the world
of the flesh, penetrated into the rank and file. Clearly no good answer is
possible, but it seems likely that in the first few centuries the drive of Chris-
tian asceticism did go wider and deeper than it has gone since, save perhaps in
such renewals of this element of Christianity as Calvinist Puritanism — and
Calvinism, as we shall see, was not ascetic after the manner of the early
Christians. This early asceticism trusted no appetite, not even the simple
appetite for food. When Tertullian writes that "through love of eating love
of impurity finds passage," we may well believe that many of the faithful
did find all bodily enjoyments dangerous, all potential passages for evil.20

Christian asceticism, then, is real and extensive. Certainly most Christians
did not pursue the ideal into saintly depths. But the tone, the coloration, of
ordinary lives was altered from the tone that had been imparted by the very
effort of the pagans to attain the beautiful-and-good. A dignified, rhetorical,
but, one feels, sincere avowal of Christian asceticism comes out in the poetry
— classical in form — of the convert Paulinus:

Time was when, not with equal force, but with equal ardor, I could join with
thee in summoning the deaf Phoebus [Apollo] from his cave in Delphi. . . . Now
another force, a mightier God, subdues my soul. He forbids me give up my time
to the vanities of leisure or business, and the literature of the fable, that I may
obey his laws and see his light, which is darkened by the cunning skill of the
sophist, and the figments of the poet who fills the soul with vanity and falsehood,
and only trains the tongue.21

20 Tertullian, De Jejunis, Chap. I.

21 Carmina, x: 22.30. Quoted and translated in Dill, Roman Society in the Last Cen-
tury of the Western Empire, p. 398.

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Paulinus found "business" a vanity. We come to the old accusation that
Christianity unmanned men, and women, and made them unfit for the world's
work. It is true that the monks fled this world in all its aspects. It is probably
true that for some centuries Christianity did turn many less radical rebels
against the daily round of duty done — civic, soldierly duty. Tertullian can
always be trusted to blurt it out plain: nee ulla magis res aliena, quam pub-
lica.22 The first Christians were pacifists of a sort, pacifists who would not fight
worldly figftts. There are classic texts in the Sermon on the Mount:

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called children of God.

but I say unto you, Resist not him that is evil: but whosoever smiteth thee on thy
right cheek, turn to him the other also.

but I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that persecute you:23
Paul himself occasionally sounds like a moderate pacifist:

Render to no man evil for evil. Take thought of things honourable in the sight
of all men. If it be possible, as much as in you lieth, be at peace with all men.
Avenge not yourselves, beloved, but give place unto wrath: for it is written,
Vengeance belongeth unto me; I will repay, saith the Lord But if thine enemy
hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him to drink: for in so doing thou shalt
heap coals of fire upon his head. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with
good.24

Yet Christianity was not and is not faith in passive resistance, to say
nothing of Laodicaean or skeptical lying down before the facts of life. The
charge to the apostles is the familiar text to bring up against the Sermon on
the Mount:

Think not that I am come to send peace on the earth: I came not to send peace,
but a sword. For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daugh-
ter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law: and a
man's foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother
more than me is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more
than me is not worthy of me.25

We have to get beyond the balancing of texts one against another, Christians
for the most part have never really believed that the truths of their faith

22 "No thing more alien [to the Christian] than the public thing." Tertullian, Apolo-
geticus, Chap. 38.3.

23 Matthew 5:9, 39, 44.
2* Romans 12:17-21.
25 Matthew 10:34-37.

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would impose themselves magically on the wicked of the world. The many
figures of struggle, even of fighting with the sword, so obvious in the New
Testament and among the Fathers, we know historically turned out to be no
mere figures of speech. At least as early as the Arian controversy at the end
of the third century Christians were resorting to bodily violence to further
the work of God. Such conduct ought not to surprise and shock us as it
appeared to surprise and shock the Victorians.26

It is a clear induction from Western history that the old spirit of the
Homeric agon is not subdued but heightened when the individual fights, not
primarily or solely for his honor or his prestige, but for the Right, for the
word of God, for Fatherland, for the word of Dialectical Materialism. From
martyrdom to crusading is but a step, an easy and a natural step, for martyr-
dom itself is a form of crusading. I do not mean here to make the cheap asser-
tion that the Christian who turns, and keeps turning, the other cheek is merely
using "tactics" he will change when he thinks he or his cause will profit. I
mean, rather, that the Christian drive toward realizing the good right here
on earth is so strong as to amount to a ruling passion; the Christian cannot
avoid resisting evil.27

Otherworldliness running to the extremes of asceticism and even, among
ordinary men, to an indifference to the call of citizenship is surely present in
early Christianity. So, too, to complete the catalogue of attitudes alien to
most of us today, is what must be called the anti-intellectualism of early
Christianity. The later Greco-Roman formal culture, as we have noted
above, was strongly tinged with rationalism. Christianity was in the beginning
a faith of the poor and humble who disliked and distrusted the higher educa-
tion and the higher educated of their time; it was a transcendental faith that
could not for a moment stomach such fashionable beliefs as Euhemerism nor,
perhaps even more repugnant because so high-minded, Stoic or Epicurean
deism. The texts are there, St. Paul himself providing some of the best:

If any man thinketh that he is wise among you in this world, let him become a

26 See Westermarck, Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, Vol. I, p. 348 ff.,
and especially his back reference to Lecky, p. 349 n. Lecky had argued that it was
only the influence of the struggle with Islam that turned the Christian church from
merely "condoning" war to "consecrating" it.

27 Note the trouble Matthew 5:39 has always given. The Greek Trorqpos, poneros, is
literally "evil." But the text "resist not evil" has been interpreted commonly as mean-
ing do not resist with actual physical violence the man who is doing an evil thing.
The Christian must resist evil, regarded as what we moderns would think of as a
"force," just as he must hate sin; he must love, as ultimately images of God, all men,
sinners or saints. Christianity is an exacting faith.

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fool, that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with
God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their craftiness: and again, The
Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain.28

The Fathers are more explicit. Here is the third-century Didascalia Aposto-
lorum:

This says bluntly, "Have nothing to do with pagan books," and gives some rather
surprising grounds for this injunction. What connection can any Christian have
with all the errors they contain? He has the Word of God — what else does he
want? The Bible not only provides for the supernatural life but for all cultural
need too! Is it history he wants? There are the Books of Kings. Eloquence, poetry?
The Prophets! Lyrics? The Psalms! Cosmology? Genesis! Laws, morality? The
glorious Law of God! But all these outlandish books that come from the Devil —
they must be hurled away.29

Yet, fixed though the eyes of the early Christian were on the next world,
it is clear that he sought to lessen actual suffering in this one. We moderns
should have no trouble recognizing the very real aid and comfort the evangel
— in Greek, "good news" — brought simply in terms of psychological satis-
faction. Christianity at its minimal was surely a triumph of faith healing not
remotely rivaled by the best we moderns have been able to do outside or on
the margin of organized Christianity. Whatever their hopes of a Second Com-
ing, the early Christian also took some care of the animal man. The apostles
themselves began the communistic sharing of things of this world as of the
next which was to be the great strength of the new faith:

And all that believed were together, and had all things common; and they sold
their possessions and goods, and parted them to all, according as any man had
need. And day by day, continuing stedfastly with one accord in the temple, and
breaking bread from house to house, they did take their food with gladness and
singleness of heart, praising God, and having favour with all the people. And the
Lord added to them day by day those that were being saved.30

Charity in something like our modern sense was almost from the first a
part of Christian ethics. That it was later taken up into high theology as part
of the doctrine of good works does not by any means lessen its reality or its
importance. The Calvinists did hold that the Biblical "the poor ye have al-

28 1 Corinthians 3: 18-21.

29 H. I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, p. 320. Marrou on pp. 318-321

handles this subject briefly and thoroughly. For more detail, see C. L. Ellspermann,

The Attitude of the Early Christian Fathers towards Pagan Literature and Learning,

Washington, D.C., Catholic University of America, Patristic Studies, Vol. LXXXH,

1949.

so Acts 2:44-47.

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ways with you" had an ethical as well as a cosmological implication, poverty
being a proper punishment as well as a God-made necessity; in their way,
the nineteenth-century utilitarians, who were most dubiously Christian, went
even further, holding that charity was both ineffective, for it never really
"solved" the problem of poverty, and also most damaging to its recipients,
who were kept enough alive to procreate more poor, quite contrary to the
intentions of Organic Evolution. But in spite of all this, over the centuries
Christian ethics has enjoined the feeding of the hungry, the clothing of the
naked, the alleviation of pain, the kindly treatment of the stranger. There
is a humanitarian strain in Christianity, though there it clearly is feebler, or,
at any rate, more resigned, than in the religion of the Enlightenment.

We are back to Nietzsche. Christianity did set up as virtues much that
looks in common sense quite the opposite of the warrior virtues of Homer
— and of Moses.

Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the strength of
Christ may rest upon me. Wherefore I take pleasure in weaknesses, in injuries, in
necessities, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ's sake: for when I am weak,
then am I strong.31

Christianity did urge that love should replace rivalry; it did seek to lessen
the competitiveness of the classical agonistic view of life. In modern terms,
there was in early Christianity a strong vein of insistence on what we should
call co-operation, altruism, even, perhaps, social security. I must come
shortly again to the problem of the paradoxical nature of Christianity; but, for
the moment, let me simply say that Christianity does sound firmly a note not
so clearly heard before in the West: the note of the agape, the lovefeast, the
common weal that is common woe to none, not even the outsider.

The note is sounded most clearly in the Beatitudes, which must be read
along with the Ten Commandments:

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be
filled.

Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called children of God.

Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs

si H Corinthians 12:9-10.

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is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye when men shall reproach you, and perse-
cute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.32

The two codes — if one may call the Beatitudes a code — are both parts of
the Christian ethical inheritance, and though the sentimentalist is likely to
find the one affirmative and kindly, the other negative and harsh, they do
belong together.

IV

Historical Christianity is no monolithic faith. It is not sufficient to say
that it is a complex set of beliefs and practices always subject to heresies and
splintering. One must note that Christianity is a religion full of quite deliberate
paradoxes of the emotions:

He that findeth his lif e shall lose it; and he that loseth his lif e for my sake shall find
it.

But many shall be last that are first; and first that are last.33

The Fathers, too, were fond of this striking weapon of paradox, so suited to
the defiant challenge Christianity makes to common sense. Tertullian will do:
Cerium est, quia impossibile est?*

The verbal and literary paradox, which is not quite the paradox of the
logician, is likely to be thought today to be somewhat cerebral, typical of the
way a mind like Oscar Wilde's or Aldous Huxley's works. In high
philosophy it smacks of the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis. But in the
logic of the emotions this sort of paradox simply expresses the human condi-
tion, the eternal "I hate and I love . . . and suffer." In Christianity the para-
dox can be stated simply and tritely: the Christian can neither accept nor
deny this harsh world of the flesh, cannot — save for a few mystics who are
perhaps not really Christian — feel this world as illusion, as evil, as some-
thing to be wholly transcended. Neither, of course, can he accept this world
as pleasant, or interesting, or amusing, or, indeed, as quite necessary and
permanent, as it stands, a mere product of historical necessity.

Against the extremes of otherworldly ethics that I have brought forward

32 Matthew 5: 3-11.

33 Matthew 10:39; 19:30.

34 Tertullian, De Came Christi. "It is certain because it is impossible." This form is
much more powerful than, indeed, quite different in meaning from, the corruption
often quoted, Credo quia impossibile (or, in some versions, absurdum), "I believe
because it is impossible" (or absurd). I do not wish to be understood as citing Tertul-
lian as a typical Christian, but he certainly is a good Christian.

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above, the historian can bring out many characteristic Christian compromises,
even from quite early days. One may argue that Christ himself had no the-
ology. It is quite clear that there was in early Christianity a strong current
of distrust of things of the mind, a preference for the wisdom of babes and
sucklings. Yet within a few generations Christianity had developed a subtle
and complex theology which enlisted the best minds of Greco-Roman culture.
The Fathers were worried over the temptations set forth in the pagan classics,
but even so Rousseauistic or Carlylean a character as Tertullian held that the
pagan authors simply had to be mastered if the new church were to maintain
proper educational standards. As for St. Jerome, though he regretted that he
had read Cicero, he continued to write a fine polished Latin; one suspects
that he didn't really regret Cicero.35

Extreme pacifism was early qualified, and by the time of St. Augustine
this foremost of Western founding fathers could write that when Christ said
"all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword" he referred to such
persons only as arm themselves to shed the blood of others without either
command or permission of any lawful authority — in short, to common-law
murderers and unsuccessful wagers of civil war, not to legitimate soldiers or
policemen.36 The formula had been found much earlier, early enough to get
into the canon, though it is surely unlikely that Christ himself found it:
"Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's; and unto God
the things that are God's."37 Christians could and did fight in the armies of
the Empire. But the swing was not unlimited; they could never fight in the
gladiatorial games, never, as good Christians, fully identify themselves with
the pleasures of the Roman people.

Even — perhaps, above all — on sex the Christians made their compro-
mises. After all, St. Paul's most famous pronouncement on the matter did not
enjoin total continence; marriage became early, and remained, one of the
Christian sacraments. Among the highly placed of the Christian world the
line between Caesar and Christ was drawn rather freely: the Christian em-
perors and empresses were for the most part not appreciably more chaste than
had been the pagans. But, again, the swing was not complete. Even for ordi-
nary folk Christian moral standards in sex relations were of a Hebraic strict-
ness. Critics find a continued harshness toward the sinner who strayed outside

35 On Christianity and classical education, see Marrou, History of Education in An-
tiquity, Chap. DC.

36 Augustine, Contra Faustum in Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus (Latin series),
XXE,70.

37 Matthew 22:21.

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the permitted connubial intercourse. Westermarck, for instance, points out
that if Christian feeling for the sacredness of the individual soul made of
infanticide a crime punishable by death, and even perhaps lessened the num-
ber of actual infanticides, Christian feeling for the enormities of fornication
led to great harshness toward the mother of illegitimate offspring.38

Christians have over the centuries conducted themselves variously in
matters sexual; and even Christian ethical principles as to sex are by no means
monolithic. We may as well face at this point the anti-Christian's charge that
Christianity has by its ideas on the subject perverted a fine, natural, simple
instinct: without Christianity, we should all come of age, and stay of age,
serenely and enjoyably, as in Samoa. If this and similar charges are made
from a naive "naturalistic" base of belief that if men, and women, would but
let their natural instincts guide them in sexual relations all would be well,
they start from nonsense and must end in nonsense. Just as a sport, sexual
intercourse requires for success acquired skills; poor Homo sapiens cannot
even swim without lessons. But sex is much more than a sport, and the regu-
lation, in some senses even the suppression, of sexual relations has been the
concern of all societies and all ethical systems. All this should be truism.

But has not Christianity suppressed too much, made learning sexual skills
more difficult, turned women, whose physiological evolution seems to have
inclined them on an average away from easy sexual satisfaction, into actual
frigidity? I do not think we know nearly enough about the physiology, psy-
chology, and sociology of sex in humans to answer that question. Purely from
the record, it must be said that there are Greek and Jewish precedents in our
own tradition for the rigorous control of sex conduct, and for feelings, senti-
ments, that the business of sex is in some sense shameful, and certainly is so
if it is public or promiscuous. And to anticipate, it must be noted that many,
many Enlightened anti-Christians of various freethinking sects since 1700
have been at least as prudish, as repressive, about sex as any Christian. John
Stuart Mill is, perhaps, an extreme example, but there he is.39 As it has worked

38 Westermarck, Christianity and Morals, New York, Macmillan, 1939, p. 241. The
theologians had difficulty over the problem as to just when the immortal soul entered
the embryo. They finally decided that forty days after conception the embryo in-
formatics was endowed with a soul and became the embryo formatus, the killing of
which was a crime punishable by death. See Westennarck, Christianity and Morals,
pp. 243-244.

39 Mill's Mrs. Taylor is surely the most high-minded of frigid females we know from
the record — and somehow high-minded frigidity seems much worse than the merely
neurotic kind. See for the curious story of Mill's nonsex life F. A. Hayek, John
Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951.

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out, ordinary parish Christianity has allowed for a fine range of sexual
"naturalness," notably in the great Christian centuries of medieval times. I
incline to the belief that recurring phases of what the vulgar call "Puritanism"
in sex matters are in Western history usually symptoms of deep-seated social
problems — as are recurring phases of widespread sexual license.

Finally, it is true enough that historic Christianity has been what the
Enlightened would have to call antifeminist. Christianity has blamed a lot on
Eve, and taken it out on her daughters. But here again, only a very unhis-
torically-minded polemicist can maintain that Christianity has elevated man
and lowered woman more than did the earlier cultures from which it derived,
and into which it breathed new life, notably the Jewish and the Hellenic.
Feminism as a faith is a product of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
Roman women in the upper classes of the Empire did gain an extraordinary
degree of personal freedom; but Christianity did not end a nonexistent Roman
feminism, for the old classical culture was definitely a masculine one. Here,
as throughout, the never-quite-effaced Christian doctrine of the equality of
all souls, even female souls, preserved a base from which the Enlightenment
was later to work. And it should be obvious that anti-Christian writers have,
by their emphasis on some monkish writings, greatly exaggerated the extent
to which Christianity condemned women as women, and blamed them as the
source of evil. Ordinary parish Christianity, the Christianity of the cure of
souls, if it wanted women kept in their place, also wanted that place to be a
dignified and honorable one, far nearer the old Roman than to the old
Athenian place of woman.

Here, too, Western Christianity made one of its most fateful compromises:
complete celibacy, impossible and, therefore, undesirable, for the many, was
made necessary for the clergy. There was for centuries a struggle within the
Roman Church over this requirement, and the matter was not finally settled
for the lower secular clergy in the West until the great Cluniac reforms of the
eleventh century. But almost from the first, as the clergy began in practice and
in law to be distinguished from the laity, there were voices to urge that celi-
bacy is essential to the priesthood. Yet here again the church as established
avoided the extreme. It accepted, or, rather, made, a distinction between
clergy and laity; that distinction was real, tangible, and important, but at the
bottom it was a functional distinction, as a distinction of status, though a very
holy one, not a distinction of kind or essence; nor was it, since the ranks of
the clergy were never wholly closed to the poorest lad with a vocation, even
in the less democratic phases of the church, a distinction of caste. The Cath-«

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olic priest was held to more rigorous standards of conduct than the layman,
and he had privileges that went with his responsibilities; but he was not a
different sort of being, not fundamentally holier, than the layman. The saint
is holier than the ordinary Christian; but the church has carefully avoided
canonizing anyone as saint until after death. The Catholic Church avoided
here the Manichaean, and, later, Albigensian, heresy, in which a caste of
perfect ones, Cathari, was so sharply separated theologically from the com-
mon run of the faithful as to seem different beings, a caste in the Eastern
sense that the West has always repudiated in ideal, and, therefore, in the
long, long run, in practice.

The church has avoided the trap of formal dualism in theology and meta-
physics. The simple — relatively simple — moral distinction between good and
evil sets an unavoidable problem to the monotheist: a God all-powerful, all-
knowing, and all-good presents to human logic a challenge. There have been
many solutions to this problem of theodicy in Christianity; Job's seems to me
still the basic one:

Then Job answered the Lord, and said, I know that thou canst do all things, And
that no purpose of thine can be restrained. Who is this that hideth counsel without
knowledge? Therefore have I uttered that which I understood not, Things too
wonderful for me, which I knew not. Hear, I beseech thee, and I will speak; I
will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me. I had heard of thee by the hearing
of the ear; But now mine eye seeth thee, Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent
in dust and ashes.40

One humanly tempting solution has remained heretical from the Mani-
chaeans to John Stuart Mill, who fell from freethinking into this heresy in
his old age: this is the dualistic solution of making God all-good but not
all-powerful. God in this view wants the good to prevail, but he cannot elimi-
nate evil, Satan, the Dark One, his opponent. We human beings ought to
fight for God, not for Satan, but we cannot be sure of being on the winning
side. To put things crudely, the religious difficulty of this solution is that a
God whose intentions are no doubt good but whose proven capacities are
not much greater than man's is not a very useful ally in the moral struggle,
and soon becomes quite as superfluous as the deist's watchmaker god —
indeed, the lower case letter "g" heralds his superfluity. To the dualist's argu-
ment that the fighter for the right who goes into the struggle quite uncertain
as to who will win is morally superior to the monotheist who knows he,
through God, cannot possibly lose, the Christian monotheist has an effective

40 Job 42: 1-6.

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reply: On this earth the outcome of any given struggle is highly uncertain, for
God does not rig the struggle here; He has ordered the universe as a whole in
accordance with His wisdom, not ours, and the dualist argument above is in
fact an argument for theological humanism, not for Christianity.

But these are high and ultimate matters. The historian adhering to the
merely empirical can assert that over the centuries the dualistic solution of
the problem of evil has been rejected as shallow, commonsensical, morally
inadequate. A church that accepted dualism as an ultimate would soon cease
to satisfy human needs for an ultimate. Not only Roman Catholic, but the
great majority of Protestant Christianity, has refused to set up the patent,
unavoidable Christian tension between this world and another, between Na-
ture and God, as a dualistic antithesis, a polarity of equals. Christian morality
accepts competition, conflict, the agon, even a touch of pride, but only in
tension with loving kindness, altruism, co-operation. In simplest terms, Chris-
tianity since Augustine certainly, accepts war on this earth as necessary if it
is just — if it furthers Christian purpose; but its heaven, its ideal, its ultimate
moral tone, is peace.41

Christianity so sets the way Westerners, even Westerners who would hate to
think of themselves as Christians, thi'nV and feel about morals that it is worth
our while here, at the risk of some repetitiousness, to put the broad lines of
that way and its difficulties as succinctly as possible.

The individual, endowed with an immortal soul of priceless value, is a
free moral agent. Once he is mature, he knows, by the grace of God and
through the teachings of the church, right from wrong. If he chooses to do
wrong, the conscience God has made part of, or a function of, his soul tells
him he is guilty. He can perhaps plead physical duress, and, to a limited
extent, ignorance, but he cannot plead total irresponsibility, cannot claim that
he acted under cosmic necessity. He is, through his conscience, aware of the
"civil war within the breast," aware within himself of something that drives
him to sin, and of something within himself that urges him to virtue. Put in
another way, he is aware of the contrast between his soul and his body, and

41 Denis de Rougemont in his Man's Western Quest brings out well this Christian con-
trast of this world and another, a contrast that never — while orthodox or even mildly
heterodox — approaches the Eastern (Asian) denigration and denial of this world of the
senses, and of the agon. Americans, who are put off by epigrammatic cleverness, at least
when it is displayed on the side of the angels, should realize that M. de Rougemont, who
writes with epigrammatic cleverness, is deeply serious as well as obviously serieux.

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aware that the soul ought to be the master of the body. This attitude I should
like to put as the "minimal Western puritanism," an attitude never totally
absent in the Christian moral outlook.

Now this minimal puritanism is not menaced — indeed, is greatly rein-
forced— by deterministic theological and metaphysical ideas that might seem
at first sight to destroy the free moral agency of the individual. There can
hardly be in matters of Western morals a safer induction from experience
than the above statement. The Christian who believes that everything he does
is foreordained by an omnipotent and omniscient God never goes on to say:
Since God is responsible for all my thoughts and desires, he has clearly put
into my mind my present desire to fornicate; I shall therefore fornicate, since
God so clearly wants me to.42 We shall have to return to this matter with
those two great modern variants of the doctrine of determinism, Calvinism
and Marxism.

This minimal Christian puritanism, this basic but not radical dualism, has
had to struggle with determined foes in the long course of Christian history.
At the most theoretical, there have been many kinds of theological and meta-
physical doctrines that deny, gloss over, or exaggerate the dualism of soul
and body, Higher and Lower, such as pantheism on one hand and Manichae-
anism on the other. Most of these intellectual deviants are present in one form
or another in those great earliest centuries of Christian heresies.

At a much less intellectually respectable level, Christianity has been men-
aced in this basic moral position by the persistence of many forms of early
("primitive") cosmic beliefs centered on the concept of wrongdoing as a kind
of plague, a visitation from gods not really interested in human beings, a
possession by demons, a consequence of the individual's breaking, through
accident or bad luck, absolute rules made by powerful nonhuman forces "out
there," controllable, if at all, only by magic and conformity. This is the
moral attitude of Piaget's little children, and it clearly has no place for our
concepts of individual moral responsibility. It is not as near extinction in the
modern West as we once liked to think. It survives in many ways, from simple
superstitions like newspaper astrology to the concept of guilt by association
— the latter not without roots in common sense, but, as we all know now,
spreading into much deeper and less pleasant soils.

42 My "never" above was no doubt an exaggeration. The enemies at least of the radical
sect known as the Antinomians in the sixteenth century accused them of justifying all
sorts of excesses by some such reasoning as the above. Still, the generalization holds
up: somehow deterministic doctrines do not explain, let alone justify, wickedness in
individual action. Sm is a mystery.

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In modern times, however, the chief threat to minimal Christian puritan-
ism has been a heresy as profound as any Christianity has faced, the doctrines
that gave direction in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to the belief in
the natural goodness and/or reasonableness of man, and its corollary, the
belief that evil is a product of environment — partly of natural or geographic
environment, but mostly of human or socio-economic environment. As we
shall see, in the actual struggles of ideas this doctrine of the environmental
origin of evil does not by any means banish the concept of wicked and
virtuous, of morally responsible individuals. To the Marxist, the capitalist is
a villain, responsible for the evil he does, even though he would seem to be,
like the rest of us, the innocent product of the means of production. Indeed,
Marxism is a "primitive" determinism which has borrowed much of Christian
ethics. To all this we shall have to return.

VI

Christianity will be a constant theme for the rest of our study. To the outsider
certainly Christianity on this earth has changed, developed, had a history.
Here again the theme we have just discussed is apposite; there is in Chris*
tianity a tension, a contrast, which to some has appeared a contradiction,
Christianity, it is maintained, is a revealed religion; it is true; truth does not
change; Christianity was in the beginning what it is today. Therefore, obvi-
ously, Christianity has not changed and the changes historians record are
either not real changes or they are not Christian changes (that is, they are
temporary and in this world successful heresies) . The position briefly outlined
above is known to Americans as Fundamentalism, and though with elaborate
exegesis on the adjectives "real" and "Christian" it could be made acceptable
to a wide range of Christians, in its simple form it is by no means representa-
tive of Christian attitudes toward this world and the history which is here
made — though not in heaven, which is well beyond history.

Here on this earth the church has a history; it has failures and successes.
It grows, develops, for it is alive with human life. Cardinal Newman put the
matter provocatively in his Development of Christian Doctrine, written, it is
true, just before Darwin, but fully abreast of nineteenth-century acceptance
of ideas of growth and evolution. Just because the church is in part human,
it must change: " — in a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live
is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often."43
43 J. H. Newman, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), p. 40.

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These early centuries in which Christianity was fighting — I use the word
advisedly — its way to success are not quite the years from which one would
try to draw the Christian moral ideal, embodied or not. It is profoundly true
that Jesus Christ is the Christian moral ideal, but not in the sense I am using
that phrase in this study. Christ is, save to the extreme Unitarian or "hu-
manist," God, and an imitatio Christi must have elements not found in simple
moral emulation, which is always to a degree prudential. What Christ did
during his ministry on earth is of major importance in the moral content of
Christianity, above all, to re-emphasize what I have noted above, because in
the balance that ministry rejects the Homeric agon and its successor for the
beatitudes and for the greatest of these, love. But to draw the outlines of what
Christianity brought in place of the Homeric hero, the Periclean beautiful-
and-good, the Stoic servant of duty, we shall do better to wait until in the
next chapter the saint and the knight of the Middle Ages appear. Both owe
much — in a sense, everything — to the first Christian centuries, but they are
not, historically, contemporaries of the martyrs and the Fathers.

We must, however, come back briefly in conclusion to two problems of
direct historical pertinence here. On the old question of the part played by
Christianity in the fall of the Roman Empire we can be quite brief. Unless
the naive anti-intellectualism which says that men's beliefs in the big and
dignified matters of religion and ethics have no relation whatever to their
actions, then one has to conclude that a set of beliefs which, as we have seen,
is neatly pointed up by Tertullian's "nothing more alien to us than concern
with the public thing" must have been one of the variables the historian will
list and roughly measure as elements in the collapse of the Greco-Roman
One World. But there are many, many such variables, among which Chris-
tianity is, I think, no more than of middling importance. I do not think that
even if the soldierly Mithraism so strong in the armies had also won over the
civilian population of the Empire the outcome would have been very different.
Gibbon's famous "triumph of barbarism and religion" remains what it has
always been: good Gibbon, but poor sociology, poor history.

The historian is always confronted with a post-mortem, and must always
wonder whether anything could have saved the patient. I think it clear that
what I have a bit loosely called the "civic virtues" — disciplined obedience to
law and authority, steady ways of ritual communion with one's fellows of the
common weal, self-identification of the individual with the society, expecta-
tion of the need for self-immolation in war, and, to use a modern instance not
misleading, a degree of willingness to put "guns before butter" — these civic

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virtues simply did not exist among the masses of the Roman Empire. Their
existence, often as strong sentiments, among the few who held the armies and
the civil services together was clearly not enough. Now Christianity was later
to give abundant proof that it is wholly congruous with a high degree of the
civic and military virtues; it is sufficient to mention the Teutonic Knights, the
Cromwellian New Model Army, the help Christianity has given — to the regret
of many Christians — to the modern nation-state in war.

But — and it is a big but — there is a whole side of Christianity that cannot
accept the civic and military virtues, as they get focused in this world, as
virtues at all. Some Christians at all times are fighting pacifists, rebels against
the political in-group, condemners of the great, the high, the mighty; some
Christians really do not believe in rendering anything at all to Caesar, for
they do not think there should be Caesars. We are here at a point far more
important than the old chestnut about the role of Christianity in the downfall
of the Roman Empire, a point to which we shall have to recur. Deepest of all
the problems and contradictions of historical Christianity is this basic, this
fundamental, this recurring — if in this extreme form heretical — Christian
motif: the world is bad, success in it is failure, satisfaction with any part of it
is the mark of the false, the spurious Christian. Church organization has
mined the Christianity of Jesus Christ, theology has f alsified the gospel faith,
spontaneous religious emotional life has been strait-jacketed by dogma, the
Letter again and again has killed — but the Spirit will not quiet down. For ye
have the Kierkegaards always with you.44

A Kierkegaard in a nineteenth-century Lutheran Church which was about
to blossom in the great German Empire had but little effect, was really no
more than a reminder that the martyr is indeed a witness. But in the early
years of Christianity the martyrs were rather more than forerunners of Exis-
tentialism. The lift of the otherworldly ideal was strong, so strong that though
we cannot "explain" the fall of the Roman Empire in Gibbon's terms, we can
and must note that Christianity contains in it a menace to all worldly empires.
Tamed, it is a marvelous discipline, a nurse of the civic virtues. But it is hard
to tame, hard to keep tamed. We must return again and again to this theme,

44 Many a great work has been built on one form or another of this Christian contrast
or tension, for instance, Harnack's great history of dogma. The reader will find in
Philip RiefFs excellent introduction to a modern reprinting of Harnack's own one-
volume summary of his life work, a very succinct statement of this conflict between
what I may perhaps too lightly call comfortable and uncomfortable Christianity in
history. Adolf Harnack, Outlines of the History of Dogma, intr. by Philip Rieff, Boston,
Beacon, 1957.

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A History of Western Morals

for the ethical implications of Christianity tamed are quite different from the
ethical implications of Christianity wild.

The other favorite freethinker's denigration, that the noble ethical prin-
ciples of Christianity had no effect whatever on human conduct in these first
four centuries of the Christian era, that men continued to murder, gamble,
whore, and generally conduct themselves in ways the freethinkers, the
Enlightened, in the modern West disapprove, deserves short shrift. If we must
reject the naive anti-intellectualist assertion that ethics have no effect on
conduct, we must reject — perhaps a little more forcefully and with a little
greater effort, for we are more conditioned to it — one sort of idealist's asser-
tion that ethics ought to be synonymous with conduct, and would be, if only
. . . well, usually because there are a few, just a few, villainous men, villain-
ous beliefs, villainous traditions, or villainous institutions about. I shall come
again to this difficult relation, difficult in reality as it is difficult in analysis,
between ethics and conduct. Here it should be sufficient to note that Victo-
rians like the freethinker Robertson gravely oversimplified the relation. In
very brief statement: Christian ethics set very high standards, not for a priv-
ileged few, such as the Aristotelian ethics very specifically did, but for the
many, for everyone. We should not be surprised that the many then and now
failed to live up to these standards. We should not be surprised that Chris-
tianity failed to suppress immediately the cruelty of the arena, the obscenity
of the stage, the fearful agon of imperial politics. Surely we should be sur-
prised only if the whole Roman world had suddenly started to live up in
practice to the Christian ethic.

The historian, at any rate the historian with sociological leanings, may
perhaps be permitted to ask whether a religion that does set high, in a sense
humanly unnatural, ethical standards achieves as good a level of conduct as
might a religion less exacting in ethics. This, and the closely related question
of the reality of moral "progress" or "evolution," we must ultimately come
back to, though here we may note that neither history nor sociology as social
or behavioral sciences are yet old enough, well-enough developed, to give us
good answers. Certainly they will not give us neat answers of the sort Robert-
son gave, for he and his fellows actually set their standards quite as high as
Christianity ever did — and proposed to realize them with no help from God,
nor even from that rather pale but not wholly ineffective substitute for God,
the Greek sense of the dangers of hubris, with help only from a highly intel-
lectualized "conscience."

Though Christianity sets very high ethical standards — go over once more

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The Beginnings of the Judaeo-Christian Tradition

the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount — those Christians
who have the cure of souls have usually tempered the wind to the shorn lamb.
At all times some Christians, and at some times a great many., are spurred —
we really do not know why, how, under what conditions — to attempt to
realize here on earth these lofty standards. But for the most part, the church
of Christ, and, after the separation of East and West, the churches, have acted
in accordance with the Christian estimate of human nature, which is not that
men are naturally good and/or reasonable, but that they are naturally sinful,
though through God's grace they may even here on earth conduct themselves
rather better than they would by nature. Oddly enough, this Christian esti-
mate of human nature was by no means inadequately stated by Alexander
Pope, who did much to help the rationalist Enlightenment on its way to its
heretical belief that men are by nature good.

Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer,
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thirds too little or too much:
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus'd,
Still by himself abus'd, or disabus'd.45

Such an estimate ought, in fact, to be acceptable even to the anti-Chris-
tians and the varieties of the Enlightened who hold that man is simply an
animal who has come out on top after a long course of organic evolution. This
animal is clearly not — or at any rate not yet — a social animal in the sense
that the bees and the ants are social animals. If we are as close to the higher
mammals as the materialist believes we are, then Christianity, seen simply in
naturalistic-historical perspective, is a magnificent achievement, and a highly
suitable faith for Homo sapiens — far better than an Oriental faith like Bud-
dhism, which will not in the end tolerate or accept the animal at all, far better
than the modern Western secular faiths like Marxism and anti-Christian
democratic nationalism, or cosmopolitanism, which hold that animal to be
already by nature tame, domesticated, a freethinking mammalian bee — a
paradox, in short, far more incredible than the Christian one.

45 Alexander Pope, An Epistle on Man, Epistle n, 3-14.

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The Middle Ages

THE MIDDLE AGES began, after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the
West, with several centuries of violence and primitive political and economic
life, centuries that used to be called the Dark Ages. They still look dark on
the record, though we note with less surprise than did our Victorian prede-
cessors that to its own contemporaries the record of these Dark Ages seemed
to reflect the obvious fact that God, the orthodox God of the Trinity, was in
His heaven and all was as right on His earth as He had intended. Gregory of
Tours, whose work is as much a locus classicus here as that of Tacitus for the
early Roman Empire, is certain that God was pleased with the Prankish
King Clovis; Gregory has, when he makes this remark, just finished recount-
ing a series of murders and betrayals by which Clovis did the work of the
Lord.1

Once again, the facts are substantially clear, and we need not spend much
time on them. Gregory's ample record of the struggle for power in Mero-
vingian Gaul — actually, already France — in the fifth and sixth centuries is
surely no unfair sampling; but almost any of the other chronicles of the time,
such as that in which the British monk Gildas recounts the horrid deeds of
the pagan Anglo-Saxons, or lives of missionary saints like Boniface which
reflect the conditions under which these devoted men labored, are full of deeds
— murders, poisonings, patricides, matricides, adulteries, incests, gluttony,
drunkenness — at least as bad as any in Western history.2 It is true that we are

1 Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, II, 29 (40).

2 The reader should go direct to Gregory; the rivalry of those two remarkable women

776

The Middle Ages

once more in the presence of the familiar and unavoidable fact that the wicked
deeds are interesting, dramatic, and get recorded; and we have also for this
period an added factor that makes for bias. All our records are in fact
monkish or priestly chronicles, written by firm, excited, uncritical believers
in an order of the universe that is not at all our world of science, and social
science. Do not ask semantic concern from Gregory and his fellows; do not
even expect them to worry over the distinction between the normal and the
abnormal in human nature.

Yet there is no need to question the facts established above. The conduct
of ruling classes in the West in these centuries is bad enough to need explain-
ing. That explanation can hardly for us lie in the nice rationalism of recent
generations. Lecky throws light on the nineteenth, but not on the sixth, cen-
tury when he writes :

It would be easy to cite other, though perhaps not quite such striking, instances of
the degree in which the moral judgements of this unhappy age were distorted
by superstition. Questions of orthodoxy, or questions of fasting, appeared to the
popular mind immeasurably more important than what we should now call the
fundamental principles of right and wrong.3

Lecky probably did actually believe that questions of orthodoxy were not
fundamental questions of right and wrong. The old and dangerous figure of
speech does better for us: these centuries are centuries of youth, immaturity,
crudeness, barbarism. However tricky this figure may be — the protagonists,
in spite of the suddenness and frequence of death by violence, in spite of
lamentable lack of hygienic measures, were not in years significantly younger
than in other societies — it seems unavoidable. These grown-up men and
women do behave with a child's bright violence, a child's lack of adult sense
of proportion, or merely sense of probable consequences, a child's cruelty
and love of being loved. And, like children, they are romantics, always to be
blest or damned. Like children, they know regrets, but not conscience.

The Victorians, who did not worry much about using figures of speech,
knew that these Germanic barbarians of the West in the Dark Ages were
children, that theirs was a "young" society. But since most Victorian writers
were victims of Wordsworth's ideas about childish innocence and virtue, and
since children like Clovis and Fredegonde behaved wickedly indeed, they

Fr6degonde and Brunehaut, as recorded in Books YE and Vffi, will leave him in no
doubt as to their wicked conduct. The morally outraged Lecky, History of European
Morals, Vol. n, pp. 235 ff., summarizes in detail.
3 History of European Morals, Vol. II, pp. 242-243.

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A History of Western Morals

faced a contradiction. Charles Kingsley, who, incredibly, was elected Regius
Professor of History at Cambridge, wrestled with the problem in his inaugural
lectures on the barbarian invasions. He felt as he was bound to, that the
Germans were blond and good, the Romans dark and bad. Of course, the
Romans corrupted the Germans, who were too inexperienced to withstand
temptations of the "troll garden" (the Empire!). Kingsley actually calls the
Germans children, "often very naughty children," but, of course, at bottom
virtuous and good muscular Christians.4

There remains for us the puzzle of Gregory's moral attitudes, a puzzle
we shall not solve, for if no man can know another among his contempo-
raries, the best of historical imaginations will not take him back to a man as
remote from us as was Gregory. Yet clearly Gregory, of an old and cultured
Gallo-Roman aristocratic family, was no barbarian. I do not think he was
consciously making what we call propaganda. When he wrote that Clovis was
doing the Lord's work, he was not urging an Orwellian "doublethink," nor
even quite the Nice Lie by which Plato sought to reconcile the inferior men of
brass to the rule of the golden philosopher-kings.5 He meant, if I may be
anachronistic, that Clovis, the heathen converted, not to the devilish heresy
of Arianism, but to God's own orthodoxy, was doing God's work in his, and
His, world — but not in the world of Mr. Gladstone and the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Gregory did not, could not, have expected
his Franks to conduct themselves as private persons other than as they did;
he did not condone the wickedness of high politics, any more than we condone
the weather. He accepted but did not necessarily like or approve evil, as we
accept the weather. He was still an early Christian, for whom this dark world
is but an entrance to another, much better, or much worse; and the neces-
sary way to the better world, the way people ought to go, is through Christian
orthodoxy. Gregory did not say that murder, betrayal, adultery are good;
insofar as a priest he exercised cure of souls, he most certainly held such con-
duct up as sin. What he did say was that the victory of the Roman Catholic
Church here on earth is the great good.6

The medieval man was bound to feel and classify as normal in fact a kind

4 See my English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century, London, Benn, 1933,
p. 128.

5 The Republic of Plato, trans, by A. D. Lindsay, London, Dent, 1948, pp. 99-103.

6 1 am aware that this argument is bound to seem casuistical to most twentieth-century
Americans of good will; but it seems casuistical basically because, as heirs of the En-
lightenment, we expect so much better conduct from everybody — and especially from
our rulers.

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The Middle Ages

of melodramatic violence that we, in spite of the tabloids, in spite of our
own prophets of doom, in spite of the H-bomb, are at heart convinced is
abnormal, a preventable, curable, moral delinquency. Huizinga has put it
well, not only for these early years, but for the whole of the Middle Ages,
that most Faustian time:

So violent and motley was life, that it bore the mixed smell of blood and of roses.
The men of that time always oscillate between the fear of hell and the most naive
joy, between cruelty and tenderness, between harsh asceticism and insane attach-
ment to the delights of this world, between hatred and goodness, always running
to extremes.7

Even if you find the explanation of figurative youthfulness in a society
inadequate, the facts are there. Not the least conspicuous of the extremes of
this society is the width of the gap between the ideal and the real, between
profession and performance, the gap everyone notes in Gregory's lying mur-
derer Clovis, the favorite of the God of Moses and Isaiah, the God who had
sent his only begotten Son to redeem us all.

Men in the Dark Ages, and to a degree in the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, too, faced a life of insecurity everywhere — an economic order
still at the mercy of drought, flood, inadequate transportation, inadequate
finance, a political order that could not administer effectively any large ter-
ritory— with the economic consequence that markets, too, were small and
"inefficient" — a moral order that in the face of violence and insecurity did
not, could not, expect men to be sober, steady, cautious, restrained, to have,
in short, what I have called for the Romans at their best the "civic virtues."
As the Western world grew into modernity, political order and some of the
civic virtues followed; but the haunting fear of both this world and the next
never quite left medieval men, and it gave their lives a tone of desperation —
not for the most part Thoreauvian quiet desperation — which later historians
in their own security have been able to find romantic, heroic, fascinating in
vicarious experience.

Some mark of this excess of excessiveness, then, remains throughout the
Middle Ages; but the naivete of these early years is lost. It is a grave mistake
to regard the Middle Ages as a perpetual childhood. Most of what the later
medieval centuries were to fashion into the complex and subtle moral ideals
of the saint and the knight have their immediate origins in this crudely violent
society of the Dark Ages. At the very least, these centuries are the matrix
out of which came the great heroes, the great achievements, of the High
7 J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, p. 18.

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A History of Western Morals

Middle Ages. They are to the High Middle Ages what the days of Moses were
to the Jews, the days of Achilles to the Greeks. But not even the best known
and most important of all these sources, the epic poem of the Chanson de
Roland, took on its transmitted form this early. For us, certainly, what the
poets later made of Charlemagne is more important than what contemporaries
like his biographer Einhard made of him. What the twelfth and the thirteenth
centuries were to make into the academic culture of the Middle Ages is more
important than the rather pathetic "Carolingian Renaissance" in which the
clerics staged the first major rally of learning since the breakdown of the fifth
century. We may then proceed directly to the developed ideals of the knight
and the saint.

ii

At the outset we run into a difficulty that can be no more than acknowledged.
The Middle Ages regarded both the knight and the saint as complementary
facets of a single ideal, the Christian; both were needed servants of God and of
His order on earth. Since the spirit is in Christian formal belief loftier than
the noblest flesh, the saint, if there must be a ranking, comes before the knight.
The first estate of the medieval assemblies was not the nobility, but the clergy.
Now such, if we will be moderately honest, is by no means our ranking today.
We not only put the warrior, the politician, the judge, the captain of industry,
the magician of science well ahead of the man of God, but we suspect that the
Middle Ages did not really put the spiritual first, did not really rank the priest
ahead of the noble. Yet this suspicion of ours is unjust, and leads us astray.
We shall not get far inside the men of the Middle Ages unless we recognize
that they "believed in" their ideal representation of the universe in a way we
can hardly believe in ours, unless we are better Christians or more naive
materialists than most of us are. The medieval man knew that spirit primes
matter; he did not, of course, expect the spiritual as a rule to be crowned with
material success here on earth — that would indeed have been a transvaluation
of values in his eyes. But he was no hypocrite; he knew that in the next world
God would surely set matters right.

To the knight, then, is, in theory, assigned the task of keeping this earthly
social frame we must inhabit in good order. He is soldier, landlord, governor,
fitting neatly into a hierarchy that reaches its top in kings and in the emperor,
Western successors of the Caesars. And in fact the knight is the man who gets
things done at the top, the member of what is until fairly late in the Middle

180

The Middle Ages

Ages a comparatively homogeneous ruling class. The priest, who alone at first
could read, was needed in lay affairs from the start, for he alone could keep
records; and the beginnings of the lawyer, the civil administrator, the entre-
preneurial merchant, even of the efficient professional physician, go farther
back than we used to think. Still, it is substantially true that the feudal nobility
are the representative figures of the lay vita activa right up to that seedbed
of our times, the fourteenth century.8

Now the knight was first of all a fighter. He was trained from childhood in
the skills, in those days before gunpowder most exacting athletic skills, neces-
sary to the fighter on horseback. It was, however, a training in one important
respect excessively individuaEstic, even anarchic. The medieval knight was
by no means wholly undisciplined; the physical rigors he had to live through
and the technical skills he had to acquire involved hard practice and much
self-denial. Moreover, the final form of Christian culture to which he was
subjected, itself the forerunner of the duty-filled education of the Western
resident country nobility of early modern times, was very far from irrespon-
sible anarchism. Yet the knight at arms was never trained to fight in close and
disciplined battle order; he was at the opposite pole from the Spartan hoplite,
trained to perfectly timed shield-to-shield dressing with his fellows in the line
of battle. The knight was never really melted into the soldier; he always stood
out.

He stood out so much that in fact he is one of the prime exemplars of
that eternal theme in Western moral history, the agonistic competition. The
knight seems at least as determined to excel as ever the Homeric hero was.
His supreme virtue is honor; and though at its best the concept of honor is
much more than this, it has always an element we nowadays cheapen in the
term "face." Honor consists in being honored, honored by coming out on top
and being recognized in that position. It seems odd now that anyone should
have believed that the individual in the Middle Ages did not stand out as an
individual, that this was an age of collective effort and submergence of the
ego (in the old use, not the Freudian one, of the word) in some noble com-
mon thing.

The Middle Ages did not have the vulgar word "publicity," but they had

8 1 cannot begin to discuss the socio-economic aspects of medieval culture in a book of
this sort. The reader who wishes to refresh himself in these matters can start with some
of the books suggested on pp. 30-31 of Brinton, Christopher, and Wolff, Modern Civili-
zation, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1957. For the complete beginner, Will
Durant's The Age of Faith is recommended; also W. C. Bark, Origins of the Medieval
World, Stanford University Press, 1958.

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A History of Western Morals

exactly what that word means. Here is Jean Froissart quoting a feudal lord
setting the conditions of one of those public-private combats of knights, the
"combat des Trentes," that unfortunately did not settle the business of war
even then: "And let us right there try ourselves and do so much that people
will speak of it in future times in halls, in palaces, in public places and else-
where throughout the world."9 But the point hardly needs driving home. The
thirst for glory was surely a medieval thirst. It is familiar enough in silly
forms, as in the career of a Richard Coeur de Lion. But do not be misled by
our modern superstition that the successful are above illusions. Richard's
hard-bitten and practical rival Philip Augustus of France was also a knightly
type; his gloire was at least as far from Christ's as was Richard's.

But the knight was a Christian. Surely was not the bitter competitiveness
of the old male warrior society somewhat softened over the old Homeric
standards? It was unquestionably so modified. In the first place, the code
insisted on gentleness toward women and children, respect for the clergy,
and for the masses at least some protection, exemption from the actual pres-
sures of combat. If, in the second place, the code was, especially in respect
to treatment of social inferiors, often violated, if the knight in a temper was
capable of shocking cruelties even toward the weak, let alone toward a con-
quered foe, he was also subject to painful and exceedingly real bouts of
conscience-stricken horror when he woke to what he had done. As I wish
to keep insisting, he did believe in his religion, he did know right from wrong,
and he knew, in a way the first Prankish warriors did not, that his God pun-
ished sin. This knowledge did not keep him from sin, but it did insure, the
clergy aiding, frequent and sometimes spectacular repentance. The knight
who had had a beaten enemy castrated in a fit of anger might take up the cross
in penance, or make some religious endowment, or even do something for the
family of the ruined man.10

The code, moreover, by no means existed solely in the breach. There were
knights of impeccable physical prowess who nonetheless deserve that then-new
word "gentleman"; they were gentle, not harsh, not forever challenging. The

9 "Et la endroit nous esprouvons, et faisons tout que on en parle ou tamps a venir, en
sales, en palais, en plaches et en aultres lieus par le monde." Oeuvres de Froissart, ed.
Kervyn de Lettenhove, Brussels, 1867-1877, Vol. V, p. 292. Note that these knights want
admiration not only from their peer groups, but from the "public."
10 1 know of no single work in which this phase of the knightly soul, this more than
black-and-white contrast between shocking cruelty and deeply felt repentance is better
brought out than in Zo6 Oldenbourg's admirable historical novel The World Is Not
Enough, New York, Pantheon, 1955. The original French has the title Argile (clay).

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The Middle Ages

knight of Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" has become a set example, but he is real
enough. Best of all, perhaps, is the actual Jean de Joinville, whose memoirs are
one of the most valuable of medieval documents. Joinville was devoted to his
king, the Louis of France who became St. Louis. He followed the king on his
futile and outdated crusade and tells simply and quite uncritically the story
of these bungled wars. He does not seem at all aware that they were bungled,
at all aware that the French feudal nobility were an ill-disciplined, prideful,
and inefficient set of fighting men. But the knightly ideal has — and this is
important — very little place for the critical intellect. The normal dose of
neurotic complaining, which goes with the knightly real life as with all forms
of real life, had to be rather severely repressed, one guesses, with some of
these gentlemen, and crops up most obviously in their bouts with their con-
science, their concern with their honor, and, as we shall shortly see, in their
extraordinary later preoccupation with courtly love. We are today so thor-
oughly used to associating brightness with complaining that a Joinville, who
never complains about the structure of his society, the policies of his king,
the state of the universe, seems not quite bright. Clearly he was by no means
unintelligent; he managed his own affairs well, he wrote simply and clearly,
and he knew his own limitations.

It must not be assumed that the medieval knightly ideal, to say nothing of
knightly practice, was a static one. Over six or seven centuries from Caro-
lingian times there is a clear process of growth, and of decline or corruption.
That noble document of the early years the Chanson de Roland, a recited
epic poem of one of Charlemagne's expeditions against the Moslems in Spain,
is no contemporaneous document. It represents a long line of professional
troubadours or minstrels who worked over traditional materials, and it is
surely not without a touch of deliberate "primitivism." The paladins seem
so noble, so simple, so innocent, so athletic, so damned knightly that they
can hardly have been real. They clearly live by violence, but it is a nice clean
violence, with no hint whatever of matters later to be associated with the name
of the Marquis de Sade. They do God's work against the infidel, but again
with no worries, and certainly with no trace of theological hatred. They hold
their honor very dear indeed, far dearer than success, especially military
success. They are lions, in fact, with no fox in them.

As in Western Europe from the eleventh century on all the material
indexes start on upward, as the self-sufficient feudal-manorial society grad-
ually turns into a modern capitalist society, as the modern state, in fact, takes
shape, lawyers, bankers, accountants, all sorts of professionals begin to take

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A History of Western Morals

over the real work of running things; rather soon, indeed, in view of the
modern liberal's notion that the soldier is particularly stupid and unenter-
prising, the professionals take over even the business of war. The individual
knight could, and did, sometimes adapt himself to these changes, especially
in Great Britain and in the Low Countries. Still, the class of knights as a whole
was left with nothing like enough to do and with a fine impractical set of ideals
as to how to do it. I am here obliged to scamp a good deal of importance to the
social and economic historian, but the upshot of a process that begins to be
noticeable as far back as the thirteenth, "greatest of centuries," is the creation
of a privileged class molded and trained for an occupation and status that had
in reality ceased to exist — that of feudal seigneur. But the class continued to
enjoy its privileges; and it made use of its abundant leisure to push the knightly
ideal into two related extravagances, the combat of the tourney and courtly
love.

Individual combat between champions goes back to the very beginnings
of knighthood in the Dark Ages. A perhaps too optimistic or intellectualist
sociological concept suggests that in their origins all institutions arise to fill a
need, and at first do fill it well enough. At any rate, it can be argued that where
these fights were struggles between champions of given sides in a real conflict,
they were socially useful. Intellectually, once you accept the premises they
were based on, trial by combat and even trial by ordeal are nice, clean-cut
methods of deciding disputes among us poor fallible humans. If God directly
and immediately and constantly intervenes in the daily happenings of the
world, then obviously he does decide which of two fairly matched knights
wins in a judicial combat, and he decides it justly.11

Even at the beginning, these knightly combats were in part agonistic sport
as well as private war or a method of judicial decision and a necessary train-
ing for the wider actual battlefield. As true law courts, in our sense, grew up,
as with the Hundred Years' War vulgar infantry began the long process of
making war serious and deadly once more for the many, these joustings
came to be little more than ostentatious mock war, an organized aristocratic
sport. As time went on the rules and conventions of the jousting got more and
more complex, the armor got more complete, more rhinoceros-like, and the
sport got somewhat less dangerous to life and limb, though to the very end it

n God himself, of course, would not approve a hopelessly unequal combat, as, for in-
stance, between a completely inexperienced fighter and a tried and mature champion, or
as between a heavyweight and a flyweight

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The Middle Ages

must have taken great courage to run full tilt into an oncoming opponent.
These tourneys, as might be expected, exhibit full cultural lag, and survive
well into the Renaissance. By a nice irony, the Cromwell family owed at least
as much to the jousting prowess of Sir Richard Cromwell, who got himself
knighted for his victories by Henry VIE, as to Richard's Uncle Thomas, the
able, realistic, unscrupulous, and "modern" liquidator of monastic wealth.12

The knight in these tourneys, it is well known, was fighting for his lady
love. We come now to a much more important phase of the late Middle Ages
than the sport of jousting. Courtly love has an elaborate and, unless you are
prepared for it, fantastically unreal literature, but it is much more than a
phase of literary history. Courtly love is an ethics, a religion, an obsession.
It is to the historian of Western morals one of those exceptional developments,
one of those aberrations, in this one respect analogous to Greek pederasty, in
which the physical facts of sex, complicated enough in themselves, get blown
up into something huge, something that comes to take up the whole of living.
Unlike Greek pederasty, however, courtly love is still with us, transmuted,
popularized, seized upon by the octopus we call publicity, so altered that the
noble lords and ladies who once pursued it would hardly recognize it. But
Isolde still dies her love-death — and not only on the operatic stage.

We must have a brief preliminary here. Perhaps nowhere does our con-
temporary reluctance to come out solidly with a neat formula of separation
between normal and abnormal show up so often as in the matter of sex. Yet
the journalist-psychologist formula that "We are all abnormal, therefore we
are all normal" is surely great nonsense. Ethics and conduct in the field of
sex relations are indeed most varied; study of non-Western cultures has
driven this home firmly. Even in the West, there is, so to speak, no compact
norm, certainly not what the Victorians thought of as a norm. Still, there is
over the centuries a kind of wide zone of normality, a zone in which, above
all, matters sexual do not fully occupy every moment of waking and sleeping,
even for those privileged few who are not obliged to work for a living, a zone
in which matters sexual are not thoroughly mixed with matters philosophical,
religious, cosmological. In short, medieval courtly love is an aberration.
Whether its modern variants, literary romantic love, Hollywood love, or any
other mass-produced love, are aberrations is another, more difficult question.

The literaiy origins of courtly love lie in the Mediterranean, and specif-
ic Maurice Ashley, The Greatness of Oliver Cromwell, New York, Macmillan, 1958,
p. 27.

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ically in the troubadours who sang in Provencal from the twelfth century on.13
There are, no doubt, deeper origins in Greek and Roman culture, for these
admirable pagans clearly did not quite take sex in their stride. Aphrodite and
Eros are an uncomfortable pair, and their suppression by Christianity was
quite incomplete. Yet, the rise of the cult of love and of the woman — the
Woman — must have had deep roots in the whole situation of the knightly
class: its heritage of excessive masculinity, its counteracting inheritance of
Christian ideas of love and gentleness (remember, ideas do have conse-
quences, if not always obviously logical ones), its exasperations, frustrations,
and, above all, its increasing divorce from the real work, the real rewards, of
this world. These gentlemen needed the aid and comfort the ewig weiblfche,
the Woman, can always bring. Fortunately, men can always invent her in
their hour of need*

The church found it useful, and probably, so great was the fashionable
rage, necessary to adapt the Woman to its needs. Hence the cult of the Virgin,
which, in spite of all the talk about a syncretic Isis and Earth Mother, is
much more a medieval phenomenon than one of early Christianity. And as
the Virgin of common conventional Christianity, the Woman was indeed
tamed, disciplined, caught in the unconstricting net of common sense, so that
she became almost the pure consolation that the unhappy Henry Adams
writes of so warmly — for an Adams — in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres.
Our Lady, duly rendered orthodox, was a symbol quite as devoid of the meta-
erotic complications we all know so well nowadays as of the more rugged
sexuality of the driving flesh. She remains, in spite of Protestant and free-
thinking reproaches, a triumph of priestly wisdom, well understood of the
people.

Not so the Woman of the troubadours. Through whole cycles of trans-
muted legends, of which the Arthurian cycle, and, within that, the Tristan
theme, can be fairly singled out as central, she made her devastating way,
sometimes femme fatale, la belle dame sans merci, Isolde of the White Hands,
Laura or Beatrice, in the end pure longing, pure swooning, pure death.

13 Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, p. 75. This is a book indispensable
for the student of the theme. The American reader must not be put off by M. de Rouge-
monfs cleverness; this is a serious scholarly work, though admirably compressed. M.
de Rougemont's ingeniously established link between the Cathari of the suppressed
Albigensian heresy and the troubadours is not essential to the rest of his book. It is one
of those interesting scholar's affiliations of ideas, and by no means implausible; but I
suspect there is more in the developed Tristan myth, the love of love, than a Mani-
chaean revenge on Christian monism. So, to be fair, does M. de Rougemont

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In dem wogenden Schwall,
in dem tonenden Schall,
in des Welt-Athems
wehendem All —
ertrinken —
versinken —
unbewusst —
hochste Lust.1*

It was a twisting and devious way, above all — and this is of much importance
— a way that hardly ever touched, and then never for long, the bedroom. We
are, of course, dealing with very subtle matters. It is crude to say that courtly
love is a deliberate playing with fire, but the fine old cliche has its uses. One
suspects that the fire was rarely a great consuming conflagration. The chem-
istry of human sex has pretty unheroic limits, as compared with the capacity
of the human soul for wanting something more.

It is not that courtly love was usually, or even often, of the kind sometimes
miscalled "platonic." By a firm convention among the literary, it could not
possibly be love between man and wife. It could not by an even more obvious
convention — without which, no poem — run smoothly. It had to confront and
overcome obstacle after obstacle, the more unlikely, the more unnecessary
the obstacle, the better; it had, to paraphrase the familiar misquotation from
Tertullian, to go on the principle of amo, quia absurdum. One may distin-
guish two lines of development of the tradition, both present in the Roman de
la Rose, a thirteenth-century poem put together from the work of two quite
separate and different poets, Guillaume de Lorris, of the first half of the cen-
tury, Jean de Meung, of the second half. The Lorris part is all allegory, a

14 These are Isolde's last words. They are quite untranslatable — thank God — into so
pedestrian a language as my English. The "Authentic libretto" of Wagner's opera as
published by Crown Publishers, New York, 1938, makes the following inglorious at-
tempt (p. 347) :

In the breezes around,
in the harmony sound
in the world's driving
whirlwind be drown'd —
and sinking,
be drinking —
in a kiss,
highest bliss!

Our American insistence on having these operas in the original tongue is not mere
social snobbery, nor even realistic concession to the need of hiring German singers.
Isolde's last, last word, "Lust," is certainly not "bliss"; I suggest, in our own undignified
American, that "superlonging" comes close.

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sort of symbolic and almost, but not quite, platonic investment of a lady
whose virtue is both obstacle and reward. The part contributed by Jean de
Meung is more clearly in what Americans thir>Tc of as the Gallic tradition; the
language is the language of sensual enjoyment, and the denouement is not at
all uncertain or allegorical.

As M. de Rougemont points out, these two lines run on well into modern
times, the first or meta-erotic one through Dante and Petrarch to Rousseau's
Nouvelle Heloise and even to the modern French novel of love, which until
very recently was most cerebral, if not precisely spiritual, and by no means
"broad" or naturalistic in its details; the second or realistic one through "the
lower levels of French literature — to gauloiserie and the schools of broad
Gallic jokes, to controversial rationalism, and to a curiously exacerbated
misogyny, naturalism, and man's reduction to sex."15

For the moralist, both strains have this in common, that they represent
a turning inward to introspection, a spiritualization or a materialization, of
the old agonistic competitive drive, and this precisely in a society originally
most masculine, soldierly, extraverted. Courtly love, however, by no means
softened or extinguished the bitterness of the agon. The Woman in this tradi-
tion is far from the Virgin of Christianity, however much the poets of the
Middle Ages may confuse them at times. There is no doubt that over the
medieval centuries courtly love and its accompaniments did bring to the
European nobility refinements of manners, a kind of civility that was by no
means without its value as a moral instrument. But in the sense I have sought
in the previous chapter to define one essential moral strain of Christianity —
the disciplining of human competitiveness into co-operation, spiritually the
extinction of pride and the exaltation of humility — courtly love brought no
help to Christianity, but, rather, set itself up against Christianity. Courtly love
at the least sublimated was a sport in which there was a victor and a loser; at
its most sublimated it was a series of mutual stimulations to a perpetual
longing for more, more of something — more, certainly, of suffering.

E perche 'I mio marfir non giunga a riva
Mille volte il di moro e mille nasco.16

Tristan and Isolde were, after all, adulterers. The device of the love potion

is De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, p. 176. Like all such dualisms, this is an
imperfect one in face of the complexities of human nature. Is there a scientist's concern
with sex that fits neither category?

ie petrarch, Sonnet CLXIV (164). Literally, "And since my martyrdom does not come
to end, I die a thousand times each day, am born a thousand."

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The Middle Ages

and Brangane's fatal error seems just that — a literary device, and no reflec-
tion of a tragic destiny or necessity. Or, if the poets were appealing to a pagan
concept of necessity, they were thereby underlining their heresy. In Christian
terms, the lovers were sinners who never did repent sincerely, who relapsed,
and ended in a most un-Christian, but perhaps quite Freudian, fulfillment of
a death wish.

It would be unfair to the medieval knightly ideal to dismiss it with these
perversions of the jousting tourney and the tradition of courtly love. At its
best and simplest it deserves high rank among the working ideals of this im-
perfect world. It has suffered from the praises of the literary romantics of the
school of when-knighthood-was-in-flower, has, like other phases of medieval
culture, been used as a stick to beat the present with. Most of its central
concepts as summarized in the word "chivalry" run contrary to the deep egali-
tarianism of our own day. But it was of remarkable civilizing power. Dip, if
only briefly, into Gregory of Tours and then into Joinville, seven centuries
later. Something has happened that one is almost tempted to call moral
progress.

Ill

The saint is the Christian hero. His life, too, is an agon, for the church accepts
as real and important this world of change and struggle. The saint's struggle
is not with his fellow men but with evil; his victory is not an athletic or artistic
or intellectual first, but a conquest of evil in himself and in others. His glory
is not a personal glory. His victories are God's, for the saint is always what
the pristine sense of "martyr" implies, a witness, a living evidence, of the
grace of God, of God's governance of the universe, which is not to be proved
or witnessed by ordinary naturalistic means as in law, politics, or natural
science.17

So much for the ideal. The real here is not so much spotted, not so much
in obvious contradiction with the ideal, as richer in concrete detail, more
varied, more colorful. There are many saints from the earliest centuries about
whom in a naturalistic-historical sense we know almost nothing at all reliable;
such lives as we do have are no more than documents for social and intel-

1T "Saint'* is for the sacramental Christian churches, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox,
Anglican, and the like a word with an exact meaning. It refers to what one may call a
status; in this sense even evangelical Protestants are no longer as afraid of it as they
were. "Saint" and "saintly" have also loose vulgar uses as no more than emphatic ways
of saying "good" or "holy," but I have the impression that this loose usage is not, in
fact, very common. As words go in ordinary discourse, "saint" is a precise one.

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A History of Western Morals

lectual history, full of miracles, sufferings, echoes from the primitive past. But
of the saints real to us, and to come down no further than the High Middle
Ages, a sampling must show a wide range of human personality, of role, even
of Weltanschauung. From Paul himself through Jerome, Augustine, Gregory
the Great, Boniface, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas a
Becket, Francis of Assisi, Dominic, Bonaventura, Louis of France, to take
only familiar names, the range is wide indeed.

No polar dualism will work, even for these few. The contrast, suggested
by the vocabulary of the Middle Ages themselves, between the vita activa and
the vita contemplativa, will not stand up, even if it is interpreted not so much
in terms of role as in terms of temperament, disposition, philosophy. St. Paul,
as would be clear had we no more than his letters to the Corinthians, was a
gifted organizer and Administrator. But those words to an American hardly
suggest the mystic, the eloquent preacher, the seeker — and Paul was all of
these, and, perhaps more than these flat words suggest, a troubled soul. This
list is full of great men of action, men who guided the church in this world
with such skill that in the High Middle Ages it was able to challenge for a
time, politically, and in this world, all political organizations in the West.
Gregory simply as a lay ruler would have won from history his title of "the
Great." Bonaventura must figure in any history of Christian mysticism, yet
this Franciscan played an important part in the organization of his order and
belongs also to ecclesiastical history in its narrow sense. Bernard of Clairvaux
disliked intellectual reformers such as Abelard and fought them; he himself
was an emotional reformer, one who has left a great mark on the history of
monasticism.

There is no doubt a clear limit toward the pole of practical administrative
skills and successes. The Christian saint as an ideal, and to an extraordinary
extent in reality, is never merely a this-worldly manipulator of men and things.
Our vocabulary of cliches — always useful to historians — lets us talk about
captains of industry, indeed, about Napoleons of industry, but never about
saints of industry. The anti-Christian, or merely the anti-medievalist, will
reply that of course the respectability and prestige of the church prevents any
such picturesque and fruitful comparison entering into our common lan-
guage. This is no doubt true, and hardly a discredit to the church, but it does
not exhaust the meaning of the facts. The Christian saint, no matter how well
he has done his work in this world, has by his life given evidence that to him
this world is not enough.

But is the other one? It seems clear that the saint shares often a great

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deal of the primitive Christian revulsion from, emotional rejection of, hatred
for, this world of eating, drinking, lusting, idling, bickering, damaging, and
conforming. Yes, you may pursue these dull formulas on until you get to the
realities of madness and the Freudian death wish. There is all this in Chris-
tianity, because there is all this in us Westerners. The Christian church and
after Luther, in the long run, most of the churches have, unlike many of the
surrogate secular churches of the Enlightenment, recognized that this dark,
rebellious, impatient lusting after an end to lusting is there, in us, not to be
denied but to be controlled, tamed, disciplined, perhaps even to be trans-
muted into a kind of conformity.

The church, in short, has had its troubles with the mystic vein in the
Christian heritage. With the quieter, pietistic sort of mysticism the church has
been successful indeed. There is too much historical uncertainty about the life
and personality of Thomas Hammerken, known as Thomas a Kempis, and
about the authorship of the Imitation of Christ for canonization of the per-
son; but if it were possible to canonize a book, outside of the Bible, the
Imitation of Christ would have been canonized long ago. Here the prospect
of another world is a consolation and a steadying support in this one, no
goad to rebellion, no stimulant to the passions. The outsider cannot be so
sure about those two Spanish mystics of the Catholic Reformation, St. Theresa
and St. John of the Cross. Their passions look dangerously clinical, and most
inadequately sublimated, from the point of view of quiet, conforming Chris-
tianity. The church has accepted as saints some of the earlier German ladies,
such as Elizabeth of Hungary, whose mystic exaltation looks from this dis-
tance quite compatible with the sobrieties. It has always had its doubts, how-
ever, about Meister Eckhart, who, already in the fourteenth century, seems
too German to be true:

God is all things; all things are God. The Father begets me, his son, without
cease. I say more: he begets in me himself, and in himself me. The eye with which
I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. ... My eye and God's eye
are one eye.18

Pantheism must always get short shrift from orthodox theology, for it destroys
the whole central drama of Christ's epiphany, to say nothing of what I have
called the minimal moral puritanism of Christianity. Aggressive, mystical
pantheism like that of Meister Eckhart is a dangerous invitation to rebellion.
The Germans are no doubt quite justified in regarding these German and

*8 Quoted from Kuno Francke, A History of German Literature as Determined by
Social Forces, New York, Holt, 1903, p. 1 10.

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Dutch mystics of the late Middle Ages as precursors of their Reformation, if
not of Kant and HegeL

St. Francis of Assisi sets the problem of the saint and conformity in its
sharpest focus. His life, after his conversion in the midst of a youth of worldly
pleasure, seems to catch once more that note of primitive Christianity so
difficult for most of us, touched as we are by the natural science, the rational-
ism, the liberalism, the comforts, and the sentimentalities of the modern
world, to hear at all. Francis, it is often said, really did seek to imitate
Christ, to relive the life of Christ on earth, but, do not forget, the Christ who
said, "There be some of them that stand here, which shall in no wise taste of
death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom." There is in Francis
more than a touch of the chiliast To him the imitation of Christ was not
gentle, sober, polite conformity to the ritual, the decencies, the conventions
of a church that had long since accepted this world as not to be greatly
changed. It was perhaps not quite imitation of the angry Christ who over-
threw the tables of the money-changers in the temple; it was not quite imita-
tion of the Christ who delivered to the multitude in Jerusalem that sermon —
fit and proper foil to the Sermon on the Mount — in which there resounds the
most Christian curse "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!"19
Francis is nearer the Christ of the marriage of Cana, of the woman taken in
adultery, of the advice to the young man who had great possessions that he
sell all and give it to the poor.20 But the love Francis preached and practiced
was not the modern humanitarian's desire that we should all be comfortable
and therefore good here on earth. There is in Francis, though the modern
sentimentalist must fail to see it, the vein of iron that runs through all Chris-
tianity, at least until modern times, a vein that has sources in the Stoa as well
as in Sinai. Franciscan poverty was not a form of enjoyment, not even, thougji
the doubter with a smack of psychology will continue to doubt, a perverse
and masochistic form of enjoyment. Francis was in fact a very medieval man,
one very hard for a modern to understand.

Poverty was to the first Franciscans not merely abstention from the com-
forts and prestige and all the rest that goes with what we call wealth; it meant
also abstention from the kind of possessions Francis abhorred at least as much
as wealth, that is, learning, theological skills, all the possessions of the intel-
lect One suspects that Francis himself had he lived would have been even
more indignant at the reputation of his order for learning than at its great

19 Matthew 21: 12; 23: 13 ff.

20 John 2:1; 8:3; Matthew 19:21.

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The Middle Ages

material wealth, both achieved in a short generation after the saint's death.
The wealth was, after all, a corporate wealth, and, as individuals, members
of the mendicant orders did not often fall into worldly self-indulgence, as had
some of the earlier monks; but the reputation of a Robert Grosseteste or of
his pupil Roger Bacon, both great scholars, both precursors of modern natural
science, was an individual reputation.

Perhaps a profounder and more useful polarity in medieval sainfliness
than that of action and contemplation would be one between the intellectual
and the anti-intellectual. The two terms are strained by contemporary abuse;
and they are, of course, exceedingly imprecise. But they will do as well as
any to indicate the gap between a Thomas Aquinas or a Bonaventura on one
hand and a Bernard or a Francis on the other. There is a strain in Christianity,
clear in much of what our sources tell us of Christ himself, that distrusts the
ratiocinative, analytical, organizing, conforming, and also disturbing, but
wrongly, devilishly, disturbing intellect. The Christian of this strain distrusts
the intellect as the basic seducer, the serpent in Eden, the goad to a flesh that
might otherwise accept peace. This strain is clear in medieval Christianity,
clearest of all in the greatest of its saints, Francis of Assisi.

The most striking, and to some no doubt most painful, of the contradic-
tions of sainfliness lies in the fact the living saint is almost always a dis-
turber, who disturbs the comfortable, well-behaved, in our ordinary sense of
words by no means wicked or perverse, conformist; and the dead saint, duly
canonized, is taken up into the very order of imperfection his life had pro-
tested against. You may soften the contradiction, if your temperament permits
you to do so, by insisting that the saint's own real life is such that even his least
worthy worshiper cannot be wholly untouched by this holiness, this leaven.
But I do not thinV you can challenge the fact that the living saint is no merely
conventionally good man, no humanitarian reformer, no "liberal" complainer,
not even a good practicing Christian, but a man who will not have this world
at all at the price most of us pay for our share of it.

IV

The note of distrust of the conclusions arrived at by the established, conform-
ing mind is also clear in the less heroic field of ordinary medieval ethics. In
this age of extremes one would expect to find examples of return to primitive
simplicities, dislike of the learned, dislike of those in power, dislike of wealth
and privilege; and so one does. The rebellions and the heresies from the tenth

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century on, from the Pataria through the Waldensians and the Albigensians
to the revolting peasants of the later Middle Ages, within the church itself
in the waves of reform from Cluny to the coming of the friars — all these lively
conflicts are reflected in the political and ethical theory of the time. The range
of this writing is great, and some of it sounds like a muted version of the great
religious repudiation of this pharisaical world we have heard before.

But one may risk a generalization for the High Middle Ages: the normal
ethical tone is not set by the rebel, but by the conformist; it is not an ethics
that appeals to the heart against the head, but quite the opposite, a very
rationalist ethics; it is not heaven-storming, but moderately and modestly
worldly; it is, substantially, the ethics expounded for the learned by Thomas
Aquinas, and brought to the many from countless pulpits and confessionals
and even in the sculptures and stained glass of the churches, and to a degree
in the written word, for the High Middle Ages were not by any means wholly
illiterate outside the clergy.

We can here touch but very generally on this standard medieval Christian
ethics. But first of all we must note that it is an ethics centered on a Christian
cosmology and theology as yet untouched by natural science, still strong in
its literal theism. God was so real to the medieval man that, if the word could
be stripped of its many unfavorable connotations, one would have to say that
his was an anthropomorphic God. Here, for instance, is Aquinas himself:

If we compare murder and blasphemy as regards the objects of those sins, it is
clear that blasphemy, which is a sin committed directly against God, is more
grave than murder, which is a sin against one's neighbour. On the other hand, if
we compare them in respect of the harm wrought by them, murder is the graver
sin, for murder does more harm to one's neighbour, than blasphemy does to God.
Since, however, the gravity of a sin depends on the intention of the evil will,
rather than on the effect of the deed, as was shown above (I.-IL, Q. LXXIIL,
A.8), it follows that, as the blasphemer intends to do harm to God's honour,
absolutely speaking, he sins more grievously than the murderer. Nevertheless
murder takes precedence, as to punishment, among sins committed against our
neighbour.

This sounds strange, for our own rationalism would put God far above so
human a concern as honor.21

But do not be put off by such instances. If you turn to Aquinas on private

21 St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.2.13.3. 1 quote this largely for the sake of
the thoroughly medieval phrase "God's honour," but the whole passage is a fine example
of Aquinas at his most Whiggish. You do on this earth have to crack down harder on
murder than on blasphemy.

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The Middle Ages

property, he will surely not sound at all strange. Private property, he finds, is
not originally an institution of natural law, but has been added to natural law
by human reason working on the materials given by long experience of human
society. It is justified by its utility; a person will take care of his own in a way
he will not take care of things not his own — this is just a fact. Such ownership
is subject of course to Christian duties of charity; private property must be
in part shared property.22 And so throughout, Aquinas is always sweetly
reasonable, always willing to compromise where compromise seems to him
required by nature and human nature, never, strangely enough in a medieval
man, advocating the excessive gesture of rebellion — or of defiant Tory con-
formity to an idealized past.

There are certain major assumptions of this medieval ethical orthodoxy.
There is, as in all orthodoxies, a clear line between right and wrong, an
authority that draws that line. In matters of faith the church is that authority.
We know, for instance, that the doctrine of the Trinity is true, that we must
believe it, because faith is above questioning. But in the immense majority
of problems this life presents us with, we must judge in accordance with our
reason, which is guided by natural law. Men do, however, most obviously
differ in their use of reason to find the right decision in concrete cases. Is there
not still a problem of authority? Who rightly interprets natural law?

Modern students of the Middle Ages have answered this — to us, certainly
— key question variously. The hostile anticlerical from the Enlightenment on
has tended to believe that the whole fabric of medieval philosophical devotion
to natural law was no more than a device to fool the many, to consecrate
what to them was the real ethical principle of the Middle Ages, that what the
church says is right. We need not take so partisan a position to admit that in
accordance with the ethical conservatism of the time, there was in fact a great
reliance on established practice, on what had been done time out of mind, on
consensus and common agreement, on what most men would have thought to
be "natural." All this is something very different from the arbitrariness and
unreason that the Enlightenment, and the Renaissance before it, loved to
attribute to the Middle Ages.

What the Middle Ages called a "just price," for instance, was not an
arbitrary one in the sense that it was dictated by the will of any individual
or even of any small group. The just price was in theory that price which
enabled the worker to live at his accustomed standard of living while he was

22 Summa Theologica, Hii.66.

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working on the goods so priced, and make his customary profit. In practice
it was no doubt the price that had prevailed in the trade in that particular
market, a price always threatened by the endemic inflationary tendencies of
the growing medieval economy, a price always defended as the "natural"
price. Adam Smith's price, set in theory by the naked play of supply and
demand at a given moment, would have seemed to the medieval man to be
an arbitrary and unjust price, one that might be too low to guarantee to the
laborer the fruits of his labor.

The medieval man never thought of this order of nature as arbitrary —
at least not in our sense3 which implies an unjust and preventable arbitrariness.
He knew God could change everything root and branch, but he did not really
expect God to do so. On the whole, medieval man was no chiliast, and he did
not think God would intervene in any upsetting way with the order of nature.
(God did, of course, constantly intervene in specific normal ways, guided
nature, so to speak, which is why prayer, reasonable prayer, duly accompanied
by works, is effective.) The world as it now stood was far from perfect, but
neither was it unworthy of God and man. It had gone on a long time, and we
knew a good deal about how to get along in it.

In fact, the medieval was an Age of Faith in a somewhat different sense
from the theological one we usually give the familiar formula. This was the
last time in the West when most men believed in a quite literal sense in what
we call the status quo; or, put negatively, and perhaps to us more clearly,
these men did not believe it possible by planning, inventing, research, to alter
in any important way the sum total of existing "arrangements," culture, institu-
tions, ways of getting things done. Piecemeal, local change, yes; but even then
the medieval mind, as in the familiar process of development of statutory law,
liked to think of this as a finding, even a rediscovery, not a making, of a law
already there, somewhere, where the over-all plan exists, at bottom, of course,
in the mind of God. All this is even better illustrated by the almost universally
accepted metaphor of society as an organism in which each individual, or,
better, each group, had its appointed place and function. The rulers, lay and
clerical, are the soul, the mind; the soldiers are the heart; the workers are
the belly, and so on. This is one of the oldest of Western political metaphors.
That the belly is as necessary as the head is crystal clear, but it is also clear
that the belly has not the same adornments as the head, the same position as
the head. The lesson is obedience, acceptance of one's earthly lot, acceptance
of the order of rank of society.

Yet the record of the Middle Ages is by no means one of general obe-

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dience and conformity, and certainly not one of unchanging ways. We now
know well that from the eleventh century on the medieval economy was a
dynamic one, that all the material indexes start on upward, that not even
the Black Death really stopped them; and, of course, we know that in fact
civil disorders, risings of the underdog, the discontented, were common. It
is true that there is by no means general agreement among our medieval
specialists as to the socio-economic history of the late Middle Ages, especially
of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.23 But in the balance it is clear that
there were important and disturbing changes, some of them making in the
long run at least for economic progress, and most unsettling to those of steady
ways, to ordinary medieval men, no matter what their social class. This is the
familiar paradox once more, the gap, greater in the Middle Ages than is usual
even in the West between the ideal and the real, the profession and the
practice. But the paradox itself here needs a bit of explanation.

First, and this is particularly true of earlier rebellions, there is the revo-
lutionary ingredient in Christianity. I have tried to make clear that primitive
Christianity was not originally a "social gospel" of the full dinner pail and
comfort for all. But the New Testament does have eloquent passages against
the rich, the powerful, the successful. It is easy enough to turn much of
Christianity from mere repudiation of this world to its alteration, alteration
in something like the sense that the phrase "social revolution" carries for us
today. Moreover, even when, through triumph of church organization, con-
solidation of dogma, assimilation to the world of war and politics, Christianity
had become a prop of the established order, there remained in its cultural
tradition an irreducible minimum of ethical idealism, a feeling that cruelty,
pride, injustice are not necessarily in the order of nature. There was no reason
why Zeus or Jupiter should be sorry for slaves; there was every reason why
Jesus Christ should refuse to back up a wicked baron or a corrupt bishop.
There is, as Nietzsche saw, almost as much moral dynamite in Christianity
as in socialism.

Second, in no mere perfunctory bow to the Marxist interpretation of
history, we may note that the very success of the medieval synthesis in
enabling men to live and work together in comparative peace and good order
contributed to the overthrow of medieval ethical conservatism. It is the full,
or at least partly full, belly that revolts against the ignoble, if essential, role
the head and the heart have combined to give it. Or to put the matter less

23 On this see the Cambridge Economic History, Vol. H, ed. Postan and Habbakuk,
Cambridge, England, 1952.

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metaphorically, a reasonably widely accepted feeling that a given society is
in fact a just one, a society in which co-operation and integration are normal,
expected, and conflict abnormal, or not really there, simply cannot last in a
complex dynamic society such as Western Europe had already begun to be
by the High Middle Ages. The fact of change cannot be forever concealed,
even by legal fictions; and change means conflict in this real world, if not in the
world of ethical, or of economic, theory. When the feudal baron and his lady
really were the heads of a kind of expanded Great Family on the almost self-
sufficent manor, patriarchal theories, metaphors of shepherd and flock, and a
lot more pleasant notions would do very well; when the baron and his lady
had become absentee landlords, when the steward had become in fact an
entrepreneur in the production of wool, and the serfs had become free
peasants with money incomes they could hope to increase, when, in short, the
Great Family had broken up, it was not possible to go on forever insisting
that the father was still a patriarch. The medieval ethical synthesis, attractive
though it was, and still is, to the wistful who want the lion to lie down with
the lamb, could not last.

V

To discuss the actual conduct of medieval men and women we do well to take
their own picture of society with its first, second, and third estates. Inevitably,
we know more about the leaders in each group and more about the ordinary
members of the clergy and the nobility than about the common folk. We by no
means know enough in terms of statistics and the like to be at all confident
about our generalizations. But we can hazard something.

The record of the clergy is extraordinarily varied and uneven, exceedingly
difficult to summarize in a short chapter like this. I trust the reader will for-
give me if I make the dull and Whiggish remark that the record seems to me
by no means as bad as most freethinking and Protestant historians have made
it out to be, nor quite as good as some Catholic admirers of all things medieval
feel that it has to be. Take at random concrete cases. As an individual bad
example, Gregory of Tours has an abundance; perhaps the Abbot Pagulf will
do. Pagulf, after trying in vain to get rid of, indeed to murder, the husband
of a woman he coveted, slipped into the house one night in the husband's
absence, and got what he wanted. The injured husband took a brutal revenge,
burning up house, abbot, and wife, but the right did not always triumph so
clearly in those rough days.24 As a group example, almost any of the chapter
24 Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, VIE, 19.

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The Middle Ages

visitations collected and translated by Coulton will do. Here is one for Rouen
cathedral in 1248.

We visited the Chapter of Rouen, and found that they talk in choir contrary to
rule. The clergy wander about the church and talk in the church with women, dur-
ing the celebration of divine service. The statute regarding the entrance [of lay
folk] into the choir is not kept. The psalms are run through too rapidly, without
due pauses. The statute concerning going out at the Office of the Dead is not kept.
In begging leave to go forth, they give no reason for so going. Moreover, the
clergy leave the choir without reason, before the end of the service already begun;
and, to be brief, many other of the statutes written on the board in the vestry are
not kept. The chapter revenues are mismanaged [male tractantur].

With regard to the clergy themselves, we found that Master Michael de Bercy
is ill-famed of incontinence; item, Sir Benedict, of incontinence; item, Master
William de Calemonville of incontinence, theft, and manslaughter; item, Master
John de St. L6, of incontinence. Item, Master Alan, of tavern-haunting, drunken-
ness, and dicing. Item, Peter de Auleige, of trading. Master John Bordez is ill-
famed of trading; and it is said that he giveth out his money to merchants, to
share in their gain. [19 March 1248]25

It is, however, easy enough to balance these instances of vice with in-
stances of virtue. In Gregory's own day many a missionary to the heathen
north and east gave the example of devoted Christian zeal. The accounts of
the lives of saints are often, in our eyes, naive and historically unreliable,
but the residue of saintliness is there, not to be denied. Even the freethinkers,
though they recoil in horror from the earliest Eastern hermit monks, have
good things to say about Western monasticism in the first years of the Bene-
dictine rule. These monks did live arduous lives of real labor on the land, in
the library, in the missionary field. Nor can even the hostile observer question
the reality of the successive waves of renewal that restored the discipline and
the ardor of Western monasticism through these centuries. Whenever monastic
life seemed to have gone the way of all flesh, when monks had become well-
fed, lazy, lustful, worldly, there was certain to be a reform, a renewal, a new
order or a reformed old order, right on down to the Reformation.

Even Coulton, an admirably trained professional historian who somehow
failed to fall in love with his subject, and who managed to collect a whole
series of damaging pieces, nonetheless occasionally brings in a favorable one,
even, at times, an instance that has a touch of humor. Here is one from the
thirteenth-century Franciscan preacher Berthold of Ratisbon:

25 Coulton, Life in the Middle Ages, Vol. I, pp. 95-96.

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When I was in Brussels, the great city of Brabant, there came to me a maiden of
lowly birth but comely, who besought me with many tears to have mercy upon
her. When therefore I had bidden her tell me what ailed her, then she cried out
amidst her sobs: "Alas, wretched girl that I am! for a certain priest would fain
have ravished me by force, and began to kiss me against my will; wherefore I
smote him in the face with the back of my hand, so that his nose bled; and for
this as the clergy now tell me, I must needs go to Rome." Then I, scarce with-
holding my laughter, yet speaking as in all seriousness, affrighted her as though
she had committed a grievous sin; and at length, having made her swear that she
would fulfill my bidding, I said, "I command thee, hi virtue of thy solemn oath,
that if this priest or any other shall attempt to do thee violence with kisses or em-
braces, then thou shalt smite him sore with thy clenched fist, even to the striking
out, if possible, of his eye; and in this matter thou shalt spare no order of men, for
it is as lawful for thee to strike in defence of thy chastity as to fight for thy life."
With which words I moved all that stood by, and the maiden herself, to vehement
laughter and gladness.26

We may risk a general summary. There is, especially for the higher clergy,
the bishops and the abbots, a long and deep trough in the Dark Ages, the
years of the fighting prelates, fighting with their battle-axes alongside then:
lay cousins, years when the higher clergy were assimilated almost wholly to
the political ruling classes, years no doubt of maximum sexual license for the
higher clergy. They are the years when, for the lower clergy, sheer ignorance
and the example of their betters kept them also in a trough. Clerical concubi-
nage was very nearly transformed, for the lower clergy at least, into legitimate
marriage. Then in the tenth and eleventh centuries there came one of the most
remarkable waves of reform, of moral renewal, in the Western record, a wave
comparable in depth and force, though in many ways very different from, the
reforms that followed on the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. This medieval
reform, centering in the tenth-century reformed Benedictine foundation at
Quay, seems clearly to have been a reform initiated and carried through as a
reform, not a revolution, by a self-conscious and mainly clerical minority
which by the eleventh century had captured the papacy. But this was also a
reform movement that had to win over, if not the millions of serfs and
peasants, at least the many thousands of the ruling classes. Our sources are
certainly inadequate for a study of what we may nonetheless call "public
opinion" in the eleventh century. But we can be sure that the Cluniac move-
ment was one of the first in a long line of modern Western efforts to achieve
through propaganda, pressure groups, electioneering — intrigue, if you like —
the kind of social change we may unblushingly call "voluntary."

26 Coulton, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 125, quoting Berthold of Ratisbon, Lib. H, Chap, xxx, p.
290.

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The Middle Ages

It was a successful reform. It did not achieve anything like what its most
dent proponents — for example, the monk Hildebrand, as pope, Gregory
II — may well have wanted. Some of the Cluniacs wanted a European society
tied by the Church of Rome, a true theocracy; and though there have been
iefly and locally pretty complete theocracies in the West — Geneva, Boston,
iraguay — the whole temper of Western life has been against such rule.
>urred by the partial success of the reform, the later medieval popes went on
assert claims to supremacy on earth, but by 1300 they had clearly failed.
re may guess that some of the reformers hoped to transform men and women
ght here on earth into what Christian ethics wanted them to be, but we can-
)t be sure of this, as we can for many later secular reformers.

What the Cluniac reformers did achieve was a good deal. They established
srical celibacy as the law of the church, a law certainly violated again and
jain, but always, since, not only a sin but a scandal. They helped along the
•ocess of disentangling the clergy from the full play of the complex feudal
stem, though they by no means succeeded in making complete separation of
erical and feudal persons. They helped initiate, in the Peace of God and the
ruce of God, some social control of the private warfare among the second
tate, and thus, in a very real sense, helped found the modern state. Against
e sin of simony they were at least as successful as against the sin of clerical
continence; simony was never again as open, nor as common, save in the
orst days of the Renaissance popes, and then largely in Italy alone and at
e top of the hierarchy. In short, the Cluniac movement raised, if only what
our day we might think of as "a few percentage points," the standards not
dy of clerical, but of lay conduct. It did not make over human nature, but
did make certain extreme forms of misconduct unfashionable.

There was, however, a lapse. By the early sixteenth century the clergy over
ost of Europe had once more fallen into a trough. The prelate with the
itfle-ax was gone forever, and so, too, in its pristine form, was the feudal
)bility. The temptations that beset the higher clergy in the late Middle Ages
sre perhaps simpler than those of the ninth century; they were chiefly
captations of the flesh in a society, judged by previous standards, with a
nsiderable margin of wealth for conspicuous consumption among the pos-
ssing few, a society of fashionable sophistication, indeed, as Huizinga's
asterpiece Waning of the Middle Ages has made clear to us all, a society
' self-conscious preoccupation with all sorts of things one need not be a
>rokin or a Toynbee to recognize as signs of cultural decadence. Here is a
>od sample:

the fifteenth century people used to keep statuettes of the Virgin, of which the

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body opened and showed the Trinity within. The inventory of the treasure of the
dukes of Burgundy makes mention of one made of gold inlaid with gems. Gerson
saw one in the Carmelite monastery at Paris; he blames the brethren for it, not,
however, because such a coarse picture of the miracle shocked him as irreverent,
but because of the heresy of representing the Trinity as the fruit of Mary.2T

Here, surely, in this almost Hegelian world of ours in which an excess seems
to breed its opposite, is one of the reasons for Reformation puritanism.

I have perhaps said enough about the second estate under the heading of
the moral ideal of the medieval knight. I have there hardly overstated the
extent to which in its earlier days this class was a professional fighting class,
the most undisciplined in Western history, and at least as unintellectual, or
anti-intellectual, as the Spartiates. Here is Bertram de Born, an average
knight, complaining about the clerically sponsored Truce of God, which
sought to stop private feudal warfare between Wednesday evening and Mon-
day morning, and on holy days:

Peace does not suit me; war alone pleases me. I am not at all concerned over
Mondays or Tuesdays. Weeks, months, years — all that is to me a matter of in-
difference. At all times, I want to destroy [perdre] anyone who does me harm.28

These early and deadly private wars were modified into the jousting tourney
and the duel, both a bit less murderous; still, over the later centuries there
can be no doubt that the class, in part deprived of its roots in the soil and
its local governing functions, committed suicide hi wars such as the English
Wars of the Roses. It and its successors — who were not actually in very large
part its descendants — the European aristocracies of early modern times, never
wholly lost an anti-intellectualist stamp, in part imprinted by a genuine rivalry
for power with the clergy, the intellectual class. As late as the sixteenth
century, we find English gentlemen protesting vigorously against the new
fashionable education at Oxford, Cambridge, and the public schools, where
their sons were actually studying Greek and Lathi like any narrow-chested,
nearsighted clerk, instead of whacking away at each other on the exercise
ground.29

The second estate had, it must be admitted, some of the virtues the
romanticist cherishes in the knights of old. They were not, as ruling classes
go, addicted to the corruptions of the rich, perhaps in part because they were

27 Huizinga, Waning of the Middle Ages, p. 140.

28 Bertram de Born, cited in Villemain, Cours de Litt6rature Fran9aise. Tableau de la
Litterature du Moyen Age, Paris, Didier, Libraire-Editeur, 1850, Vol. I, p. 103. My
translation.

2» Fritz Caspari, Humanism and the Social Order in Tudor England, Chicago, Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1954, pp. 136ff.

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The Middle Ages

never for the most part exceedingly rich. All Europe was poor in the earlier
medieval centuries, and as Europe grew rich it was not the knights, but the
new merchant and capitalist classes, and their helpers in the new model
monarchic state, who got most of the spoils. The knight was, as a businessman,
inhibited by the rules and standards of his order, and by an upbringing that
stifled any inventiveness he may have been born with. The class was sexually
promiscuous enough, for this was a sexually promiscuous time, but it was
comparatively free from the not unusual addiction of a military class to
homosexuality — a practice, moreover, very vigorously condemned in Chris-
tian ethics. Many of its members were later sidetracked into the wastes of
courtly love. Even its sense of honor was not quite what the nineteenth-
century admirers thought it was. Like all sporting classes, it was taught respect
for the rules of the game, but it was also taught by life to want very much to
win. One feels it to have been closer to current American sporting ethics than
to that, say, of the British Victorian upper classes, who really almost did,
sometimes quite did, put virtue above winning.

Toward their inferiors the second estate were by no means the insufferable
tyrants later democratic propaganda, mostly stemming from the French
revolutionists, made them out to have been. They were certainly not human-
itarians or egalitarians; they were full of pride of rank, and contemptuous of
commoners, especially of successfully wealthy commoners. But — and this
needs to be hammered home to Americans — they were constrained by habit,
by unthinking respect for custom, by lack of enterprise, if by nothing else,
from what the Marxist means by "exploitation" of the lower classes. By the
High Middle Ages, chattel slavery had almost vanished from Western Europe;
commoners, including many of the peasants who formed the bulk of the
third estate, had the juridical status of freemen, and they were protected by
what is one of the firmest marks of the medieval mentality, respect for status,
for the established order. All this is less than Lord and Lady Bountiful —
though such existed; but it is a great deal more than the wicked seigneur,
fattening on the blood of his serfs, enjoying his right of first night with their
brides.30

I do not wish to exaggerate in my effort to redress the balance upset by

30 Such did not exist, certainly not in law, as modern research has made clear. The jus
primae noctis is probably the invention of some French eighteenth-century political
propagandist of talents worthy of Madison Avenue. In real Western life, the men of a
privileged class are rarely as enterprising in rape or seduction of women of classes in-
ferior to them as our modern class-warfare-conscious tradition makes them out to have
been, if only because the women of their own class are usually too exacting of their
energies. I trust this remark is not a mere obiter dictum inspired by the spirit of our
own age.

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our eighteenth-century democratic belief that an aristocracy of privilege is
not only wicked but abnormal. Clearly there were oppressive landlords in the
Middle Ages, as there were rebellious peasants, disputatious peasants,
peasants addicted to moving boundary stones on the sly. Certainly the rosy
picture of medieval society painted by the great literary rebels against nine-
teenth-century industrialism, a Carlyle, a William Morris, is no piece of
realism. I am here maintaining, as often in this book, no more than the dif-
ference of a "few percentage points" in the sum total, a difference made by,
a consequence of, at a minimum a reflection of, a widespread world view, an
expectancy based on a generally held interpretation of the nature of man and
the universe. The medieval second estate, though it numbered grasping, cruel,
above all, unrestrained individuals, displays over its whole history at the very
least the decencies of an unprogressive class.

The third estate in the Middle Ages was almost wholly a peasantry, though
by the end of the period there was a small but well-developed urban middle
class, especially in Western Europe. Most of the broad generalizations we
shall risk about the actual conduct of the masses are, however, roughly true
even of the higher classes. Ordinary folk in the Middle Ages were by no means
puritans. There were gusts of revivalism, sometimes in unlikely places, in
which the laymen were swept up into forswearing the ways of the world. Of
these the best known is the brief Florentine madness under Savonarola at the
end of the fifteenth century, but in these last centuries there were many less
excessive religious excitements throughout the West. And always the masses
held what they deemed genuine saintly otherworldliness in enthusiastic
admiration. Still, there is no gainsaying the earthiness, the coarseness, some-
times the exuberance, of the common people of the Middle Ages. Folk tales,
such as the French fabliaux, and their reflection in such a literary man as
Chaucer, the details of many of the carvings of medieval churches, the many
complaints the preachers make of the evils of dancing and feasting, all mount
up to impressive evidence* But you can see this best in anything Breughel
painted. It is true the actual painting is later than the medieval period, but
these peasants at their quite unspiritual tasks and pleasures are surely
unchanged from their medieval predecessors.

Bastardy was certainly not uncommon. We do not have adequate sta-
tistics; it may well be that the ratio of illegitimate to legitimate births was
in many parts of Europe ho greater than it was to be in the nineteenth century.
But the attitude toward bastardy was very different from that of the nine-
teenth century. The Christian sacrament of marriage, the whole structure of

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The Middle Ages

family law, made the status of the bastard inferior; but men found something
amusing in the fact that nature had overcome the priest. For the layman, at
least, sexual continence was hardly an obligation, and the remedy for frigidity
or indifference in a wife was clear and easy. Again, there are no good
statistics, but it does not seem that this far back there exists much difference
between the hot-blooded South and the cold-blooded North. Bastardy was
no disgrace in the Italy of Leonardo da Vinci, but neither was it a necessary
trauma in the Netherlands of Erasmus. And Erasmus was actually a priest's
son.

In fact, in the eternal warfare between Christianity and the natural animal
man, Christianity among the masses in the Middle Ages had to settle for what
must look to the Christian ethical idealist — who, since the eighteenth century,
has frequently been an enlightened freethinker — as a pretty empty victory
of mere prestige. Medieval anticlericalism, which is genuine anticlericalism
from within the church, not the anti-Christianity that often goes by the name
of anticlericalism in modern Catholic countries, is evident from the slightest
acquaintance with the age. The priest was for many commoners the agent of a
great power indeed, a God whose existence they never doubted, but who
somehow was not quite the loving God of Christian sentiment. To avoid the
errors of the traditional rationalist freethinker is this matter of medieval faith
— those of a Harry Elmer Barnes, for instance — I shall have somewhat
reluctantly to use the language of popular psychology, which is no doubt full
of its own errors: there is a deep-seated ambivalence in the sentiments of the
medieval masses toward all the priest stands for.

The facts are there. I cite from Coulton once more:

In certain districts I have seen men when they meet priests [the first thing in the
morning] forthwith crossing themselves, saying that it is an evil omen to meet a
priest. Moreover, I have heard on sure authority that in a certain town of France
wherein many of all conditions died, men said among themselves, "This deadly
plague can never cease unless, before we lay a dead man in his grave, we shall
first cast our own parson into the same pit!" Whence it came to pass that, when
the priest came to the edge of the grave to bury a dead parishioner, then the
countryfolk, men and women together, seized him, arrayed as he was in his
priestly vestments, and cast him into the pit. These are inventions of the devil and
demoniacal illusions.31

A simple partial explanation is obvious. The priest inherited from ages and
ages of magic and of religious belief heavily weighted with fear of utterly

si Life in the Middle Ages, Vol. I, p. 35, no. 15. These are two other instances, less
extreme and more amusing, cited on these same pages.

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A History of Western Morals

inhuman forces. The priest was a magician, but also a man, and as a man he
might not really be in control of these forces. Better cross yourself . . . .

The age was fully as superstitious as its detractors have pictured it. Once
more, there is clearly an irreducible minimum of superstition, taken in its
widest sense, throughout Western history. It can be argued — not proved —
that one kind of superstition slips into the place of a discarded superstition,
that the sum total of superstition is roughly constant in our brief Western
history. But the range and variety of superstitions in the Middle Ages was
certainly great. The order of nature was no succession of scientifically estab-
lished uniformities, but a colorful, only partly predictable, melodrama mixed
with comedy. Nothing was untouched by the elaborate network of associa-
tions that composed the Christian tradition, swollen by hundreds of local
pagan survivals. A whole book could be written about the superstitions
centering on Friday, that dark day of Christ's suffering which was yet the
bright day of our redemption. It would take volumes to record what happened
to the relics of saints, and much of the record would be black.

These superstitions, or, if you prefer, these naive folk beliefs, do often
show the freshness, the touching innocence of the child on its good behavior,
the engaging immediacy of symbolism lovers of the Middle Ages dwell upon.
Here, for the sake of fairness, is one of these:

A certain lay-brother of Hemmenrode was somewhat grievously tempted; where-
fore as he stood and prayed he used these words, "In truth, Lord, if Thou de-
liver me not from this temptation, I will complain of Thee to Thy Mother!" The
loving Lord, master of humility and lover of simplicity, prevented the lay-
brother's complaint and presently relieved his temptation, as though He feared to
be accused before His Mother's face. Another lay-brother standing behind the
other's back smiled to hear this prayer, and repeated it for the edification of the
rest. Novice. Who would not be edified by Christ's so great humility?32

Finally, there is that acceptance of violence and sudden death that makes
the Middle Ages so different from our own. The alert reader will here detect
two contradictions, or, at least, difficulties: one summarized by Belsen, Hiro-
shima, and other contemporary horrors, the other an apparent contradiction
with my previous insistence on the traditional, stable, conservative side of
medieval culture, which should make for regular ways, not violence and inse-
curity. The first I find no difficulty at all, for today we do not "accept" the
violence of total war as natural and unavoidable, not, even, as such, the do-
mestic violence Europeans find so great in the United States. To this subject

32 Coulton, Life in the Middle Ages, Vol. I, p. 65, no. 35.

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The Middle Ages

I shall have to return. Nor is the second a genuine difficulty. Violence was to
the medieval mind a part of God's plan, part of the expected regularities that
govern the world. Disease — above all, disease at its most catastrophic in
plague — as well as madness, hysteria, violent repression of heresy, the whole
range of conventional crime, and, most important, perhaps, of all this, and
something quite unknown to Americans for generations, the ever-present
threat of famine in an economy wholly incapable of transporting staple food-
stuffs very far or fast — all these made for suffering, insecurity, violence.

The Middle Ages, then, could not be humanitarian in our sense of organ-
ized humanitarian movements. The Christian heritage did insist on the obli-
gation of charity, and the church did what it could in the vast field of what we
should consider necessary social services. There is no lack of the milk of
human kindness in the lives of these people. Medieval piety is full of tales of
Christian sharing with the unfortunate, from the familiar one of St. Martin
of Tours, who slashed his cloak in two to warm a beggar with half of it, right
on through to the end of the period. There is no question of hypocrisy here.
But certainly to the rationalist humanitarian of the eighteenth century and
later there is definitely something that shocks him, something that seems to
him wrongheaded. This something is best put as the acceptance, the expecta-
tion, of violence and suffering as part of nature and human nature. The medi-
eval mind would have accepted as a truism the favorite reproach of the later
rationalist humanitarian that Christian charity is mere alleviation of symp-
toms, no cure of disease. The man of the Middle Ages was sure that there is
no cure — no cure here on earth and in this life, though a certain cure in
eternal salvation.

We sometimes like to imagine the admiring amazement with which we
suppose, somewhat naively, a medieval man brought to our world would
confront, say, an airplane in flight. Actually, fear might well be his first but
not at all unusual emotion. And since he was quite used to attributing to the
Devil at least as much ingenuity as we now attribute to ourselves, he might
on reflection be neither puzzled nor surprised. Were he an educated medieval
man, what would really astonish him, confront him with something utterly
beyond his comprehension, would be an exposition of our belief in progress,
natural science, heaven on earth to come. Machines he could take, but not
the beliefs that made and were made by the machines. Happiness, salvation,
heaven were certain enough to him, but not in this life, not on this earth, not
even as remote goals of earthly progress.

Salvation was a moral certainty of God's universe, though no single indi-

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vidual Christian could be sure of his own salvation, not certain in the meaning
the word has for common sense. We moderns have, however, so confused the
common-sense meaning of "certain," the statistical sense science gives the
word, and the surviving moral sense we inherit from the Middle Ages, that
we find it very hard to feel the word in its medieval sharpness, except per-
haps in our moments of reverence for the wonders of natural science. Deep
within some of us, at least, and perhaps surprisingly, in view of the newness
of the sentiment, there is this opposite of the medieval attitude: the feeling
that what we consider evil is not a part of the structure of the universe, that
evil is not something we must struggle against with no hope of eradicating it,
but is something we can destroy root and branch. No medieval man could
really understand this point of view. It is significant that when the kind of
writing we call Utopias reappears — the Greeks, of course, had Utopias, no-
tably the Republic of Plato — we are already in the Renaissance. The Christian
heaven was Utopia enough for the Age of Faith; but it was a sure possible
haven, not a "no place" — which is what Utopia means in Greek.

VI

This last brings up a final problem, one not to be avoided, but certainly not
to be solved with universal acceptance. The Middle Ages in the West was
indeed a time — the last in Western history — when, at least on the surface, all
men had the same religion. To be more cautious, we may say that in the
Middle Ages all Westerners were members of one church, the Roman Catho-
lic. What effect did this unanimity, this existence of One Church, have on the
conduct of men, on their moral attitudes?

But first, was there unanimity? Was even the thirteenth century quite the
irenic Age of Faith its apologists make it out to be? The actual incompleteness
or imperfection of medieval spiritual unity is not to be denied. Heresy was
endemic, and after the quarrel between Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII at
the beginning of the fourteenth century schism was so deep and open that one
may say that ecclesiastical unity was never really restored in the West. There
were among the ruling classes who leave a record behind many hard-boiled
political realists like Peter of Dreux whose conduct can hardly be reconciled
with membership in the church even by a most extreme accepter of the gap
between word and deed.33 More important, there is evidence that laymen

33 Yet the gap was indeed huge in the Middle Ages, if only because the whole structure
of the word was so real and so perfect and so unattainable here on earth. I should guess
Philip the Fair thought he was a good Christian — perhaps not as good as his grandfather
had been, but, still, a Christian.

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The Middle Ages

sometimes went beyond the normal anticlericalism of the age into expressed
doubts about articles of faith. The view that nobody dared express his doubts
in the Middle Ages is simply not true. Here is a thirteenth-century Belgian
cleric:

Certain men of note in this world sat drinking in the tavern; and, as they grew
warm with wine, they began to talk together of various things; and their talk fell
upon that which shall be after this life. Then said one, "We are utterly deceived
by those clerks, who say that our souls outlive the destruction of the body!**
Hereupon all fell a-laughing. . . ,34

True enough, the anecdote ends with the scoffers taught a lesson, but the
scoffers could talk freely in their tavern, and they did question the doctrine of
immortality. Finally, in formal philosophy, in metaphysics and epistemology,
the range of medieval thought is quite as complete as it had been in the ancient
world.

Yet the fact of One Church and One Faith remains; and, moreover, for
the ordinary thinking and feeling man there was no real alternative to the
Christian cosmology, such as the Renaissance and, more particularly, the
Age of Reason were later to provide. The medieval Tom Paine or Ethan
Allen, or, for that matter, Thomas Jefferson, had to take it out in straight
heresy on Christian grounds. We must try to estimate what difference this
degree of formal unanimity made in medieval life.

Two negatives seem clear. First, the unanimity was not by any means so
complete and far-reaching as to preclude those differences of opinion or atti-
tude that are essential to change, or, if you wish, "progress." In all sorts of
ways, from technology and economic organisation to the fine arts, the four
centuries after 1000 are centuries of conspicuous, though not by our standards
rapid, change. Second, in terms of such familiar ethical codes as the Ten
Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, it has to be said that there is
no good evidence that medieval conduct was among the many any better than
it had been in earlier times. It is very hard to disprove the freethinker's favor-
ite assertion; the Middle Ages are not a period of lofty standards of loving-
kindness, gentleness, honesty, chastity, refinement of passions. They are not,
to a sympathetic student, the centuries of ignorance, cruelty, and filth they
appeared to later freethinkers to be. But they certainly are not in practice
"Christian" centuries; there have never yet been such centuries.

The existence of this formally united Christendom does, however, help
explain a good deal that went on in the Middle Ages. Without it, the Crusades

34 Coulton, Life in the Middle Ages, Vol. I, p. 131.

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would have been impossible; and the Crusades were of great importance in
the formation of our modern world. Without it, the West might never have
been able to carry into modern times that tenuous sense of belonging to some
society bigger than the nation-state, which it has never quite lost. Above all,
this feeling that there is One Faith had as a logical, indeed inevitable, conse-
quence certain medieval habits of mind hard for doctrinaire modern liberals
to understand — though they ought to try to understand these medieval atti-
tudes, since they are human habits of mind not wholly banished, let us say,
from the liberal's own unconscious mind. If you really know that x is evil and
by its very existence threatens to destroy y, which you know equally well is
good — the good — you can hardly avoid concluding that x must be got rid of
as completely and as certainly as possible. Such certainty here on earth only
death affords. I do not quite dare in these days suggest that the problem
of toleration is one of pure logic; but there is a logic of the emotions in which
the medieval attitude toward heretics, the institution of the Inquisitions them-
selves, is clear, and untainted with the abnormal.

Indeed, the heretic was to the medieval mind the abnormal, the corrupt.
Here is Etienne de Bourbon in the thirteenth century:

Heretics are refuse and debased, and therefore they may not return to their for-
mer state but by a miracle of God, as dross may not return to silver, nor dregs to
wine.33

Another chronicler tells how, after the orthodox crusaders had successfully
stormed the Albigensian stronghold of Beziers, their leaders came to the
Abbot of Citeaux, spiritual guide to the operation, and told him there were
Catholics mingled with the heretics in the city.

"What shall we do, Lord? We cannot discern between the good and evil." The
Abbot (fearing, as also did the rest, lest they should feign themselves Catholics
from fear of death, and should return again to their faithlessness after his de-
parture,) is said to have answered: "Slay them, for God knoweth His own." So
there they were slain in countless multitudes in that city.35

I think the reader will understand how ordinary medieval folk felt about
heretics and the way they should be treated if he will reflect on how ordinary
newspaper readers, and some judges, feel about "sexual psychopaths" today.
There is, finally, the question, I think unanswerable, but surely unavoid-
able for us in our multanimous times: Did this broad medieval unanimity
(save for a small heretical minority) on matters of religion, this common

33 Coultoa, Life in the Middle Ages, Vol. I, pp. 87; 68.

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The Middle Ages

acceptance of an explanation of man's fate, even of the whole universe, help
make men less unhappy, give them a mental and moral security we lack, make
them, to come out with the stereotype, less neurotic? We cannot give statis-
tical estimates of any value as to the relative incidence of mental "disturb-
ances" of all sorts as between 1850 and 1950, let alone as between 1250 and
1950. Our literary sources make it perfectly clear that madness — insanity —
was common enough in the Middle Ages; they also make it clear that the
medieval explanation of madness — essentially, in one form or another, pos-
session of the soul of the madman by agents of Satan — together with the
medieval habit of violence, and other factors, such as the cost of care, com-
bined to make the lot of these unfortunate madmen unhappy indeed, most
shocking, to our notions. But for the great majority of medieval people the
question, whether put in the form "Was there less neurosis then than now?"
or in the less pretentious and more familiar form "Were these morally and
theologically convinced people happier than we are?" is quite unanswerable,
and, not merely in the narrow logical-analytical sense, meaningless. I should
grossly answer, they probably were not happier. But the Matthew Arnold who
wrote in those rosy Victorian times felt differently.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.36

And so, too, do our own contemporary publicists who worry over our obvious
many-mindedness in these great matters of world view. They give, or at least
imply, another answer, that medieval men had a spiritual serenity and, there-
fore, a happiness we have disastrously lost. The skeptic can do no more than
conclude, not proven. German is a great help when one wants to be vague.
Sorrows these medieval men and women had, if not our world sorrows; but
how real are Weltschmerzen?

36 Dover Beach.

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The Reformation

THE PAIRING RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION, consecrated in American
undergraduate terms as "Ren and Ref " in many a college, is now of such long
standing that it will probably survive the attacks of the revisionists. The two
coincide roughly in time, at least in the climactic sixteenth century, and they
are related, as all parts of Western culture are related. But to tag the sixteenth
century as "Renaissance and Reformation" is no more sensible than it would
be to tag the nineteenth century as "Nationalism and Natural Science." The
reformers and humanists, even though there were individuals, like Erasmus,
whose lives linked them personally, were different men trying to do different
things, as different as the nationalist Mazzini and the scientist Darwin. For
the historian of morals in particular, Reformation and Renaissance are dif-
ferent worlds, not easily yoked in any metaphor, not even as obverse and re-
verse of a medal struck against the Schoolmen.

The Reformation belongs essentially to the history of the Middle Ages.
The movements symbolized — yes, let us avoid the trap of materialist deter-
mination and say frankly, in part initiated and guided — by men like Luther,
Zwingli, Cranmer, and Calvin were but the last of a long series of medieval
outbreaks of the profound Christian not-acceptance of things as they are — but
outbreaks from a Christian fortress, not freethinking attacks on that fortress.
I have used dull and flat words indeed; the matter can be put more eloquently,
and perhaps, therefore, more accurately: The Protestant reformers and those
of the Catholic Reformation, too, were the heirs and successors of Benedict of
Nursia, of Hildebrand, of Bernard of Qairvaux, of Francis of Assisi, of

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The Reformation

Wycliffe and Hus, and of many others who throughout the ages sought to tear
the church from its compromises with this world of success, wealth, power,
comfort, cruelty, thick-skinned "realism," men who sought to bring back in
all its freshness, all its revolutionary immediacy, the good news of the Gos-
pels; they were not precursors of Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, Jeffer-
son, and Bentham.

Every one therefore which heareth these words of mine, and doeth them shall
be likened unto a wise man, which built his house upon the rock: and the rain
descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house;
and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that heareth
these words of mine and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man
which built his house upon the sand: and the rain descended, and the floods
came, and the winds blew, and smote upon that house; and it fell: and great was
the fall thereof.1

There are, of course, great differences between Luther and Calvin and
their medieval predecessors; the Protestant reformers broke the unity of West-
ern Christendom. Their heresies founded successful schismatic churches,
which have gone on multiplying to the point where neither heresy nor schism
really comes into many a modern Protestant's working vocabulary, any more
than such to him obsolete words as "brook" and "village" come into the
Coloradan's vocabulary. Note, incidentally, that the cultural environment can
be as tyrannical as the geographic. Until Luther, the church had either insti-
tutionalized, tamed, softened — I do not mean this in a bad sense — the pas-
sionate other-worldliness of a Francis, or buried under the weight of academic
disapproval the incipient, and dangerous, rationalism of an Abelard, or simply
exterminated or, at least, driven underground by firm suppression threatening
mass heresies, as with the Albigensians. That Luther and Calvin had another
fate we must in fairness admit is due in part, indeed in large part, to a great
complex of causes, some of which the analyst must list as economic, political,
institutional, and the like. But the fact remains that Luther and Calvin were
not entrepreneurs, nor nationalists, nor — above all not this — "modern"
rationalists, democrats, workers for the eventual establishment of the Jeffer-
sonian-Jacksonian-Rooseveltian republic of the United States. They were
medieval men: Luther an Augustinian monk who owed a great deal to his
founder, Calvin a serious-minded medieval lawyer, a member of that middle
class that had long been taking over the work of running things that the
knights could not or would not do. Neither Luther nor Calvin, for that matter

i Matthew 7:24-27.

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not even the mildly "rationalist" Zwingli, thought of himself as tearing the
seamless web of Christendom, as setting up a church that would settle down in
comfort with hundreds of other schismatic churches. They were all setting up
what they thought, if I may use the political language of our time, was the
One Church, the eglise unique.

That the Protestant Reformation helped greatly to make the world we live
in should be most obvious. In important senses, Protestantism is "modern,"
as modern as science and technology. But this modernity, I must insist, was
not planned by the fathers of Protestantism, was, in fact, unforeseen by them,
a fine example of something obvious to all but the very naive rationalist, that
a planned reform, once introduced into the infinite nexus of concrete human
relations, can have quite unpredictable results. Once the break with Rome
was in the making, even Luther, driven by the break to appeal against author-
ity, against tradition, power, status, was put in the posture of defending free-
dom, innovation, individualism, "modernity." Luther, and the other reform-
ers, for the most part, wanted men free from Rome, but not free from a God
who was no anarchist, no scientific naturalist, who was a churchman and a
Christian; but any challenge to authority, any challenge as eloquent as theirs,
can stir the anarchist in us all, the anarchist who refuses to listen to the old
argument that true freedom for the individual is not his doing what he wants,
or thinks he wants, to do, but his doing what is right, what you want him to do.
Protestantism did help make the non-Christian world view of the Enlighten-
ment.

That the Protestant reformers so broke up the formal unity of Western
Christendom against their original intentions is due to the course of events
dependent in part on quite other than direct religious or theological concerns.
To such concerns we shall come soon enough. Meanwhile, our starting point
must be the same as Luther's, Calvin's, and even Loyola's: how to do God's
will on earth, or, if you insist on the moral side of it, how to make men more
truly Christians. Now it is true that the reformers, though they were agreed
that the Catholic Church of the early sixteenth century was not fulfilling its
mission on earth, were in broad disagreement as to just what this mission
should be. The range of Protestant opinions as to the true Christian mission
is great, almost coextensive with the range of human nature. On the rejection
of certain specific Catholic institutions, such as monasticism, celibacy of the
clergy, and a few others, there is nearly unanimity among the early Protes-
tants. Theologically, however, it is hard to weave a blanket wide enough to
cover all the Protestant reformers. Luther at his most excited — which is very

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excited — pushed the doctrine of salvation by faith alone to the point of an-
archy, a point at which his own new Lutheran Church never arrived, and
where Luther the administrator did not stay for long. In a very general sense
it may be true that religious rebels appeal to faith as against works just as
political and moral rebels appeal to liberty against authority, but the general-
ization is too broad to be very useful; the facts resist this particular dualism
more clearly even than usual. Some of the reformers seem to have wanted no
more than to take over the governance of the church from Rome; a "high
church" party is present from the start in the Anglican and the Lutheran
Churches, a party that hardly feels at all the evangelical need to make the
good news revolutionary, earth-rending.

If now you ask what moved these reformers to want the particular kind of
evangel they preached, and if what moved them to various expressed religious
aims was not simply various changes in their concrete cultural environment —
the coming of nationalism, capitalism, science, technology, and the like — we
are right back at the old, unsolvable, unavoidable problem of circularity of
causation. I can only repeat that the problem seems to me really unsolvable.
But I think that one reason why Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and perhaps even
Henry VIII wanted what they wanted was because they could read, and being
able to read, they could read such prodding sentences as:

Take heed that ye do not your righteousness before men, to be seen of them:
else ye have no reward with your Father which is in heaven.

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other;
or else he will hold to one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and
mammon.2

II

We may go direct to what is, certainly for the historian of Western morals,
the most important spot on the Protestant spectrum — the way of life associ-
ated with that big word "Puritanism," or, almost as big a word, "Calvinism."3
"Puritanism," especially, is one of those imprecise words that irritate the
semanticist, no doubt unduly. It does have a hard core, which I suggest can
be reasonably well located as a belief that the individual, the person, has a

2 Matthew 6:1; 6:24. "Righteousness" in 6:1 may be "almsgiving"; but the central
notion is clear.

3 I cannot here go into church history and history of dogma sufficiently to cover the
varieties of Protestantism. For a brief survey I can send the reader to my Ideas and
Men, pp. 316-333, and to the works suggested for reading with that chapter.

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spiritual component (not a phrase the Puritan would like — he would say
simply a soul) which can and ought to control rigorously the demands of his
fleshly component, his body. Such demands are many and varied, and the
Puritan, historically considered, in his sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
setting and in his modern one, has varied in his estimate of their badness as
well as in his measures to control them. The Puritan ought, however, to be
distinguished from the Christian mystic and the Christian ascetic, much
though he has in common with these protesters against the Chretien moyen
sensuel. The Puritan does not flee this world, does not deny the flesh, does not
by any means seek to annihilate the flesh; he does seek to control the flesh,
which means under certain conditions refusing its demands.

Now "Puritanism" is the semanticist's despair — as are so many of the
words the moralist, and the social scientist as well, must use — not so much
because of taxonomic sloppiness in the way it is used generally, but because
of the human sentiments of love and hate that inform, and deform, its use.
Especially for the English-speaking peoples, it is important to note that cer-
tain tendencies of earlier Puritanism were incorporated into the way of life we
call "Victorian" and were, in the process of incorporation, twisted in ways
Calvin or John Knox would not have recognized. When in the early twentieth
century the literary led a mass onslaught against everything Victorian, Puritan-
ism was one of the first and most often buried of the victims. We when young
knew the Puritan was life-denying, joy-killing, and a hypocrite in the bargain.
The balance has swung back again, but the echoes of the great noise set up
by Mencken and many another are not wholly stilled. It takes an effort to get
back to the Puritanism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.4

What the Puritanism of Calvin, Knox, the Mathers, and all the others
meant for morals is, of course, closely tied to the systematic thought of these
leaders on matters of theology. For us, their central position is a very firm
insistence on the absolute omnipotence of God and on the wormlike insignifi-
cance of man. But these thinkers differ greatly from the author of the Book
of Job, who ends with one of the most eloquent assertions of God's inscru-
table might and man's presumptuous weakness. The Calvinists do not — so the

* The reader should go to the soundly balanced studies of Perry Miller, The New
England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, New York, Macmillan, 1939, and The New
England Mind: From Colony to Province, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1953.
George F. Willison, Saints and Strangers, New York, Reynal and Hitchcock, 1945,
tries to redress the balance in a way all too common, by asserting that what is usually

said about the Puritans — at least about those in and around Massachusetts Bay is the

opposite of the truth. But then, historians have to make discoveries, just as scientists do.

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The Reformation

outsider must conclude from their actions — quite find God's will inscrutable.
God might indeed have condemned us all to hell. Adam's sin was reason
enough, but the Calvinist's God does not need reasons, not reasons tailored
to poor human understanding, and there are moments in the sermons of
Puritan divines when it seems as though God, turned Freudianly anthropo-
morphic, sadistically enjoys our suffering, and intends to keep piling it on.
This is surely true of Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry
God," notably the famous passage:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some
loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath
towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to
be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you
are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful
venomous serpent is in ours.5

If, however, you read the whole sermon unsympathetically enough, you will
have no trouble concluding that Edwards was skilled in what the complainers
nowadays worry over as "motivational research," that he was a gifted but by
no means "hidden" persuader.6

The Calvinists were desirous of saving men's souls, and of getting them
to act on earth in such a way as to make salvation at least not impossible.
They were surprisingly practical men, not anchorites, not mystics; they were
men for whom the cure of souls meant saving souls to further the good on
this earth. This in turn meant knowing something about God's wishes. If you
assumed these Calvinists to be rationalists, you might accuse them of both
inconsistency and pride. But they were not rationalists, and they did not need
to account to anyone for their knowledge of God — except to God, and in a
very exacting, if not rationalistic, accounting. But as outsiders, we may dis-
tinguish two contradictions between their theology and their ethics.

The first we have already dwelt upon, for it runs through Western moral
and intellectual history. Theologically, the Calvinists were extreme deter-
minists; ethically, though the orthodox ardently repudiated those doctrines
of mere "conditional" predestination and even outright freedom of the will
later grouped as "Arminianism," they were clear that their duty was to fight
evil here on earth, and thus make the necessary prevail. The Calvinists, espe-
cially during their great debates of the seventeenth century, are most interest-
ing because they are ferociously determined to solve this puzzle of predesti-

5 The Works of Jonathan Edwards, AM., London, Ball, Arnold, 1840, Vol. H, p. 10.
6 1 hesitate to make so rationalistic a suggestion as that Edwards knew what he was doing.

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nation, to keep their insufferably powerful God from appearing to poor
humans quite the tyrant he looked like — indeed, had to be. Their leaders
wrestled with the problem; the ordinary Calvinist had to live with it. He lived
with it as, fortunately, human beings even in the West have lived with their
metaphysical anxieties, by solutions adjusting, somehow, sentiments, emo-
tions, habits, and at least a minimal demand of the intellect. The commonest
solution was not far from Job's: man cannot know all God knows, or he
would be God, which is unthinkable; therefore, the individual cannot know,
cannot be certain, that he belongs to the predestined saved (as the antinomian
John of Leyden was said to have believed of himself) instead of to the pre-
destined damned; the individual is not, however, wholly without some light
on the differences visible here on earth between saved and damned; the
saved are likely to do the ethically right thing, a thing clear in the whole
community of the Puritans, the damned to do the ethically wrong thing; there-
fore, the individual who feels any inclination to do what he knows is wrong
will suppress — he is as yet without benefit of Freud — any such inclinations;
he will behave as if saved, in the hope that he is saved, according to rigidly
predestined plans made by God in eternity for this testing earthly prelude to
eternity. It is no test for God, who knows how it will come out; but it is a
fearfully uncertain test for the tested.

The second Calvinist difficulty does indeed, at least in its historical aspect,
deserve to be called an inconsistency. The Calvinists at their most extreme
made the sharpest of distinctions between the very few saved, the saints, and
the very many damned, the sinners. This sort of distinction in worldly matters
is clearly one between the aristoi and the polloi. The Calvinists were aristo-
crats of the spirit. Yet they appear in some senses to have fathered democracy,
both of the flesh and of the spirit. Again in terms of historical development,
there is no real difficulty here. In the first place, the Calvinists were for the
most part, save in France, where some of the great nobles made use of Cal-
vinism in their unsuccessful fight with the crown, members of the landed
gentry, caught in the squeeze of inflation, the professional classes, or the
merchant classes. They did not like what was left of the old feudal nobility,
and said so firmly. They at least helped discredit an older and quite different
kind of aristocracy. Second, Calvinist ethics, as Max Weber pointed out, had
its part in the long process by which capitalism and its complex of values,
some of which made for egalitarian democracy, prevailed in the West. Third,
Calvinism got its start in rebellion against the established church; and in the
West rebellion of any consequence has always had to appeal to the individual

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to make the decision to break with habit, law, established right, and such a
break must be made in the name of the individual's right to think for himself,
to be a "free" man. In short, Calvinism carried with it seeds of a way of life
very different from that of Geneva, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, and Boston.

In those places, and wherever it flourished pristinely, however, Calvinism
was not democratic, not libertarian, not really "modern." An American's
mind at these words leaps at once to the Salem witchcraft trials. The historian
is not surprised at these trials, but, rather, at the fact that there were not many
more of them. For the Calvinist at bottom saw the universe as his medieval an-
cestors had seen it, as the universe of Christian cosmology, not by any means
the universe of the "Newtonian world-machine." That from Calvinist societies
there came so much so different from what the first Calvinists could possibly
have planned or expected or wanted is in part explicable, as we shall shortly
see, in terms of the theoretical explanations made by men like Weber and
Tawney. But it is in part also explicable by the fact that in ethics and politics
ideas can have consequences not clear to those who first develop these ideas;
or, in a familiar figure of speech, idea seeds do not always grow into quite the
plant the sower had expected.7 Calvin, Knox, and the rest did not knowingly
sow what we have recently been reaping.

Much of the way of life that developed out of their leadership did prove
congruous with the channeling of human energies into the great increase in
material wealth, in human command over natural resources, that made the
modern West unique. We have come to the "Weber thesis," one of those
ideas, or "leads," or simply "interpretations," that are now part of the slowly
cumulative study of human conduct.8 Greatly simplified, Weber's thesis —
which he insists is a sociological, not a psychological, thesis — is this: the
Protestant, and more especially the Calvinist, worked hard on this earth in
the station to which he had been called — usually in what we should now call
"business" of some sort or a profession like law or medicine; he worked hard
because he believed God wanted him to follow his vocation faithfully, and

7 The stock example is the relation between the Locke-De Lolme-Blackstone concept of
the separation of powers in eighteenth-century Britain — in itself to some extent objec-
tively erroneous — and its later development in American constitutional history. On this
see A. L. Lowell, "An Example from the Evidence of History," in Factors Determining
Human Behavior, Harvard Tercentenary Publications, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1937, p. 119.

8 The reader had best go direct to the locus classicus, Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism, ed. by T. Parsons, New York, Scribner, 1930. Also R. H.
Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, new ed., New York, Harcourt, Brace,
1947.

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also, no doubt, because "the devil lies in wait for idle hands"; he believed,
also, that success in his worldly enterprises was a sign that God was with him;
he had no scruples about the morality of interest-taking, nor in general about
the whole economic structure of nascent industrial capitalism; he was ready,
once technology had got that far, to put his capital into new power machinery
which in turn snowballed into the great productive capacity of the modern
world. If, as a consumer and an encourager of consumption, he was certainly
no ascetic, the kinds of products his tastes and his ethics impelled him to turn
out were the solid goods of large-scale production, mass market, profits
plowed back, not the luxury goods of the artist and craftsman working to
provide noble and churchman with "superfluous" end products. Even his
churches were bare of the kind of ornamentation that costs heavily in support
of "unproductive" artists. In short, the Protestant turned great moral ener-
gies, such as inspired the best of medieval monasticism, not, so to speak,
away from this-worldly economic productivity, but directly into it.

Weber himself had been influenced by Marxism, and seems to have felt
that the Protestant ethic helped the capitalist to justify what was "exploita-
tion" of the workers. The Englishman Tawney, and others who have pursued
this line of study, have gone further. They are clear that the Calvinist ethical
concept of worldly success as a sign from God that the successful was not
unlikely to be numbered by God among the saved was extended by the suc-
cessful capitalist to include the convenient notion that failure to make money
— remaining in the status of a paid worker with no capital save his capacity
to work for a bare wage — was a sign from God that the worker was perhaps
damned, or had somehow sinned, if only by being lazy and incompetent.
Even ordinary Christian charity migjit seem interference with the will of God;
to this may be added the general Calvinist notion of predestination, which
could be used to justify any established relation, and also the common Protes-
tant appeal to the individual as against authority, which could be used to
justify economic individualism, or laissez faire, as it was later called.

The sum total puts too much of a burden on the Protestant ethic. By the
eighteenth century, many other ideas and influences were coming to bear on
the economic structure of the West. But even to limit the discussion to the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one must first of all show that there was
in fact "exploitation" of workers. Absolutely, in terms of real income, it
would seem difficult to show that workers were worse off in these early mod-
ern times than in medieval times. Relatively, in terms of a comparison be-

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tween what the middle classes and what the workers gained from the slowly
increasing economic productivity of the early modern centuries, it may be
that the workers, no longer effectively protected by their obsolescent medieval
guild and companionship organizations, did fall behind. But one would be
safer with a Scots verdict of "not proven." The fury with which the twentieth-
century attack on capitalism, industrialism, the Protestant ethic, has been
carried out is in part simply a manifestation of sentiments of revolt, not very
different from those that inspired Menckenian attacks on Puritanism.

An even greater difficulty with the Weber thesis taken as a blanket ex-
planation of modern capitalism is the fact that so much of the spirit of capital-
ism is discernible in the late medieval world before the Protestant revolt.
There is a good symbol here: the ledgers of the fourteenth-century Florentine
merchant Datini — two centuries before Calvin — are headed "In the name of
God and of profit." Datini was one of those obsessive persons who can de-
stroy no papers, and by extraordinary luck the life record of this otherwise
ordinary person is available to us. It shows much the same combination of
business and religious anxieties, of concern for his far-flung business interests
and for his future life, that come out in Weber's Protestant Ethic*

Well before the Protestant revolt, firm foundations of modern capitalism
had been laid in Italy, in the Low Countries. Capitalist careers, those of a
Jacques Coeur in France, of the Fugger family in Germany, had been made
by men untouched by the Protestant ethic. Venetian trade with the Levant,
the English wool trade, the Hanseatic trade are all medieval examples of
highly organized marketing methods dependent on banking and on "business"
mentality. The Protestant ethic was an important contributory factor in the
rise of capitalist society in those nations of Europe which, on the whole, were
later to be the leaders of the industrial world: Britain, North Germany, Hol-
land, the United States. But the map of nineteenth-century industrial leader-
ship does not exactly coincide with the map of Protestantism: Belgium, North-
ern France, the German Rhineland, Piedmont-Lombardy remained Catholic
countries, and yet full of the "spirit of capitalism." Some of what went into
the frame of mind that made capitalism is not specifically Protestant nor
specifically Catholic, but, rather, Western, a product of the long moral history
we have been tracing, and no doubt of the long moral prehistory we cannot
trace. The agon, the Western ritual of formal competition, or combat, if you

9 Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato, New York, Knopf, 1957. Datini's ledger is quoted
on p. viiL See especially the Marchesa Origo's perceptive introduction.

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prefer, at some point in the Middle Ages, perhaps as early as that marvelous
thirteenth century, began to take economic channels that were to lead to the
Napoleons of industry. We cannot fully understand why human energies took
this turn, but once it was taken, the Weber thesis, and the Marxist thesis, help
us to understand why these energies were so effective. Protestantism helped
weaken that contempt for the banausic that dominated the Western warrior
aristocracies so long, and that contempt for everything this-worldly — includ-
ing the banausic — that filled the minds of some of the ablest and most ener-
getic of the priestly aristocracies.

It is, finally, worth noting that as long as Protestantism in any of its
forms — including, very notably, Calvinism — remained what I have elsewhere
called an "active" religion it by no means encouraged the worldly way of life
Weber, Tawney, and others have analyzed. The Christian who takes his reli-
gion to be his whole life — and this is true of the active phase of any form of
the Christian religion — cannot possibly be first and foremost an entrepreneur
or a capitalist. He need not — the Protestant did not — flee this world as did
the anchorites. But he cannot make worldly success even one of his major
goals; his mind must be on other things, even if those other things are mind-
ing other and weaker, or, at any rate, less religious men's business. Calvin's
own Geneva was by no means a progressive industrial center; nor is the
Boston of the Mathers very clearly as yet the germ of the Boston of the
Lawrences, the Lowells, the Forbeses.

Once the fire goes out of Calvinism, once it becomes sober, respectable, a
matter of routine — not, be it understood, therefore a matter of mere form, or
hypocrisy, or pharisaism, though it always seems such to the next set of
rebels — once Calvinism is "inactive," then the Weber thesis does seem to
hold. The moral residue of Calvinism, after the intense fusion of theology and
ethics in the heart of the believer no longer obtains, is congruous indeed with
the "spirit of capitalism." But so, too, under favoring conditions, is the moral
residue of Catholicism. Modern, industrial capitalism found less good soil in
many Catholic countries, such as Italy, in large part because such countries
lacked coal and iron. Moreover, Catholic habits, traditions, its network of
established values, certainly made for conservative resistance to change — and
change is the essence of capitalism. But once, as in Belgium, Northern France,
Piedmont, the new capitalism got a start, it found in the disciples of estab-
lished Catholicism a by no means unfavorable spiritual climate.10

10 1 owe this point to David Landes, who in his studies of the very Catholic textile center
Roubaix-Tourcoing has found a living ''Protestant ethic" in Weber's sense.

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III

This central world-view of Protestantism, which we have to call Puritanism,
was by no means limited to the formal Calvinist sects. Puritan ethics and
Puritan morals are found in wide sectors of the conservative state churches,
the Anglican and the Lutheran, and they inspire many of the wilder sects of
the Left of Protestantism. Now many of these groups, both of the Right and
of the Left, by no means shared the deteraiinist theology of the Calvinists.
Puritanism as a moral ideal and as a way of life is broader than any theology.
Calvinism is its core, but there is a wide margin around that core, a margin
unmistakably Puritan.

The Puritan as a moral ideal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
is more difficult for us today to understand than the Greek beautiful-and-
good, the feudal knight, or the medieval saint, perhaps because the Puritan
ideal, very considerably altered, and often not recognized as such, is nonethe-
less so alive with many twentieth-century Americans. We do not, I think, see
the ideal embodied in an ecclesiastic, not in Calvin himself, nor in Knox, Beza,
nor even in some less-known and presumably more typical Puritan divine.
Though we refer freely to the Puritan "theocracies" of Geneva or Boston, we
do not think of the Puritan ideal in clerical terms. Cromwell comes closer. He
is certainly, in the Carlylean sense of the word, the Puritan hero. His aware-
ness of — "intimacy with" is not quite the fair way to put it — God, his
troubles with his conscience, his mastery of discipline for himself and for his
men, his Puritan orthodoxy in dress and manners, his practical gifts of com-
mand and persuasion — all this fits in with the ideal.

But for what I have called the moral ideal one does not go to the great, the
geniuses. The moral ideal is never perfectly embodied in anyone. It is a
concrete abstraction built up from many sources. A good many Americans,
in spite of the work of the debunkers, still see the Puritan as the conven-
tionally handsome young man the sculptor Daniel French made into a bronze
John Harvard, or the grave, mature, sturdy Puritan of St. Gaudens's Deacon
Chapin in Springfield, Massachusetts. And it does seem again that physically
the Puritan ought not to be frail, ought not to look (to use a favorite word of
the nineteenth century) too "spiritual." Nor ought he, though John Milton
was indeed a Puritan, be poet or artist. Tawney to the contrary notwithstand-
ing, he ought not to be a London or an Amsterdam merchant or banker.

Our best lead here is David Riesman's phrase "inner-directed." The Puri-
tan was alive to the civil war in the breast, and knew that he had to fight it.

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God was on his side, wanted him to win, would even, in the sense of the
typical Puritan adage that "God helps those who help themselves," be his ally.
Still, the war was no war of coalition — not on the Puritan's side at least. He
had to fight himself with himself, alone. The outside world of nature and of
other men did not necessarily seem hostile to him in his struggle, though in
comparison with later humanitarian and universalist faiths Puritanism is pes-
simistic, has in its full strength the vein of iron that runs through Christianity,
both active and inactive. The Puritan was not antisocial, asocial; he knew he
had to get on with his fellows. He knew that charity was enjoined on him as
a duty, and that he had to do his duty.

His commanding general in this war with himself, which did often involve
war with others, was his conscience. He would not, I think, even were he a
strictly orthodox Calvinist, have easily thought of his conscience as "deter-
mined" by something quite outside him, even if that something were God.
His conscience was himself. (Here, incidentally, is the heart of the intellectual
difficulty with unconditional predestination I have discussed above.) As out-
siders, we may hold that his conscience responded to the voice of a particular
cultural tradition, to the pressures of his fellow Puritans, to the demands of
the body he was disciplining, to an unconscious he had never heard about. He
was always sure it was his voice, and always hoped that it was echoing God's.

Concretely, his conscience told him to obey the Ten Commandments. The
Puritan's dependence on the Bible is a commonplace, and so, too, is his
tendency to go first to the Old rather than the New Testament. This last point
must not be exaggerated, however, or we shall fall into the errors of the
debunkers of the 1920's, who made out the Puritans to be ferocious devotees
of a revived Jehovah utterly forgetful of the Sermon on the Mount. Here, as
so often in matters of morals and taste, one needs a hairspring balance. The
Puritan, like most morally earnest men in the Western tradition, had at least
a touch of the Stoic. His inner-direction would not let him wear his heart on
his sleeve, but it is not fair to say that he had no heart. He liked order, disci-
pline, neatness, and these things he did not find in the undeserving poor who
are the usual objects of charity. But he was even harder on himself than OP
others, if he lived up to the ideal; and the world he wanted this one to be was
surely not a cruel world.

Nor was it a gloomy one, a prison for the flesh. We must continue to step
carefully. The Puritan was certainly no hedonist. Much that in normal West-
era practice, and even in normal Western ideal, is at worst harmless pleasure,
he felt was following the Devil's lead. In those few times and places when the

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strongly Puritanical were in full power, they translated their ideal into blue
laws, sumptuary legislation of all sorts, the laws of a "republic of virtue." A
rigid Sabbatarianism has long been the symbol of this phase of the rule of the
saints, one that sticks firmly in the craws of their many opponents and that
gave rise to the well-known squib:

To Banbery came I, O prophane one!
Where I saw a Puritane-one,
Hanging of his Cat on Monday,
For killing of a Mouse on Sonday.11

The Puritans passed laws to compel non-Puritans to behave in certain
ways because, like good heirs of a long Western history, they thought this
was the way to regulate morals. They had not had Political Science 104 in a
good American college, and did not know that sumptuary and suchlike legis-
lation was ineffective. Moreover, in ideal, and to a great extent in practice, the
Puritan required no more from others than he required from himself. If he
believed the community should have rigorous codes of conduct, he had al-
ready been rigorous with himself. There were Puritan hypocrites, of course,
but Robert Burns's Holy Willie is no fair sample; besides, Willie's trouble
was not hypocrisy, but pride. There is nothing perverse or unusual about the
legal phases of the blue laws, nor nearly as much as we once thought is per-
verse in the moral phases.

The Puritans were strict Sabbatarians because they felt strongly that the
Catholics from whom they were revolting had profaned the Sabbath by letting
all sorts of worldly activities go on then, by making it into what in English is
now called a holiday, instead of making it what God meant it to be, a holyday.
Much of the rest of their prohibitions are a defiance of the old nobility against
whom also they were in revolt. Their simple clothes, their dull, somber colors,
their short-cropped hair, their avoidance of the dance, music (save for hymns,
in which the modern psychologist might say they found an outlet for much
that was otherwise repressed) , the drama, all are protests against the con-
spicuous consumption of an upper class. These prohibitions, and the deep
Puritan distrust of the arts in particular, no doubt have deeper roots than this

11 Richard Brathwait, Barnabae Itinerarium: Barnabee's Journall, ed. by D. B. Thomas,
London, Penguin Press, 1932, p. 17. Brathwaifs Latin (p. 16) is better:

Veni Banbery, O prophanum!

Ubi vidi Puritanwn,

Felem facientem furem,

Quid Sabbatho stravit Murem.

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protest against an old nobility and an old, and by the sixteenth century very
much painted and adorned, church; but the protest, the inevitable human
version of Hegel's dialectic, is there.

The other roots are no doubt many as well as deep, not altogether ex-
posed in their entirety even by psychoanalysis. Macaulay's well-known epi-
gram that the Puritans stopped bearbaiting in England when they were in
power, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to
the spectators is true — a bit over half true, anyway — but not just. The Puri-
tans shared the common Western acceptance of the facts of pain and violence,
an acceptance not challenged by large groups in the West much before the
eighteenth century. You cannot expect them to feel for the bear. As for the
spectators, the Puritans felt that they were demeaning themselves at bear-
baiting; they felt that this was a low pleasure, and they did not hesitate to ban
what they thought to be low pleasures. There were, in their opinion, many
such, though the long list of them comes almost wholly under a broad head of
long-recognized vices, or temptations to vice — gambling, drunkenness, lewd-
ness, boasting, conspicuous consumption. These pleasures all seemed to them
a threat to what they valued most in externals, in conduct — self-control.

There were, however, it must be insisted, allowable pleasures for the
Puritan. He did not approve of gluttony, which appears in the sermons along
with other vices. But he was not greatly worried over it, and in matters of
food and drink he favored solid, sound fare and enough of it. He was not
notably abstemious if his digestion was good, and contrary to the opinion of
the young of the 1920's his digestion often was good. He took the command-
ment against adultery at least as seriously as he took the others, but within
the due bounds of monogamous marriage there is no evidence that he felt
about sexual intercourse any of St. Paul's obvious doubts. The empirical
evidence that he enjoyed the pleasures of the bed is overwhelming, especially
for the American Puritans, for whom large families were an economic asset.
The simpler pleasures of life, those of work, good health, exercise, the
weather, all were open to him; if you are going to make much of Milton the
Puritan, you had better accept the poet of L* Allegro and // Penseroso as well
as the poet of Paradise Lost. There were the pleasures of the mind, for though
the Puritans were by no means all intellectuals, their average was high; they
seem often to have found pleasure in such matters.

But they did not like Art. They closed the playhouses, stopped dancing
on the green, where folk habit encouraged warmly boisterous embraces, or
anywhere else, discouraged the arts of architecture and decoration in their

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The Reformation

barnlike churches, banished for a time all music but the pounding hymns.
This bill of particulars is not quite fair, but it is true enough that the Puritan
at his most ardent moments distrusted the higher pleasures of art as well as
the lower pleasures of the flesh. I am tempted to take a cue from Macaulay,
and note that what the Puritan objected to was not art, but the artist. Not all
artists had by the seventeenth century become deliberately, and certainly had
not yet become commercially, Bohemian. Even today, there is an occasional
artist or poet who behaves like an insurance executive, and even is one. We
shall come to this revolt of the artist against the Philistine again with the
Romantics of the nineteenth century. The process of making the artist dis-
reputable had, however, begun, and had gone far with the stage and was visible
in the studio, and in most un-Puritan lands like Italy. The Puritan, who did
not like disorder and what he thought was irresponsibility, had no patience
with this incipient Bohemia. The artist has paid him back, and did not have
to wait until the early twentieth century for his revenge. On the whole, from
Hudibras on, the artists of the word have been harsh on the Puritan. Butler
on the Puritans already sounds like the emancipated readers of Mencken:

Compound for sins they are inclin'd to
By damning those they have no mind to:
Still so perverse and opposite,
As if they worshipp'd God for spite.12

The hangers-on of the world of art, the social environment in which it
thrived, also struck deep into the hates and fears of the Puritan. The English
stage had produced the immortal Shakespeare, but even if the Puritan had
been able to understand and accept the un-Christian realism of Shakespeare,
what he could not stomach was the easygoing manners and morals of the play-
house, audience as well as actors. As for the fine arts, they were in the Puri-
tan's mind indelibly associated with the old church and the old nobility, both
of which he had rejected. Still, no doubt one must try to get at the something
else in the Puritan that made him distrust, perhaps fear, the arts. We are back
again at the inner-directed man, fearful, above all, of loss of self-control,
aware that this world is full of temptation, indeed, taught, and believing, that
such temptation is no working out of natural sequences, but the direct, ever-
present intervention of the Devil himself, whose eye, like God's, is ever on
the sparrow though with very different aims. I have said above (p. 155) that
much would look very different to us if we really thought, with the first Chris-
is Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part I, Canto I, lines 213-216.

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tians, that the world would end tomorrow or the next day. It would surely also
look very different to us if we felt every time we had even a slight fantasy of
doing something not approved by our conscience— our superegos, if you like
— that the fantasy in itself was a sign that we were likely to spend eternity in
fearful suffering. I am not maintaining that this belief of the Puritan was a
reasonable belief, nor even that it was a useful belief, but merely that, given
the Puritan's cultural inheritance, it is an understandable belief, indeed, I
fear I must say, a "natural" belief.

The lover of the high arts may still not be satisfied. Is not the Puritan's
fear of art really pretty perverse at bottom, for do we not all know that high
art, great art, is catharsis, an emptying of the soul of pettiness and evil, an
elevating thing? Low art may stir the genitals, but high art, though perhaps
only a John Mill would hold that it achieves a happy spiritual castration of
the rapt appreciator, still has to the genitals a relation that can only be de-
scribed in terms like transcendence, sublimation, ennoblement. Perhaps
Dante, for one, knew better; or were Paolo and Francesca reading a work of
low art that day? As always in this obstinate world — obstinate to the work of
the simplifying systematist — both sides can appeal to the "facts." It is very
hard to imagine anyone led astray from even Puritan morality by Oedipus
Rex. But Tristan und Isolde? Give the Puritan his premises, and he has a case.

Still another major interpretation of the Puritan ideal demands our atten-
tion. Erich Fromm, who knows both the Marxist-Weber literature and the
Freudian, holds that the way of life that came out of the Protestant Reforma-
tion puts too great a strain on ordinary human nature.13 The Reformation, he
maintains, broke down the complex medieval network of social, economic,
and religious institutions, ritual, and beliefs which combined to give the indi-
vidual some material security and much spiritual security. The ordinary man
in the Middle Ages knew where he stood, had, so to speak, to make to a
minimum extent the kind of decision that puts a strain on him. In Riesman's
terms, he was "tradition-directed." Then Luther and the rest of the reformers
came along, working, it is true, in consonance with changes in the mode of
production, and emancipated the individual from all or at least a great many
of these restraints. They freed him. But to the psychologist looking back on
the situation, it seems clear that for most men these medieval ways had been
not so much restraints as supports. Such men did not really, in their uncon-
scious, want to be free. To the sturdy, and exceptional, Protestant individ-

13 Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, New York, Farrar and Rinehart, 1941.

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The Reformation

ualist, Lutheran doctrines such as justification by faith and the "priesthood
of the believer" were challenges to do his best in this world without the
priest's "interference," to work hard, to face the need to make decisions on
his own, to be in matters of the spirit as well as in matters of business his own
master.

But the majority proved incapable of this exacting way of life. In purely
economic terms, they had to put up with what amounted to exploitation by
the stronger. It took a long time, and presocialist and socialist effort, before
the workers once more could be organized. Psychologically, as well as institu-
tionally, no really adequate substitute for the assurances that the medieval
synthesis gave ordinary men was worked out in the West, with the result that
in our own times the masses "escaped from freedom" into the arms of the
totalitarian dictators of Right and Left, We shall have to face this problem of
the moral difficulties of modern libertarian democracy in a later chapter.
Most of us today, however, touched as we all are by some popular versions
of psychology, are more likely to think of Protestantism in its active Puritan
form in the seventeenth century as suppressing, not liberating, as putting on
restraints, self-imposed by the good Puritan on himself, and, through blue
laws, imposed on others.14 Yet the psychological interpretation is not here
inconsistent; for the good Frommian, the artificial and harsh external re-
straints of later capitalist Puritanism were made necessary in part by the
earlier loss to Luther and his allies of the natural and accepted supports which
the old institutions and beliefs once gave the now-unsupported individual.
Whether the new harsh codes were imposed by the Puritan on himself by his
conscience or on the others by laws and institutions, the net result was that
natural psychic drives or energies, driven back into the unconscious, took all
sorts of revenges in psychoses, neuroses, maladjustments that had piled up to
plague us now. We must then ask the question: Is it sensible to apply modern
notions of "repression" and its evil consequences to our classical Puritan?

The question cannot be satisfactorily answered. The relativist that dwells
in every historian, comfortably or not, must insist that all modern psycho-
logical theories or doctrines may turn out to be quite impermanent, that it is
absurd to apply to the seventeenth century the fashionable ideas of the twen-
tieth, and so on* And it is true that one can hardly imagine a seventeenth-

14 1 use "blue laws" as a handy American term for all the complex Puritan attempts to
"legislate private virtue." The reader should be warned that to the purist in matters
historical the phrase means only a specific set of laws in seventeenth-century Connecti-
cut See W. R Prince, "Peter's Blue Laws/' American Historical Association, Report,
1898.

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century Puritan on a modern psychoanalyst's couch. We shall never know
what horrors of infantile experience lay behind Oliver Heywood's self-
reproach:

Oh my Lord, I am here at Thy footstool, a worthless worm, an unprofitable
branch, a sinful wretch, fit for nothing but to be cast out as unsavory salt.15

At the very start, it may be urged that the problem is unreal. The Puritan,
it may be argued, was not suppressing, but merely "controlling." Now that
the first wave of popularized Freudiamsm has receded, we do not regard any
and all interference with the child's, let alone the adult's, wishes to be sup-
pression, and bad. We guide, control, even punish. There is a familiar
semantic situation here, the complete clearing up of which would be difficult
indeed: "suppression" will for a long time not lose for us its pejorative sense.
Even so, I must insist that at least for such periods of Puritan dominance as
the 1640*s in Britain, the rule of the saints in Geneva and in New England,
and within the congregations themselves for much of these early centuries of
the Reformation, "suppression" is the accurate, the necessary word. American
traditions about early New England, molded still more by The Scarlet Letter
and its like than by the debunkers of the 1920's, are not altogether mislead-
ing; the Puritans said No. Calvin's own Geneva was so fully regulated that
one wonders how even the political theorists could have dug libertarian
influences out of pristine Calvinism. Here is a recent popular historian's
summary:

To regulate lay conduct a system of comiciliary visits was established: one
or another of the elders visited, yearly, each house in the quarter assigned to him,
and questioned the occupants on all phases of their lives. Consistory and Council
joined in the prohibition of gambling, card-playing, profanity, drunkenness, the
frequenting of taverns, dancing (which was then enhanced by kisses and embraces) ,
indecent or irreligious songs, excess in entertainment, extravagance in living, im-
modesty in dress. The allowable color and quantity of clothing, and the number
of dishes permissible at a meal, were specified by law. Jewelry and lace were
frowned upon. A woman was jailed for arranging her hair to an immoral height.
Theatrical performances were limited to religious plays, and then these too were
forbidden. Children were to be named not after saints in the Catholic calendar
but preferably after Old Testament characters; an obstinate father served four
days in prison for insisting on naming his son Claude instead of Abraham. Cen-
sorship of the press was taken over from Catholic and secular precedents, and

w Oliver Heywood, quoted in W. Notestein, Four Worthies, New Haven, Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1957, p. 214. The whole essay on Heywood is worth reading as a good
sampling of the minor Puritan divine. Heywood's language is the then-fashionable
language.

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The Reformation

enlarged (1560) : books of erroneous religious doctrine, or of immoral tendency,
were banned; Montaigne's Essays and Rousseau's Entile were later to fall under
this proscription. To speak disrespectfully of Calvin or the clergy was a crime.
A first violation of these ordinances was punished with a reprimand, further viola-
tion with fines, persistent violation with imprisonment or banishment. Fornication
was to be punished with exile or drowning; adultery, blasphemy, or idolatry, with
death. In one extraordinary instance a child was beheaded for striking its
parents.16

This would seem to be almost the opposite of "freedom" in any sense,
except for the few who made and enforced the laws. It is not that in ordinary
Protestant societies the individual was left, in the sense the philosophical
anarchist gives the word, "free"; it is, rather, that for the old medieval set
of conformities there was substituted in Protestant countries a new one, one
which in the Calvinist range of Protestantism was a great deal stricter, more
repressive of ordinary human drives, than the old had been. The question then
becomes: Was the new nexus of controls unsuited to the task of cementing
a going society?

In its extremist forms at Geneva, in Holland, in New England, in the
English Puritan Revolution, I think the answer must be yes. At any rate, by
pragmatic test, these societies in their strict form did not endure. The rule of
the saints at its fullest anywhere was an attempt to push and pull poor human
beings to heights — and they are heights, not depths — they appear to the
realistic observer not to have been designed for. The rule of the saints I have
elsewhere classified with the rule of the Jacobins and of the "old" Bolsheviks,
as the effort under the pricks of an active religious drive to make this earth
some kind of a heaven.17 As the Puritan drive slowly subsided, as the greatly
moderated Calvinist groups became part of conventional Western society,
the moral implications of their way of life change. To these we must come
later, for they set their stamp — no longer by any means quite the stamp of
Calvin himself — on a great deal of the nineteenth-century West, and in
particular on the English-speaking parts of the West.

But even at the height of their drive to their ideal, there is no clear evi-
dence that Calvinism "produced" more of what we call mental disturbances
than earlier phases of Western society. I do not think that Oliver Heywood
was insane, or even neurotic. Statistics, as I have had to remark often, are
just not good enough to test so woolly a thesis as that Puritan suppressions

i* Will Durant, The Reformation, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1957, p. 474.

" See my The Anatomy of Revolution, New York, Norton, 1938; in Vintage Books,

New York, Knopf, 1957, especially Chap. VH.

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produced mental disturbances on a large scale. For one thing, since they were
small societies, for the most part, and men are mobile, the most recalcitrant
could and did escape, in New England to life among the Indians of the
frontier, in Europe to neighboring lands. For another, we must remember
the vulgar German proverb "The soup is never eaten as hot as it is cooked."
The Americans of the 1920's were not the first "scofflaws" under this kind of
prohibition; even at Geneva, one could commit adultery, and procreate
bastards; in England, a large country for those days, traces of Merry England
survived here and there all through the Puritan revolution. It is impossible,
save in inverted Utopias like Brave New World and 7 954, to repress all of the
people all of the time.

In summary, the Puritan ideal, even when pushed into fanaticism, is at
the very least one of the fascinating efforts human beings have made to tame
themselves. The romanticist is no doubt right: we are indeed wild animals,
barely domesticated enough to keep our species going. But the dream of an
ordered society keeps recurring, spurs men on to transcend themselves and
history. Puritanism is by no means the harshest of these dreams, and, in its
effort to make itself real, by no means the least effective. Liberal cant in this
country, which has shut so many off from so wide an area of human experi-
ence ("the liberal is a man who will not read anything he is going to disagree
with"), has been especially unfair toward the Puritans. They deserve better
from us; we can perhaps learn from them almost as much from the Zuni, the
Hopi, or the Samoans.

IV

Puritanism, Calvinism, though I believe they are central to the moral
experience of Protestantism, by no means exhaust the varieties of such experi-
ence to be found in the Reformation. Once more using a convenient if imper-
fect dualism, we may distinguish between "hard" and "soft" Protestantism,
or, indeed, Christianity. This distinction is not by any means that suggested by
Paul's contrast of Letter and Spirit, nor that between staying in this world and
fleeing from it, nor is it quite that between the organizer (Gregory the Great,
Bernard of Clairvaux) and the withdrawn mystic (St. John of the Cross).
The soft Protestant is no wastrel, nor is he by any means a rationalist. But he
shies off from the harsher and more aristocratic doctrines of Calvinism —
unconditional predestination, not to speak of such refinements as infant
damnation, restriction of God's grace to a very few elect, and the Stoic bearing
that goes with Puritan dignity. Though they flourished more particularly in

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the eighteenth century, the origins of these softer Protestants go back to the
very beginnings of Protestantism. Already in the sixteenth century, Merino
Simons, founder of the Mennonites, anticipates much with his doctrine of a
"new birth," itself a signal of salvation. German Pietists, British Methodists,
French Quietists — the latter formally Catholics, but hardly orthodox — are
almost always on the soft side of the line. The Quakers, those peculiar people,
have their soft affiliations, conspicuously in their pacifism and their escha-
that their emotions were not those of the romanticist in revolt. They were
optimistic and truly democratic Calvinists, as in a sense they are. But the
taxonomy of Protestant sects is a bewildering task. The Methodists had their
Calvinist wing, and they, the Baptists, and other sects were, in matters of
private morality, drink, dancing, card-playing, often quite as "puritanical"
as the saints had been. The Bible was their common source book. They did
not precisely welcome the Age of Reason. They, and not Yankee Congrega-
tionalists, and certainly not Boston Unitarians, are in twentieth-century
America the last of the Puritans.

Positively, these softer Protestants do have in common an acceptance of
some form of the doctrine of free will, and at least a tendency toward, if not
precisely universalism — each sect believed firmly it was the true form of
Christianity — at least a belief that God had basically good intentions toward
the human race and would welcome a significant increase in the number of
the saved. What they have most conspicuously in common is an emotional pi-
ety which in their meetings might rise to the excitements their enemies of the
Age of Reason regarded as indecent, and described with the horrid word "en-
thusiasm." They were not for the most part wild men, however, and it is clear
that their emotions were not those of the romanticist in revolt. They were
simple people, mostly from the humbler ranks of society both in Britain and
in Germany, and in the North American colonies. Lecky thought that the
Methodist movement in Britain probably saved that country from grave
difficulties with its lower classes, who had to bear the brunt of the Industrial
Revolution; the miners, the workers in the new industrial towns, the deprived
village laborers, found in the sharing of religious emotions, in the whole
conservative fabric of Methodism, a satisfaction that saved them from the
allurements of French-inspired revolutionaries. This thesis was expanded
and extended by the French historian Elie Halevy.18

18 W. E. H. Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, New York, Apple-
ton, 1888, Vol. H, pp. 691-692; Elie Halevy, A History of the English People in the
Nineteenth Century, London, Benn, 1949, Vol. I, England in 1815, pp. 424-428. Lecky
could hardly have picked up the Marxist tag about "opium of the people," and Halevy
no longer needed it

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Though the pietistic sects attracted a by no means negligible number
of the evangelically inclined among the educated classes — Wesley was an
Oxford man, and Zinzendorf a count — they must be numbered among those
who have pushed Christianity away from the intellect and toward the emo-
tions. Their theology was relatively simple, their clergy often uneducated, and
their distrust of the highly educated great indeed. But this very anti-intel-
lectualism helped them resist much more successfully than did the hard
Protestants the pressures of the Enlightenment. The Puritans' contempt for
the damned of this world, their self-insulation from common sense, their
intense desire to remake human conduct, would seem on the surface to be
more proof against the natural science, the rationalism fondly supposing itself
common sense, the often sincere belief in toleration of the Enlightenment,
than would the gentle piety of the Methodists and Pietists. And no doubt in
its first fire, its active stage, Puritanism was quite safe from pure rationalism.
But the Puritan was essentially an intellectual; he had to think, to understand,
and his warfare with himself was in part the war of the head with the heart.
When the active phase of Puritanism was over, its prosperous third and fourth
generations, no longer driven to bring heaven to earth, began the process of
reconciliation with this earth as it stood, a reconciliation that brought some of
them to Unitarianism or freethinking. The intellectual history of Boston is an
excellent illustration of this movement.

Not so with the pietist sects. They not only resisted the rationalist current
of the Age of Reason; they for the most part also resisted the closely inter-
flowing current of sentimental humanitarianism. They damped the hell-fires
a bit, but they did not extinguish them. They worked with the poor, the
unhappy, the wicked, and welcomed their conversion or even their reforma-
tion, but they did not altogether equate sin with a bad socio-economic environ-
ment. In fact, they believed in original sin, not in the natural goodness and/
or reasonableness of man. The intellectuals have not much liked them. They
are not very exciting, but they were numerous, and perhaps a useful brake
on our madly progressing modern world. They are still with us, almost wholly
apart from the intellectuals, almost wholly, as real living persons, unknown
to the intellectuals.

Protestant tradition, naturally enough, has held that the Reformation re-
formed, that human conduct improved under Protestant successes, that even
the Catholics, tardily learning a needed lesson, put their house in somewhat

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The Reformation

better order in what the Protestants call the "Counter Reformation." The
freethinkers of the Enlightenment had a bit more trouble in estimating the
moral value of the Reformation. They felt that the Protestants had at least
been an entering wedge for the Enlightenment, and they discerned in Protes-
tant attacks on Romish superstition and corruption much of their own senti-
ments; still, they could and did read, and they realized that early Protes-
tantism was Christian, in fact, superstition. And, of course, debunking has
been long an irresistible temptation to all sorts of historians, including the
Enlightened. We may then start with some of these doubts about the reforms
of the Reformation.

The complex most consonant with the temper of our age goes back at least
to William Cobbett, a testy radical journalist of early nineteenth-century
England, who wrote a history of the Reformation in England.19 Cobbett has
been expanded and extended by the positivists, by the Marxists, by Weber,
Tawney, and Fromm, and, naturally enough but perhaps not altogether
wisely in such company, by Catholics. At its broadest, this line of attack
maintains that Protestantism substituted for the communally responsible
medieval society with its guilds, its organized charities, its notions of a "just
price," its obligation to make life as secure as possible even for the poor, the
modern unrestrained scramble for wealth. Released from these good medieval
Catholic Christian restraints, the followers of the reformers, above all, the
new modern territorial rulers and their hangers-on, grabbed all they could,
no matter who suffered. Henry VIII in England suppressed the monasteries
and confiscated their wealth, which he used to reward his courtiers and build
up to support his own upstart dynasty the nouveau riche Tudor nobility and
gentry who we mistakenly think were real nobles of Norman lineage. The
German princelets, the Dutch burghers, all got their share of the spoils, and
the French Huguenot nobles would have got theirs if they could — obviously
it was hope of spoils that attracted them to the Calvinist allegiance.

The new rich, the attack continues, in spite of their canting Protestantism,
which did not last very long anyway, conducted themselves in matters of
private morality at least as badly as the rich usually do. Public morality in
politics, already undermined by the unscrupulous power politics of the Italian
Renaissance, was surely not improved in the North by the Reformation.

i* A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland: Showing How That
Event Has Impoverished and Degraded the Main Body of the People in Those Conn-
tries. In a Series of Letters, Addressed to All Sensible and Just Englishmen, London,
1824-1825.

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A History of Western Morals

Public morality in economic life, as we have noted, was, according to this
thesis, greatly worsened. Now the limits were off in competition, and the Devil
took the hindmost. The new wealth came from commerce and investment, not
primarily from land; its possessors lacked the steadying customary morality
and the sense of duty to their dependents that the old class had had. "As truth
spread," wrote J. A. Froude, "charity and justice languished in England."20

There are two obvious criticisms to be made of this general thesis. First,
and simpler, is the criticism we have already made of the Weber thesis, that
whatever the facts of change from the medieval way of life to the modern —
and these facts are no doubt partly those of an expanding economy, and the
transfer of the agon, the competitive spirit, from the life of the knight and
the cleric to the life of the courtier allied with new capitalistic wealth —
these changes greatly antedated the posting of Luther's Ninety-five Theses in
1517. Protestantism in some of its phases was part of these changes, and
was affected and made possible by these earlier changes. What I have said in
comment on the Weber thesis holds for this extension of his thesis: unscrupu-
lous "Renaissance" politics in the struggles of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries between pope and emperor, not to mention the Hundred Years'
War, grave neglect of the poor by their superiors, clear evidence of popular
unrest all through the fourteenth century, beginnings of the ejection of farming
peasants by "capitalist" landlords anxious to make more money by sheep
grazing in fifteenth-century England, very modern "class struggle" condi-
tions, the popolo grasso against the popolo minuto, the revolt of the ciompi
in the Florentine trecento — the list of these unidyllic conflicts of the "serene"
Middle Ages could be long indeed.21

Second, and more complicated, there is the criticism based on doubts as to
whether there was in fact a general increase in conventional immorality among
the ruling classes, a general increase in suffering, deprivation, neglect, among
the ruled. We shall have in a final chapter to attempt to put into understand-
able order those changes in actual group moral standards and conduct that
we can roughly establish. There are such changes, but they will probably not
turn out to make the kind of sense the proponents of the thesis we are here
commenting on try to make. There are sudden and usually impermanent col-
lective accesses of puritanical conduct — the brief rule of Savonarola, for

20 Henry VIII, Vol. I, p. 74. Even though Froude was a Victorian and a bitter anti-
Catholic, I suspect there is irony in that "truth.**

21 For the Florentine class struggles, see Iris Origo, Merchant of Prato, pp. 66-67.

236

The Reformation

example. There are, at least in modern times, accesses of particularly striking
unpuritanical conduct among those who can afford luxury, often reaction to
the opposing kind of excess, such as the period of the Stuart Restoration in
Britain after the Puritan Commonwealth. There are, to anticipate a bit, all
sorts of long and short "cycles," varying with different classes or other groups
of a given society. Ethics, conduct, morals do change between 1250 and 1700,
but not as simply as the critics of Protestant morality make out.

As to the general moral level of those who could afford to live loosely —
and many who tried to live as their betters lived — Huizinga's Waning of the
Middle Ages shows clearly that the luxury, the overrefinement, the fascination
with death and corruption, the morbid excesses of the sixteenth century are
all present in the fourteenth and fifteenth. The same holds true of the suffer-
ings of the poor, and of the relation between the rich and the poor. This last
relation was never, at the height of the feudal-manorial system, one of mutual
Christian loving-kindness. The class struggle, which the Marxists are perfectly
right in insisting is a constant of Western history, was intensified and made
more open, but not by the Protestant Reformation, for the process goes back
much further in time. Clearly, individuals and sometimes large groups did
suffer in these changes. There were evicted peasants, victims of technological
change, victims of the bitter foreign and civil wars, which also antedate
Protestantism, though here they are clearly stepped up by the new hatreds
Protestantism brought with it. But, as I have already noted, real income, even
real income for the many, the "people," subject to the ups and downs of a
reasonably free market economy and to the grave local shortages inevitable
in those days of primitive transportation and primitive economic administra-
tion and no doubt to many other variables, has been going up, on the whole,
ever since about 1000 A.D. I do not think that the most morally outraged
economic historians have shown, again on the average and over the long
run, that "workers," "proletarians," even "peasants," any "lower class," has
been wholly excluded at any time from at least a share of this increased real
income.

But has not one of the marks of the modern world been the unhappiness,
the discontentedness, of large numbers of those at the base of the social
pyramid? Is not Fromm perhaps right, after all, that the upshot of the Protes-
tant Reformation has been to leave the masses forlorn, spiritually uprooted,
victims of a freedom to change they could not adapt themselves to, mass
men deprived of all that makes for human dignity? The broader implications
of this very broad generalization we must face in a later chapter. In its specific

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A History of Western Morals

application to the Protestant Reformation I think the thesis cannot be well
established, and certainly needs many qualifications.

First, in terms of charity, seen as what we now call social service, the
situation was not nearly as bad as some historians, like Cobbett or even
Froude, have made it out to be. Even in England, the Elizabethan Poor Law
of 1601 is merely the culmination at the center of national government of a
long process whereby the secular authority took over the major share of
responsibility for those we nowadays piously and democratically call the
"wrtrferprivileged." Once more, Puritanism is in principle harsh and disap-
proving toward the poor. Like that last Puritan, George Bernard Shaw, most
Puritans felt the poor must be undeserving or God would not have made them
poor (for Shaw, it was lack of the Life Force that made them poor) . But
here I think we might reverse the usual order of the puzzling relation between
principle and practice; the Puritan did better by the poor than his preaching
would show. I grant that he did not love them (does anybody?), but he did
not let them starve.

Again, over the whole wide range of Puritanism, above all, in its less
intense forms, it can be argued that men got at least the satisfaction of bring-
ing the ideal and the real into closer approximation than has been usual in
Christianity. Grant the lapses in conduct the novelists build on, grant the
aesthetic poverty of the ideal, grant much of all the anti-Puritans say, it is
still true that Puritans lived in communities where much that the general voice
of the West has long regarded as virtue was practiced, where much that that
voice has regarded as vice was kept at a minimum. The Puritan way of life
for many approximated the Puritan ideal. Plain, not ascetic, living was the
common lot; high thinking, exhortatory and introspective, was by no means
an uncommon lot. The Puritan was far too self-conscious, at bottom too
touched with a kind of rationalist drive, to take the label "primitive"; he was
not even, as some of the softer eighteenth-century humanitarians became, a
conscious seeker after a primitive past. (The Protestant appeal to the Bible
and to "gospel Christianity" seems to me by no means genuine primitivism
even in groups like the Mennonites and the Quakers.) But the Puritan way of
life does have analogies with that of simple, well-disciplined, tradition-directed
societies, where from top to bottom there is no luxurious living, no con-
spicuous consumption, no open vices, no intellectual vices like irony and
cleverness.

It could not — or, at any rate, it did not — last. Puritanism had its part in
the Victorian ideal and reality, and it is not without its part in our own lives.

23R

The Reformation

But the Puritanism of the seventeenth century has ceased to live. The Marxist
is no doubt, as usually, at least partly right; the very productivity of a Puritan
society was bound to increase wealth, and to set before the successful
temptations to luxurious living they could not withstand. But the Puritan
respect for education, indeed, for the life of the intellect, was also a danger
to the Puritan way of life. If men's "lower" appetites and feelings tend to lead
them to the vulgar vices, their "higher" intellectual drives tend to lead them to
even more dangerous and more varied vices — to originality, to the high disgust
we call in America "liberalism," to cleverness and irony, to that attitude, most
objectionable to the Puritan, for which we must, since it is usually such a
thing, use the sophomoric word "sophistication." In a sense most important
of all, in the specific historical situation of the West in the seventeenth century,
to encourage the free use of the intellect — and to encourage the intellect at all
is to tempt it to free thinking — meant to encourage the development of
modern natural science. And, again, whatever it might or ought to have done,
natural science has proved in fact the greatest dissolvent of the cosmology
central not only to Puritanism but to all Christianity. Perhaps the central
element of the "Protestant ethic" that helped make our world of mid-twentieth
century was not the glorification of hard work and of worldly success, but the
glorification of the intellect. Plain living the Puritan could often stand without
yielding to temptation; but high thinking proved too much for him.

We may use a more concrete and perhaps more suggestive metaphor. The
Puritan society was, though less simply so, one like the Spartan, the early
Roman, the feudal lords of the early Middle Ages in some of their aspects,
a society of lions. But the Puritans, though they disapproved of the morals
of the foxes, were not without some admiration for the brains of the foxes;
or, as some might prefer to put it, the Puritans themselves as men of business,
the men Weber depicts, and finally as men of politics, were themselves foxes.
In the human, if not in the animal world, the fox ultimately destroys the
lion.22

VI

To return to our starting point, whatever its ramifications in politics and
economics, the Reformation of the sixteenth century, both Protestant and

22 The metaphor is Machiavellf s. It is developed at length by Pareto, whose lions are
conservative, tradition-directed aristocrats guided by sentiments he calls "residues of
persistent aggregates," whose foxes are innovating, clever, unscrupulous leaders guided
by sentiments he calls "residues of instincts for combinations,*' It is hard to plunge
into Pareto; but see bis The Mind and Society, New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1935, para.
2178, 1480.

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A History of Western Morals

Catholic, was in the minds of many of its leaders, and their followers, too, an
effort to renew the moral crusading spirit Christianity is born with. Some of
them — who can be sure? — were perhaps inspired by a stepping up of that
spirit into a heresy most dangerous and yet endemic in Christianity, a heresy
deeper even than Manichaean dualism, a heresy anticipating that of the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Some of them may have hoped to destroy
evil on earth, to "cure" evil, a task the moral realist finds as meaningless as
the physician would find the "curing" of death. At any rate, if you want to
measure the success of the Reformation by the degree to which it turned all
men into morally perfect beings, you can say quite simply that the Reforma-
tion was a failure.

If you take a modest standard and ask what specific reforms were
relatively successful, you get a different answer. Much that outraged the
reformers in the church of the late fifteenth century was ended, and has
never come back in so scandalous a form. The Catholic Reformation was a
striking success. The Roman papal court that so shocked Luther, and not
only Luther, has never returned. It is no doubt impossible, and perhaps
undesirable, to eliminate entirely the politician from the ecclesiastical adminis-
trator; but the vices symbolized for us all by the Borgias cannot possibly
persist for long in any Christian clergy, and they have not persisted at Rome.
The Catholic Reformation was a renewal all along the line, renewal of mis-
sionary zeal as the geographical discoveries opened up new worlds, renewal
of organized social work as new orders filled with charitable zeal were
founded, renewal of confidence that inspired the counterattack so successful
in Central and Eastern Europe. There were relapses, even among the clergy,
as the Enlightenment brought temptations of a different sort, and as the old
ones were, at least for the upper clergy, renewed in an atmosphere like that of
the French ancien regime. Yet even for France, the state of the church in 1789
does not look to modern research anywhere nearly as bad as it looked to the
French revolutionaries and their faithful historians — a degree of indifference,
yes, much ignorance and incompetence among the poorly paid lower clergy,
but nothing like the fleshly corruption of the fifteenth century.23

This Catholic Reformation, be it noted, was a moral reform in a church
that at the Council of Trent firmly refused to change its theology or its govern-
ment Even the rather extreme extension of the doctrine of good works which

23 Pierre de la Gorce, Histoire Religieuse de la Revolution Frangaise, Paris, Librairie
Plon, 1925; Andre LatreiUe, L'Eghse Catholique et la Revolution Fran$aise, Paris,
Librairie Hachette, 1946.

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The Reformation

had started Luther off, the sale of indulgences, was corrected in practice rather
than in theory, for at Trent the fathers decided that there was indeed a
treasury of good works on which mortals under proper conditions might draw.
The Catholic Church has not in matters of ultimate philosophical concern
been quite the monolithic survival of the Middle Ages some both inside and
outside it like to maintain it has been, but in comparison with Protestantism
it has certainly resisted the later complexes of heresies I shall here call simply
"optimistic-rationalist-humanitarian" and to which I shall shortly return in
considering the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.

As for the Protestants, they, too, failed to cure evil. They may, as a man
like Tawney thinks, have added to the miseries, and the relative number, of
the poor, have set up a new and worse Pharisaical middle class. They may
have added to the number of what the modern psychologist would consider
the unnecessarily self-tortured. They may have condemned many a fine artist
to mute ingloriousness or vain rebellion. They may have been most respon-
sible for the perhaps dangerous multiplicity of modern Westerners on all
matters of ultimate philosophical concern. These are all most debatable
propositions, and I feel wholly justified in putting them in the conditional
mood. As the reader will know, I incline to think that in all these matters the
requisition against Protestantism has been drawn up too strongly in recent
years. But no one in his senses will accuse the Protestants of encouraging the
Borgias in their midst. The Puritans, in fact, were for the most part reason-
ably— sometimes most unreasonably — pure. Even the conservative estab-
lished churches, the Anglican and the Lutheran, though not unfairly accused
of Erastianism at times, though they have always had numerous conven-
tionally un-Christian Christians, have also never been conventionally corrupt.
To a Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Lutheran Church was truly cor-
rupt; but Kierkegaard was sicker, or madder, or more Godlike, than almost
anyone in the long record of Christianity. He needed (he third-century desert,
but had only nineteenth-century Denmark. To all but the Kierkegaards and
their lesser likes, the Protestant, like the Catholic, Reformation was a true re-
form; in both, it seems likely that the level of laymen's conduct was raised
somewhat; in both, the open scandal of a clergy living in clear and simple sins
of the flesh was ended, at least in the West.

241

The Renaissance

If ever an elite, fully conscious of its own merits, sought to segregate itself from
the vulgar herd and live life as a game of artistic perfection, that was the circle
of choice Renaissance spirits.1

ALL CONCEPTS OF MORAL EXCELLENCE are aristocratic, for their holders
know well that the many do not live up to them. Even the most innocent of
American democrats knows that, at the very best, most of the people have
hitherto been fooled most of the time. There is, however, a great difference
between two kinds of Western aristocracies, well brought out in the contrast
between the Renaissance and the Reformation. Huizinga is quite right: the
choice spirits of the Renaissance, the men of virtu, the humanists, the
courtiers, asked only that the many not trouble them. In a few circles like
that of Pico della Mirandola there was a vague, Platonic-Utopian feeling that
the whole world might be much nicer if everyone knew Plato, but there really
was no true reforming zeal in these people. These aristocrats of the soul and
body not only did not dream of making the many into men of virtu, of learn-
ing, of civility; most of them did not worry at all about the conduct of the
many, as long as they were not themselves interfered with.

The Protestant reformers, more particularly at the Calvinist center of
Protestantism, were, as their enemies have always loved to point out, aris-
tocrats, elitists, spiritual snobs. The elect were few, and knew it; the damned

i Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p. 180.

242

The Renaissance

were many, and were kept constantly aware of their unhappy state by the few
saved. Here, put with no real malice on my part, is the clue to the difference
between these two aristocratic attitudes. At the very lowest point, the Puritan
saint could not be indifferent to the conduct of the damned — the predestined
— multitude, if only because, as a Puritan divine said, their conduct stank in
the nostrils of the faithful. The Puritan may have felt he could not save the
many, but he certainly could not let them sin in peace. Actually, as I have
insisted, his practice was much more hopefully melioristic and Christian than
his theory. He wanted his fellows to behave themselves, and he did his best
to make them do so. As for the less heroic forms of Protestantism, they never
quite lost, any more than did the Catholic Church, the basic Christian drive to
achieve a society in which all men should live up to the aristocratic Christian
ethical ideal — but to achieve it without violence, and without the heroism that
destroys.

The Renaissance return to the Greeks and Romans, then, was not simply a
return to round arches, Ciceronian Latin, Plato, and the rest; nor was it a
return to anything so vague as a healthy paganism, the spirit of individual
freedom, the revolt against authority. It was an attempt made by another aris-
tocratic minority to live again the life of the beautiful-and-good, the Aris-
totelian Golden Mean, the enjoying — but not uncomfortably original, not
worried, not frustrated — mind in the graceful body, the life recommended by
the Just Cause of Aristophanes, "redolent of ease," the serene divorce from
sweaty reality so nicely reflected in my quotation from Seneca (see p. 116).
"Courtesy," wrote Paolo da Certaldo in the fifteenth century, "is nothing but
the [Golden] Mean, and the Mean endures."2 But the mean in this sense is
about as far from "average" as one can get.

Now the men of the Renaissance did, like their Greek models of the
Great Age, make a real effort to combine in one the excellences of the two
major Western aristocratic roles, so often separated in fact and in ideal.
They sought to be best with their bodies and best with their minds, to com-
bine the warrior-statesman and the priest-artist-intellectual. They were not
by any means as successful as their modern admirers have made them out to
be. The Renaissance scholar-humanist, unaided by our modern lexicons,
reference books, indexes, and well-catalogued libraries, had so colossal a

2 Paolo da Certaldo, Libro di buoni costumi, ed. by Aldredo Schiaffini, Florence, Felice
Le Monnier, 1945, no. 82, p. 79: Cortesia non e altro se non misura, e misura dura.
There are touches of Polonius in this little fourteenth-century book of moral advice,
much folk wisdom and common Christian sense, and faint echoes of the beautiful-and-
good.

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task that he can hardly be expected to have had time to develop his body.
Some of them did their best, but on the whole the European scholar was as
tied to his desk as the Schoolmen had been. Indeed, only in England was the
attempt to bring together in higher education the young of both aristocracies,
the doers-to-be and the thinkers-to-be, destined to survive in partial success
in Oxford, Cambridge, and the public schools. On the other side, the men of
virtu had nothing for the exercise of their bodies quite as good as the Greeks
had had in their games and their wars. The knightly tournament persisted,
more than slightly ridiculous, in the sixteenth century of the High Renais-
sance in Northern and Western Europe; the hunt and youthful games were
available. But gunpowder had begun to spoil the sport of war, or, at least, to
spoil its aristocratic side, and there was never a continental equivalent of the
playing fields of Eton. As for the artists, their favorite sporting exercise was
usually taken in bed.

We shall, then, defying the tradition that makes the Man of the Renais-
sance a glorious union of the artist, scholar, and man of action, do well to
consider separately the ideals of the humanist and of the man of vinii. Of
course, the two ideals worked often in the consciousness of the same man;
more particularly., the artist was likely to try to have the best of both worlds —
sometimes, as with a Benvenuto Cellini, with a degree of success. At the
court of Lorenzo de* Medici, the artists and the men of letters strove for
courtesy and virtu, and the courtiers strove to be humanists. Symonds,
Burckhardt, and the other lovers of the Renaissance — they were usually also
haters of the nineteenth century — were not wholly wrong: these Renaissance
athletes of the spirit tried hard to be Apollos. They tried, perhaps, a little
too hard.

ii

The humanist ideal gets neatly, but, as always, imperfectly, embodied in a
culture hero, Erasmus. The humanist, who was a scholar and often also a
man of letters and a moralist, was not what we know as a natural scientist.
If, like Erasmus, he were distinguished enough, he did, however, acquire
among all interested in formal culture something like the prestige of the
physicist today. Had there been newspapers and news weeklies, Erasmus and
a few others would have figured prominently on their pages, as an Einstein
or a Bohr has in our day. How far down into the masses this repntation went
in the sixteenth century is hard to measure. There was hardly yet in the

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The Renaissance

West, even in Florence, Paris, or London, the equivalent of the big sophisti-
cated cities of antiquity, Athens at its height, Alexandria, Rome, no doubt,
certainly Constantinople at the height of the figjht over Christian heresies,
where your man in the street is a kind of debased intellectual, lively and
interested in debate on matters of taste, philosophy, or religion, almost, but
not quite, as much as in sport and scandal.

The figure of Erasmus suggests some negatives about the humanist ideal,
negatives with which we may frankly begin our attempt to understand the
ideal as it really was, for they must be cleared out of the way. The humanist
was no democrat; he had no illusions that Plato would do for the many. It is
a commonplace that the first few generations of humanists after the invention
of printing felt toward that mechanizing of a beautiful art the kind of scorn
the artist has ever since felt for the machine-made. Printed books they dis-
liked perhaps also because such readily distributed learning threatened to
make learning easy and not a rare distinction. They need hardly have wor-
ried. The humanist was proud of the skills he had laboriously acquired,
proud to the point the democrat would call snobbishness. These skills were
the traditional skills of grammarian, literary historian, critic, philosopher,
amassing bits from the already immense body of work in Latin and Greek;
apart from a touch of archaeology, then at its very beginnings, they were not
the skills of experimentation, concrete observation, case histories, in short,
they were not the skills of the scientist who dirties his hands. The humanist
was not a man who had nobly and in anticipation of the modern world
emancipated himself from the authority of custom, the printed word, the
accepted; only, unlike the Schoolmen, he did cut away as far as he could
patristic and medieval tradition, and went back directly to his beloved
Greeks and Romans. He merely substituted one authority for another. To-
ward the Schoolmen a rebel, toward the giants of classical antiquity he was
the humble disciple.

But he was humble only toward the long dead and their works. He was
contemptuous of his medieval predecessors, whom he regarded as benighted
barbarians ignorant of good Latin and of any Greek, subservient to the repu-
tation of an Aristotle they had never read in the original. Toward his con-
temporaries he displayed that curious form of the Western struggle for prize
which prevails among the learned, and which has rarely been as naked, as
vehement, as Homeric, since the great era of the humanists. Erasmus himself
was a vain 'and prickly scholar, justifiably aware of his gifts and his prestige,
but certainly guilty of the great Christian sin of pride. Here, as a sample of

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the controversial manners of the age — an extreme one, no doubt — is Poggio
Bracciolini addressing his fellow humanist Tomasio Filelfo:

Thou stinking he-goat! thou horned monster! thou malevolent detractor . . .
May the divine vengeance destroy thee as an enemy of the virtuous, a parricide
who endeavorest to ruin the wise and good by lies and slanders, and the most
false and foul imputations. If thou must be contumelious, write thy satires against
the suitors of thy wife — discharge the putridity of thy stomach upon those who
adorn thy forehead with horns.3

It is true that these quarrels of humanists have a touch of the unbuttoned
that one does not find in later and purely academic versions — not even in
the nineteenth-century German version — of the entremangerie professorate.
There is Renaissance gusto in all but the driest of them, a sense of emancipa-
tion rare in the scholarly tradition. This same Poggio Bracciolini, when in
middle age he found it prudent to marry, "was obliged to dismiss a mistress
who had born him twelve sons and two daughters."4

Yet for the historian of morals the important thing about the Renaissance
humanist is that in him it is possible to see, faintly indeed — it is not more
than the old reliable small cloud on the horizon — the beginnings of the
alienation of the intellectual that is so important a phase of our own moral
climate. The attitude described in that nowadays-familiar phrase is not alto-
gether absent from the ancient Greco-Roman culture. But not even in Plato,
or the Roman satirists, or in Lucian does one see the formation of a corpo-
rate spirit, of what we call a "class/' aware of itself and of its differences
from any other social and economic grouping, convinced that it does not
really have its rightful place at the head of all other groups. Among the
Renaissance humanists there is by no means the sentiment that vulgar busi-
nessmen are doing what the humanists ought to do; there are no leagues of
artists against the Philistines, the bourgeois. We must not deal in anachro-
nistic fancies. But there is a strong consciousness of kind, a sense of belong-
ing to a privileged group, a group so privileged not by birth but by talents,
and disciplined by hard work, in short, an aristocracy of the mind, an elite.
That aristocracy was at the height of the Renaissance treated very well indeed
by the other aristocracy, that of the body, of political and economic power.
There is not yet alienation. But it will come, and the successors of the
humanists and artists of the Renaissance will be ready for it.

8 All this, of course, in good Latin. Translated in M. W. Shepherd, Life of Poggio Brae-
ciolini, 2nd ed., Liverpool. 1837, p. 282.
4 Shepberd, Bracciolini , p. 282.

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The Renaissance

Among the artists, there is clearly in the Renaissance that sense of not
being held to the conventions and decencies of ordinary life that was later
caricatured in nineteenth-century "Bohemianism." Again, the word itself is
an anachronism. Not even late medieval circles like the one that produced
Villon, though they were raffish and disreputable enough, are much like the
self-conscious, virtuously loose-living modern Left Bankers, Greenwich Vil-
lagers, or beat North Beachers. For one thing, there was no Victorian respect-
ability to revolt from — that is, no organized and powerful middle class.
Cellini himself, for all his crimes and disorders, so proudly reported in his
autobiography, is no Bohemian. Yet the signs of what was to come are there,
as they are among the scholars. The artist is the man set apart to do great
things, the man made to break rules, the man who cannot be expected to
put up with the dullness of life. He is still the greatly honored Michelangelo,
still the Protean Leonardo da Vinci, still, even as a minor artist, the Cellini
who hobnobs with a king of France. His successors will not take as kindly to
their middle-class patrons.

Once more, and at the risk of being unduly tedious, I must point out how
thoroughly the Renaissance ideal of humanist and artist bears the stamp of
the struggle to prevail in an intense competition. I would not for a moment
contest the fact that the scholar and the artist were inspired by lofty ideals of
Truth and Beauty. I am willing to grant that it is nobler, more useful to
mankind, altogether morally better, to produce the best piece of statuary, the
best critical edition of Aeschylus, the best plan for St Peter's, than it is to
run the fastest race, knock out the most opponents in prize fights, joust best
in a tourney. But we should not forget, as we tend to forget when we feel the
prizes of a contest are noble, that the contest still was a fight, that there were
more losers than winners, that the winner almost certainly enjoyed winning,
that, in short, the Sermon on the Mount was no part of it all. The Renais-
sance so many have admired from a distance, the Renaissance the textbooks
strew with nice words like "individualism/' "free spirits," "gusto," was in
fact one of the most violent free-for-alls of Western history, one with a great
deal of infighting, and no referee.

in

The most important and all-inclusive of Renaissance ideals is that of virtu.
It is an ideal that descends clearly in many ways from the medieval knightly
ideal, and in one of its phases, that represented by the familiar Courtier of

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Castiglione, employs the same term the troubadours used to designate the
ideal of courtly love. It is an ideal for the first aristocracy, the men of affairs,
though certainly many a member of the second aristocracy was inspired to
follow it. Cellini, for instance, was sure that he had achieved virtu — as,
indeed, he had.

Etymology can help here, and clear up the difficulty that springs from the
fact that virtu is not virtue. Both words come from the same Latin root,
which means simply "male strength," and has survived in the English "virile/'
In modern English and French, however, Christianity has scored at least a
verbal triumph and has succeeded in divesting the word "virtue" of its mas-
culinity, pugnaciousness, and general aura of magic potency, and investing it
with its current and relatively peaceful ethical content. The Italian virtu, the
great word of the Renaissance, kept its more primitive associations; but
even so, when taken over bodily into English in the eighteenth century, it
came to mean there a passionate connoisseurship of art objects, became
merely a part of that great Mignon complex, or fallacy, that has so distorted
our Northern understanding of the Italians.

Virtu for the man of the Italian Renaissance meant doing supremely well,
gracefully, and, if possible, with no sign of effort, what his society esteemed
most worth doing. Now as I have already noted, it is true enough that in the
Renaissance many of the things scholars and artists do were esteemed as
permitting the exhibition of virtii. (No lonely virtu, of course; it has to be
exhibited to others.) Castiglione would have his courtier

more than passably accomplished in letters, at least in those studies that are called
the humanities, and conversant not only with the Latin language but with the
Greek, for the sake of the many different things that have been admirably written
therein. Let him be well versed in the poets, and not less in the orators and his-
torians, and also proficient in writing verse and prose, especially in this vulgar
tongue of ours; for besides the enjoyment he will find in it, he will by this means
never lack agreeable entertainment with ladies, who are usually fond of such
things. . . ,5

But Castiglione's man of virttt has much more firmly the markings of the
aristocrat of the great Western tradition of bodily gifts, of the warrior spirit
and training, tamed vastly, softened perhaps, and certainly civilized, in com-
parison with the simple sword wielders of old, but still a full hormonal male.
Again, an excerpt or two will do:

5 Castiglione, Count Baldassare, The Book of the Courtier (1528), trans, by Leonard
Eckstein Opdycke, New York, Scribner, 1903, p. 59.

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The Renaissance

... I am of opinion that the principal and true profession of the Courtier ought
to be that of arms; which I would have him follow actively above all else, and
be known among others as bold and strong, and loyal to whomever he serves. And
he will win a reputation for these good qualities by exercising them at all times
and in all places, since one may never fail in this without severest censure. And
just as among women, their f air fame once sullied never recovers its first lustre,
so the reputation of a gentleman who bears arms, if once it be in the least
tarnished with cowardice or other disgrace, remains forever infamous before the
world and full of ignominy. Therefore the more our Courtier excels in this art, the
more he will be worthy of praise. . . .

I wish, then that this Courtier of ours should be nobly born and of gentle race;
because it is far less unseemly for one of ignoble birth to fail in worthy deeds,
than for one of noble birth, who, if he strays from the path of his predecessors,
stains his family name, and not only fails to achieve but loses what has been
achieved already; for noble birth is like a bright lamp that manifests and makes
visible good and evil deeds, and kindles and stimulates to virtue both by fear of
shame and by hope of praise. And since this splendour of nobility does not
illumine the deeds of the humbly born, they lack that stimulus and fear of
shame, nor do they feel any obligation to advance beyond what then* predecessors
have done; while to the nobly born it seems a reproach not to reach at least the
goal set them by their ancestors. And thus it nearly always happens that both in
the profession of arms and in other worthy pursuits the most famous men have
been of noble birth, because nature has implanted in everything that hidden seed
which gives a certain force and quality of its own essence to all things that are
derived from it, and makes them like itself: as we see not only in the breeds of
horses and of other animals, but also in trees, the shoots of which nearly always
resemble the trunk; and if they sometimes degenerate, it arises from poor cultiva-
tion. And so it is with men who if rightly trained are nearly always like those
from whom they spring, and often better; but if there be no one to give them
proper care, they become like savages and never reach perfection.6

The Courtier is, like so much else in the Renaissance, deliberately Greek.
Sir Harold Nicolson has put this well :

Castiglione had at the back of his mind the twelve great virtues which Aristotle
defined as essential to the perfect man. He assumes above all that the good
courtier will possess the two virtues of Magnanimity and u^aXoTrpeVeia, ^hich is
generally translated 'magnificence/ but which also signifies 'grandeur controlled
by taste.' It is greatness of mind and nobility of soul that differentiate good man-
ners from such things as deportment and etiquette, which can be taught fcby any
dancing master.' Moreover, the function of courtier might be humiliating, were
it not for the end, or telos, that it serves. A courtier should train himself to be-
come a man of such character, ability and standing as to be able to direct his

6 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, pp. 25, 22.

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A History of Western Morals

prince along the paths of liberality and justice and to keep him always within 'la
austera strada della virtu.5 Were it not for such high ideals and purposes the posi-
tion of a courtier might appear parasitic.7

Castiglione, who seems to have been a nice man and who, after all, was
writing a book of etiquette, even though it has high philosophical touches,
does not really underline the extent to which virtu is a masculine thing. But
note a significant detail from the history of costume. The fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries are, as far as I know, the only period in the history of the
West when the male wore very tight lower garments ("hose"), with a con-
spicuous codpiece, which was often ornamented. This fact "proves" nothing
but symbolizes a great deal. The man of the Renaissance admired masculin-
ity, one may hazard, but was a bit uncertain as to whether he had it; hence,
he must display what he undoubtedly had. Remember, the old feudal fact of
maleness, untouched by art and letters, was still fresh in men's minds. In-
deed, one may hazard a broader and even riskier generalization: in the
Western tradition, the pursuits of the artist, writer, scholar, priest have never
been accepted generally as fully masculine pursuits. The codpiece accom-
panied naturally enough the highest masculine flight of the artist and thinker.

A special kind of virtu came from the successful application of this
heightened ethics of competition to politics. We think, once we have got
over our first normal Western identification of Renaissance with Art — an
identification not necessarily made by the men of the Renaissance themselves
— of the Borgias, of Machiavelli, of the condottiere, of the Renaissance
popes, as typical figures of their age. And so they are. High politics, it need
hardly be said, is not a pursuit in which the participants have generally lived
up to the best ethical concepts of the Western tradition. But the politics of
Renaissance Italy survives in our memory, along with that of the Roman
Empire at its worst, as peculiarly immoral, as combining the refinements of
a high culture with the ferociously unprincipled struggle for power of Mero-
vingian France. The world of Machiavelli does, however, seem to most of us
somehow worse than that of Gregory of Tours — though the fact remains that
in the end both justify acts that are certainly contrary to the rules of Christian
morality. Perhaps we are all victims of our feeling for history: Cesare Borgia
should have known better; Clovis the barbarian could not have known better.

Nor was the politics of virtu by any means limited to Italy. Burckhardt,
who did not like being the safe Swiss bourgeois he was, admired the virtu-
filled actors of European politics, as he admired most of what went on in the
7 Good Behaviour, Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1956, p. 152.

250

The Renaissance

sixteenth century. They made the state a work of art, he felt And as artists
they could hardly expect to be what the bourgeois call moral. Certainly the
personalities stand out. The struggle for power between Charles V and
Francis I, with Henry VIII strutting the sidelines, with all Italy boiling with
men of virtu, with Protestantism in the North in its first heat of passion — all
this, heightened by the beauties of art and letters, makes a picture most at-
tractive from a safe distance. But the potlatch touch is there, in fact, rather
more murderous in its ultimate extension than it seems to have been among
the aborigines of the Pacific Northwest, and absolutely, if not relatively,
even more expensive. No Kwakiutl ever bested those two Renaissance tribes-
men Francis I and Henry VIII at their meeting on the Cloth of Gold near
Calais. Indeed, for those who like to line up the perfect transitional moment
from medieval to modern — Dante, first modern and last medieval writer,
Bouvines, last medieval and first modern battle, and so on — the Held of the
doth of Gold (1520) makes an excellent, if rather late, moment. The Field
was a medieval tourney, the armored knights tilting away as of old; but it
was also an international conference "at the summit," and it was conducted
with some awareness of what we call "public opinion.*'

One final carping word about the Renaissance ideal. These aristocrats
were reasonably secure in their superiority, clear that they were above the
common herd. They did not, it is true, seem to worry much about their
inferiors. And yet, they seem, from our remove in time, to be not quite as
assured as the Greek gentlemen were; they seem to be consciously different
from the vulgar, on the edge, at least, of worrying about their superiority.
Castiglione can be read as being somewhat on the defensive. The reader may
remember the line from Homer cited in Chapter m, which I have crudely
translated "always to be best in masculine excellences and come out on top
of others" (see p. 65). Here is the Renaissance George Chapman's version:
"that I should always beare me well, and my deserts enlarge beyond the
vulgar. . . ."s One should not hang too much on a single instance. But
Homer says not a word that can be remotely associated with the concept of
"vulgar." The man of virtu knew the vulgar were there, not altogether un-
menacing.

I have no doubt painted too black a picture of the two great Renaissance
ideals of the humanist and the man of virtu, or, at any rate, of men trying to
live up to these ideals. The humanist was not always vain and quarrelsome

8 Homer1 s Iliad, trans, by George Chapman, London, Routledge, 1886, Book VI, line
218 in the translation.

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A History of Western Morals

with the peculiar defensive vanity and purely verbal violence of the scholar;
and in the ideal he should not have been vain and quarrelsome. The Floren-
tine Platonists were apparently gentle souls, no more than agreeably proud
of their great learning. Ficino, in an age when the scholar might in an eco-
nomic sense exploit his patrons and often did, remained as poor and devoted
to his tasks as any medieval monk. The many Christian humanists who be-
fore and after the hotly combative Luther and the coldly assured Calvin
sought to bring the new learning to purify but not disrupt the old church
were often as good Christians as it is permitted men to be, modest, temper-
ate, kindly, firm, unposturing. Guillaume Farel, John Colet, St. Thomas
More, or, among those who left the church, Zwingli and Melanchthon, must
be put as a balance against the more violent and prideful. Virtu itself need
not, and did not, always take the course it took with Cellini, or Cesare
Borgia, or the other Renaissance earth stormers. Lorenzo de' Medici was
worthy of his circle. Castiglione's cortegiano was no mere exemplar of the
will to shine, but a cultivated, disciplined, considerate gentleman, trained to
reconcile in conduct and in ideal the beautiful and the good.

"Reconcile" is not the word the Renaissance man would use here. The
ideal has the attractiveness most of us find in the old Greek identification of
the beautiful with the good — to which one might as well add the true, even
the natural. These great and good words, no matter how they may annoy the
naive semanticist, mean much, and very specifically. The beautiful means
inevitably to us Westerners much that the puritanical strain in our Christian-
ity cannot quite accept as good: guiltless sensuous pleasures of all sorts, from
pleasure in human nakedness to pleasures in sounds that lull instead of
Inspire. The true must seem to many of us not quite the unavoidable and not
Very pleasant thing the realist — or Nature herself — sometimes thrusts under
our noses. Somewhere, outside the cave Plato himself did not quite escape
from, beauty must be truth, truth beauty, and both good and natural. Why
not in Medicean Florence?

IV

Why not indeed? For one thing, because a Florentine monk, Girolamo
Savonarola, who does not figure in the Mignon complex, did not feel that the
beautiful is the good. Savonarola's brief bonfire of books and paintings seems
out of place in the Renaissance, and so it is, for the Renaissance is not a
"period," but, rather, the lives and achievements of a small group of artists,

252

The Renaissance

scholars, men of virtu. Unlike Puritanism, the Renaissance never did touch
the many, even in Italy. No doubt the Florentine masses were aware of the
reputation of their city, and proud of it; so were the Parisians of the nine-
teenth century aware that theirs was la ville lumiere. But this is the vicarious
satisfaction of fctpooled self-esteem." Neither morally nor aesthetically were
the masses of either city lifted to the level of those they admired.

Savonarola's brief career as a Puritanical fanatic at least as extreme as
the Calvinists is a reminder of several things that need saying here. First,
although no Puritanism imprinted itself as a way of life among the many in
the so-called "Latin" nations as did Calvinism in the North, the notion that
Puritanism plays no part in the moral history of these lands is not true. The
Puritan temper is in its characteristic forms passionate indeed, dedicated to
ends utterly opposed to the ideal of the beautiful-and-good. excitable, per-
fectly congruous with our stereotypes about the Latin temperament. Histor-
ically, Puritanism was bora in the Mediterranean, with Moses and with
Plato, and it has never ceased to crop up there. Most of the great renewals
of Latin monasticism were inspired by the Puritan desire to subdue the old
and too-comfortable Adam in us all. From Arnold of Brescia through Francis
of Assisi to Savonarola and Socinus, Italy has produced in all their varieties
these passionate men of single purpose, who do not remind one at all of the
brilliant polymaths and sunny artists of the Renaissance — the Leonardos, the
Ficinos, the Raphaels . . . and the Sodomas. Spain, of course, does even
better with the austere, tortured, proudly militant or raptly mystical Christian
whom we English-speaking people cannot think of as Puritans, largely, no
doubt, because our own Puritan ancestors thought of Spaniards as their an-
titheses as well as their enemies. The list is long, culminating in Loyola, St.
John of the Cross, and that Greek who must have been a Spaniard, though he
goes by the name of El Greco.

Savonarola may remind us not only of the fact that even in the South
there are, especially for the historian of morals, many great figures in the
chronological "period" Renaissance that do not fit with the threar Renais-
sance, but also of the fact that Savonarola and many of these other dark
rebels against even the beautiful-and-good in its resurrected form could
move the people, the many, in a way the Politians, the Ficinos, the Erasmuses,
the painters and sculptors could not — and indeed did not want to move them.
They remind us who are Protestants that the passions, the great mass
movements, the killings and the torturings, the series of revolutions we call the
Reformation are no Northern thing, but cover all the West. Spain again is a

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A History of Western Morals

good symbol. The siglo de oro was not for most Spaniards a time of great
artists and writers; it was a time of searing religious conflicts between the
conservatives and the reformers, conflicts quite as bitter as if Lutherans and
Calvinists had actually won a foothold in Spain, conflicts that bred among
the masses that extraordinary tension that is the mark of social revolution,
successful or abortive. This is what happened to the body of St. John of the
Cross:

Hardly had his breath ceased than, though it was an hour past midnight, cold and
raining hard, crowds assembled in the street and poured into the convent. Press-
ing into the room where he lay, they knelt to kiss his feet and hands. They cut
off pieces from his clothes and bandages and even pulled out the swabs that had
been placed on his sores. Others took snippings from his hah* and tore oft his
nails, and would have cut pieces from his flesh had it not been forbidden. At his
funeral these scenes were repeated. Forcing their way past the friars who guarded
his body, the mob tore off his habit and even took parts of his ulcered flesh.9

Something like this can happen anywhere, anytime, as long as the Chris-
tian eschatology has meaning for the many; if sin, damnation, and salvation
are real to them, men are going to grasp excitedly for available salvation, as
they would for available gold.10 But there was too much of this kind of reli-
gious frenzy, too many signs of deep popular disturbance and unrest, in the
centuries that culminate with the sixteenth for the historian of morals to
dismiss all this as simply another constant of human conduct. We come to
the most important and difficult part of our subject, the estimate of the level
of moral life of an age. It looks as if for such a purpose the chronological
period really appropriate is the last few centuries of the Middle Ages —
Huizinga's "autumn" of the Middle Ages, roughly the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries — and the sixteenth century itself, the golden age of the Renaissance.
These look like disturbed, unhappy, difficult centuries, especially for the
many, a period of moral lapse, a kind of trough in the diagrammatic account
of human conduct in the West.

It is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to show an actual decline in the kind
of conduct easiest described as the domain of conventional private morality.
Was there over all the West a relatively greater number of men and women
who commonly lied, raped, murdered, fornicated, committed adultery, stole,

9 Gerald Brenan, "A Short Life of St. John of the Cross," in The Golden Horizon, ed.
b> Cyril Connolly, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953, pp. 475-476.

10 It began to happen not many years ago over the grave of a priest in greater Boston;
church and state combined to stifle so un-American a manifestation of the primitive in
Christianity.

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The Renaissance

got drunk, idled unprofitably, behaved, as our self-conscious generation puts
it, "neurotically," in 1490 than in 1290? The reader knows already that I
do not think this question can be answered at all in accordance with the
highest standards of the historian's profession. National, local, class variation
in these matters forces itself on our attention ever more vigorously as our
sources improve in quantity. Nevertheless, I think it worth while to try to
guess at some answers, which add up to a 6fcyes, there is more private im-
morality on an average and among the many in these centuries."

The preachers, the moralists, are vigorous enough. Here is a final lead
from Savonarola, who writes to his father in 1475:

In primis: the reason that moved me to enter religion is: first, the great misery
of the world, the iniquities of men, the rapes, adulteries, larcenies, pride, idola-
tries, and cruel blasphemies which have brought the world so low that there is
no longer anyone who does good; hence more than once a day I have sung this
verse, weeping: Heu fuge crudelas terras, fuge littus avarum! And this is why I
could not suffer the great malice of the blind peoples of Italy, and the more so
as I saw all virtues cast down and all vices raised up. This was the greatest suffer-
ing I could have in this world.11

And here is a less exalted moralist, the English Elizabethan translator —
Grub Street is already near — Aegremont RatcliSe:

For who ever saw so many discontented persons: so many yrked with their owne
degrees: so fewe contented with their owne calling: and such number desirous,
greedie of change, novelties? Who ever heard tel of so many reformers,
or rather deformers of estates and Common weales; so many controllers of
Princes, and their proceedinges: and so fewe imbracing obedience? whiche be-
ginneth nowe (the more pitie) to be lagged at the carte's taile. And to be short:
such straunge and souden alteration in all estates? . . . The Merchant, doth he
not tickle at the title of a Gentleman? Tne Gentleman, doth he not shoot at the
marke of Nobility? And the Noble man, hath he not his eye fixed uppon the
glorie and greatnesse of a Prince? What Prince could not be contended to be
Monarche of the whole world?12

Finally, even earlier there are ample signs of the kind of social unrest
that makes, if not for private immorality, at least for the kind of personal
difficulties over status, security, discipline v^hich our contemporary alarmists
seem to find so unprecedented. As early as 1381, John Ball wrote:

By what right are they whom men call lords greater folk than we? . . . how can

ii Quoted in Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance, New York, Viking, 1933, p. 4.
12 "Dedication to Politique discourses"' quoted in Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the
znghth Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century, University of Illinois, Studies in Language
and Literature, XIV, No. 1-2, Feb.-May. 1929, p. 32.

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they say or prove they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for
them by our toil what they spend in their pride.13

Now it is true enough, as I have pointed out in my introductory chapter, that
there is in Western tradition almost a constant of complaint of this sort,
generation after generation of intellectuals who tell us the men and women
of their time are wicked, more wicked than usual, and who say so with an
eloquence that makes my report of what they said seem inadequate. Yet we
must not conclude that such complaints are of no use to the historian seeking
to find out how men really did conduct themselves; these moralists must be
used with care, with due reference to all other sources, and to the full record
of other kinds of history, but when so used may help us in our attempt at
retrospective man watching,

There is, then, hi the writings of these men of late medieval and early
modern times a surprising degree of unanimity about the moral failings of
their age. Their tone is quite different from that of what was, after all, a great
Age of Complaint and even Conflict, the Victorian. The Mills, the Carlyles,
the Renans, yes, even the Kierkegaards and the Nietzsches, make their chief
attack on mere stuffiness, "middle-class morality," and insensitiveness to the
good and the beautiful. The moralists of the eighteenth-century Enlighten-
ment center their attack on the privileged classes; they clearly for the most
part believe in the natural goodness of the common man. But the late medi-
eval and early modern reformers, from Wycliffe and Hus to Luther and
Calvin, spare no one. They are, of course, preachers by calling. What they
say is backed up, however, from many sources. It is no doubt unwise to swing
completely around to the "realist," and insist that Chaucer, Boccaccio,
Marguerite of Navarre, and the others are simply reporters, social scientists
desirous of arriving at the typical in human behavior. It would be dangerous
to call in and take at their word the deliberate shockers, an Aretino, the
proto-Bohemians, a Villon, the cheerful skeptics, a Rabelais, the concerned
skeptics, a Montaigne, the inverted idealists, a MachiaveLi. But when taken
with several grams of salt their evidence is impressive: a troubled, lively,
fascinating, and immoral age.

When, therefore, all this is put together, when much social history is
added in confirmation, one gets the firm impression that the Reformation,
Protestant and Catholic, was needed, and was indeed a moral reformation.
Again, no single item is necessarily more than a bit of the fait divers which
were there before there were newspapers to record them. When we read that
13 Quoted in Kelso, English Gentleman, p. 31.

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The Renaissance

Charles the Bold in 1468 witnessed a Judgment of Paris in which the three
goddesses were appropriately naked, we may regard this as just one more
example of the way the great misconduct themselves. When we read that
women danced naked in some of the taverns, we may feel we are simply deal-
ing with the eternal Folies-Bergere, one of the great constants of history.14
But when to many details of the sort one adds the fact that in the history of
female costume these centuries, starting from the full, modest robes of the
thirteenth century, witness the gradual development of exposure and empha-
sis until decolletage, front and back, becomes as complete as possible — and is
accompanied by that helpful egalitarian device we call "falsies" — we begin
to see the light of a process, a describable social change.15

Indeed, the historian of morals, who should realize that deeds are often
closer to other deeds than words to deeds, must pay careful attention to the
history of human dress. Clothes are one of the chief forms of conspicuous
consumption, one of the chief signs of great success in any agon. There is
certainly no universal co-ordination between clothes and sex morality, but
within one cultural tradition, such as that of the West, female costume is at
least some indication of how far in a given class strict, male-dominated
monogamous marriage is an expected and even realized thing. We must re-
turn eventually in considering our own society to this puzzling problem of
the relation between the outward recognition — even the flaunting — of sex
differences, the display of the female breasts, the male genitalia (as in the
above-mentioned codpiece, symbol of virtu) , and the morals and the morale
of a whole class or society. We may modestly rest content here with the
obvious fact that in the late Middle Ages and in the Renaissance the facts of
sex were flaunted.

There are other indications of a high-living age. The arts of luxury, not
merely dress but furniture, cookery, private and public building, all flourish.
The ideals of the humanist and, on the surface, the man of virtu, pay respect
to the "classical" or ** Apollonian" feeling for moderation, self-discipline,
restraint, respect for the opinions of one's peer group, the old Greek wisdom
of "nothing in excess." Yet the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were among
the wildest, most excessive, most exuberant of times. Painting, sculpture,

14 Friedlander, Roman Life and Manners, Vol. II, p. 93, quoting Falke, Deutsche
Trachten-und Modeweh, Vol. I, p. 278. Friedlander thus emerges from his own
"period" for the good purpose of showing that the looseness of imperial Rome was not
unique.

15 On all this see Durant, The Reformation, pp. 766-768, with many useful references to
secondary literature.

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architecture were so directly in the classic tradition that we tend to be fooled
by these works of art, which do look restrained, restrained notably in compari-
son with the later baroque. But the life behind the paintings and the sculptures
was unrestrained, rowdy, given to extremes, consciously lived as something
for the record. These immoralists, had they not been orthodox Latinists,
might have gone us one better with that horrid prefix "super." The men of
the Renaissance lived romantically, anticipating and often in real life outdoing
the romanticism of the Romantics of the nineteenth century. These latter had
to take out their wild desires, for the most part, in printer's ink.

And always, right through the Renaissance, there is the familiar violence
that had so long been man's lot. There was the uncertainty of daily life in the
face of the never wholly absent threat of famine, plague, the diseases of filth
and contagion, and, in most of Europe, the cold of winter. There was the
still, by modem standards, most imperfect public order. Police, beyond a few
night watchmen in the cities, did not exist. Bands of beggars could be violent
and dangerous; highwaymen were an accepted risk of travel. The atrocious
punishments for what are now minor crimes — the famous example is the
English penalty of death for sheep stealing — added public executions to the
violent flavor of all life and clearly did little to diminish crime. It must be
repeated: however real in the West today, and especially in the United States,
are the problems set by violence, from juvenile delinquency and adult gang-
sterism to highway accidents and the fearful threat modern war presents,
however persistent in "human nature" whatever drives men to these violences
may seem, the fact remains that the problems of violence in our world are set
in so different a framework of social and political institutions, of actual
human expectation and habit, that they are quite different problems. We
think of much if not all violence as preventable; the men of the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance did not. The haunting fear our intellectuals have of the
atom bomb is a different thing from the fear everyone then had of famine,
plague, and their fellows.

After such serious matters, it may seem trivial to come to the topic of
cleanliness, even if there is an English proverb that cleanliness is next to
godliness, and should, therefore, be a concern of the moralist. But one of the
many eddies of the modern current of thought that sees the Middle Ages as
good and later ages as bad has a little eddy on cleanliness. The Middle Ages,
it is maintained — at least as far as towns and cities went — were relatively
clean, and physically a good human environment, if a trifle cramped; people
took baths. With the growth of the modern way of life, and especially after

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The Renaissance

capitalism, the cash nexus, the businessman, the mad scramble of the market
place had taken over and ended medieval togetherness and mutual responsi-
bilities, towns and cities got crowded, dirty, ugly, and people stopped taking
bafhs — the capitalists would not let them.16

I am afraid this thesis cannot be proved. It can hardly apply at all at any
time to the great majority of Europeans, peasants whose housing, sanitation,
and the like were probably not very different in 1550 from what they had
been in 1250 — cramped, filthy, unhygienic, and not even lovely. Peasants did
not bathe. As for the towns, still walled, they had often grown considerably
by the sixteenth century, and were more crowded, and hence perhaps less
agreeable to live in. But I do not think that medieval towns were as clean and
pleasant as the lover of the Middle Ages — who is almost always a hater of
the present — makes them out to have been. I do not think that the moral, or
immoral, equivalent of the cash nexus was quite absent from Western society
even in the thirteenth century.

There is not much doubt that the West in the sixteenth, and right through
the eighteenth century, was what we should consider very dirty and unsani-
tary indeed. Individuals who prospered could often live as comfortably and
as cleanly as they wished in their own interiors; housing in the countryside in
Western Europe did clearly improve considerably in early modern times.
But urban filth was an Augean stable. The most ardent lover of eighteenth-
century London — and there are many of them nowadays — knows well it was
a stinking place.17 In the Louvre, and at Versailles, those great palace cities,
there was a most inadequate provision for what Americans now call "rest
rooms." The male courtiers, at least, commonly simply retired to a corner
behind a door; as a result, the odor of urine was a permanent thing in these
abodes of luxury. It seems farfetched to blame this on the spirit of capitalist
enterprise.

The historian of morals must be careful to record the moral reputation an
age has left behind it; that reputation may seem to him not entirely deserved,
and, in particular, the reputation may rest on the conduct of a class or group
by no means typical of other parts of the society. But there will always be

16 Mr. Lewis Mumford will do as an example of this attitude. I do not much caricature
his position in my brief account. See Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities, New York,
Harcourt, Brace, 1938, pp. 42-51.

17 My older readers may remember the late Leslie Howard in Berkeley Square, a play
in which the sentimental twentieth-century lover of the eighteenth gets transported back
to his beloved eighteenth-century London — and is horrified by its stench, its dirt, its
harsh class-lines, its violence.

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A History of Western Morals

some fire behind the smoke, some truth in the cliche. The Renaissance has
left us the evil moral reputation of Italian life at its height, and the beginnings
of the firm belief among Northerners, at least, that in Western Europe the
distinction between North and South is no mere geographical cleavage, but a
moral cleavage.

The best-known exhibit of Renaissance immorality is the papal court
under popes like Alexander VI and Julius II. No sensible person nowadays
would think of trying to deny the personal immorality of the conduct of
Alexander Borgia, which is quite down to that of Clovis, nor the worldliness
and corruption, the shocking struggle for prize, of the papal court in much
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One need not consult Protestant or
freethinking historians: the great Catholic historian Ludwig Pastor is quite
frank about it all, indignant as a good man should be, and aware as a historian
should be that no evil is quite unprecedented. Homo sapiens has been on
earth enough to give a full indication of his capacities for both good and evil.18

A sounding almost anywhere in contemporary writing should convince
the reader that this Italian Renaissance, for all its glories, was a violent and
immoral age. Almost any page of Cellini will do for the artist. Here is a
passage from Boccaccio's Decameron which shows a breakdown of morals
and morale far worse than what Thucydides tells us about the comparable
plague at Athens:

Some thought that moderate living and the avoidance of all superfluity would
preserve them from the epidemic. They formed small communities, living en-
tirely separate from everybody else. They shut themselves up in houses where
there were no sick, eating the finest food and drinking the best wine very tem-
perately, avoiding all excess, allowing no news or discussion of death and sick-
ness, and passing the time in music and suchlike pleasures. Others thought just the
opposite. They thought the sure cure for the plague was to drink and be merry,
to go about singing and amusing themselves, satisfying every appetite they could,
laughing and jesting at what happened. They put then- words into practice, spent
day and night going from tavern to tavern, drinking immoderately, or went into
other people's houses, doing only those things which pleased them. This they
could easily do because everyone felt doomed and had abandoned his property,
so that most houses became common property and any stranger who went in
made use of them as if he had owned them. And with all this bestial behaviour,
they avoided the sick as much as possible.

In this suffering and misery of our city, the authority of human and divine

is The reader should dip, at least, into one of the fifteenth- or sixteenth-century volumes
of Ludwig Pastor, History of the Popes, English translation, 40 volumes, St. Louis,
Herder, 1910-1955. This is sober, conscientious historical writing, in no sense alarmist.

260

The Renaissance

laws almost disappeared, for, like other men, the ministers and the executors of
the laws were all dead or sick or shut up with their families, so that no duties
were carried out. Every man was therefore able to do as he pleased.

Many others adopted a course of life midway between the two just described
They did not restrict their victuals so much as the former, nor allow themselves
to be drunken and dissolute like the latter, but satisfied their appetites moderately.
They did not shut themselves up, but went about, carrying flowers or scented
herbs or perfumes in their hands, in the belief that it was an excellent thing to
comfort the brain with such odours: for the whole air was infected with the smell
of dead bodies, of sick persons and medicines.

Others again held a still more cruel opinion, which they thought would keep
them safe. They said that the only medicine against the plague-stricken was to go
right away from them. Men and women, convinced of this and caring about
nothing but themselves, abandoned their own city, their own houses, their dwell-
ings, their relatives, their property, and went abroad or at least to the country
round Florence, as if God's wrath in punishing men's wickedness with this plague
would not follow them but strike only those who remained within the walls of the
city, or as if they thought nobody in the city would remain alive and that its last
hour had come.19

Finally, here are a few entries from the diary of the Florentine Luca
Landucci. They are, like our newspaper stories of today, accounts of what
the reader most wants to read, the horror story; they are not sociological
studies. Still, this is surely a world far more violent, more insecure, more
"natural" and undisciplined, more immoral., than ours:

21st June. We heard that the French had gone vuth our troops to encamp before
Pisa, and the Pisans had fired upon the French and killed several of them. The
French leader came here, and it was said that the French went in and out of Pisa
as they chose. Treachery was suspected, and this suspicion was justified.

At this time the plague appeared in several houses, and many people were suf-
fering from French boils.

On this day certain women came out of Pisa clothed only in then- chemises; but
our troops took them, suspecting that they carried messages, and decided to search
them. The soldiers were so shameless as to search them to their skins, and they
found letters to the Pope's son. Think what wars bring about, the innumerable
cases that happen, and the sin of those who cause it all.

At this time we heard that there had been a tumult at Perugia, and that the
Baglioni had been expelled, 100 men having been killed. Also that the Sienese
were in arms, and that the father-in-law of Petruccio had been killed.

i» Trans, by R. Aldington, New York, Covici, Friede, 1930, pp. 3-4. The reader should
go to the whole of this introduction to the First Day.

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A History of Western Morals
llth August. Pistoia rose in arms, on account of internal disputes.

During these days all the people here were discontented, chiefly because of the
barzello, which had been very hard upon them, and also because they could see
that no conquests were made, and there would be large costs to pay. The Pisans
had sacked Altopascio and taken Libraf atta.

17th August. We heard that the Pistolese were still fighting amongst themselves,
and that 150 men had been killed, and houses burnt down; and the church of San
Domenico was burnt down. The people from all the country round, and from
the mountains, rushed to the town; and it was said besides that Messer Giovanni
Bentivogli had sent men on foot and horseback.

19th August. We heard that the Pisans had taken the bastion, and killed everyone
in it, and that they were encamped at Rosignano; and our leaders did not send to
relieve any place, it almost seeming as if they were stunned. We were without
soldiers, in fact, or to speak more correctly, with but few; their number not
sufficing to go to the succour of a place when needed, so that we were between
the devil and the deep sea. It was a very distressing and perilous time, so much
so that on the 20th August, the day of San Bernardo, the bells of the Palagio
were not allowed to be rung, on account of the dangers within and without; but
God has always helped this city.

30th August. Soldiers were hired and sent to Pistoia and to Livorno and to gar-
rison the castles.

1st September. Many people passed through here on then: way to the Jubilee.

5th September. We heard that the Turks had taken Corfu and Modone, and had
killed everyone, and razed Modone to the ground. And it was said besides that the
Turks had defeated the Venetian fleet and captured it; and that 30 thousand
persons had been killed, on board the vessels and in the cities together.20

Something of this laxity, corruption, and violence is visible in other parts
of Europe than Italy. The fifteenth century, notably, is everywhere one of
social unrest, endemic violence, of widespread fears and pleasures of the
senses, an age that seems to deserve Sorokin's label for our own: sensate.
And in the sixteenth century, the Northern Renaissance itself, if it does not
equal the achievements of the picturesquely sinful Italians, is not an age, even
in those homes of virtue, England, the Low Countries, and Germany, of
chastity and simple moral virtue among the great. Elizabethan England would
have — I almost wrote should have — shocked Victorian England.

20 A Florentine Diary, trans, by Alice De Rosen Jervis, London, Dent, 1927, pp. 170,
171, 172-173. The "French boils" are almost certainly syphilis, a new disease which
people of a given state usually named from their favorite enemy. The year is 1500.

262

The Renaissance

But, though as Protestants many of us register firmly Italian immorality
for these centuries, general opinion in the West has been willing to forgive the
Renaissance its sins, as it has not been willing to forgive imperial Rome, or
Byzantium, or — much much less sinful, in fact — the aristocracies of the
ancien regime in France and her imitators. Partly, no doubt, we are, in spite
of ourselves, heirs of the Victorians, who held that, particularly for the
Renaissance, great Art redeems everything. We feel, and perhaps not without
justification, that the unprincipled struggles, the exaggeration of pride into
virtu, the romantic, Faustian effort to bring back to life classic, Apollonian
Greece and Rome, the tremendousness, the sheer hyperbolic drive of these
men of the Renaissance, was somehow nonetheless not without a most para-
doxical aesthetic measure and restraint. (Paul Bunyan, pure and revolting
hyperbole, is no Renaissance character.) Their saving graces make their
immoral conduct somehow fruitful, at bottom, moral. Perhaps more soundly,,
we judge, from the vantage point of time past, these disorderly centuries of
the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance to have been signs of an age of
growth, of progress, those of imperial Rome and Byzantium to have been
signs of decay and death.

As to the second major aspect of the reputation of the Renaissance, the
establishment of a division between a moral North and an immoral South, we
must note that Northern opinion greatly exaggerates for the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries the reality and degree of that difference. Nevertheless, the
division is by no means wholly unreal. Calvinism, whether you think it eco-
nomically or spiritually determined, took root in the North as it never did in
the South. The South, as I have insisted above, has had its Puritan rebels, its
crowds inspired by brief and quite unsunny passions; it has never had a large
middle class endowed or afflicted with ''middle-class morality." There is that
much truth in the Mignon complex, even in the forms it takes with a Norman
Douglas or a Robert Graves.

Moreover, to balance the laxities and the corrupting rivalries of court life
and high politics, there was throughout the North an aristocracy and gentry,
formed in just these centuries from the fourteenth through the sixteenth,
varying certainly in its ideals and conduct in different lands, but, on the
whole, as I shall point out in the next chapter, a disciplined, serious-minded,
conscientious, privileged class, much maligned in our tradition. The English
landed gentry, the Dutch nobility, the French provincial noblesse, the Prus-
sian Junkers — these were not much like the Italian upper classes of the
Renaissance. They were, substantially, lions, not foxes, and they as much as

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A History of Western Morals

the Protestant reform and the rising middle classes gave to the next few cen-
turies of European life its stamp of high seriousness.

v

What we are dealing with in this chapter, however, exceeds the bounds of
private morality, of a history of morals taken in a narrow sense. What seems
to be happening in these centuries is a widespread disturbance, a loosening
of the old steady ways, a social syndrome of the kind that the philosopher of
history calls by some phrase suggesting death or decay, with or without over-
tones of coming rebirth. Intellectuals of our own day, feeling that we ourselves
are on some horrifying descent, have been fascinated with syndromes of this
sort in the past of civilization. We do not understand them; we are not even
sure that we can identify them. After all, the West survived this crisis of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — if there was a crisis. Perhaps what hap-
pened was simple enough: wealth increased markedly over these centuries
and, however bad the condition of the masses may have been, a very great
number of people were by 1500 able to do something besides work, eat, sleep,
and procreate. They could afford luxuries, afford to play, afford to sin; and
this they proceeded to do, and to worry vocally about it.

At the very least, this innocent economic interpretation must be accom-
panied by recognition that for many whose wealth permitted the pleasures of
the flesh, as well as the pleasures of high competition, of virtu, there was a
haunting memory of the fact of sin. The tensions, the excitements, the tor-
tured awareness of the macabre, the excessiveness of the age must have their
theater of action in the human soul. But we can go much further. Surely new
and increasing wealth and its consequences have their place in the syndrome,
but so, too, must a major fact of the history of ideas, and therefore of the
history of morals: from the fourteenth century on there was slowly formed
a new cosmology, a new attitude toward man's place in the universe — "new,"
as always in human affairs, implying much survival of "old" — a new view of
reality which could not always or readily or forever sit comfortably along with
the old medieval synthesis in the mind of any one normal man. We shall be
much concerned with this new view of reality — better, new views of reality
— for the rest of this book. Summary of so complex a thing is impossible; we
may for the moment content ourselves with a good symbol, the title of a
book by the late V. Gordon Childe, a distinguished Australian anthropologist

264

The Renaissance

and non-Christian: Man Makes Himself.2* I feel sure there are no medieval
books with titles remotely like this.

With the Reformation and the Renaissance we have at last come to the
end of the Middle Ages. An older way of looking at historical periods did see
in both Reformation and Renaissance the modern age born fully formed,
ready for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There is no use quarreling
over so adjustable a matter as a historical period. It is a long way from the
thirteenth century to the eighteenth century, and in all these years the Middle
Ages as a way of life was slowly giving way to what we call the modern, or,
in Toynbee's despairing words for our own contemporary generation, the
"post-Modern." The historian who focuses on international politics, national
history, art, letters, technology, will naturally emphasize quite different dra-
matically notable points of break between medieval and modern, or insist
there is no such break, but only a long slow transition. For the historian of
morals, however, the break, though far from sudden, comes rather in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than earlier, and it comes out fully only
when those two great factors in the modern Western moral outlook, the
nation-state and the complex of science, technology, and business enterprise
have come into being, and man has before him the alluring promises of the
religion of the Enlightenment with its doctrine of progress.

There remains, in a brief retrospect of the Middle Ages from the point
of view of the historian of morals, a whole interrelated set of attitudes, theses,
theories, and just plain notions, which add up to the view that, despite their
violence, social and economic inequalities, superstitions, poverty, and all the
rest, the way of life of the Middle Ages was somehow more suited to la con-
dition humalne than our own, that they were, or at least had, a Golden Age.
Some form or other of this view, though it is still almost unknown to many
Americans, has had a great revival in our own day, a revival quite different
from what seems to us the naive and romantic "Gothic revival" of the early
nineteenth century. Even in this brief survey we have come across the names
of several associated with one form or another of this view — even if their
emphasis is often less on exalting the medieval than on damning the modern.
Weber, Fromm, Tawney, Riesman, Sorokin, Lewis Mumford, James Joseph
Walsh — but the list could be very long.

Few of these writers would dare, or perhaps care, to assert frankly that

21 London, Watts, 1941 (1st ed. 1936). This book is a very good brief specimen of an
attitude, a world view, we shall be much concerned with, under the broad name of En-
lightenment It is available in a paperback, New American Library, Mentor Books.

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A History of Western Morals

men were "happier" in 1250 than in 1950. Some, though not the best bal-
anced of them, have asserted that the morals of 1250 were better than those
of 1950. The best of them, I think, assert something like this: the "organically
structured" society of the Middle Ages, with its peasant communities, ac-
cepted social hierarchies and economic inequalities, or a relatively stable set
of peck orders, if you insist, tradition-guided nexus of mutual obligations,
guilds, "just prices," common membership in the great community of Catholic
Christendom, common acceptance of Christian theism — this society enabled
men to live more serenely, securely, normally than can we in the mad free-
for-all of modem society, where many, many men are insecure in status, inse-
cure in means of livelihood, insecure in standards of taste, insecure in man-
ners, insecure in faith.

First of all, I must insist that the medieval synthesis so admired lasted
briefly indeed, hardly more than the thirteenth century. From the Black Death
of the fourteenth century right on through the Renaissance, the modern age,
with its cash nexus, its economic growth, its new dynastic states, its overseas
expansion, is in the making. In these centuries the medieval Christian world
view is slowly undermined for many intellectuals, though only in the late
seventeenth century does another world view, which I have called the religion
of the Enlightenment, fully emerge. Those two world views, the Christian and
the Enlightened, are different enough, as I hope to show. What is really
puzzling is how much difference the holding of these different views has made
in human conduct. I feel very sure that it has made a difference; but I am
quite as sure that that difference is exaggerated in our tradition. We are — if
I may be permitted a methodological aside — quite unable to measure human
differences as we measure chemical differences. Any culture is at least a
compound, indeed a mixture; but we cannot measure its components, and
can only try quite crudely to describe them.

The world view of any culture is but a component of the total culture; yet
from the inside, even to a degree from the outside, we think and feel, we
experience, that culture through its world view in a way you may find sug-
gested in such terms as "holistic," "Gestalt," "style," "form." So experienced,
even vicariously, as the historian must always experience, the West of 1250
is certainly very different from the world of 1750. Yet I do not feel confident
that the questions suggested by this contrast of medieval and modern can be
answered at all out of our analytical and empirical knowledge. Here I wish
to do no more than point out that not the least of the difficulties in our way
is a grave and obvious contrast between the real and the ideal in medieval

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The Renaissance

life itself, a contrast that can be at least partially established empirically. //
medieval life were what it seems in analysis of its "values," usocial structure,"
and "world view" and so on, one might grant that men were then secure,
serene, balanced, "human," in a way they are not now. But we know the
violence, the uncertainties, the breakdowns of nice theories of mutual obliga-
tion, the peasant wars, the cruelties, the fanaticism, the ignorance and super-
stition— I refer the reader once more to Zoe Oldenbourg's admirable The
World Is Not Enough — and the rest of the long tale of suffering of life then
as it was really lived. I am not sure that a degree of unanimity — it was only a
degree, for heresies were endemic — on matters of religion was quite a balance
for all these uncertainties.

We are at the dead end that seems always to come when one tries to test
broad theories of moral development in the West, a dead end blocked more
firmly by the fact that such theories, divorced from transcendental a priori
standards to measure development, progress, or retrogression, tend in our
time to drift into the impossible attempt to measure whether men were
"happier," "more comfortable," "better off" in the past than now. The at-
tempt is impossible if it is made with purely naturalistic standards, if the
process of moral development is judged as though the process itself auto-
matically gives us standards with which to judge its results. If you judge the
course of history by standards ultimately beyond history, as the full Christian
must, you may then at least say, not that medieval men were happier than we
are, but that they were better than we are, for they knew, they believed, what
millions of us cannot bring ourselves to know and believe, that there is some-
thing beyond history. Within history, men seem always essentially the same
in their differences, and Talleyrand quite irrefutable: Plus ga change, plus
c'est la meme chose.22

22 "The more it changes, the more it's the same thing." The attribution to Talleyrand is
uncertain, but appropriate.

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The Seventeenth Century

IF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES may be regarded as the seedbed of modern
Western culture, the sixteenth century as the bare beginnings of sprouting,
then in the seventeenth century, one may say, the plant begins to show above
ground. The metaphor is imperfect, for in the long slow process of change in
human culture so little disappears entirely; the Middle Ages are still alive in
our midst — and not merely in some rural pocket in Europe. The Hearst
property at San Simeon was certainly not the mere "ranch" it was called, nor
even a modern rich man's "estate" — it was a barony. Baron Hearst — himself
a human palimpsest — was a medieval lord, a man of virtii, a freebooter, a late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American entrepreneurial survival of
the Gilded Age. The personality is indeed a persistent Western, if not human,
one; the total cultural pattern, I repeat, seems to me to involve a social
process hard to put in words, even in figures of speech. The central point is
this recapitulation, this reviving, this persistence of a pattern from the past.
Of course, the persistence is often deliberate, a conscious harking back, in its
weakest and perhaps final form no more than the intellectual's peevish regrets
in the style of Edwin Arlington Robinson's Minniver Cheevy. But I find terms
like "archaism" (Toynbee), "fossil" (Guerard, Toynbee), and the heavily
metaphysical "pseudo-morphism" of Spengler unsatisfactory, for they all
imply a conscious f akery, or a mere seeming, an unreality by no means always
present in this little-understood process of keeping (not just reviving) the past
in the present.

Three aspects of modern culture do show themselves clearly in the West

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The Seventeenth Century

is seventeenth century: the new state, without which our sentiments to-
the territorial in-group could hardly have taken the form we call "na-
lism"; the new natural science, without which our modern metaphysical
nalism might have been as shallowly rooted and as limited to a small
ectual class as was the Greco-Roman, and without which our modern
omic and technological development would have been impossible; the
Puritanism, without which — and to hold this one need not accept every-
5 Weber and his followers have written — science, technology, and entre-
surship could not have combined as they did in our modern world. The
sr who has persisted this far need hardly be reminded that none of these
:ts of culture are "new" in any absolute sense, in, for example, the sense
prettily illustrated by the astronomer's nova, the new star that appears
e nothing at all had been visible in the blackness.

>uritanism is so immediately a part of the ^hole Protestant Reformation
I have dealt with it under Chapter VTII above; but even for Puritanism,
aoted there, the alliance with capitalist commerce and industry, the new
sr of the state, all that was to give our modern Western world its quite
ecedented mastery of material resources, is not at all obviously begun in
ixteenth century, nor indeed very conspicuously even in the seventeenth,
hall encounter this Puritanism again, in the English eighteenth and nine-
h centuries when as "dissent" or "nonconformity'' or "Victorian moral-
it has really outgrown its medieval beginnings. Here we must consider
me length the new state and the new science. But we shall conclude with
>ral ideal most characteristic of the century, one which flourished then at
sight, that of the noblesse of the old regime in the West.

II

;annot in a book of this sort concern ourselves with the details of the
and varied process by which, from out of the "feudal disintegration" of
' medieval times, states already by 1500 so firmly "sovereign" and so
3rn as England, France, and Spain had grown, or been made. The proc-
surely by no means well understood, is by no means without interest to
listorian of morals. If, as some think, the central moral problem of the
twentieth century is how to prevent war among "sovereign" states, it
it be possible to learn something from the way in which these sovereign
s came to preserve peace within their own boundaries. Within what by
) had become France, it had been, only a few generations earlier, legal

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A History of Western Morals

and moral — not contrary to the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" — for a
Burgundian to kill a "Frenchman" in organized warfare. Within the new
France, it had become murder for a Burgundian to kill a Frenchman, for the
old duchy had been incorporated in the French state. And only a few genera-
tions earlier yet, what the historian calls "private warfare," wars between
mere feudal barons, had been fitting and proper.

Now much that is central to any understanding of Western political moral-
ity is wrapped up in the processes that made France out of a feudal congeries.
Did the Burgundian, or the Breton, or the Gascon feel that he had been
forced into becoming a French subject? Was the process one of pure violence
on the part of the French crown? If so, why was it so successful? Or, perhaps
the most fundamental problem of all, was the process of uniting France — or
England, or Spain, or even those late-comers to national unity Germany and
Italy — a "natural" one, one fairly put as "growth," one that therefore had to
"come about" in due and often very slow course? Or was it an "artificial"
one, one best put as "making," one that, therefore, we can say was "planned"
and put through by human conscious effort, and that can perhaps be copied
by us and our children on an international, even on a world, scale?1

We shall here take the sovereign state of early modern times as already
formed. The degree of unity under the crown — or, in a few instances, mostly
surviving medieval city-states like those of the Hansa, under the republic —
varied greatly. But everywhere, even in Germany, the new state is to be
found; and wherever it is to be found, it demands the final earthly allegiance
of all its inhabitants. There survived everywhere a great deal of the old medi-
eval particularism, and in terms of culture, and often of pure tourist bait, there
still survives today much of the variety of old. But this new state was the
matrix of the modern nation-state, the legal entity within which what we call
nationalism was to develop, adding to the state as ultimate legal authority
the claim of the state as ultimate moral authority, indeed, ultimate teleological
authority.

Long before with the great French Revolution of 1789, however, this
focusing of the moral and emotional loyalties of citizen (or subject) on the

1 The reader no doubt knows my own answer — it was both natural and artificial. But
the sorting out of the two, and the gradings in between, is a very difficult matter. I have
tried in a little book, From Many One (Harvard University Press, 1948), to sketch out
the importance of the problem, and suggest possible lines of approach. There lies in
the offing, of course, that particular form of the old problem of determinism which has
reached an acute form in our own day as "historicism": Were both France of today and
Germany of today "determined" by Charlemagne, or, for that matter, by Adam and
Eve?

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The Seventeenth Century

nation-state had become evident, the new state — call it as yet no more than
the dynastic state — had set in a new and still-troublesome form an old moral
problem. This is the problem that confronted Antigone (see above, p. 103),
the problem of conflict between moral and political law. The statesmen of
these early modern centuries set up for the new state the claim to be above
the accepted ethical principles that were supposed to guide the conduct of
the individual in his private life. There is certainly a link between this modern
doctrine of "reason of state" and the old Greek doctrine, or better, perhaps,
traditional assumption that life of and in the polis is the realization of the
beautiful-and-good, that, in our terms, the state is the supreme moral end of
life. It is clear, however, from the Antigone, and from Aristotle's Politics, that
even in antiquity this doctrine by no means banished the difficulty in a con-
crete case: What course of action is in fact the one consonant with the su-
preme good which is the state?

To this last phase of the problem some distinguished leaders of the new
dynastic state — I am simplifying here, but not, I hope, distorting — gave what
was essentially the reply Plato makes Thrasymachus give in the Republic to
the question What is justice? Reason of state dictates as the right course, the
moral course, what human reason, working on the stuff of experience, judges
to be the most likely to succeed. And what is success? Well, for Cardinal
Richelieu, perhaps the most representative exponent of reason of state, in
theory in his famous testament, in fact in his whole unpriestly and un-Chris-
tian life, success would be something like this: first and foremost, the reten-
tion and improvement by France of its newly acquired position as leader in
the struggle for prize of Western international politics, its hegemony (what
the United States now has in the same scramble of world politics) ; this posi-
tion to be maintained if possible by diplomacy, if necessary by war; the
means, whether diplomacy or war, to be the most efficient, the most likely to
succeed, regardless of how many ethical principles are violated, and how
often; similar "rational" (or pragmatic or instrumental) tests to be applied to
internal or domestic French policies, always with the aim of making the entity
France strongest among other states in the struggle for prize, which is so
much, much more than the struggle for life or survival; this victory to be
achieved, these tests to be applied, always with a prudent, if possible well-
disguised, disregard for the principles of morality. Richelieu, in fact, is a better
representative of reason of state than the better-known Machiavelli, whose
name springs naturally to one's attention as a representative immoralist of
high politics. Machiavelli, for all his defiance of Christian morality, did have

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A History of Western Morals

as a test of success, even for his Prince, a state in which the good life showed
traces of the old pagan ideals of the beautiful-and-good. Richelieu seems to
have wanted no more than that France, that haunting, not-quite abstraction,
the France he ran, the France that was his team, should place first and stay
first in the Big League.

What all this meant in terms of human careers is the creation of a rela-
tively small but well-trained class of civil servants, diplomatists, and domestic
administrators, really dedicated to the success of the state, the rational, the
efficient success of the state. They were to prove skillful indeed, professionals,
not amateurs lite their medieval predecessors. Without them, the economic
advances of the modern world, even of our whole developed culture, would
have been entirely impossible, for they built the frame of public order, of
security for private property, within the state — and to a degree even in inter-
national relations, which were by no means anarchical, but, rather, an organ-
ized struggle for prize — without which nothing else could have been done.
They were, even when socially mobile, for the most part gentlemen, and they
had the manners and morals of gentlemen. Even as agents of reason of state
in international relations, the diplomatists were not quite the villains of our
current popular conceptions, not Hollywood-conceived diplomatists. Like
Talleyrand, who is a superior specimen of the breed, they did not believe in
the unnecessary violation of the principles of morality, and they were fully
aware that open and avowed immorality even in international relations is not
wise. They knew that vice always owes its tribute to virtue, and that the
tribute should be a graceful one. But there can be no doubt that both in do-
mestic and in international relations this new class was strongly influenced by
the doctrine of reason of state, and by the feeling for rational efficiency, for
rational organization, that was so much a part of that doctrine. At the very
least, if they were not wicked oppressors, they were insensitive managers, firm
believers that what was good for them was good for France, or Prussia, or
even England.2

Reason of state was, both as ethics and as conduct, profoundly anti-
Christian, and in the perspective of time seems far the most dangerous menace
to the Christian view of life that came out of the Renaissance. The Middle
Ages could hardly have entertained the doctrine. Grant, as in this book I
have perhaps too freely granted, that the spotted medieval reality was bad,

2 The doctrine of reason of state as formal political philosophy was never very popular
in England, but the practice surely was — or so we non-English have long believed.

272

The Seventeenth Century

that private and public conduct was often most un-Christian, it remains true
that medieval man could not have thought that all things are Caesar's. A
medieval Antigone, supported by her confessor, would have confronted a
feudal baron ordering her to violate canon law without much sense of being
heroic, and she would have been well supported by the organized church. In
fact, the international church was better organized than the international state
(the imperfect empire of the High Middle Ages) ; in theory, the doctrine of
the two swords, lay rulers and spiritual rulers, each with his own province,
left to Christian ethics a very great sphere. A medieval cardinal might have
had quite as strong a will to power as Richelieu — many of them clearly did —
but he could not have possibly exercised that will to power as Richelieu did,
and have kept the good opinion of the world. It is a measure of the difference
of the climate of opinion in the two cultures that, though he had his critics,
Richelieu was accepted in his own day as, if not a good man, at least as one
not to be greatly blamed.

One may risk a broad generalization: with the rise of this class of pro-
fessional servants of the new state, who were not only necessarily in close
relations with men of '"business," but had in a sense to be themselves men of
business, the characteristic agon of the West begins its spread into activities
that the ancients considered banausic, and that the ruling classes of the
Middle Ages considered low. The reader must recall that I use the word
"agon" not as a synonym for human competitiveness, let alone for the full
range of the Darwinian "struggle for life" among human beings, but for the
ritualized, almost sportive, competition for the great honors of a given society,
for the satisfaction of the will to shine perhaps even more than the will to
power, and often with extreme disregard for the will to survive. With the
possible exception of the late Greco-Roman world, the agon had hitherto
been limited to the kind of group and the kind of activity suggested by words
like "aristocrat," "gentleman," "amateur," and the like. Even in the society
of the Roman Empire, the newly rich Trimalchio is a figure of fun, the de-
voted soldiers and administrators for the most part Stoic gentlemen full of
scruples, basically amateurs, and quite incapable of an expressed concept like
reason of state.

It is certainly true enough that the old prestige of the warrior-aristocrat
and the priest-aristocrat continued. Indeed, even in these United States today,
the opinion polls always show the heirs of Achilles, Odysseus, and Socrates,
the soldiers, judges, politicians, scientists — yes, even the college professors —
ahead of the businessman or banker in the agon. But the businessman and the

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A History of Western Morals

banker are there, in the midst of the agon, along with a great many others
who were not there in earlier times.

Here the question — unanswerable, as usual, in this form — inevitably
arises: Did the new economy precede, "cause," the new state and its morality
of efficiency, or did the new state and the new morality "cause" the new
rational and dynamic economy? We Americans, children of the Enlighten-
ment, like the Marxist grandchildren of that great change in our views of the
universe, tend to put the economic horse solidly before the linked carts of
morals and politics. Actually, we are dealing here with a process of historical
action and reaction, of multiple causation, in which no horse-and-cart meta-
phor helps, nor any metaphors of roots, or watersheds and tributary streams,
or trigger pulls. Richelieu, Colbert, Cromwell, Heinsius — not to mention John
LaW — are all part of a long process in which millions of now-forgotten men
made millions of decisions that made the modern world. You cannot, except
in a frame of purely metaphysical thought, say if there had been no great
administrators like the above, then no Watt, no Stephenson, no Rockefeller,
no Ford. But you can say that in the historical process as we know it, the new
economy and the material gains it brought in its train were impossible without
the new state, the new bureaucracy, the new standardization and efficiency in
administration. If you are still dissatisfied with this formulation, consult your
sentiments, which should, as always, give some kind of answer to the unan-
swerable. My own lean toward: In the beginning was the Word.

in

But surely did not Francis Bacon, Galileo, and Newton have a part in the
great transformation of values that has put a Henry Ford not, indeed, in the
place of an Achilles, but at least in a place of honor not totally unlike his?
Natural science is certainly one of the major components of our contempo-
rary view of the universe, and therefore of our morals. But the relations be-
tween the development of modern natural science and the whole social and
cultural matrix out of which science grew are most complex and ill-under-
stood.

As systematic knowledge of "events" in the external world and their
probable interrelations — including the possibility of predicting them — natural
science goes back to the ancient Near East. So, too, does the helpmeet or
auxiliary of science, mathematics. The distinguished historian of science the
late George Sarton devoted several long volumes and hundreds of articles to

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The Seventeenth Century

his chosen subject without ever getting very far into modern times. Nor was
ancient and medieval science — there was indeed science in the Middle Ages
— simply "deductive." The present elaborate social and material equipment
for testing, experimenting, verifying did not exist, but the fundamental con-
cept of Western science summed up as the imperative to submit "theory" to
the test of "facts" was as well known to Hippocrates and Archimedes as to
us.3

Yet we do quite rightly assume that "modern" science is different from
earlier forms of science. First and most obviously, it clearly occupies a more
important place in our culture, in terms appropriately if only roughly meas-
urable in man-hours devoted to it. It is, as a corpus of learning, immensely
greater and more varied. No matter how you decided to measure it, your lines
of graph would skyrocket from the seventeenth century onward. Second, and
quite obvious to us today, the work of the "pure" scientist was to prove use-
ful to the "practical" engineer, technologist, craftsman, entrepreneur, and
through them to make possible the extraordinary material success of the
modern West, a success neatly summarized by the fact that at the present apex
of this process, the ordinary American has in his garage the power-equivalent
of a princely stable of former times, or of a whole plantation full of slaves.
Third, less obvious but more important for the historian of morals, modern
natural science has buttressed, extended, in a sense made possible, a whole
set of heresies of Christianity, or, if you prefer, an anti-Christian world view*
for which I have used the no-doubt-inadequate blanket term "Enlighten-
ment." I now offer the reader a wide assortment of terms: materialism,
rationalism, "humanism," scientism, naturalism, secularism, evolutionism,
positivism, ethical culture. Again, with the great name as symbol; no Galileo,
Newton, Darwin, then no Locke, no Herbert Spencer, no Marx — or, at the
very least, no such great secular religions associated with such names as these
last, no modern democracy, no widespread belief in "progress," no Commu-
nism.

Although for us, concerned with the history of Western morals, the third
factor is of major importance, it is worth noting briefly that both the other
factors have a moral aspect. Science in itself, as an intellectual discipline,
could hardly have flourished as it did after 1600 had it not been for the long
tradition of disciplined thinking, and disciplined scholarly patience, that had
inspired even so unscientific an intellectual achievement as medieval scholas-

3 On "facts'* I refer the reader back, through my note on p. 4 to L. J. Henderson.

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A History of Western Morals

ticism. The banausic virtue, or necessity, of sheer hard dull work had well
before Calvin been an acquisition of the second or intellectual aristocracy of
learning as, in spite of the need for a degree of "practice" in athletic training,
it had not been for the first, or warrior-statesman, aristocracy. Catholic
Christianity, especially in its monastic form, had made work honorable and
habitual among the learned. This same extension of the banausic virtues had
to come about before science and technology could begin their modern col-
laboration. That collaboration is not as old — not, at least, in the form we
know it — as is commonly thought. Francis Bacon does foresee it, with the
scientist leading the way. But for a long time in these early modem centuries
it is the craftsman, the empirical inventor of instruments, the metallurgist who
make it possible for the pure scientist to do more and more refined and effec-
tive work. But for the two to come together at all, the scientist had to be
conditioned, not merely to the intellectual attitude implied in his Antaeus-like
return to earth after flights of thinking and imagination, but to the moral
attitude that the search for facts cannot be identical with the pursuit of the
beautiful-and-good, cannot be done with the old Greek grace, cannot, indeed,
be done with Renaissance virtu.

We do not, I repeat, understand how this came about; but somehow the
virtues of the workshop became also the virtues of the laboratory and the
office or bureau. The modern German gift they vulgarly call Sitzftetsch — you
will hardly find it in the Germans of Tacitus, or of the Song of the Nibelungs
— came into honor in the West. We can, however, once more be sure that the
process was not one of idea-horse pulling matter-cart, or vice versa, but the
long, slow mutual interaction of millions of human beings variously moti-
vated, variously environed, a process circular, or spiral, but not neatly uni-
linear. This is quite as true of the process by which the modern heresies above
so generously named came into being. Science had a most important part in
the process, but in no sense was its only begetter — but this last, too, is an
unsatisfactory figure of speech, for in such processes the begetter is also be-
gotten by what he begets.

Once it had begun to seep down into the awareness of the educated and
later of the partly educated classes, which it had done in Western and Central
Europe and the United States by the last of the eighteenth century, science-
atfw-technology had its major effect in reducing immeasurably the areas
within which a man might assume a will at least remotely like his own to be
operating. Medieval Christianity, as we have noted, still left an immense field
for a God — yes, let us use, though not in scorn, the word "anthropomorphic"

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The Seventeenth Century

— who even when He did not "interfere" with Nature, still guided and con-
trolled Nature and, above all, gave purpose to natural processes. Science and
many scientists themselves were not long in coming to the point Laplace at
the end of the eighteenth century had arrived at when he could say of God,
"I have no need for that hypothesis."

We need not here consider how legitimate, wise, or valuable was this leap
from the specific study of scientific problems to a religion, or at least a
cosmology, which we commonly call "materialist" or "mechanical.'" The fact
is that men made the leap, and that they were encouraged to make the leap
by the extent to which science already had succeeded in accounting for much
in nature that had hitherto defied "rational" accounting. Thunder and light-
ning, that old favorite, will do as an example. Admittedly, even the illiterate
Christian probably did not see his God in the storm in the role of Jove or
Thor actually wielding bolts of thunder, but neither could he account for the
phenomenon, save by common sense, which never really accounts for any-
thing, never satisfies our need for a metaphysics; he could not, as a matter of
fact, account in this way for wood floating in water, and iron sinking. Histo-
rians of science are quite justified in pointing out that scientists themselves,
qua scientists, by no means "produced" the world view of the new Enlighten-
ment, and certainly not the doctrine of the natural goodness of man. But the
upshot of the popularization of science among the upper and middle classes
was an invitation to a world view that would dispense with, or at least greatly
curb and confine, the activities here on earth of an immanent godhead.

A concrete instance may help the modern reader. Henry VIE of England
had his marriage with Catherine of Aragon annulled (it was not a divorce)
no doubt in part for reasons of state. The arriviste house of Tudor needed a
male heir, and though poor Catherine had had numerous miscarriages and
had borne short-lived infants, only Princess Mary survived. It is easy for us to
say that Henry acted out of selfish and hard-boiled motives. But he said he
believed his marriage with Catherine had been contrary to canon law (she was
his brother Arthur's widow) and that God was punishing him for this sin by
denying him a male heir. Why should he not believe this sincerely, since he
found it convenient to so believe? Henry knew much less about the physi-
ology of human reproduction than does the ordinary schoolboy today; in fact,
from the point of view of modern science, he knew nothing. Even today, the
fundamentalist Christian can believe that God directly guides the spermatozoa
on their heroic way to the ovum and can and does sidetrack them if He likes.
But most of us, Christian and non-Christian, would turn our minds first, in a

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A History of Western Morals

specific case such as this, to anatomy, physiology, and the mathematics of
probability.4

Earthquakes, terrifying indeed, and occurring at no regular intervals and
with no obvious "natural" causes, are an even better example of the gradual
encroachment of natural causation upon divine intervention. They were until
the eighteenth century almost universally regarded as acts of God in a literal
sense hard for most of us, even if we are honest Christians, to recapture — by
no means acts of God in the sense covered by that phrase in our insurance
policies. The disastrous Lisbon earthquake of 1755 is nearly at the dividing
line for the educated classes. The general public still interpreted the catastro-
phe as a warning and an intervention of divine power; the philosophes, though
they believed the disaster had natural causes, nonetheless launched themselves
from it in vigorous moralizing, as did Voltaire in his Candide; the scientists,
or natural philosophers, as they were still known, though very much in the
dark, went to work gropingly on what became the science of seismology.5 The
scientists, let it be repeated, have won, for the great majority of Westerners,
even though they are Christians, cannot see directly, concretely, as the
metaphor requires, the hand of God in specific chains of "natural causation."6

But was not common sense enough, and had not common sense already in
the Middle Ages pretty well banished primitive animistic notions, and even
expectancy of the kind of miracle Christian tradition enshrined? To a degree,
this is no doubt so. But just what did go on in the medieval mind when it
faced the traditional water test for a person accused of witchcraft, whereby

4 For the facts of Henry's belief see C. W. Ferguson, Naked to Mine Enemies: The Life
of Cardinal Wolsey, Boston, Little Brown, 1958, pp. 331-332. The familiar story of how
Charles n roared with laughter when he heard that the scientists of his Royal Society
were trying to weigh air is another case in point.

5 "In 1750 a writer on the subject [of earthquakes] in the Philosophic Transactions of
the Royal Society of London apologized to 'those who are apt to be offended at any
attempts to give a rational account of earthquakes'." K. E. Bullen, *The Interior of the
Earth,** in The Planet Earth, a Scientific American Book, New York, Simon & Schu-
ster, 1957, p. 19. For the fascinating intellectual and moral history of the aftermath of
the Lisbon earthquake see T. D. Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake, London, Methuen,
1956.

6 1 had written the above when I saw an arresting newspaper headline: GOD'S ROLE IN
THE RECESSION. Further reading, however, as is not infrequently true of headlines, actu-
ally confirmed what I had written and showed that my first impression, that here was
a good old-fashioned fundamentalist, was wrong. Someone had written the evangelist
Billy Graham asking why God allowed the unemployment crisis of 1957-58 to be thrust
on the people, and Mr. Graham began his reply: "Certain things that come upon nations
are not necessarily ordained of God, but are the result of the law of cause and effect.
God doesn't as a rule go against the laws of the universe." It is quite possible in our
world that the headline writer or the questioner or both were Enlightened, attempting
to needle Mr. Graham. San Francisco Chronicle, April 19, 1958, p. 12.

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the accused was thrown into deep water, considered innocent if the water
swallowed him and guilty if he succeeded in keeping above water, presumably
on the grounds that the innocent water rejected an evil thing? Clearly there
is a normal expectancy here, not wholly irrational by any means; but equally
clearly there is a view of the properties of water hard for the most convinced
Christian today to entertain. I think it clear that common sense — even
Western common sense, which is perhaps to a degree inclined toward what
becomes natural science — is, unbuttressed by that science, unable to question
seriously the full Christian cosmology. Common sense alone would never
have the courage, or the foolhardiness, to question the possibility of the
miraculous. Even at the height of the Middle Ages, common sense could and
did question the probability of the miraculous in the daily round of life, but
not the possibility of the miraculous. To conclude that miracles in the Chris-
tian sense of the word are impossible took a bolder, newer, less experienced,
more ruthless mental discipline than common sense, or even "pure'' phil-
osophical rationalism, could provide. This natural science did provide.

Natural science also helped fill out, extend, and implement in many ways
that form of rationalism that is best called "'efficiency" and that I have already
called attention to as one of the goals of the new state. Indeed, natural science
is the most efficient tool man thinking has yet developed to help him realize
certain definite aims or goals; sufficient here to mention our modern conquests
of wealth and power. In itself, and in spite of the deep belief of the heirs of
the philosophes that it does provide such, science does not provide what the
moralist as well as the theologian has to call ends, goals, purpose. The growth
of natural science in the modern West is, as we have noted already, and shall
have to pay much more attention to in the next chapter, intimately connected
historically with the rise of full cosmological rationalism. But in itself science
merely helps us do what we want to do, blow up Hiroshima or reconstruct it.
The help is the help of a giant, and no doubt the knowledge that the giant is
there has deeply and subtly affected our feeling for what is desirable, if only
by so enlarging our feeling for what is possible. Science probably does add to
our Western hubris; but the hubris was there, very strong, long, long ago.
More important — I shall return to this point — science normally supplies no
such restraint on, discipline of, that hubris as that which orthodox Chris-
tianity supplies.

Finally, natural science played a great part in the growth of the modern
doctrine of Progress (the capital letter is necessary). At the very end of the
seventeenth century, in the great debates over whether the moderns could

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ever equal the ancients, the concrete evidence of scientific progress was useful
to the proponents of modernity. Dean Swift's attack on the scientists in the
Academy of Laputa, though by no means the last attack on scientists, was
perhaps the last brilliant attack in which they were accused of living in a
Qoud-Cuckoo-Land of utterly impractical projects, made to seem in their
way quite as unworldly or foolish as the Renaissance humanists had made the
Schoolmen seem, debating how many angels could sit on the point of a
needle.7 By the end of the eighteenth century, French scientists were being
formally organized to help the revolutionary government in that most prac-
tical of human activities, warfare. Men in hot-air balloons, after small animals
had previously been sent up, had begun the conquest of the air. The fact of
technological progress, and its relation to the work of the pure scientists, had
begun to be evident to the general public. The men who planned and made the
great French encyclopedia in the mid-eighteenth century were well aware of
this conquest of the scientists and technologists; soon, with St. Simon,
Fourier, Robert Owen, men were to assert the modern conception that there
could be a social science modeled on natural science, and that, just as natural
science bore fruit in technological "progress," so social science would inevi-
tably bear fruit in moral progress or, what their thinkers regarded as identical
in meaning, social, economic, and political progress.

Yet the seventeenth century was by no means simply the first of the modern
centuries, the century of the triumphant new secular state, of the beginnings
of organized science, of increasing capitalistic production, of the final swing
of power — and of cultural leadership, too — from the Mediterranean to the
Atlantic. It was also the century that saw the culmination in practice and in
ideal of a way of life that was destined to die out in our time as completely
as any such way of life can in our history-ridden Western world. Though what
is suggested by words like "aristocracy," "noblesse," "gentleman," "Ritter-
lich" "hidalgo" still carry some weight of associations, favorable or unfavor-
able— in fact, as always for most of us normal human beings, mixed and
ambivalent associations — the style of twentieth-century culture has no place
for the reality behind the words. Even where, as with the "new conservatives"
in the United States, there is an attempt to uphold the linking of privilege

IV

T Howard Mumford Jones, in his recent defense of research in the humanities, points
out with satisfying irony that Swift was accusing the scientists of exactly the kind of
silly pedantry it is now fashionable to hold against the humanist scholar.

280

The Seventeenth Century

and duty, the full overtones of noblesse oblige, the dignity, good taste, re-
straint, pi etas (capacity for feeling reverence), and distrust of innovation
and bright innovators that characterizes the ideal of the gentleman of the
ancien regime, there is rejection of \vhat was, after all, a fundamental of this
actual European aristocracy — inherited title, privileges, wealth, protected as
far as seems possible in the West by caste restrictions on marriage with out-
siders, or mesalliances. Our new conservatives want an open aristocracy of
merit — an aim, the historian of the West is bound to insist seems as Utopian
as when Plato first announced it in the Republic. As for the remaining nobles
in the flesh, two centuries have been very hard on them, even in Britain. A
duke, like a queen, does not even look quite right in modern dress.

The aristocracy of the European ancien regime was in fact the last natural
aristocracy in the West. The "nature's nobleman" of the sentimental eight-
eenth century, the "aristocracy of talent" of hopeful intellectuals, above all,
no doubt, the horrid "superiors" emerging from the cauldron of modern
racist, elitist, and even crankier thinking and feeling all seem unreal, syn-
thetic, unnatural. Our notions of excellence — I use the word deliberately
instead of another with more suggestions of social hierarchy — have been
splintered, atomized, specialized, though by no means destroyed or even, in
a sense, lessened, in our world of egalitarian ideals and prize-seeking realities.
In our world a cat cannot only look at a king — if he can find one — but, if he
is a prize-winning, pedigreed, best-of-show champion, is himself a kind of
king. The European aristocracy of old was founded on a conception of gen-
eral excellence, of hierarchical superiority, not merely the old Greek effort-
less and amateur superiority of the beautiful-and-good (though that was an
important part of the aristocratic ideal), but on a conception of an order
actually cosmological, not merely psychological or sociological, on a belief
that the aristocrat was a part of God's and nature's plan for the universe. It is
almost impossible for a modern American to understand the sentiment that
made of this aristocracy a reality. I can hardly do better than revert to a
concrete instance that brought the reality to me sharply in the midst of my
early researches in the history of the French Revolution. A servant was
brought before the revolutionary authorities for smuggling in roast chicken to
a nobleman imprisoned during the Terror as a suspected '"counter-revolu-
tionary." The unrepentant servant explained his act simply: "But M. le
Marquis was born to eat chicken."8

8 Crane Brinton, The Jacobins, New York. Macmillan, 1930, p. 269n. I think there is a
symbolic truth, and not mere irony, in the fact that in our United States chicken is no
longer in any sense a luxury food.

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A History of Western Morals

It must not be assumed that either in theory or in practice this aristocracy
was an absolutely closed caste. What I have said above does not so much need
qualification as completion. Outsiders could enter the aristocracy, but ac-
cording to the theorists, only for some outstanding merit, such as great service
to the country; and even those formally ennobled, or, in England especially,
granted the legal right to use a coat of arms, and thus enrolled among the
gentry, could at best hope that their sons or grandsons would be fully and
completely assimilated to the quality of gentlemen. We can today, of course,
look back and say that precisely the reason for the vogue of manuals of
"courtesy," of self-help in learning how to behave like a gentleman, which
from Castiglione on are very numerous in the West, was that the successful
bourgeois were pressing very hard and Marxistically on the class above them.
And there is some light thrown on human conduct by the obvious though not
Marxist truth that the early modern bourgeoisie sought to imitate the man-
ners, the 'Values" of the noblesse, and that the nineteenth- and twentieth-
century proletariat sought to imitate the manners and values of the middle
class. This latter imitation would appear to have been especially close and
successful, if, by our current aristocratic Western artistic standards, unfortu-
nate, in the Soviet Union.

Still, the tone of these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuals of
behavior is very different from that to which the American disciples of Emily
Post and her fellow writers on etiquette are accustomed. Sir John Ferne was
simply more outspoken than his colleagues when he concluded the long title
page of his The Blazon of Gentry (1586), "wherein is treated of the begin-
ning, parts, and degrees of gentlenesse," with the specific injunction: "Com-
piled by John Feme gentleman, for the instruction of all gentlemen bearers
of armes, whome and none other this worke concerneth."9 That tone is
already, by the close of the sixteenth century, the tone of a group on the
defensive, aware that it is defending if not a lost, at least a menaced, cause.
Ferne must have known that the "Mercers, and shopkeepers, retaylors, Cooks,
victaylours, and Taverne-holders, Millioners, and such lyke" who, he com-
plained, were "suffered to cloath themselves, with the coates of Gentlenes"
would make up a large part of the public for his book.

These gentlemen, if, as all such classes must be, they were sure of their

9 Quoted in Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Cen-
tury, University of Illinois, Studies in Language and Literature, XIV, No. 1-2, 1929, p.
208. The reader will find in Dr. Kelso's bibliography an admirable guide to the litera-
ture of "courtesy" not only for Britain, but for the rest of the West European countries.

252

The Seventeenth Century

standards of value, were not at all sure that they would be allowed to real
them in this real world. One may hazard the guess that in the West, at les
no privileged aristocracy has been entirely unaware of some danger £r<
below, though it is hard to read such awareness into either Homer or 1
Chanson de Roland. But there is a difference between fear of the masses a
fear of those barely below — perhaps, in actual economic position, above
who are pressing hard for a share of honor, glory, prestige, all goods mu
less readily divisible than mere money. The Due de St. Simon spends paj
recording with full moral indignation his efforts to maintain his right to hs
the president a mortier of the parlement (a noble indeed, but of the nev
nobility of the civil service, not, like St. Simon, one who could claim to be
the old feudal warrior nobility) doff his hat in the ducal presence. St. Sim
seems to us abnormally sensitive, his insistence on such points of etique
petty. He was indeed a great writer, but there are no grounds for holding tl
he was otherwise very different from the rest of his order. He is at the end
a long tradition, an exhausted tradition, in which manners and morals hs
been frozen into a ritual exactness and exclusiveness which paradoxica
sharpens and intensifies the struggle for prize the ritual is intended to tan
or at least control. The French royal levee, as described in a famous passe
of Taine, is a good example: the queen was sometimes left shivering in 1
damp chill of the ill-heated palace of Versailles as successive delayed arriv
of ladies of precise but varying rank and privilege prevented the rapid exec
tion of her ritual clothing.10

I had written these last sentences about the fantastic order of rank in 1
ancien regime, and the intensification — the rendering ridiculous — of 1
struggle for prize that it produced when my mind reverted to my own bi
experience as a civil servant, and to certain difficulties over a rug in one ofB
a bare floor in another. Sociologists of business have reminded us that in 1
great corporations rank and privilege go along naturally enough with storm
ulcers; and we academics, aware that the entremangerie projessorale is i
unconcerned with external signs of rank, should be careful not to cast 1
first stone. Yet the conclusion from these parallels should not be that i
struggle for prize, seen as a whole, never changes. Western man is the eter
contestant, and there are never prizes enough; but the nature of the contc
its goals and its prizes, the relative numbers of those who may participate
it, even its rules, vary greatly — or we should have no history of morals,

1° H. A Taine, The Ancient Regime, trans, by J. Durand, New York. Holt, 1896, p. 1
footnote 1.

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A History of Western Morals

history of any kind. What the Due de St. Simon was fighting for was truly a
lost cause, and because it was lost we are likely to be unfair to those who
fought for it Especially in France, where the fight reached a climax in
bloodshed and terror, the vanquished have either been damned by the tri-
umphant democracy or made by their descendants and admirers into very
much gilded lilies of the field. We in the United States, with no more than
an incipient squirearchy in the North, an insecure group of country gentle-
men in the South, nonetheless managed to follow the French lead in this
matter. We damn an aristocracy we never had.

This last European aristocracy was indeed, as we have noted above,
keenly aware of its honors, felt and announced superiorities over the com-
moners, defended them as well as it could; but it was not a harsh, ruthless,
Spartan ruling class — not even in East Prussia — and it was not, as aristocra-
cies go in the West, lax in its private morals, luxurious and dissolute in its
tastes. It was, in its core and majority, which I am here taking as typical of it,
the country gentlemen of varied title — sometimes, in Britain, no more than
"Esquire" — by conventional moral standards one of the best aristocracies in
our Western history. I do not quite dare fly in the face of common knowledge
and maintain that even in France its virtues were responsible for its downfall;
but in the midst of a culture that is clearly the product of the aggressive, inno-
vating, restless energies of the foxes I confess to a certain wistful fondness
for the virtues of these rather tired lions, the unprogressive gentlemen of the
ancien regime.

The gentleman was culturally — though, so great is social mobility even in
the Middle Ages and early modern times, not by 1700 in most cases genet-
ically— a descendant of the feudal knight. The apparatus of titles, coats of
arms, possession of a landed estate, are a direct inheritance from medieval
society. So, too, is the dedication to arms, though arms and the dedication
had greatly changed* Great nobles might still raise and command regiments,
but they were regiments of the royal army, under professional command, and
ultimately subject to the direction of what was already a national ministry of
war. The officers of these armies were indeed mostly gentlemen, and among
them such feudal survivals as the duel still obtained. The knightly code of
honor, the knightly awareness of caste and privilege still survived, heightened,
as we have just noted, by the rise of rival groups, into a systematic defensive
code. The medieval knight hardly needed to feel contempt for underlings —
though nineteenth-century fiction sometimes pictures him as so feeling — and
he certainly was not, until late in the Middle Ages, and then only in advanced

284

The Seventeenth Century

commercial societies, in danger of being tempted to go into trade.11 The
landed aristocracies of the old regime, however, very self-consciously erected
barriers between themselves and the "fund lords." To vivre noblement one
had to be above the need to work, not merely at the banausic occupations,
but in theory at least, at any form of what we should call "business." The pure
landed noble looked down a bit even at those who practiced law, or admin-
istered the growing state. Highest political posts, posts as officers in army and
navy, and general supervision of his estate just about ended what a noble was
supposed to do without derogation of his rank in established society. The
church, Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, in certain societies, Calvinist, would
do, especially its highest posts, but usually these were refuges for younger
sons. Court would do, and indeed the pensions, sinecures, the whole network
of privilege surrounding the royal or princely court was essential to the eco-
nomic survival of the class. The class as a whole, and on the average, did not
do well in terms of economics, though it is not fair to blame its failures en-
tirely on its inability to adapt itself to the new world of capitalist industry.
Moreover, its more enterprising individual members often did well by them-
selves, for, whatever theories of derogeance might have been, participation in
finance, speculation, the dignified and really profitable end of the new business
world was open to nobles everywhere, even in that supposed home of the aloof
noble, France. The improving agricultural noble landlord, who profited eco-
nomically as well as culturally by his improvements, is a familiar figure in
England, and by no means unknown on the continent.

Yet the core of the class, the smaller landed nobles and gentry, at its eco-
nomic worst hardly above the peasantry in parts of Europe, was old-fash-
ioned, unenterprising, economically "unfit'* — and relatively law-abiding and
morally sound. They were good conventional Christians, according to the
accepted faith of their land; the Prussian Junkers, notably, were God-fearing
Lutherans. The Jansenists, who were rather more than conventional Chris-
tians, were strong among the administrative and judicial noblesse of France;

ii Much of the above does not hold for the Italian aristocracy, which, as has often been
pointed out, never got as divorced from urban life as the feudal aristocracies of the
North, never became as "medieval," as "Gothic," and was not until 1860 to become part
of a major state organization. I am in this chapter following culture on its western way,
and am writing chiefly of the trio that will rule the Western world of power, wealth, and
culture for some centuries, Britain, France, and the Germanics, and of the smaller but
culturally important states around them, Netherlands, Switzerland, Scandinavian coun-
tries. Spain, as always, was strange, intense, apart; her hidalgo class deserved to have its
Cervantes. I shall at the end of this chapter note briefly the fact that the "European"
aristocracy had by the seventeenth centur> already developed conspicuous national
differences.

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A History of Western Morals

and the members of the corresponding class of small nobles in the Hapsburg
dominions were sober, steady, practicing Catholics.

The rural landholding nobility were through most of Europe at the very
least no more oppressive toward the peasantry than their medieval predeces-
sors had been. The fashion among recent British historians has been to exag-
gerate the novelty of the actual suffering that the two great waves of enclosure,
that of the sixteenth and that of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, brought on the peasantry. At any rate, the Carlylean picture of a
French, if not, indeed, a European, noblesse doing nothing useful and living
riotously off the labors of their oppressed inferiors, can no longer be accepted.
Many a country gentleman did his best, as tradition directed him to do, for
those dependent on him. For England this is admitted, if reluctantly, of the
Squire Allworthys and many others, even of the nobility, carrying out their
duties as justices of the peace, as customary landlords, as dispensers of char-
ity. But even in France, where propagandists of the new order since 1789
have made us see the noblesse as irresponsibly hounding their stewards to get
every penny out of their peasants — and, on their rare trips to the country,
enjoying the right of first night with peasant brides and forcing the men to
beat the frog ponds to stop croakings that spoiled sleep — even in France
the responsible country gentleman doing his duty by his dependents is by no
means a rare figure.12

Their private morals seem to me to have been, even if judged by conven-
tional Victorian standards still prevailing amongst us today when we judge
others, on the whole rather better than those of most privileged classes. I am
not, of course, referring to the very small group of courtiers, the top of the
social pyramid, about whom I shall shortly say a word. But the small nobility
and the gentry, save for the inevitable black sheep, were not dissolute. As
gentlemen in the great tradition, they hunted, rode to hounds, drank as a
gentleman should, conducted themselves as a gentleman — who is after all
and above all, in the great tradition, a male — should. As to sex, they believed
in and practiced what is known as the "double standard," an attitude so far as
I know not seriously challenged among laymen in the West before the last

12 My favorite instance is the Marquis de Ferrieres, deputy from the noblesse of Poitou
to the Estates General of 1789, whose memoirs and letters back home to his wife have,
because of this political post of his, been published. His letters show just the kind of
concern with everybody on the estate one expects from the best eighteenth-century
English squire. I realize Ferrieres is no statistical fact, but neither is the wicked, oppres-
sive absentee. On the general state of our studies of the European noblesse of early
modern times — studies that I think confirm what I say above — see A. Goodwin, ed., The
European Nobility in the Eighteenth Century, London, Adam and Charles Black, 1953,
also Marquis de Ferrieres, Charles Elie, Correspondance inedite, Paris, A. Colin, 1932.

286

The Seventeenth Century

years of the eighteenth century. But they were not heroically promiscuous,
certainly not in the way later republican propaganda on the Continent was to
paint them. Their arranged marriages certainly lasted; divorce, in spite of the
virtuously interested efforts of a John Milton in its favor, was nowhere gen-
erally accepted. Even at the top there were loyal, chaste, and continent hus-
bands, from Cromwell, of whom it would be expected, to Louis XVI and
George III, of whom it would not be expected. Among the rank and file of
gentlemen, the slightest dip into the source materials of social history, now
beginning to be abundant, shows many a happy marriage, adultery-free.

The resemblance of this class to other privileged hereditary classes with
steady moral ways, with the "lions" of Machiavelli and Pareto — with, for
example, the early Roman aristocrats — increases wThen one realizes that they
were not very intellectual. They had, of course, both refinement and culture
if they are compared to their early medieval predecessors. They were literate,
and those who had literary or artistic tastes could readily satisfy them. They
were exposed to higher education, in England already to the sequence of
public school and Oxford-Cambridge, on the Continent more often to private
tutors, though there the Jesuit schools were most influential in Catholic lands,
and the military schools wrere beginning to rise. Still, though it was by no
means illiterate as were the nobles of Charlemagne, the tone of the class was
against the innovating mind, against the disturbing doubts the new rationalism
was introducing, against the kind of sensibility coming into fashion with the
advanced. Faintly, the outlines of the coining separation between Horseback
Hall and Heartbreak House were already visible.

Though there are survivors of this class of small and middling landed
nobles in our contemporary West, they survive as relics, sometimes nicely
refurbished relics, like Williamsburg, Virginia. This is now true even for the
Prussian Junkers, who survived longest in the modern world, and who are in
many respects an extraordinary group, closest Christian parallel to the old
Roman aristocracy of the Republic. The Junkers held themselves together
long enough to play a major, though by no means a determining, role in the
making of modern Germany. The un-Jeffersonian democratic imperial Ger-
many— or, if even so qualified, ^democratic" here offends you, I will settle
for "mass- or Fo/Jt-based" imperial Germany — that finally in 1870 emerged
from the rivalries and complexities of the early modern Germanics was not
a society in which the Junker could ever feel at home; indeed, the feeling
many Junkers had about their own Bismarck, that he had with their help
made an empire out of the wrong material — industrialists, bankers, Jews,
intellectuals, liberals, all sorts of peoples who sought to ape the ways of the

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A History of Western Morals

dissolute, unmanly, and materialistic West Europeans and Americans — is
fully understandable in the light of their past.

The Junkers were the descendants, spiritually and often genetically, of
the Teutonic Knights, those organized pioneers and crusaders of the late
Middle Ages who led the Germanic conquest of the less well-organized Slavs.
They were a landed aristocracy, not quite in the desperate position of the
Spartiates toward their Helots, but, still, a reasonably purebred Germanic
minority ruling over a much more mixed group of serfs in an agrarian military
economy, almost a frontier economy, one conquered from an enemy people.
They were early and almost automatically converted to strict Lutheranism. By
early modern times they had consolidated into a landed upper class loyal to
their Hohenzollern rulers, who wisely did not interfere with basic Junker
interests at home, a fine reservoir of officers for the Prussian army, masters
of their own estates, which they administered with no nonsense about progress
and humanitarian enlightenment, but which, in contrast with some of the West
European nobilities, they did administer. The Junkers have suffered in West-
ern opinion from their association with two great German nationalist efforts
to gain supremacy in the Western state system. And it would be absurd to
deny that many of the class had a part, not only in the conventional aggres-
sions of Wilhelm's Germany, but also in the insanely romantic aggressions of
Hitler. They were, after all, loyal soldiers, professionals loyal to a whole set
of values which did not include critical political thought. Still, the class did
not at heart like Hitler, nor the modern world. The Junker was one of the last
of the old lions — a disciplined, God-fearing, traditionalist, a believer in the
order of rank in which his birth had placed him on top, a soldier by faith and
profession, an uninquiring mind hostile to the foxes of this world, an anti-
intellectual, but of the simple old sort, not at all like the neurotic intellectual
anti-intellectuals we today all know too well. The Junkers, though they were
aristocrats, remind one of the Boers of Oom Paul Kruger, children of a simple
agrarian culture, patriarchal, rigid conformists to a code straight out of the
Old Testament; they would have no truck with "liberty, equality, fraternity,"
nor in general with the religion of the Enlightenment, and the Western liberal
has rightly felt that they do not belong in his world. But they should not be
confused with the wild men of racist creeds, the naive imperialists, the eco-
nomic expansionists, the mass of nationalists, the unprincipled idealists, who
have made the recent German attempts to dominate, or secede from, the
West.13

L» See W. Goerlitz, Die Junker, C. A. Starke, Gliicksburg, 1956.

255

The Seventeenth Century

To this general account the very top of the upper classes, the active court
nobility, is almost everywhere in the West a partial exception. Even of the
court nobility of the later Stuarts, or of the last three Louis of France,, or of
the big and little German princely courts, it must be said that they look pretty
Victorian in comparison with the Roman privileged classes we read about
in Tacitus, Suetonius, Martial, and Juvenal, or with the upper classes of
Renaissance Italy, and look very Christian in comparison with the untamed
Merovingians we read about in Gregory of Tours. These people suffered even
more than the rank and file of their class in the virtuous republican propa-
ganda inspiried by the "principles of 1776 and 1789," since their doings stood
out so firmly; they were newsworthy, historyworthy. Still, there can be no
doubt that theirs was not the life of sober, steady, principled adherence to
high moral standards in the Christian tradition. Many of them were caught
in the intense competition of high politics, and at just the time when the new
doctrine of reason of state was ready to still any conscience that needed
stilling. The political morality reflected in the Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz,
for instance, is low indeed, and the record of British politics from 1640 to
1660 and 1660 to 1689 does not remind one very much of the career of
Clement Aflee.

Nor is the private morality of these courts a loftly one. Kings had to have
mistresses, as part of the display of royalty, even if they were not sexually
very enterprising. The notorious laxities — sexual promiscuity, drinking, gam-
bling, extravagance of all sorts — the cynicism reflected in the theater of the
age, and the general abandonment of the English Restoration of 1660 are not
quite typical, though they are hardly exaggerated in our history books. This
moral relaxation was general, by no means limited to the court of Charles H,
and seems to be one of those interesting and essentially modern phenomena,
a cyclical swing in revulsion from a great collective effort to achieve moral
reform, a phenomenon aktn to the French Thermidorian reaction of 1794, and
also to the less-complete and violent twentieth-century revulsion from Vic-
torian standards.14

14 There is a familiar, apt, and perhaps even authentic anecdote here which helps us
understand English folk feelings on a more important matter than the private immo-
rality of the court. There were two chief mistresses of Charles EL Louise de Keroualle,
a Frenchwoman and a Catholic, and the English Nell Gwynn, a former comic actress.
The Frenchwoman, made Duchess of Portsmouth, was hated by the English people, as
the full-blown Nell was not. Nell, royally ensconced in a coach, was once mistaken for
her rival — or collaborator — and hearing the angry shouts of the mob, leaned out of the
window and said firmly: "Good people, I am the Protestant whore." The temper of the
crowd changed at once, and she was loudly cheered. But what if she had said: UI am
the English whore"?

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A History of Western Morals

The conduct of the nobles of the court of Louis XIV, especially in his
early years, was, however, hardly any better than that of the nobles of the
court of Charles II, and is not to be explained as a revulsion, except perhaps
from the tensions — not exactly puritanically inspired — of the Fronde. The
German courts, which imitated the French in everything, of course imitated
the French in morals. We confront once more the usual list: sexual prom-
iscuity, in these very upper groups often, but not always, extended to permis-
sible promiscuity for married women as well, a kind of single standard of
laxity, as well as unscrupulous rivalry in the struggle for place and power, the
potlatch spirit in conspicuous consumption, a fashionable fondness for the
wit that shocks and sounds like cynicism — is sometimes cynicism — and the
inevitable minor vices of gambling, drinking, idling.

Yet even the conspicuous consumption, even the minor vices, were at the
height of this culture in the best year of Louis XIV redeemed — or, at the
worst, very agreeably gilded — by high standards and high achievements in
taste and manners. Indeed, one can go further and assert that the ideal of
French classicism at its best was one of the great moral ideals of the West, an
ideal to be ranked with that of the beautiful-and-good, the medieval knight,
the man of virtu. Like them, it was an aristocratic ideal for an aristocracy,
though it was not untouched by an even more serious Christian sense of duty
toward lower classes than that which had suffused the medieval ideal. It shared
to the full the respect for the mind of the Greek ideal. It held high as virtues
dignity of deportment, good manners, which inevitably means consideration
— thoughtful consideration — for others, mesure, that very French version of
the Greek "nothing in excess," the Christian moral code — taken, duly, with
mesure. It is not a heaven-storming ideal, but it is not a conventional one.
From the classic Greek and Roman ideal that these gentlemen held so high it
differed, as any Christian ideal must, by something rather more than what I
have called the minimal puritan touch — witness the court preachers, and,
further on toward the central Christian tensions, Racine, Pascal, and — yes —
La Rochefoucauld himself. It is, for many reasons, chiefly perhaps because of
its great respect for dignity, hierarchy, "those rules of old discover'd, not
deviz'd," its deep underlying pessimism, never romantically on exhibition,
and its high aesthetic content, the most difficult of all Western moral ideals
for us Americans to understand. It is the Christian ideal nearest the old Greek
ideal, nearer by quite a bit than the morally disordered Renaissance ideal of
virtu.

Like most such ideals, it is not easily embodied. The French are no doubt

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quite right; Louis XIV, all of him, his whole career, even with the mistresses,
even with the devastation of the Palatinate, is as good a French classicist of
the great age as one could find in the world of action. But no American can
take Louis seriously. I should not dare suggest any of the great literary figures
mentioned above, though, just as is true for the work of the great Athenian
dramatists as examples of their culture, the total work of Corneille, Racine,
and Moliere is no bad sampling. Perhaps, in spite of her femininity, one could
take Madame de Sevigne as representative. She has, for an American, the
great advantage of not wearing the periwig, that symbol of what we call the
stuffed shirt — which is just what these aristocrats were not, not even Louis
XTV.

Finally, we must note here that what has been written above about the
rank and file of the European aristocracy of the old regime has made the not
wholly justifiable assumption that there was such a European aristocracy. Was
there not in reality nothing more than an English nobility — which the honest
historian would never equate entirely with the gentry, as I have tended to do —
French noblesse, German Adel, Spanish hidalgos, even that squabbling,
undisciplined, ill-fated lot the Polish szlachta? Most certainly by the seven-
teenth century the process of national differentiation in Europe was well
along toward its modern form of nationalism, and had come to include in part
the aristocracies. A Prussian Junker was already a very different man
from a French provincial noble — though, indeed, the medieval Teutonic
Knight was in some ways very different from a Joinville or a Froissart. But
we are going to have to cope with the many and difficult problems of the moral
implications of modern Western nationalism soon enough. This nationalism,
though it engulfed the aristocracies almost completely by the nineteenth
century, was not primarily a product of these aristocracies. For the treatment
I have in this chapter given the noblesse of Europe as a whole, I can bring
out two justifications. First, there was among aristocrats everywhere, even as
far east as Poland, a survival of the medieval feeling that nobles belong to-
gether, that there is a European nobility above mere newly fashionable nation-
ality. This feeling is admirably brought out in Shaw's Saint Joan in the
conversation between the nobleman and the chaplain, one of Shaw's stock
Englishmen.

THE CHAPLAIN. ... I feel it, my lord: I feel it very deeply. I cannot bear to
see my countrymen defeated by a parcel of foreigners.
THE NOBLEMAN. Oh! you are an Englishman, are you?

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THE CHAPLAIN. Certainly not, my lord: I am a gentleman. Still, like your lordship,
I was born in England; and it makes a difference.
THE NOBLEMAN. You are attached to the soil, eh?

THE CHAPLAIN. It pleases your lordship to be satirical at my expense: your great-
ness privileges you to be so with impunity. But your lordship knows very well that
I am not attached to the soil in a vulgar manner, like a serf. Still, I have a feeling
about it; and I am not ashamed of it; and [rising wildly] by God, if this goes on
any longer, I will fling my cassock to the devil, and take arms myself, and
strangle the accursed witch with my own hands.

THE NOBLEMAN, So you shall, chaplain: so you shall, if we can do nothing better.
But not yet, not quite yet . . *

THE NOBLEMAN [airily] I should not care very much about the witch — you see, I
have made my pilgrimage to the Holy Land; and the Heavenly Powers, for their
own credit, can hardly allow me to be worsted by a village sorceress — but the
Bastard of Orleans is a harder nut to crack; and as he has been to the Holy Land
too, honors are easy between us as far as that goes.
THE CHAPLAIN. He is only a Frenchman, my lord.

THE NOBLEMAN. A Frenchman! Where did you pick up that expression? Are these
Burgundians and Bretons and Picards and Gascons beginning to call themselves
Frenchmen, just as our fellows are beginning to call themselves Englishmen?
They actually talk of France and England as their countries. Theirs, if you
please! What is to become of me and you if that way of thinking comes into
fashion?

THE CHAPLAIN. Why, my lord? Can it hurt us?

THE NOBLEMAN. Men cannot serve two masters. If this cant of serving their
country once takes hold of them, goodbye to the authority of their feudal lords,
and goodbye to the authority of the Church. That is, goodbye to you and me.15

Second, and quite as important, the French aristocracy held in this seven-
teenth century, and continued to hold in the eighteenth, a degree of cultural
and social primacy so great that it can be not unfairly taken as setting stand-
ards for all. Certainly it is at least as fair to take the France of Louis XIV as
"typical" of Europe as it is to take the Athens of Pericles as typical of Greece.
But the caution is very real: the future does not belong to the aristocrats,
certainly not to French aristocrats. Within a few generations, even the British,
even the Prussian aristocracies will be swallowed up in the new world, to
which we must now turn.

w Seven Plays, New York, Dodd, Mead, 1951, "Saint Joan," pp. 838, 839, used by
permission of the Public Trustee and The Society of Authors.

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IN THE COURSE of the eighteenth century a **New Moral World," to borrow the
phrase of Robert O\\en, one of the most hopeful prophets of this world, came
into full competition with the complex of older moral worlds we Westerners
had been living in. By this sweeping statement I do not at all wish to deny that
the origins of the "new morality" go back well into the medieval centuries;
nor do I wish to imply that the new wholly replaced the old then or now. I
trust I have sufficiently insisted throughout this book that we are all, whether
or not we are devoted to the study of history, deeply marked by all history,
all prehistory. But there are in history periods of great and identifiable in-
novation— "revolutionary" periods, if you like — and the eighteenth century
was one of these. The French call their history from Louis XI to 1789
"modern," from 1789 to the present "contemporary"; and though the par-
ticular bitterness of the French political struggle no doubt accounts for this,
to us Americans, fantastic nomenclature, the conception has applicability to
all the West. We are still struggling with the fundamental problems the eight-
eenth century posed; some of us, especially in the United States, are still
proudly, but a bit worriedly, living in the eighteenth century.

In accordance with our tried, and not very empirical, method, we may
begin by attempting to state in as broad terms as possible the fundamental
positions of this new morality, this new world view. To start with the broadest:
the eighteenth-century Enlightenment sought to substitute — take that word
literally, as "put in place of — for the transcendental God-determined Chris-
tian otherworldly heaven a this-world transformed by human reason guiding

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human action into . . . well, the phrase is inadequate, but "a heaven on earth"
will have to do.

Now Americans today are so used to this basic article of faith of the eight-
eenth-century Enlightenment — though not by any means in its fresh, revolu-
tionary, immediacy of 1789, when it took on intensities worth comparing
with early Christian expectance of a Second Coming, when, indeed, this
eighteenth-century eschatology was a messianic belief — that it is hard for
us to realize that, as at least belief that for all human beings the "pursuit of
happiness" and the attainment of comfort here on earth are normal and
expected aims, this world view is new indeed. Yet the bright and ruthless
young French revolutionary Saint-Just quite naturally, and, one suspects,
almost without thinking, tossed off in an oration in 1793 the remark Le
bonheur est une idee neuve en Europe. For once, translation has no traps;
this is simply, "Happiness is a new idea in Europe."1

There is, of course, a trap here: just what is meant "operationally" by
happiness — or bonheur, Gluckseligkeit? Nothing, surely, that we can agree on
as, one hopes, we can agree on the chemical definition of "water." Is happiness
positive, a state of rapture, joy, or at least enjoyment? Is it negative, the
absence of suffering, frustration? Is it a process — did not Jefferson write "the
pursuit of happiness"? Is it a goal, something attainable once and for all? The
word surely means all of these, in all their myriad combinations in the human
being.2 As a kind of minimal expectation among most modern Westerners,
the happiness to which he has come to feel he has a "right," the happiness
he "expects," includes the physical comforts, the material satisfactions, the
absence of preventable physical suffering — and most such suffering he has
been taught to believe is preventable by the miracles of science — and, quite as
important, such degree of success in whatever kinds of agonistic competition
he takes part in as can satisfy his self-esteem, his desire for a standing among
his fellows. Parenthetically, the obvious needs stating here: In our pluralistic
world there are so many such competitions, so many real "societies" — even,

1 Saint-Just is so cited in an interesting essay by Raoul de Roussy de Sales which throws
a good deal of light on this whole topic of the novelty of the world view behind that
deceptive phrase the "pursuit of happiness." The historian will note with no surprise that
M. Roussy de Sales implies that Saint-Just said this of all the world, though he actually
said it of Europe. As a good conventional child of the Enlightenment, Saint-Just no
doubt thought of Americans as, if not quite children of nature, at least already well
acquainted with the idea of happiness. Surely was he not right in 1793? R. de Roussy
de Sales, fcThe Idea of Happiness," The Saturday Review Treasury, New York, Simon
& Schuster, 1957, p. 206.

2 On many phases of this topic, see H. M. Jones, The Pursuit of Happiness, Cambridge,
Mass., Harvard University Press, 1953.

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let us not forget, the family, which obstinately refuses to disappear in the face
of the prophets of doom or bliss — that most of us do have a degree of success,
esteem, of loving and being loved, or the Fromms and even the Orwells would
be more than right.

This new moral concept of heaven on earth was not without its static or
negative side; its happiness is certainly cessation of care, pain, grievous
struggle. But was — is — the conventional Christian heaven much more than
that? There is not, for the ordinary Christian, in heaven much of the kind of
expectation embodied in heroic Valhallas or Elysian fields, nor even in what
the Westerner understands to be the Moslem heaven. Granted that the saved
Christian will be resurrected in the flesh, granted that the popular imagina-
tion has rather vaguely filled heaven with material satisfactions, it is still true
that Christian distrust of the flesh in this world has spilled over into Christian
ideas of the next world. "Bliss" is the favorite word of the theologians for the
heavenly state of man, and it is a very sedate and unsensual word.

In contrast, the newr eschatology insists on the continuing struggle. In-
deed, in what is so far its most extreme form among major organized religions,
the Marxist faith of the Soviet Union, the coining heaven on earth wifl be
embodied in a "classless society" in which struggle — even that of the agon —
having ceased to be the evil-producing class struggle, will be the good-pro-
ducing, the happy emulation among contented men, which we will call "Prog-
ress." The concept of Progress is, however, central to all forms of the new
eschatology, including most emphatically our own democratic form. As a
systematic interpretation of the universe as it seems to man, the idea of
Progress is a creation of the eighteenth century. In accordance with the usual
process in human affairs that I have called reinforcement (not the well-worn
vicious circle), this idea emerged from a late medieval and early modern
world in which the new state was creating better public order and wider
markets in which, in turn, merchants were increasing wealth, and inventors,
given some margin by that wealth, were increasing mechanical power, and
philosophers, benefiting from a similar margin, were mulling over ideas which
were to lead to the idea of Progress. Once clearly stated and developed, which
was not until the end of the seventeenth century, the idea of Progress
reinforced the new state, the new economy, the new technology, and set us
on the merry way of exponential increase we are still on.3

3 1 cannot here go into the general history^ and especially the intellectual history, neces-
sary for the full consideration of the place of the idea of Progress in Western history.
The best brief introduction seems to me still the "old" book of J. B. Bury, The Idea of

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A History of Western Morals

The historical process which the eighteenth century elevated into an
eschatology under the name of Progress was, to use another great term of
the century, considered a natural process. And by this word "natural" the men
of the time came increasingly to mean, at a minimum stage of opposition to
Christian orthodoxy, a process misunderstood, not really described or
accounted for, in the Christian canon and tradition, and therefore demanding
modification of Christian orthodoxy; and at a maximum stage of opposi-
tion to such orthodoxy, they meant a process that had gone on in spite of
willful Christian attempts to deny and resist it, attempts that could not stop
the process, but had indeed — paradoxically, of course, but is not all evil a
paradox of the emotions? — slowed down this inevitable process. The con-
clusion for these latter radically Enlightened was therefore clear: Christian
orthodoxy had not to be modified, but destroyed root and branch, or it might
be a more serious obstacle to inevitable Progress.

The Christian — and we are still pursuing these ideas among the extrem-
ists, the atheists or materialists — had to believe in a God who could and did
interfere with the order of nature, had to believe in some "supernatural"
which to these advanced thinkers was — and they were free with the word —
quite simply "superstition." The true nature of the universe, and of man's
place in it, was gradually being disclosed to the natural philosophers, headed
by the incomparable Newton, who together had already made it certain that
the time scale of Genesis was quite wrong, that the sun did not revolve about
the earth, and that most of the miracles recounted in the Bible were contrary
to what these natural philosophers — our "scientists" — called the "laws of
nature." Common sense, the Enlightened of the eighteenth century believed,
had always had its troubles over miracles like that of Joshua's stopping the
sun and had come independently to a good deal of healthy skepticism; but the
scientists had set the seal of highest truth on what common sense had only
suspected. Man is a part of nature; a God who is not part of nature is an
illusion; a god who is a part of nature is a superfluity.

Such rigorous conclusions were by no means common in the eighteenth
century. Before we go on to some of the implications of the new eschatology

Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (1920) now available in a paperback
(New York, Dover, 1955). Bury was a late Victorian freethinker who "believed in"
Progress. But see also Carl Becker's admirable summary in the Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences under the word Progress and his Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Cen-
tury Philosophers, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1932. For a brief bibliography
of the Enlightenment, I refer the reader to my Portable Age of Reason Reader, New
York, Viking, 1956, pp. 26-34.

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for Western moral life, we must try to be clear about a difficult and compli-
cated matter. The new view of the universe did not destroy the old; Chris-
tianity did not die out. Now, two centuries later, there are more Christians on
earth than ever before. We shall return to this topic in a later chapter. Here
it must be enough to point out that the kind of challenge to ultimate Chris-
tian beliefs presented by the system of beliefs just outlined was met by Chris-
tians with a great variety of adjustments, from a deism or "natural religion"
that could hardly be called Christian at all, through moderate compromises
on the time scale and literalness of the Bible, to forms of ''fundamentalism,"
Catholic as well as Protestant, that seem to repudiate entirely the new world
view of the Enlightenment. In the eyes of naturalistic-historical observer,
however, no one not wholly insane can entirely repudiate what the last few
centuries have brought with them. The American fundamentalist driving
his Ford through Mencken's ''Bible Belt" cannot be what his sixteenth-
century predecessor was, if only because he is driving a Ford — and may
live to see his son drive a Lincoln. More important., and more simple, he
is bound in this world to feel beleaguered, to be aware that his are no longer
the beliefs of the majority of his fellow Americans. As we shall shortly see,
it is not even quite true that Christian ethics have survived unchanged in an
era that has witnessed so successful an attack on Christian cosmology and
theology.

Moreover, we must be clear about another important modification in
what has just been written about the new world view of the Enlightenment.
Its leading eighteenth-century exponents were intelligent, cultivated men, by
no means contemptuous of history, by no means pure theorists unaware
of the facts of life. The best known of them — Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot,
even Bentham, indeed even Kant — nourished all sorts of reservations about
Progress, human goodness and reasonableness, the immediate perfectability
of men, the attribution of all evil to socio-economic environment.4 The for-
mation of a kind of canon of belief for the religion of the Enlightenment
is a process still going on; already it is clear, however, that many of these
subtle and difficult thinkers who in the eighteenth century helped make the
new faith would be quite unable to accept it now, either in its American
or its Russian form. Some such process, I must insist again, has, from

4 1 cannot here go at length into the many problems of intellectual history suggested by
this last, but I strongly recommend to the reader Henry Vyverberg's recent Historical
Pessimism in the French Enlightenment, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press,
1958, which has a very useful bibliography.

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the historical-naturalistic point of view, marked the growth of all our
Western higher religions. The fact that the religion of the Enlightenment
often claims to base itself wholly on a historical-naturalistic world view (or
"method") would not appear to have exempted it from this historical adap-
tation to the needs and nature of the many, who never yet have been
subtle and difficult thinkers.

With these necessary warnings, we may continue to pursue into the field
of ethics some of the implications of the radically anti-Christian "mate-
rialist" position we have been outlining. The new Enlightenment had made
much of what Christians had traditionally accepted as true seem literally
false. In the first rationalist flush — recall Euhemerus and Greco-Roman
rationalism — a great deal that to a less-confident and tamer rationalist now-
adays seems quite possible or even probable as an event, however much he
still refuses to accept the full Christian explanation as implied in the word
"miracles," came in the eighteenth century to seem as untrue and impossible
as the actual stopping of the sun by Jehovah through Joshua. I mean, for
example, the whole effect on us of what is fashionably called the "psycho-
somatic," and of much modern psychology, animal as well as human, which
can easily enough accept as "facts" the story of the Gadarene swine, and
even that of Lazarus. The more naive rationalism of the eighteenth century
— though even in this matter there are many hints in the work of the
subtler thinkers of anti-intellectualism and existentialism to come — felt
it had to question even the facts of the Christian tradition, had to find the
source of these lies in priestly villainy, in deliberate charlatanry, in the con-
spiracy to fool the innocent many.5 Now, as I have perhaps unfashionably
insisted in this book, the Western ethical tradition is overwhelmingly in-
tellectualist in the sense that it refuses to accept the false, the lie, as neces-
sary, or, save in the most innocent of forms of the "white" lie, as useful.6 To
many a sincere convert to the new views of the Enlightenment, historical
Christianity seemed hopelessly stained with falsehoods, whether or not they
had been propagated in good faith. A new start seemed needed.

But as the movement of ideas developed, emphasis was turned from the

5 On this whole subject of eighteenth-century rationalist attitudes toward the "irrational"
in religion and mythology, see the forthcoming book by F. E. Manuel, The Eighteenth
Century Confronts the Gods.

6 There is a strong-minded minority, perhaps dying out, that holds the absolutist posi-
tion that no falsehood at all is ever justifiable. A distinguished Boston physician not
long deceased maintained that the physician must always tell the patient the full un-
adulterated truth as he, the physician, sees it. Confronted with such intransigeance, I
feel inclined to twist the well-known dictum of Lord Acton into "virtue tends to corrupt,
and absolute virtue corrupts absolutely."

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falsehood of Christian cosmology to what seemed to the Enlightened to be
the harmful moral effects of a conventional Christian upbringing. Some of
these attacks on Christianity merely echoed the familiar pagan and Renais-
sance humanist complaint that the Christian was taught to suppress natural
instincts and appetites he ought not to suppress, that he could not enjoy
life or let others enjoy it, that he was inevitably either a frustrated, truncated
human being or a hypocrite. The important, and relatively new, line of at-
tack in ethics, however, questioned the philosophical and psychological
basis of the Christian "civil war in the breast." Robert Owen, who was born
in 1771, put the matter at its clearest and simplest: Human conduct is
wholly the result of the action of the environment — the cultural as well as
the physical environment — upon the individual. No man is, therefore, "re-
sponsible" for his conduct. We are, unfortunately, as Christians taught that
we have a "free will," that we can follow a nonexistent, yet somehow in-
vented, "conscience," that we can choose between good and evil conduct.
On this false foundation the whole fabric of religion is erected, the suf-
ferings of the poor, the tyranny of the rich, the crimes and misdemeanors
of us all explained and even justified by the preposterous notion of original
sin, and thousands and thousands of deluded individuals driven by the
sense of guilt Christianity inculcates into unhappiness and despair, into a
state of mind which, men being the product of such conditioning, drives
them into the vicious circle of evil.

Evil, then, is no consequence of an imaginary fall; Christian theology
and all that is built on it is harmful nonsense. Evil is a consequence of the
bad environment we grow up in from infancy, our constricting family, that
nest of selfishness, our schooling in error, our church, our politics, our
absurd social structure. And all this bad environment has been built up
on the sole basis of human ignorance. Man is by nature good — that is,
he comes into this world equipped to respond to stimuli from his environ-
ment in such a way that he will be happy, well adjusted, and, therefore, in
the only meaning of the word that makes sense, virtuous. But the infant
from its very first gurgle is subject to stimuli from a vicious and corrupt
environment. Naturally, inevitably, he responds in such a way that he is
unhappy, maladjusted, and, therefore, in the only meaning of the word
that makes sense, wicked*

7 1 have used a few words, like "maladjusted," that Owen would not have used, but I do
not think I have misrepresented his position. The reader should go direct to Robert
Owen's A New View of Society and Other Writings, ed. by G.D.H. Cole, London, Dent,
1927, in Everyman's Library. If he has any doubts as to the persistence of Owen's view
into our own times, I suggest he read B. F. Skinner, Walden Two.

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We need not here worry over the problem of how man, that naturally
well-adjusted creature, got so badly maladjusted. Owen seems not to have
worried over it, nor did many of the Enlightened, save an occasional subtle
soul like Diderot, who came to question the dogma of environmentalist!!. But
we must note that, having reached this point, the Enlightened tended to
divide, roughly, into two schools of thought as to what must follow. Both
agreed that existing environment produced evil. They did vary somewhat
in their emphasis on which particular environment, mostly actual institu-
tions, was most responsible for this evil. Someone at some time in the
eighteenth century no doubt blamed every institution that ever has been
blamed, but in contrast with later tendencies to blame economic and political
institutions, the thinkers of the eighteenth century reserved their heaviest fire
for religious institutions, and in particular for the Church of Rome. Still, they
spared very little of what existed. Theirs was to be a new moral world. Where
they divided was on the problem of how to bring about the transformation
of the bad environment into the good.

One group, of which the most clear-cut, logical, and extreme repre-
sentative turns out to be no logic-loving Frenchman, but a man of that
nation of distrusters of logic, the English, William Godwin, author of
Political Justice (1793), we may call the philosophical anarchists. God-
win held that if each man did what he wanted to do, free from all compul-
sions put on him by any "organization," if he were free from the laws, rules.
and, above all, the rulers of any institution from the family to church and
state, he would so act that he and all men would be happy and virtuous.
What we have here is the purest, and the most naive, consequence drawn
from the great environmentalist dogma of the natural goodness and reason-
ableness of man. The anarchist believes that man is born with a kind of
self-regulating instinct — if the somewhat unfair and gross metaphor may
be pardoned, with a kind of very complicated and effective spiritual auto-
matic regulator, or thermostat — which always works perfectly if its pos-
sessor does not try to improve on it, tamper with it, and, worst of all, try
to replace it in other human beings by exercising power over them.

The great tampering that has made this thermostat so useless in our
society is, for the anarchist, law, the attempt to regulate, which means to
treat as identical, repetitious, and, therefore, predictable what in reality is
varied, spontaneous, ever-changing. Marriage will do as a sample of the
vain, or, rather, harmful, attempt to regulate human conduct by law. If
the thermostats of both partners are working the way nature intended them to

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work, the legal formality of marriage and the absurd promise to love,
honor, and obey are unnecessary; if, in this particular relation, the miracu-
lous little thermostats indicate that all is not well, then there is no loving
and honoring, and should be no obeying — there is no marriage. Basically,
the anarchist blames the bad environment that makes for evil on what he
considers a perverse attempt to construct an artificial environment. All that
needs to be done, then, is to remove this environment, remove all insti-
tutions that prescribe, regulate, compel human action; all that needs to be
done is to leave the individual really free ("really" is, of course, the greatest
of Western adverbs). This anarchistic position is in ethics really and at last
the "immanentist" position Mr. Stace attributes, somewhat too confidently,
in my opinion, to the Greeks (see above, p. 56). Unlike the Greeks, the
anarchist is untroubled by worries over necessity, fate, hubris, or any of the
other cosmic troubles that haunted those sunny Greeks. The position of the
philosophical anarchist is the gentlest, most hopeful, of positions men have
taken toward the universe; it is the position modern sentimental Christian
liberalism — influenced by whatever also influenced the anarchists, including,
such is the nature of what I have called "reinforcement," the work of the
anarchists themselves — often assigns quite anachronistically to Jesus.

The other group is, in respect to the problem of how to deal with the
bad existing environment, at a polar opposite from the anarchists. These
are the planners, the manipulators of environment, the "enlightened despots,"
to use a consecrated historical term. Many, perhaps most, of them were
good enough children of the Age of Enlightenment to hold that all men
are naturally good and reasonable, and that once the crippling effects of the
present bad environment on the mass of human beings have been remedied,
once they have become whole men, enlightened men, then the program, or
absence of program, of the philosophical anarchists can be followed. But
right now they hold that the many are crippled, their natural instincts warped
or suppressed, their natural intelligence undeveloped in a world that leaves
them ignorant, or, worse yet, full of mistaken ideas. They are sheep led by
bad shepherds. But fortunately there are good shepherds available, the small
but potentially adequate minority of men who really understand the situa-
tion, and who have the good will to remedy it — the Enlightened. The neces-
sary steps are then clear. First of all, the bad shepherds, the present rulers
in church and state and society, must be supplanted by good shepherds.
The good shepherds will then gradually bring the sheep along the path to
transformation into the human beings they were meant to be. They will

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educate, they will make laws, they will enforce laws, they will even have re-
course to dictatorship — a virtuous dictatorship, such as the later Marxist
"dictatorship of the proletariat." They will not, and certainly not at the be-
ginnings of the process, consult the sheep, let alone allow the sheep themselves
to choose their shepherds. We have perhaps worked a rather worn figure of
speech to absurdity. The point is clear: the position of the thinkers of this
group is not a democratic one. They are authoritarians for and of the moment,
however much, like their contemporary Marxist-Leninist successors, they
may claim to be libertarians for and of the future.

Neither of these groups of moral revolutionaries of the eighteenth century
included violence in their prescriptions for society. We are today, whether we
like revolutions or not, thoroughly used to the process of violent change in
high politics. But until the French Revolution astonished the world, the men
of the eighteenth century, true to their upbringing, expected the Enlighten-
ment to do its work in the minds and hearts of few or many in such a way
that the transition to the new moral world would be peaceful and gradual. The
French Reign of Terror added a new intensity of hope or fear to political
morality in the West.

In real life, neither of the groups I have just sorted out by analysis into
the polar opposition of anarchist (libertarian democrat) and enlightened
despot (authoritarian elitist) comes out so neatly separate. The plans and
the practices of thinkers and doers alike were generally a mixture of the two.
This is especially true of some of the most influential of the great thinkers, of
none more so than Rousseau. There is still a debate, into which we need not
go here, as to whether the Social Contract comes out on the side of liberty
for the individual or on the side of authority for the enlightened ruler, or
"society." Rousseau, who was, after all, a philosopher if not a philosophe,
was sure he had solved the problem implied in the antithesis of liberty-author-
ity; the individual who obeyed the general will was wholly free, since he was
thereby obeying himself — his better self, his true self, his moral self.8 Rous-
seau was driven in the course of this abstract analysis to the famous conclu-
sion that the individual who failed to recognize his true self in the general will
could be "forced to be free," presumably by those who did recognize his true
self for him.9

8 Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans, by G. D. H. Cole,
new Amer. ed., New York, Dutton, 1950, Chap. VII, p. 13.

9 A brief note here may keep us from getting deeply involved in one of those nagging
philosophical questions I have tried in my introduction to sidetrack. (See above, p.
8.) The nominalist, the tough-minded, the realist of common sense will reject Rous-

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Even among the theorists, then, the two logical extremes were barren
poles indeed. The authoritarians did not urge that we all be slaves to the
wisest man on earth; the anarchists did not urge that all regularities, habits
as well as laws, be banished from human life. In the balance, however, it is
safe to say that the Enlightenment was generally on the side of authority —
virtuous, enlightened authority, it goes without saying. The philosophes were
bright, clever, gifted men, who have to be called intellectuals, for they were
already marked out as a group that dealt more with words than with things,
and more with words as signs of "reality" and ''values" than with words as a
direct means of commanding, or manipulating, human beings. Such bright
clever men can hardly be democrats at heart — not even when they call them-
selves New Dealers. The democrat — may I say, without much irony, the
true democrat? — has got to be patient with human imperfections, even with
human stupidity, has got, I suspect, to feel in his heart that stupidity (stupid-
ity in matters dear to our Western philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic tradi-
tion, stupidity in matters verbal) is not the real form of original sin. Voltaire
was no more a democrat than was Calvin; both would have agreed with
another nondemocrat, John Mill, that "ordinary human nature is so poor a
thing-"10

Yet the overwhelming, the abiding effect of eighteenth-century thought
on man and his destiny was to reinforce mightily all that was making for
modern democratic egalitarianism. The century of the uncommon man paved
the way for our century of the common man. Voltaire and Mill are heroes of
the democratic tradition; so, too, is Squire Jefferson, founder of a republic he
thought of, at bottom, as Roman, based on free, virtuous fanners, and who
would surely have been horrified could he have foreseen the America of an-
other squire, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

There is no great difficulty here. The thinkers of the Enlightenment
merely helped on — their help was essential — a process begun long before, a

seau's "solution.** If I, in the only conscious mind I have got, do not want to do some-
thing, and if anyone or anything human, from policeman through priest to a majority
vote of a group I "belong to," forces me to do that thing, then I am not at that mo-
ment "free." But the toughest-minded realist must admit that some such piece of
thought-feeling conditioning as that of Rousseau's ''general will" does seem in the
long run to reconcile many of us to giving in to, to obeying, persons, other wills; as
children of the West, and especially of the West of modern science, we no longer re-
gard, as our ancestors of not so long ago did regard, our relations with a to us im-
personal "'nature" as involving any other will than our own.

10 L S. Mill, "The Claims of Labour," Dissertations and Discussions (1874-1875), Vol.
H, p. 288.

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process we have traced in the history of morals through Renaissance, Refor-
mation, the new state, and the new science, a process of the utmost complex-
ity, from which I wish now merely to single out a single element of great
importance in understanding the process: the many — not all, but the millions,
nonetheless — came to want, to expect, a great deal, both in material satisfac-
tions and in spiritual (substitute "psychological" or any other word that will
do the same work for you if, as one end product of just the process I am
trying to understand, you cannot face the word ''spiritual") satisfactions that
had hitherto been limited to the few. The many came to expect to be happy,
comfortable, and, what is more important and much more difficult to analyze,
they came to expect as individuals some, at least, of the satisfactions that go
with participation in the Western, ritualized competitions I have called
agones, or the struggle for prize. This, nothing less, is what lies behind modern
Western egalitarianism: prizes for all.

Traditional Christianity, which did emerge from a society with egalitarian
elements, had through its promise of salvation given to the humblest in this
world equality with the proudest, if it had not, as the Nietzscheans have al-
ways insisted, given the weak, the botched, the failures, an absurd promise
of superiority.

But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant. And whosoever shall
exalt himself shall be humbled; and whosoever shall humble himself shall be
exalted.11

But the effect of the moral revolution of early modern times — for once the
word is not just rhetoric — was to cast grave and spreading doubt among the
many as to the reality of the Christian afterlife, and to suggest to them that
they had better try to get the promised satisfactions of salvation right here on
earth. Do you wish to feel the difference? Read again in its context the pas-
sage from the Gospel quoted just above, or, better, that passage from Mary's
hymn to the Lord:

He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He hath put down princes from their thrones, and hath exalted them of low degree.

The hungry he hath filled with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty

away.12

This last is, for the Gospels, pretty earthy and concrete and fully in the

11 Matthew 23: 11-12.
i* Luke 1:51-53.

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Judaic tradition; but put it beside the preamble to the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, or, better yet, that good, unexalted, commonsensical poetic asser-
tion of the modern egalitarian:

The rank is but the guinea's stamp,
The man's the gowd for a' that.13

Let us then recapitulate, simplifying and certainly exaggerating in the
process. The traditional Christian world view was that God had created the
world just five or six thousand years ago as described in Genesis, that he had
made it for man, that man through Adam had sinned, was banished from
Eden and condemned to suffer, that through the miraculous intervention of
the Son of God, sinful man, though cursed by Adam's fall with original sin,
might, as a Christian sacramentally made part of the church, gain salvation
in an afterlife, that conduct in accordance with membership in that church
and with the rules of morality canonically prescribed — both faith and works
— was the best sign that a man would be saved, and conduct markedly not so
in accordance, above all, such conduct not repented of and sacramentally
absolved, was a sure sign that a man would be eternally damned. Add to this
world view the general tone of orthodox Christianity in favor of established
social and economic inequalities, a conservatism not really breached by peri-
odic revolts to restore "primitive" Christian unworldliness or antiworldllness
(both of which were quite different, as I have insisted, from eighteenth-cen-
tury egalitarian democracy) and the Christian unwillingness to make sensu-
ous pleasures quite free from dangers, and you have something very different
from what most of us Westerners now accept as a world view. The Christian
could and did enjoy himself even in fornication — but, unless he was very
stupid or very wicked indeed, he had a sense of guilt about it; the Christian
could and did accept this ordinary world of cause and effect, of predictable
regularities — but, unless he was a very advanced skeptic, he believed that God
could turn everything topsy-turvy if He wished, and, what is more important,
that God actively and yet inscrutably made the regular perversely irregular, as
we all know it to be, from the fall of the dice to the fall of kings. But I am
unnecessarily wordy: to the traditional Christian the other world of heaven,
hell, and purgatory was there, real, visible, certain; Dante, if I may use a word
I suspect has never been used of him, was in these places a reporter.

13 "For A' That and A* That," The Poetical Works of Robert Burns, New York, Oxford
University Press, 1948, p. 328.

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The new view started from a different cosmogony. Newton had finished
what Copernicus had long ago begun; the earth was just a minor planet
spinning on its axis in orbit around the sun, clearly not the center of the
universe. By the end of the eighteenth century geology and paleontology had,
at least for the Enlightened, disposed of the chronology of Genesis, and, for
the really advanced, suggested that the "hypothesis" of God was hardly neces-
sary. The universe in this view was the vast mechanism we call "nature," and
man was wholly a part of it; the French physician La Mettrie wrote a book
entitled Man the Machine (1748). At death, obviously, the machine stops
and begins to disintegrate; there can be no afterlife, no immortal soul, indeed,
in the Christian sense, no soul at all. What we call a soul is really no more
than consciousness, a function of the central nervous system which behavior-
ist psychologists like Condillac, with leads from Locke, had already begun to
study. This vast mechanism of the universe is, however, one in which there is
the rather mysterious phenomenon of organic life, sentience, a not-quite-me-
chanical, at least not-quite-predictable, apparently related series of responses
to stimuli from the environment. At this point, or somewhere near it, the En-
lightened found room for — the Christian, I think, has to say smuggled in — a
teleology, in fact an eschatology, an ethics, a religion, one which, like all
Western religions, was to proliferate in sects, heresies, and schisms, a religion
which, in constant mutual interaction with Christianity, is the new religion of
the modern West.

We shall be for the rest of this book much engaged in the task of tracing
some few of the myriad forms of this interaction between the world view of
the Enlightenment and that of Christianity. Note carefully that I write of
interaction, not of polar, mutually exclusive opposition. It seems clear that no
Christian, not even the fundamentalist, can be in the 1950's what he would
have been in the 1650's; but it is also clear that there could have been no
Enlightenment had there been no Christianity. I do not think that in any
sensible foreseeable future either world view will vanquish the other; one can-
not say, cecl tuera cela, this will kill that. But there does exist in our West
this great, Enlightenment-born religion which in many of its forms specifically
declares itself to be anti-Christian, or non-Christian. I am going to use from
time to time, as the generic term for this religion, the term "free thought," but
the fact is that, as I have already mentioned (see above, p. 148n.), unfortu-
nately, there is no accepted generic term. Orthodox Marxism-Leninism (it is
now proper, I take it, to omit "Stalinism"), which is in some ways the free-
thinking analogue to Calvinism, is, thanks to its success in the Soviet Union,

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the most clear-cut and powerful of these sects, very explicit in its intolerant
repudiation of Christianity. At the other extreme are some exceedingly "lib-
eral" forms of what their holders claim to be Christian faiths, but which to an
outsider trying to be objective seem to have scrapped too much of historical
Christianity to have the claim granted. Such, for example, is American Uni-
tarianism, in its Left Wings, at any rate; there is still debate among the Uni-
tarians as to whether or not they wish to be called "Christians." Almost all
these variants can be traced back to the eighteenth century; even Marxism-
Leninism, though it does owe its actual form to these two prophets, has very
clear origins in eighteenth-century thought. 14

It is impossible to make good quantitative estimates of the number of
believers of these shades of opinion, either for the eighteenth century or, for
that matter, for the present. Even in the Soviet Union, to say nothing of the
satellites, it does not seem as if Communism has wholly destroyed Christian-
ity. In the free world, statistics of actual membership in organized religious
bodies are in themselves inadequate measures of actual individual attitudes.
There is the great obstacle of the religiously "indifferent," typified in a coun-
try like France by the anticlerical Radical Socialist who calls in the priest at
his deathbed, in America by the Sunday golfer who goes to his Protestant
church on Christmas and Easter, and even more by the churchgoer, even
church member, who conforms for social and economic reasons but who really
sees the universe as the freethinker sees it. This last type, by the way, is very
different from the medieval conformist Christian, or the indifferent, comfort-
able, shallow Christian of any past age, for these simply had no alternative
world view; in those moments when they had — as we all do — to face meta-
physical anxiety, they had to fall back on the Christian cosmology. All in all,
we had better give up attempts at statistics, and conclude simply that there
are in our modern West millions of freethinkers of all shades, none of them
theologically, eschatologically, ethically, emotionally quite Christian.

14 1 must relegate to a footnote the actual spectrum or ladder of eighteenth-century
religious attitudes, which would go up or down, depending on the position of the ob-
server, from Roman Catholicism of the extreme Right — say, that of the eighteenth-
century University of Salamanca — through the sacramental "revealed" religions, the
Leftist sects, to Unitarianism, deism, unatural religion" in all its forms, most of them
religions of the heart, of a nice nature, "pre-romantic," to its end in materialism and
atheism. There is not much room for skepticism or Pyrrhonism on the ladder, and no
one had yet coined the word "agnostic." It is almost certain that a respectable deism
was the ordinary position of the Enlightened. Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought
in the Eighteenth Century, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (London, Smith, Elder, 1902), gives in great
detail the niceties of these theologies for England, a representative country. I have dealt
with the subject briefly in the Introduction to my Portable Age of Reason Reader.

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ii

This last statement may seem to contradict the often-made assertion, to which
something I have written earlier may seem to give support, that the
Enlightened, though they rejected the theology and ritual and the rest of
organized Christianity, retained Christian ethics. It would be more accurate
to say that many of the Enlightened did preserve what they thought was
Christian ethics, or the best of Christian ethics, and that they could find in
the immense range of Christian historical experience some justification for
almost all they considered ethically right; but also that at the many points
where their own theology or metaphysics — words they would never have used
of their own world view — implied some modification of Christian ethics, they
made very important modifications, modifications that have often worked
back into accepted Christianity. I must insist that the range of freethinking is
very great, that, like Christianity, this new religion is not monolithic, and that
therefore generalizations I make about the new ethics are subject to the usual
caution: exceptions abound. It may even be possible that somewhere on earth
a vigorous, vocally anti-Christian freethinker had a set of ethical values iden-
tical with those of some Christian of old. I must confess I am at loss for a
specific example of such a freethinker; no gentle and respectable Victorian,
not even that ascetic hedonist John Stuart Mill, so incapable of anything you
or I could accept as hedone, or pleasure, will quite do. With this caution, then,
I shall consider the new directions the Enlightenment gave to ethics, the
new content — though also in part old — it gave to morals, under two broad
headings, humanitarianism and utilitarianism.

Eighteenth-century humanitarianism is newer than you think it is.15 1 do
not mean that no human being in the West ever felt sympathy for the suffer-
ings of his fellow men before the eighteenth century, nor ever sought to
alleviate the miseries he saw all about him. There is a vein or strand of this
direct, emotional recoil of pity in Christianity. There is abhorrence of human
gamecock victors in that vulgar physical agon that the Christian firmly con-
demned, and there is, perhaps in all but the saints a bit weaker than this
damning of the victors, a sympathy for the losers, the victims, the underdogs.
Pity is an emotion shared by many of the old pagan world of the Greeks and
the Romans.

w I refer the reader to my article "Humanitarianism" in the Encyclopedia of the Social
Sciences, Vol. V, pp. 244-248, and especially to the book of Hermann Kantorowicz,
The Spirit of British Policy and the Myth of the Encirclement of Germany, trans, by
W. H. Johnston, London, Allen & Unwin, 1931.

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But the humanitarianism of the modern world differs from the pity or
charity of earlier times in many ways. It was based, as we have just seen, on
the very different world view that sees suffering, not as part of the order of
nature and human nature, above all, not as ordained by God, but as unnat-
ural, as the product of accumulated human errors happily remediable now
that we know what the errors were. Hence the new humanitarianism was
organized in a manner familiar to us all today, not after the pattern of Chris-
tian charities, which to the Enlightened seemed stopgaps, part of the old
errors, but in pressure groups aiming at legislative measures to cure or pre-
vent given suffering, or as official or semiofficial governmental bodies with
similar aims, or as outright political parties organized to bring heaven to
earth. By the nineteenth century all these organizations were full-blown,
perhaps clearest in Britain: voluntary societies like the Society for the Preven-
tion of Cruelty to Animals ( 1 824) or the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Children (1884); the new Poor Law administrative system (1834) de-
signed under Benthamite auspices as the "scientific" way to deal with the
problem of poverty, and a good example of the difficulties of diagnosis and
treatment of such evils, for a whole wing of the radical humanitarians thought
the New Poor Law shockingly harsh; and, finally, such political radicals as
the Chartists, the British form of the revolutionary plan to bring heaven to
earth, or, better yet, the many American communist experiments from Brook
Farm to New Harmony. All these movements have clear origins in the
eighteenth century.

I have used Britain for most of my examples partly because many hu-
manitarian reforms, such as the abolition of the relatively new Negro slavery,
were in fact first achieved there, partly because the variety of organizations,
from private to public, was greatest there, and partly because the British,
more than any other people, extended their sympathies to the whole animal
world, and especially to horses and dogs. But France, which most English-
speaking people think of as a land inhabited by logic-ridden individuals
relatively insensitive to the sufferings of other individuals, incapable of the
sentiment of sympathy, would do quite well as an example. AslProfessor
Shelby T. McCloy has shown in a recent study, the French in thetlighieenth
century were keenly aware of the demands of humanite and in$i§uted con-
crete reforms in a wide range of fields.16

16 The Humanitarian Movement in Eighteenth-Century France, Lexingljlli, Kyn Uni-
versity of Kentucky Press, 1957. Professor McCloy studies the deed |l well as the
word, institutional as well as intellectual history, and in his brief introdlltory chapter

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The simple rationalism that made suffering out to be no more than the
result of bad environment, bad "arrangements," is, however, only part of
modern humanitarianism. The emotional elements are vastly more compli-
cated. The favorite reproach of moderate and conservative men, that radical
revolutionaries and even plain reformers do not so much pity the failures, the
weak, as envy and hate the strong, the successful, is like most such stereo-
types, unfair but by no means wholly untrue. There is such a component in
the great protesters, a Rousseau on the edge of paranoia, a Voltaire too bright
for love but not for vanity; it is even stronger, one suspects, in the professional
rebels, the Tom Paines, the Marats. Even in such men as these, however, the
particular form of not-quite-hypocrisy here involved is not only even better
concealed from the not-quite-hypocrite himself than in cases where more
private vices are involved, but it is also more thoroughly mingled with what
one has to call genuine pity, genuine moral indignation. Violent radicalism is
at least the tribute selfishness pays to altruism.

There are other, and deeper, emotional currents in humanitarianism, cur-
rents that have so far escaped the rational analysts, that, indeed, some histo-
rians like to maintain do not exist. I refer to those great shifts of taste, fashion,
emotion, surely not subject to regular periodicity, but still cyclical, during
which men revolt in the name of what they feel is simpler, fresher, more
"natural," against the complications of their civilization; and since the intel-
lectual content of our education, our literature, our arts, our legal and moral
codes does tend to get complicated, these revolts tend to have a strong
component of what is nowadays fashionably called "anti-intellectualism." The
eighteenth century, century of rationalism, of formalism, of artificiality, was
also the century of romantic emotionalism, of appeals to natural simplicity, of
revolt against not only the bad environment, but the whole environment. Our
new moral world came not only out of the relatively simple and rationalistic
world view I have outlined just above; it came out of a deep-seated, wide-
spread movement among the determining groups of Western society; a move*
ment articulate enough, often put in terms that sound misleadingly intellect-
ualist, but at bottom, like early Christianity, a really ferocious, irrational, and

gives a useful survey of expressions of the humanitarian ideal — including a reference
(p. 3, note 5) "where Voltaire speaks of being dominated by love of the human race.' "
I think it clear that no early or medieval Christian could have used that exact phrase,
so definitely omitting God, Voltaire himself, surely, was not so dominated, even though
he said he was.

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highly successful revolt against what the rebels liked to call tyranny, but which
was actually more often nothing but convention, tradition, the routine and
the dullness of the settled, the established, the unpricked. But, of course, these
common constraints are sometimes felt as tyranny by the Faustian tempera-
ment— and perhaps, up to a point, even by the Apollonian.

For the most part, the articulate eighteenth-century rebels of the heart
had high hopes for the future. Against society and its tyrannical conventions
they set the free natural man and his life-seeking, life-giving spontaneity.
They found, most of them only through the printed page of travel and explo-
ration, existing examples of the natural man, virtuous but not dull, dignified
but not vain, above all, spontaneous, tearful, joyful, sentimental, and un-
ashamed. Such were the Hurons, the South Sea Islanders, indeed most sav-
ages; such, a little more deliberately wise, a little more formal, but still not
corrupt and vicious, like Europeans, were Chinese, Hindus, Persians; such,
perhaps a bit too calculating, a bit too laden with Christianity and other
hindrances from their original homeland, were even the North American
white colonists, led by those children of nature Franklin and Washington. We
are tempted today to believe that much of the cult of the primitive in the
eighteenth century was insincere, affected; some of it, I suspect, was the work
of publicists — we really are already in modern times, and you may give the
word its full modern content — glad to furnish the public with the guidance
they thought it wanted.17

The writers of the eighteenth century had no trouble finding models of
virtue nearer home — nor, for that matter, did the artists, devoted also to the
good cause. Novels, plays — especially the comedie larmoyante, practiced by
no less a person than Diderot — essays, didactic paintings, all celebrated the
same truth: among the poor, the simple, the peasants, the workers, the in-
spired and exceptionally gifted and sensitive even among the upper classes,
there is still to be found in our corrupt eighteenth century the virtues of
gentleness, loving-kindness, mutual help, true charity (not the corrupting
"works" of Christianity), and, where a wicked civilized person or a wicked

17 Such, I think, was Lahontan, one of the earliest, whose work is not available in
English. Baron de Lahontan, Dialogues curieux entre I'auteur et un sauvage de bon
sens qui a voyage, et Memoires de I'Amerique septentrionale, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins
Press, 1931. Voltaire's Huron came, no doubt, out of Lahontan's. Surely Voltaire,
Montesquieu, and even Oliver Goldsmith wrote tongue in cheek when they had their
savages, their Persians, their Chinese, show up the injustices, the pretenses, the many
defects of European society. Still, this is a curious variant of a genre, satire, which is
never easy to classify as sincere or insincere.

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civilized institution does not interfere, true happiness. Here, in short, are the
humanitarian's prized virtues.18

We are with the eighteenth century in modern times in many ways, in
none more clearly than in its variety, its multanimity. Since with the eighteenth
century the reading public was already numerous, numbering certainly in the
millions, though still far from universal literacy, since printing and engraving
were relatively cheap, it is quite true that some of this variety can be attrib-
uted to the fact that we have more specimens surviving. But not all. Some of
it, like the multanimity of the late Greco-Roman world, is a sign of the times,
a fact. Along with the literature and the painting of the simple life, of the
children of nature, there is the formal poetry of the heroic couplet and the
Alexandrine, the witty comedies of a Marivaux, a Sheridan, the not very
natural pornography of a Restif de la Bretonne, the work of so many, many
men of all sorts in no sense children of nature, and quite incapable of pretend-
ing to belief in natural virtue as a foil to civilized vice — a Samuel Johnson, a
Burke, a Diderot in most of his moods, a Voltaire in all of his, a Kant (whose
abounding virtue is very far from the primitive), a Goethe who recovered
very quickly from Werther (was that perhaps the really big dishonest Holly-
wood job of the century?), a Choderlos de Laclos, a Sade, both still well
ahead of most of us on sex — the list could be long indeed. And remember
that Boucher was quite as popular as Greuze — and probably with much the
same people.

Nevertheless, what I have called humanitarianism, or, better, perhaps,
humanitarianism plus romanticism, is the eighteenth-century translation into
emotional terms of the new world view that man is born to happiness, that
now at last we human beings know enough, feel enough, to conduct ourselves
as the morally perfect — nearly perfect, at worst — beings we were meant by
Mother Nature to be. Still, among the intellectually enlightened it is possible
to discern already the beginnings of one of the great and painful stresses we
still suffer from — the conflict so evident among contemporary American lib-
erals between the love for common men that their principles, or at least their
sense of history and tradition, tell them they ought to have and the compound

1SA sampling: Rousseau's Noitvelle Heloise or, among the forgotten, any novel by
Robert Bage or Thomas Holcroft; for a play, Diderot's Fils naturel, or that play of
Kotzebue's, Kabal und Liebe, which in English adaptation they played in Mansfield
Park; for more formal philosophical treatment, Shaftesbury's Characteristics; for didac-
tic painting, almost anything of Greuze, which should be compared with some of
Hogarth's moral sequences to bring out what happened as the century wore on.

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of fear, distrust, and contempt for the common man that brews somewhere
inside them.

This conflict is in its most rudimentary stages in the century of the En-
lightenment, hardly visible on the surface even in such scoraers of system and
consistency as Rousseau. It was still too easy to find a few appropriate villains
who were responsible for the evils. I do not suppose any conspicuous
eighteenth-century thinker on the side of the angels could ever let himself go
as did that culture hero of American liberalism Walt Whitman in praise of
animals and dispraise of men, common men, democratic men, men Whitman
ought to love.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.19

Nor could an eighteenth-century European, even in a Europe where only man
was vile, feel like the present-day American fanatics whose skill at pressure-
group politics has set aside thousands of acres of our "wilderness areas" to be
free even from the corruption of the wheel (perhaps that first one was, after
all, the wickedest of inventions) . For these American primitivists of our own
day the only prospect that can please is one with no trace of humankind at all.
The great hope in mankind for them has ended — and not only for them, if
we may judge from the intellectual temper of our age — in the great disgust,
a disgust so universalist as to have little consoling power.

It was, however, in the eighteenth century a great hope indeed. The old
wicked world was to end in a First Coming of Reason, Nature, Humanity.
These men of the Enlightenment, whom the Victorians saw as cold, sapless,
urtimaginative, unemotional rationalists, were in word and deed religious en-
thusiasts, youthful, daring, full of gusto, founders of a faith men still seek to
live by. It is a hard faith for us today to live by, as we cannot help learning.
Its kingdom is so definitely of this earth that we find it hard to await a Second
Coming with due patience and hope. But for the men who had seen the
American Revolution followed by the French Revolution, the great day was

is Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," No. 32, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of
Walt Whitman, ed. by Malcolm Cowley, New York, Pellegrini, 1948, I, 89. There is
an amazing amount of "liberalism" packed into these lines, a great disgust that spills
over onto something more than mere environment-as-evil.

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at hand. Condorcet, outlawed and in hiding from the Jacobins who had mis-
understood the new gospel, sat down to write his philosophy of history, pub-
lished after his death in prison as Esquisse d'un tableau historique des prog-
res de Vesprit hwnain.-0 From primitive man onward, Condorcet traced in
nine epochs the gradual rise of man, his progress toward the immanent goal
of history. With his own time had begun the tenth epoch, the end of history
and the beginning of ... shall we call it the attainment of universal happi-
ness? With Condorcet we find the religion of the Enlightenment in perhaps
its purest form.21

Ill

The utilitarian strand is interwoven with the humanitarian in eighteenth-
century ethics. The century was certainly conscious of the conflict between
the head and the heart. Indeed, the man of feeling in Diderot rebelled vio-
lently against the stodgy rationalist Helvetius, and he composed a long com-
mentary on the latter's extreme version of the thesis that human beings can be
rationally manufactured according to the best standards.22 Perhaps even a
Condorcet was dimly aware of the difficulty underlying the world view of the
Enlightenment — and of the twentieth century: the naturalistic humanitarian
sentiment must basically push toward letting men do what they want to do,
think and feel at any given moment what they want to; for men, like most
other mammals, do not like cages; the utilitarian rationalist must keep trying
to induce, or even to force, men to do what he knows they ought to do, what
would be "best" — most useful — for them. But the ordinary enlightened man
in this century of the beginnings of our modern hopes was not yet aware of the
full import of the distinction I have made above between the way of the
philosophical anarchist, the way of the heart, and the way of the enlightened
despots, the way of the head.

Though the term "utilitarianism" owes its success to John Mill in the next

20 Trans, by June Barraclough as Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the
Human Mind, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955.

21 So pure that the mild paradox is irresistible: this world has with Condorcet become
quite the other world. I owe to the work, as yet unpublished, of a graduate student at
Harvard, Gerald JP Grurnan, M.D., now engaged on a historical study of ideas on what
he calls "prolongevity" a really extraordinary parallel with Christianity: according to
Dr. Gruman, the full implication of Condorcef s work is nothing less than corporeal
individual immortality here on this earth, eternal life in this flesh, for everybody, an
eschatological concept indeed.

22 Diderot, Refutation d'Helvitius in Oeuvres completes, ed. by J. Ass6zat, Paris,
Garner, 1875, Vol. II.

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century, the whole moral outlook it summarizes is the work of the eighteenth,
and in one form or another permeates the writings of most eighteenth-century
moralists. Helvetius and Bentham give a good cross section, though it should
be noted that the famous phrase "greatest good of the greatest number" origi-
nates in the On Crimes and Punishments (1764) of the Italian philosophe
Beccaria. The systematist classifying ethical ideas has, of course, to list a
broad group as hedonist, and, as always when his groups are broad enough,
finds the ancient Greeks start the line. But eighteenth-century hedonism in its
utilitarian form is by no means identical with Epicureanism. The eighteenth-
century attitude was widely held among the many of the newly enlightened,
but the Epicureans were few and aristocratic; the eighteenth-century attitude
could base itself on a naturalistic rationalism that, again in contrast to that
of the Greco-Roman world, was widely held, and, in addition, supported by
the new faith in natural science; finally, the eighteenth-century attitude was
optimistic, even messianic, that of the original Epicureans resigned, cosmi-
cally pessimistic.

Briefly, the utilitarianism of the eighteenth century starts out with the
basic assumption that human beings are endowed by "nature" with the suit-
able physiological equipment to guide their conduct in such a way that they
can do what is right and avoid what is wrong. But "right" and "wrong" are,
especially to Bentham, words stained by Christian and other erroneous no-
tions about human nature. We had better remove the stain by saying that
men "naturally" seek pleasure and avoid pain, and that if they do so unim-
peded by such fantastic notions as that there is a God who has prescribed
otherwise, that suffering is here on earth a passport to eternal bliss in another
world, that many kinds of pleasure are in fact wicked, instead of merely not
useful, and so on, each man will, by maximizing his own pleasures and mini-
mizing his own pains, so conduct himself that society as a whole will achieve
the "greatest good of the greatest number."

We may note briefly here that from the eighteenth century on — for, as we
have seen, that century was indeed multanimous in these matters — critics
have found the attitude thus baldly outlined wicked, oversimple, above all, an
invitation to human beings to wallow in self-indulgence disastrous to them-
selves and others. As held by a Helvetius, a Bentham, utilitarianism of the
eighteenth-century sort must offend the Christian, not so much because the
actual conduct that the philosophes found pleasurable and therefore useful
and therefore good is very different from what the Christian approves, but
because these eighteenth-century thinkers reject the Christian theology and

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cosmology, and do so vigorously. We must eventually come to grips rather
more closely with the problem of what if any differences in human conduct
appear to result from — or merely accompany — the differing ethical bases of
Christianity and Enlightenment. Here I prefer to call attention to the closeness
of the actual content of Christian ideas of the good and the ideas of the good
held by such very articulate anti-Christians as were many of the eighteenth-
century utilitarians.

Those sovereign masters of men pleasure and pain combine to repeat a
good deal of the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. Is there
pleasure in fornication? Yes, but in the felicific calculus of Bentham and his
followers the pains will in the long run outweigh the pleasures — pain from
awareness of having yielded to low instincts, of having broken a community
rule, monogamy, that long experience has shown to be socially useful, and
therefore moral, possible pain of having to provide for a bastard, the likely
pain, if indulgence is promiscuous, of actual venereal disease. No, the real
pleasures are the lofty ones, not the swinish ones. The English utilitarians in
particular were righteously indignant when their Christian opponents made
against them the old reproach "a hog from the sty of Epicurus." They were
wholly justified, for anyone who took the trouble to read Bentham's Prin-
ciples of Morals and Legislation ( 1789) , in which he makes a most elaborate
classification of pleasures and pains, the famous felicific or hedonistic calcu-
lus, would note at once that my example above is not unfair: what — excep-
tion made of the theological provisions, such as the first four of the Ten
Commandments — the calculus shows to be useful is substantially what the
Christian tradition shows to be good. There is here no anticipation of a
Nietzschean transvaluation of values, no praise of the bright flashing sword
of the warrior, nor even much hint of social Darwinism to come. The utili-
tarian would not, of course, encourage the lazy poor; but he would insist that
by making the pains resultant from laziness greater than the pleasures, you
could solve the problem of poverty.23

The moral values of the eighteenth-century utilitarian, then, were conven-
tional late Christian, those of the unheroic Christian, not those of the saint,
not those of the rebel, above all, not those of the mystic. This is the "middle-
class morality" that we, when young, following our master Bernard Shaw,

23 The key documents are Bentham's Principles of Morals and Legislation and J. S.
Mill's compact essay on Utilitarianism. The great critical study is still Elie Halevy, The
Growth of Philosophic Radicalism. The French are no doubt a bit more fleshy than the
English, but I think a reader who can struggle through either Helvetius's De I'homme
or De I'esprit will not feel that Helvetius is advocating a life of sensual self-indulgence,
or even of Renaissance virttt.

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found so dull, so full of hypocrisy. But in the eighteenth century they were
the moral values of the fighting radicals; they were a goal to be fought for, and
attained, an earthly paradise of universal peace, comfort, and rational pleas-
ure. The utilitarians \vere never quite sure, however, of just how to go about
reaching the goal. As Halevy pointed out, Bentham himself never clearly
faced the problem of distinguishing between what Halevy called the "natural
identification of interests" and the '"artificial identification of interests." The
basic assumption of the utilitarians, as, indeed, of all but a few of the thinkers
of the Enlightenment, was that something inside each individual if it is al-
lowed to work as it was designed to work would guide his conduct to moral
goodness. In utilitarian terms, the individual's rational interest, following the
felicific calculus, would show him the right path.

But is the rational interest of each individual always congruous with the
interest of society as a whole? The English utilitarians, who were determined
nominalists, would not quite like the term "interest of society," since they
thought of society as merely a term, dangerous like all such terms, for the
total number of actual individuals in any organized group. But they gave to
the old and troublesome problem behind this phrasing, the problem of the
relation of the individual to the group, about as firm an answer (and surely
as disputable?) as has ever been given: "The greatest good of the greatest
number" means precisely what it says — when it is attained each individual is
as happy, has as much realized moral good, as possible, and — the utilitarian
would here insert "therefore" — all individuals, or that feigned entity "soci-
ety," would have as much realized moral good as possible.

But how was this greatest good of the greatest number to be attained?
The natural identification of interests might in theory be attained by the way
of the philosophical anarchist, by leaving each individual absolutely free —
a way not much in favor with the utilitarians; or it might be attained by the
democratic way of a majority vote, on the assumption that the greatest number
knows its own greatest good, and that the minority "ought" to consent to
obey the majority. Toward this solution the utilitarians, and, for the most
part, all the Enlightened from then on, have been of two minds. It would be
unjust to them to say that they give this democratic principle mere lip service;
for one thing, their basic faith and their quite honest sentiments hold that
common men are potentially good and reasonable. But there arises this nag-
ging difficulty: How can the many, unaided, make the bootstrap-lift out of
the morass in which they now are?

Most clearly to the Enlightened, those children of Newton, one does not
defy gravity by trying to lift oneself by one's bootstraps. The many, the com-

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A History of Western Morals

mon men, have to be helped — helped, not forced, not frightened. Here enters
the artificial identification of interests. The man who does not, cannnot, in
this corrupt world, understand his own true interests must, at least for a
period of transition, be provided through planned institutions with clear
rewards (pleasures) and clear punishments (pains) so evident to him that,
though he would not unaided have thought out for himself the proper "other-
regarding" action, he can by following his sovereign masters, pain and pleas-
ure, do the right thing. The Benthamites were in their way enlightened
despots; they certainly were ingenious planners, social engineers, and on a
big and thoroughly modern scale. They seem in retrospect to have given more
attention to the punishments than to the rewards. W. S. Gilbert's libretto for
the Mikado has immortalized in circles normally not much interested in
criminology Bentham's effort to devise a punishment to fit the crime, a
punishment just sufficiently painful to the criminal to outweigh the pleasure
he had felt, or anticipated, from the crime, and therefore just sufficient to act
in his mind as a deterrent to future crimes.

The reader will see at once that even though they distrusted the many too
much to rely on the natural identification of interests, the utilitarians — indeed,
the whole of the Enlightenment — relied even in their plans for the artificial
identification of interests on universal human rationality. The bait, the in-
ducements, these shepherds devised for the sheep assumed that the sheep
were sensible, even rational, animals; the utilitarians were in no sense anti-
intellectual. The Enlightened could not have accepted either in its Christian
or in its Freudian form a concept of original sin; something of what the Chris-
tian calls "sin" was to them careless "error," as it is to scientist and magician,
the rest "shocking superstition." The death wish would have seemed to them
sheer nonsense, as it still seems to their twentieth-century followers. Working
under their formula, the utilitarian-humanitarian-enlightened radicals, as we
shall shortly note, achieved many concrete reforms, reforms all but the most
skeptic or the most saintly will call "good" — notably, for example, in the
treatment of just those mentally disturbed persons then called simply the "in-
sane" whose behavior most clearly contradicted utilitarian rationalism.
Their Enlightened voice is still strong in the land, still echoes down — "Let
me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

IV

We have now with the eighteenth century reached a point of modernity where
it is difficult to discern a single generally accepted moral ideal, such as the
Homeric hero or the Renaissance man of virtu. So little, contrary to the hopes

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of just the radical Enlightened we have been studying, dies utterly in our
history-conscious West. The Age of Enlightenment is indeed short on
canonized Christian saints, but the Christian ideals remained alive, and in
Methodism the century produced one of the great Protestant sects. The old
aristocratic ideal, directly descended from that of the medieval knight, flour-
ished, especiaUy east of the Elbe. The man of taste, the honnete homme of
classical moderation, survived far into the century, amused rather than out-
raged at the new man of feeling, and sharing with such moderate philosopher
as Montesquieu a sympathy for Greek rather than Christian ideals. The
philosophe saw himself rather as a fighter for the new ideal than as its
embodiment, though the intellectual classes, more numerous relatively and
absolutely then than in the sixteenth century, made of writers like Voltaire,
Rousseau, Montesquieu, of enlightened rulers like Frederick the Great, or
even more enlightened public figures, since they were closer to nature, like
Franklin, culture heroes more firmly enshrined than any of the Renaissance
had been in their own day. No English intellectual save Newton, who was
hardly a moralist, figures in such a list. Of Bolingbroke, the nearest English
analogue to a philosophe, Burke was not long after his death to write the
damning sentence: Who now reads Bolingbroke? Already that great moral
myth and reality, the idea of the national character, which we must treat at
length in the next chapter, was taking shape in the West.

Yet there is a moral ideal figure that emerges from the Enlightenment. I
thinV it not unfair to say that for the first time in Western history that ideal is
the common man — idealized, of course. The eighteenth century preferred to
speak simply of man, I'homme, Mensch. Later critics — Taine's embittered
analysis in the Ancien Regime is an excellent sample — have complained that
this "man" is an especially unreal, "abstract," and therefore dangerous con-
ception; the philosophes planned their new world for a man who never existed,
forgetting that real men, creatures of habit and prejudice, infinitely varied in
character and temperament, and only rarely capable of rational thought,
could not possibly follow their plans. Such plans for abstract and unreal man
when they are applied to real men end in a Reign of Terror. Now behind this
criticism there is one of the great and abiding political and ethical positions
Western men take, one better stated by Burke than by Taine. This is the
position, which we may label that of philosophical conservatism, that the
factors, the variables that count, in any given problem of human relations
are in real life so infinitely many, so wholly inseparable and unpredictable that
if the human mind tries to sort them out and take specific measures to change
any of them, and especially, one of them, then, first, these measures will turn

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out to have consequences the thinker-planner had never contemplated;
second, the wider and more extensive the changes planned, the greater will be
the discrepancy between plans and real consequences; third — and this is
crucial to this philosophic position — these unexpected consequences will tend
to be undesirable ones, to be bad?^

Yet to reproach the man of the philosophes with being peculiarly
abstract and unreal is to miss the point. All the ideals of human conduct we
have hitherto examined are abstract but real. The men of the eighteenth
century knew just what they wanted other men — and, no doubt, themselves —
to be like. Their ideal figure inherits much from those of the past, but he is
by no means identical with any of these, nor even a recognizable compound of
them. For one thing, as we have already noted, this man is potentially, and in
the real and close future, all men. It is true enough that there is in historical
Christianity a never wholly suppressed drive to transform all human beings
into Christians — Christians in the heroic, aristocratic sense of the saintly ideal;
but the drive always petered out, and in the eighteenth century is hardly dis-
cernible, even in its one major renewal of Christianity, that of Methodism,
Pietism, and the evangelical movement.

The ideal man of the Enlightenment owes much to the primitivists; he is
in part the uncorrupted, sweet simple Child of Nature, innocent of worldly
vanities, ready with sympathetic tear and rallying smile — but read, or at least
dip into, Beraardin de St. Pierre's Paul and Virginia or Thomas Day's Sand-
ford and Merton?* But the man of feeling, the man of nature, was only an
element in the ideal man of the Enlightenment. Deep down in this man there
was the rebel against all culture, all civilization — shall we say, against life? —
whom we shall meet again in the twentieth century. But in the eighteenth
century this revulsion from the "artificial" of civilized life is no more than a
dash, a seasoning; there is no touch of fine existentialist despair in this
optimistic man.

Indeed, this man is essentially the thinking man, the rational man. His
feelings, not without help from his adrenal glands, tell him that a duke is an

-* I simplify unfairly a position Americans for the most part have difficulty under-
standing at all. Still, the philosophic conservative does apply to human relations the
Hippocratic "do no harm" — use if you must political placebos, but leave the real job
of curing to nature. This nature is not by any means the nature of the primitivists, the
romantics, but, rather, the total cultural and institutional heritage of the group. Only
very wise conservatives, however, allow for the fact that a big part of that heritage in
the West is the work of the radical, innovating, planning intellect; those medical radi-
cals the surgeon and the experimental internist are rarely tempted to let ill enough alone.
25 Both these books were very popular in the nineteenth century — a significant fact —
*nd were often reprinted. They are still readily available.

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artificial creation; but his reason tells him the same thing. Head and heart are
in happy union. They agree on the good life for all, a life that must be good
for all, since if any are deprived, all are deprived. Virtue and la vertu now
take on firmly their modern meaning. The Enlightened man, the man of virtue,
will be honest, kindly, respectful of the rights of others, firm in defense of his
own, will satisfy normally and sensibly his natural appetites, including, though
only in the normal and sensible institution of marriage, his sexual appetite.
He will be a loving but firm parent, a responsible citizen — even a "patriot,"
which in eighteenth-century English and French did not mean a nationalist,
but precisely this perfect Enlightened man of virtue and citizen of the world.26
He will be neither rich nor poor, for virtue is impossible at either economic
extreme; he will not — and this is important — want to be rich, nor, of course,
in the perverse Christian sense, want to be poor. And, it goes without saying,
he will avoid the vices — the personal vices of indulgence, gambling, eating or
drinking to excess, whoring, laziness, the greater vices of vainglorious search
for power and wealth, cruelty, the magnifying of self at the expense of others.
Above all, he will put his mind to the mastery of the arts and sciences of this
great age, and use that mastery in the service of his fellows, that we may all be
better, and therefore happier — or happier, and therefore better, for, like truth
and beauty, happiness and goodness are nice interchangeable identities.

Is this a stuffy ideal, a vague and dim ideal clad in fearful cliches, the
greengrocer's paradise of Robespierre in which no one would have, or want to
have, much more or much less than three thousand francs a year, parent of
the even stuffier — because more nearly realized — Victorian ideal? Is it a long
dull sermon, its generalities unseasoned by the spice of a real and present hell,
since hell has been abolished, a sermon all promises and no threats, hardly a
sermon at all? So it must seem to many of us in a twentieth century that is
not without constant threats of a real and present hell; so, indeed, it began to
seem to the Byronic of the next generation.27

Yet the ideal did not look like this to the young, the advanced, the bright
vanguard of the 1780's; to them it had the freshness, the moral compulsive-

26 It is unfortunate we so often quote Samuel Johnson — ''patriotism is the last refuge
of a scoundrel" — without knowing what he really meant He meant, of course, by
"patriot" the enlightened citizen of the world, not the nationalist patriot Actually —
though many of his admirers will be offended by this statement — I think Johnson him-
self was an English "patriot" in our modern sense of the word.

27 1 must confess that some of the more smoothly worn phrases of the Enlightenment —
hwnanite, bontt naturelle, Nature and Reason, virtue, Aufklarung, the system of natural
liberty, and many more — grate on me as I read in the eighteenth century the way, in
the debunking decade of the 1920's, George Babbitt's word "service" used to grate on
all the young intellectuals.

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ness, of any active religious faith. For a while, the religion of humanity, too,
had its crusaders, its martyrs — apostles it had never lacked in this century
of Enlightenment. If now the ideal seems stale, this is partly because any
religion in the West seems bound to lapse into an inactive state of acceptance
of irremediable imperfections, into ritual and conformity among the many,
doubt and conformity among the few, until a new moral rebellion flares up.
In the West, as I hope to show, what may be called the first, or early orthodox
church, form of the religion of Enlightenment is democratic nationalism. The
national state became, in fact, the church visible for the new faith — though
many a believer in the fundamentals of Enlightenment stayed outside the
church as far as he could, or even joined a heretical sect, Chartist, "positivist,"
pacificist, and the like. Democratic nationalism on the whole has made its
compromises, and is now an inactive religion, but very much alive. The
major heretical rebellion against democratic nationalism, Marxist socialism,
has now, duly organized as a state religion in the Soviet Union, reached in the
West at least a stage of comparative inactivity as regards its moral ideal,
though, unfortunately, not in respect to its desire to expand as a church.

If the ideal of the Enlightenment has lost its first Promethean will to make
men into more than men, it is still, I repeat, very much alive, is still for most
of us a guide and an aim. There are still those who would renew the drive
of the men of 1776 and 1789; there are more who, struck with the enormous
gap between what Condorcet, for instance, thought the twentieth century
would be and what it has so far been, would radically alter, or throw over-
board entirely, the "principles of 1776 and 1789." But for the most part, we
are good democrats, good nationalists, good believers in progress and in the
pursuit of happiness, complaining a lot, but not, at bottom, expecting a lot,
not at any rate, heaven on earth. Ours, in short, is an inactive religion.

v

It is inactive, however, in part because so much of what it promised has in
fact been realized. We must be careful here. To the god-ridden, statistics are
meaningless, save perhaps in such instances as the parable of the lost sheep.28

28 "How think ye? if a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray,
doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that
which is gone astray?" Matthew 18:12. This parable is a good illustration of the differ-
ence between what I call an active and what I call an inactive religion — which is basi-
cally a moral difference. I should suppose that during most of Christian history no one
having cure of souls could have taken the parable as a literal guide to action. In inactive
periods, a religion has to put the ninety and nine first

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Statistics show that over the last two hundred years all sorts of standards <
living have gone up. The life span of a twentieth-century American is now ,
least twenty years longer than that of his eighteenth-century ancestor. But 1
the ardent moralist the question remains: Are those seventy years bett<
spent than were the fifty years of old? Have we made moral progress?

By the standards of the eighteenth-century philosophes we at least ha^
made some of the sort of betterment of the environment that in their ph
losophy must lead to a better life here on earth. The "middle-class morality
that has its origins in this century may well be an inferior sort of morality, bi
it has in some respects come closer to filling the gap between the ideal and tt
real, between ethics and conduct, than ever before. For the first time i
Western history, what we may call the condition of the masses began t
improve in respect to public order, public health, public manners, the who]
material side of life. The base line at the beginning of the eighteenth centur
was certainly low, as a look into social historians like Lecky and Trevelyai
into the memoirs of the period, into the Beggar's Opera of Gay or the Gi
Alley of Hogarth will show for England, one of the more advanced nation!
But we may perhaps best start with a passage from Aldous Huxley, a write
not inclined to glorify the present at the expense of the past.

Such, then, was the kind of world in which the new parson had been brought up-
a world in which the traditional sexual taboos lay very lightly on the ignorar
and poverty-stricken majority and not too heavily upon their betters; a worl
where duchesses joked like Juliet's nurse and the conversation of great ladies wa
a nastier and stupider echo of the Wife of Bath's; where a man of means and goo
social standing could (if he were not squeamish in the matter of dirt and lice
satisfy his appetites almost ad libitum; and where, even among the cultivated an
the thoughtful, the teachings of religion were taken for the most part in a rathe
Pickwickian sense, so that the gulf between theory and overt behavior, though
little narrower than in the mediaeval Ages of Faith, was yet sufficiently enoi
mous.29

By the end of the eighteenth century there was surely some justification f o

2» The Devils of Loudun, London, Chatto & Windus, 1952, p. 14. It must, however, b
pointed out that even in the late seventeenth century the beginnings of the moden
middle-class version of Puritan morality are clear in writers like Defoe and Bunyan, i
German Pietism, in French Jansenism. In our modern world, not even "trends" are t
be taken as neat entities. The witty, irresponsible Restoration playwright already feai
the respectable:

*To gain your Favour, we your Rules Obey,

And Treat you with a Moral Piece to Day;

So Moral, we're afraid 'twill Damn the Play."

Sir John Vanbrugh, Complete Works, London, The Nonesuch Press, 1927, Vol. n, i
156. From the 'The False Friend," first performed in 1702.

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A History of Western Morals

the concept of "progress." In the great field of technological control of our
material surroundings, the Industrial Revolution had well begun, the statistical
curves were turning upward, gross national product, real incomes, and the rest
all increasing, and, on the whole, the working class as well as the middle
class was benefiting from a rising standard of living. Even in the early eight-
eenth century, signs of this material progress were clear: the Industrial
Revolution does not come out of the blue.30 By the early nineteenth century
the humanitarian movement had begun to achieve concrete results. Slavery
was abolished in the British dominions in 1807, after a long and very modern
campaign by abolitionist groups inspired chiefly by that Christian adaptation
of humanitarianism known as the evangelical movement. The French Jacobins
set up briefly and on paper something that looks like the modern welfare
state; by no means all these reforms were abandoned in the subsequent
reaction. Even the much-attacked Speenhamland system of poor relief in
England, whereby doles from local authorities were paid for home use to
make up for inadequate wages, was in accord with the spirit of the age. Later
historians were shocked at the system because it corrupted the poor, dis-
couraged initiative, and kept wages down; we may see the system as permis-
sive, kindly at bottom, and inspired by a number of motives, some of which
were consonant with the Enlightenment.

There is before the eighteenth century not much feeling of sympathy for
the convicted criminal. There is admiration for the conspicuous and dramatic
criminal, yet I think it clear that what we here call "humanitarian" thought
and feeling are hardly discernible in these centuries. And the severity of
penalties, the horrors of prison life, are well known. The eighteenth century
saw a fully developed humanitarian-utilitarian theory of criminology, best
summarized in Beccaria's Crimes and Punishments, one of the clearest
examples that books do work in this world; it saw in many lands a beginning
of improvement in actual physical conditions of prisons, and, even more
conspicuously, it saw the gradual abandonment of enforcement of the old
dire penalties for petty crimes still on the statute books.

d° It is clear that the view of the Industrial Revolution as one long and unrelieved tale
of man's inhumanity to man — as exemplified in the work of economic historians like
the Hammonds — is no longer tenable. It would seem quite impossible for the popula-
tion of Western Europe to have increased as it did had the purely physical conditions
of life for the masses been worse than in earlier times. The moral effect of the factory
system is another problem, to which I shall return in the next chapter. The English
Labour Party intellectuals — one of the most powerful of Enlightened sects — have long
held that the Industrial Revolution was a work of iniquity. See the representative work
of J. L. and Barbara Hammond, The Town Labourer, new impression, New York,
Longmans, Green, 1920; and for a corrective, T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution,
New York, Oxford University Press, 1948.

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The Age of Reason

One phase of this development is an admirable illustration of how the
world view of the Enlightenment worked through humanitarian and utilitarian
values to alter Christian ethical attitudes. Christian theology condemned
suicide as a sin, morally a form of murder, since God alone could rightfully
end the sojourn of a soul on this earth; Christian society had made suicide a
crime, punishable by burial of the body outside consecrated cemeteries, trans-
fixed by stakes, at a crossroads. Christian pervasive moral sentiments had
made suicide a serious disgrace for the family of the guilty person, a painful
one to bear. Now the Enlightened — if enlightened enough — simply denied
there was a soul or a God, denied what I have called the minimal Christian
puritanism of the body-soul relation. Suicide was to the fully enlightened
neither a sin nor a crime, but entirely a matter for the individual to decide. It
should certainly carry no disgrace to the suicide's family, who were entirely
innocent. It was not even, in view of its rarity and the certainty that it would
never be common, harmful to the common good. Indeed, Beccaria makes a
comparison, characteristic of the utilitarian moral attitude, between the emi-
grant and the suicide. Both leave their country, but neither of them in num-
bers large enough to do any harm. The emigrant may by his labor benefit the
rival country; the suicide does not and therefore is even less a criminal than
the emigrant.31 It should be noted, however, that in mid-twentieth century,
suicide is still a grave disgrace for the family in all but very advanced circles.

So, too, long after the orthodox Christian view that insanity is actually
possession by demons really has almost disappeared, is mental illness. The
illness of the soul or psyche or central nervous system many of us still find
disgraceful, a matter for guilt, as we do not find illness of the body. Yet the
eighteenth-century thinkers were clear in this matter. Here the humanitarian
and the rationalist strands were interwoven to produce a new attitude toward
the mentally ill. The rationalist could not believe the insane were possessed
of demons; the humanitarian could not believe the insane were perversely
guilty and therefore to be held responsible for their actions. The old harsh
ways of exorcising the demons by whipping, the easy way of chaining the
insane up, the horrid way of putting them on exhibition in "Bedlams" — all
this came to seem absurd and wrong to the Enlightened. Gradually, under the
leadership of physicians and — a new thing — research psychologists, most of
them French, there arose the concept of mental illness, and of therapeutic
treatment. By 1800, the best opinion had long since given up harsh and
punitive treatment, had given up the feeling that somehow mental illness is

31 An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, trans, from the Italian, London, 1770, pp.
132-134.

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A History of Western Morals

the patient's fault in a way that ordinary somatic illness is not.32 The general
public was still far behind the experts in this respect, but widespread deliber-
ate cruelty toward the insane had ceased to be normal in the West.

The guillotine itself, that instrument of the Terror, was an invention
inspired by humanitarian motives. Dr. Guillotin sought a way to bring death
quickly and surely to criminals condemned to capital punishment. You may
build a good deal of symbolism around the guillotine and its successors right
down to the kindly lethal gas chamber. We kill, we avenge, we protect society,
we recognize in the deed something not quite consonant with the Enlighten-
ment, something that goes better with Dante than with Bentham — but we kill
as gently as we can. I do not think there is in the past of Western civilization
any exact precedent for the institution of the guillotine. The humanitarian
temperament crops up as far back as we can go; the humanitarian institution
is new.33

It is permissible perhaps even for us in mid-twentieth century to believe
that rising standards of comfort and literacy and security, the ubiquitous moral
preaching the Enlightenment loved so much, the contagion of fashion for de-
cency, respectability, humanite had some effect on the conduct of men in the
eighteenth century. The effect is not statistically measurable; but surely is it
not at least possible that the familiar adage about smoke and fire may apply to
virtues as well as to vices? We shall, however, return to this topic with the
Victorian middle-class morality of the next century, the classic case. That
morality was as yet no more than building up in the eighteenth century.

Moreover, even among the upper classes conduct in the eighteenth century
in the West is hardly as bad as the moralists preparing for the French Revolu-

32 The Victorian Samuel Butler in his Utopia, Erewhon (1872), has illness of any sort
punished by imprisonment, and crimes treated by hospitahzation. This bright idea is
no doubt chiefly inspired by an intellectual attitude common among intellectuals, an
attitude with important moral consequences, the attitude that the polar opposite of
what is commonly believed must be right; but it is also in part a logical conclusion from
the eighteenth-century dogma of the natural goodness of man, coupled with a belief
in individual free will.

33 1 have no more than sampled in abolition of slavery, lessening of harsh penalties in
criminal law, gentler treatment of the insane, what is really a vast range of eighteenth-
century humanitarian reforms. I refer the reader once more to McCloy, The Humani-
tarian Movement in Eighteenth-Century France, for a full treatment for at least one
country. Note that actual material, technological progress of all sorts, progress of the
kind many twentieth-century Americans think of as limited to their own point in space
and time, had by 1800 brought widespread improvements in material production and
distribution; the common man was, in fact, beginning to have it better, if not to be
better. But does, perhaps, the second follow from the first? So, at least, the Enlighten-
ment believed.

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The Age of Reason

tion have made out. The French aristocracy itself was a society open to the
rich, the clever, the interesting — sometimes to the charlatan — a society cer-
tainly not puritanical, though there were puritanical Jansenist circles in it, a
society that cultivated the usual vices, that liked witty irreverence, that no
doubt had too much leisure, too few responsibilities. Yet only very devout
French republican historians, and their followers abroad, have been able to
make out this aristocracy as cruel, heartless, or even, as Western aristocracies
go, morally very lax. Throughout the privileged upper classes in the West,
already nationally differentiated, there were many converts to the Enlighten-
ment, landlords seeking to improve the lot of their tenants, men of feeling,
earnest students of the new ideas. The salon, typical social institution of the
age, was surely the most serious-minded gathering of the sort yet to appear,
Lafayette, a portent, if not a type, reminds one much more of the Gracchi
than of the Augusti.

In respect to conventional morality, the lowest point of the century was
the "Thermidorean reaction" immediately after the fall of Robespierre in
France.34 Here for a few years, until Napoleon promoted respectability in
private life and regularity in public life, there was one of those almost mass
revulsions from the high standards of private and public virtue the radical
revolutionists seek to impose, a revulsion not unlike that of the English
Restoration of 1660. The French danced, gambled, consumed conspicuously
and in bad taste, and, of course, had fun in bed. The historian of morals
cannot claim to understand the dynamics of such periods of looseness, but he
can recognize the phenomenon as a particular phase of his history. So, too,
with the phase from which the Thermidorean reactions themselves are a
reaction, the phase particularly clear in our great modern revolutions since
Luther's, clearest of all in the French Jacobin Republic of Virtue and its
accompanying Reign of Terror: the historian still can but record these ac-
cesses of collective virtue.

Indeed, to many the Terror is the most immoral thing in the eighteenth
century. Quantitatively — it had perhaps 20,000 victims in a population of

34 1 am considering only relatively large groups in making such a generalization. You
can find individuals — a Sade, for instance — of surpassing wickedness of conduct; and
you can find all sorts of smaller groups, all sorts of specific places, where sin was open
and serious. For the first, the immediate circle of the Regent, the Due d'Orleans, in
France immediately after the death of Louis XIV (1715) will do as a sample; Orleans
was bright, witty, corrupt, self-indulgent, yet, in a general political way, well-meaning.
For the second, the city of Venice will do, already in the eighteenth century what we
call a tourist center, a ville de plaisir, indeed, where the facts of life really were close
to what good English evangelicals thought they were on the Continent.

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A History of Western Morals

about twenty-two million — the Terror cannot compete with any good modern
war, or with the Nazi attack on the Jews. But it was a series of religious
persecutions, its victims sacrificed to a religion of humanity that makes a poor
screen for such deeds. The Terrorists had mixed motives, and their Terror
was no simple thing. But one element, without which the Terror would not
have been what it was in fact, was the effort to force millions of men and
women to conduct themselves as the ethics of the Enlightenment prescribed.
Reason unreasonably proved to be quite as jealous a god as old Jehovah had
ever been.

The Terror was brief, but coming as it did in a land in the forefront of the
Enlightenment, after the shining and universal hopes of 1789, accompanied
and followed as it was by a great World War, it was a shock, and made an
epoch. "Mankind has always made this earth a Hell when it has sought to
make it a Heaven," wrote the German poet Friedrich Holderlin — poet, not
historian, for the French Revolution was surely the first attempt to make this
earth a heaven for all. The attempt still goes on, as it went on all through the
nineteenth century; for the rest of this study we must grapple with the prob-
lems set by the attempt. But the spiritual atmosphere of the attempt has never
been the same since 1792-1794; the new religion has never quite caught again
the first incredible rapture of hope of 1776 and 1789. Its major heresy, Marx-
ism, was born in hate and great disgust. Nor has the intellectual atmosphere
ever again been quite the same as it was when Wordsworth cried out his
still-familiar

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very Heaven.

The natural science that played so large a part in building up the world view
of the Enlightenment has in its still-incomplete and imperfect application to
the study of human nature in the behavioral sciences almost wholly under-
mined the fundamental dogma of the Enlightenment, the natural goodness
and/or reasonableness of man. That dogma is now at best a Sorelian myth for
all but the truest of true believers; for many today it is a dangerous falsehood.
But to this topic, too, we must return.

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The Nineteenth Century

WITH THE NINETEENTH CENTURY we are fuU in the floodstream of contempo-
rary Western life. It is quite possible that the range of human conduct, the
varieties of human conceptions of the universe, the sheer multanimity of men
were as wide during the great years of the Roman Empire as in our own day.
It is even possible that the limits of human variation within Western culture
were set long ago in the ancient Near East. But for the historian the important
fact is that so much of the record of human activities for the last two or three
centuries has survived physically. With widespread literacy, relatively inex-
pensive printing and illustrating, with the newspaper and the periodical press*
all flourishing by 1800, the historian of ideas, the social historian, the his-
torian of morals, all are confronted with far more source material than they
can ever hope to exhaust.1

Yet all this complexity is no more than the working out of what had come
to a head in the Enlightenment. Metaphors are never quite perfect tools of
analysis. Here that of seed-sprout-growth misleads, for the "plants" we are
dealing with in this kind of history crossbreed in quite impossible ways. You
might think of a vast musical composition, the plan and certainly the author-
ship of which no one really understands. The themes are, however, stated by
1789, and what follows has been development, wild orchestration, frequent

1 Our twentieth-century trivia will not survive so long, thanks to the invention of
cheap wood pulp. Indeed, the "yellow journals" of the late nineteenth century have
already faded beyond yellow into disintegration, and the cheesecake and the gow that
shock on our newsstands will not survive to shock our descendants. But the good rag
paper of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries preserves everything.

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A History of Western Morals

recapitulation, occasional harmonies, some whopping dissonances. More con-
ventionally, we are still in a "period," still best put as modern or contempo-
rary, which can be said to begin roughly with the eighteenth century; much
has been new since then, in science and technology, in art and in all our
culture, but nothing as new "across the board," nothing as fundamentally
revolutionary, as the challenge the world view of the Enlightenment — let us
symbolize it as the Newtonian world-machine — set to the world view of
Christianity — let us symbolize that by the concept of Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost.2

II

For the historian of morals, the most important development of the nineteenth
century is nationalism. The nation-state came to be the societal frame, the
"church," or organized group of true believers, within which the new world
view of the Enlightenment took on rituals, emotional satisfactions, gave to the
faithful a sense of belonging to an identifiable group, brought the difficult
abstractions with which this science-born, indeed physics-born, cosmology
had clothed itself right down to earth. Humanity, mankind, all men, the uni-
versalist and cosmopolitan ideals dear to the theorists of the Enlightenment
turned out for most men to be unable to bear the earthly weight all ideals have
to bear when they get to work among ordinary people. Only a minority of
intellectuals has been able to maintain, unchurched, so to speak, the pure
religion of humanity; and they keep trying to find themselves a church that
will be truly universal.

We need not here attempt to go into the development of Western national-
ism in most of its aspects, nor, above all, to worry over the exact definition of
what — common language, common "race," common institutions, common
history, and much else — we shall hold to be essential to constitute this
particular in-group, the modern "sovereign" territorial nation-state.3 So far,

2 1 do not find Arnold Toynbee's "post-modern" for the years since 1914— or 1875 — a
useful concept. I think he makes use of the term to persuade us that the world view of
the eighteenth-century Enlightenment is dead, bankrupt, which better and more clear-
sighted Christians than he know is not so. We will need more than another general
war to start a new "period" in Western history. See Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of
History, abridgement of Vols. I-VI, D C. Somervell, London, Oxford University Press,
1946, p. 39. For a most interesting periodization. see C. S. Lewis, De Descnptione T em-
porium, Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press, 1955.

3 Boyd C. Shafer, Nationalism: Myth and Reality, New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1955.
With Shafer as a start, the reader can go on into this very important subject from the
leads he offers.

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The Nineteenth Century

at least, there is a clear condition for achieved nationalism: the nation must
be "independent" or "sovereign," not subject to formal political control, nor
to too obvious informal political and economic control, by any organized
group outside its borders. The Russians do claim that they have succeeded
within the Soviet Union in providing full cultural independence for national
groups while merging them all in a common political and economic federal
union. In most of the West, however, those who feel that "consciousness of
kind" that makes a familiar loose definition of nationality are content with
nothing less than "independence" and at least the minimum symbolic evidence
— flag, diplomatic recognition, armed forces, rituals, and the rest — that goes
with independence.

Morally, membership in a nation means that the individual shares what
the English essayist Arthur Glutton-Brock, who did not like nationalism,
called "pooled self-esteem"; and such membership satisfies, in part, and for
many who could not otherwise satisfy it, the agonistic drive for triumph so
characteristic of the West — satisfies it in a sense vicariously, but quite con-
cretely. The nation, even the very large nation, makes a fine outlet for the
team spirit, the better just because such participation is vicarious. I recall a
public lecture at the Sorbonne in 1920, after victory had brought back to
France the iron ore of Lorraine. The lecturer, using big units or ratios the
exact nature and size of which I forget, came out at one point with some such
figures as these: French iron production in 1914, 9 units, German production,
20 units; French iron production in 1920, 14 units, German production, 9
units. The audience, which was composed of the kind of people who go to
such academic "extension" lectures, burst into loud applause at this point.
It seems highly unlikely that anyone in the audience stood to gain directly in
the way the economist measures gain from this increase in French national
production of pig iron. In fact, the comparison with football scores is sug-
gested by much more than the mere figures. Here were people, in psycholog-
ical slang, identifying with France, the France of the "Marseillaise," the
tricolor, France, mere des arts, des armes, et des lots — and pig-iron pro-
duction.

It is surely impossible even for those who find terms like "religion of
nationalism" misleading, inexact, or simply offensive, to deny that the indi-
vidual does have this emotional relation to the common thing, that much of
the hymns, symbols, and public ceremonies of the nation-state at least sug-
gest religious ritual, and that there are national holy writings, declarations,

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A History of Western Morals

bills of rights, consecrated orations by a Webster, a Danton, a Farewell
Address, other pronunciamentos, that are comparable to canonical writings
in recognized religions. There are clearly national saints — Washington, Lin-
coln, Lenin — and those near-saints, the culture heroes — Shakespeare, Dante,
Goethe.4 But, those who reject the analogy with recognized religions ask,
where is your armature of theology, eschatology, ethics, all essential to a true
religion? The answer is partly, of course, that nationalism is clearly not a
theistic religion, and if you so define religion as to make a theos and a supra-
natural view of the cosmos the essential mark of a religion, you must abandon
the analogy between religion and nationalism. You will, however, have
thereby abandoned a useful tool for understanding human conduct.

I prefer to retain the analogy with accepted religions, and suggest that,
first, many organized Christian churches have contrived very well to adapt
themselves to nationalistic beliefs, so that to many individuals the need for a
supranatural faith has proved quite congruous with ardent participation in
the nationalist common thing. The range of actual adjustment between Chris-
tianity and nationalism has been great indeed. The great gateway of "render
therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things
that are God's" has proved a wide one, no mere loophole. Very little, it has
sometimes seemed, of pure earthly concern is left as God's. The freethinkers
in 1914, when the Great War really did surprise the world, gloated over the
fact that the Germans and the British in particular were each vocally assured
that the one true Christian (Protestant) God was firmly on their side. But the
freethinkers themselves, heirs of eighteenth-century cosmopolitan belief in
the equality of all men before nature, were of divided allegiance. German

4 On the worship of Lincoln, see Ralph Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic
Thought, New York, Ronald Press, 1940; on the worship of Washington, see Marcus
Cunliffe, George Washington: Man and Monument, Boston, Little Brown, 1958, es-
pecially Chap. I, 'The Monument"; on the French Jacobin ritual and worship see my
Jacobins, Chap. IV. Note that both Mt. Vernon and the restored Kentucky cabin where
Lincoln was born are almost always known as "shrines," to which "pilgrimages" are
made. I have often had the irreverent thought that no one has yet filled out our Trinity
— unless the American Constitution will do. Neither Jefferson nor either of the two
Roosevelts has made the pantheon, in spite of efforts of their ardent admirers to get
them in. But Washington — remote godhead— and Lincoln — warm, human, both god
and man — are safely enshrined. I think it true that the British have not made use of
these same forms of nation worship to the extent the Americans and the French have
done; theirs are older, and more assimilated into Christian forms. I do not think, how-
ever, that from the point of view of a rigorous Christian idealist the British are less
idolatrous than are we or the French.

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The Nineteenth Century

socialists and French socialists, sure that God does not exist, were quite as
sure that the nation does.5

Even more important, however, nationalism in itself — or, rather, each
specific nationalism — did to a degree incorporate much of eighteenth-century
thought, which, as I have insisted in the previous chapter, is a full cosmology,
or world view. The ordinary nineteenth-century Frenchman, the Englishman,
the American, even the German "believed in" self-government and a degree,
at least, of democracy, believed in Progress, took part in the pursuit of
happiness, hoped for some, at least, of that heaven on earth the eighteenth
century had promised them — and felt, thought of, political activity, in which
as citizen he played a part, as one way, perhaps the way, of attaining that
heaven. It should hardly be necessary to point out that no medieval commoner
expected anything of the sort out of "politics." The good citizen ought, of
course, to be a good man. Except in regard to relations among sovereign
states — even here, formally, professedly — modern nationalism took over con-
ventional Western moral codes, Christian and Enlightened, in various mix-
tures. The French bon rfyublicain, who was a great preacher and moralizer,
never tired of trying to teach through nice little manuals of what we should
call civics a sound lay utilitarian morality of love and help-thy-neighbor.6

The critics and enemies of nationalism — and they are many among West*
ern intellectuals in the twentieth century — hold that as the "real if unavowed"
religion of most of the West (Toynbee) it encourages the individual to indulge
in infinite hopes and fears, and does little to discipline him into accepting
earthly limitations, that it feeds his more ignoble side, starves his nobler
possibilities. Now since, as I have argued, nationalism is the most important
of successful forms of organized belief or church which the new cosmology of
the eighteenth century takes in our world, it is not wholly unfair to attack
under the name of nationalism that cosmology itself. But what most of these
attackers, including Mr. Toynbee, are really getting at behind nationalism in
their attack is the whole world view of the Enlightenment.7

5 1 suppose that generally in the West the freethinkers in 1914 tended to side with the
Western allies, for the Central Powers stood as symbols of "autocracy," France and
England (with the dubious inclusion of Russia) for "democracy." Free thought, as heir
of the Enlightenment, has tended to side with democracy and to oppose absolutism,
and has also thought of England-France as the Palestine of the new faith. For the ex-
tremists, now, Moscow is the Rome.

HF. V A Aulard, Elements d'instniction civique suivis de resumes et questionnaires.
Cours Moyen, Paris, E. Comely, 1902.

7 In many ways the frankest and clearest of these attacks is still the work of the late
Irving Babbitt, and especially the Democracy and Leadership (Boston, Houghton

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A History of Western Morals

Few today put the central moral issue between Christianity and Enlighten-
ment as baldly as the eighteenth century, even the seventeenth, often put it:
Is the ultimate sanction of a supranatural God and perhaps even a supranat-
ural hell necessary to insure that men conduct themselves in society with a
minimal degree of decency? The eighteenth century debated this question
earnestly, and came often to the conclusion that the outright atheist at least
is a dangerous influence, that the common man cannot stand the undermin-
ing moral example the atheist affords. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
however, were to quiet that particular debate. In spite of the undoubted
spread, not so much of sheer atheism as of effective reduction of the areas of
human experience in which the supranatural or the transcendental could seem
real and pressing, the level of conventional morality in the West has clearly
not been lowered. The Victorian outlook, to which we shall come shortly, is
in itself evidence that the old supranaturalism and the new naturalism can be
combined into a way of life that certainly is no new Sodom and Gomorrah.

I thinV it can be maintained, however, that the paling for many, and the
disappearance for some, of the orthodox Christian world view, the substitu-
tion for Christendom as church of the national commonweal as church, has
for the believer meant a real loss. Christianity would seem to be, even in
comparison with other higher religions, the most consoling of faiths, the faith
that, not so much by the aspect the freethinkers love to deride, its heavenly
reward in an afterlife for suffering here on earth, as by the ritual, the ministry
of the cure of souls, the long experience of the human soul (or psyche if you
are an anti-Christian), can steady the individual in his misfortune. Marianne
of the French Republic is a lively and charming lady, whom we all know from
the cartoonists' sketches; but she is no substitute for Our Lady of Sorrows.
Nationalism has its surrogates for the saints; but not even Abraham Lincoln
seems to fit into prayer. The patriotic rituals, the hymns, the oaths, the exer-
cises, even when all these are very deliberately heightened as in Nazi Ger-
many, even when the faithful take them seriously, are at best substitutes for

MifHin, 1924), and the Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1919).
The American "new conservatives" have echoed this attack, which takes as its central
point that what came out of the eighteenth century — call it nationalism, romanticism,
democracy, humanitarianism, even, in the United States, "liberalism" — prods human
desires but does not satisfy them, puts no limit, no discipline, no end to them, denies
the basic fact of human life, that men want and need restraints, limits, boundaries,
want to know them and feel them as such; they do not really want to be infinitely free,
expansive, aggressive; their nature, their composition, to use a materialistic term, is
not able to stand Enlightenment.

334

The Nineteenth Century

the revivalist side of Christianity; they do not sound through the pains and
boredoms of daily life. My parallel above between French-German iron pro-
duction and football scores was not wholly superficial. Nationalism is fine
when our team is winning, but there is no joy left when it loses, and precious
little consolation.

The moral indignation many men of good will feel in the twentieth cen-
tury toward nationalism is centered not so much on its lack of consoling
power as on the fact that in theory and in practice the nation as guided by
its rulers is subject to no higher law. In international relations, say the critics,
though lip service is duly paid to concepts of right and wrong, naturalistic or
supranaturalistic, we really are in a situation where might makes right crudely
and simply, where all that counts is success in beating the other fellow, where,
as time goes on, even the old conventional rules of the horrid game of war,
such as formal declaration of war, Geneva convention on prisoners of war,
and the like, are cynically flouted.8 To many men of good will, the great moral
evil of our time is war; and war in our time, they hold, is made the shocking
thing it is by the complex of human relations we call "nationalism." Many of
them, led by Mr. Toynbee, are in effect saying of the nation-state what Vol-
taire said of the Roman Catholic Church — ecrasez I'infame, "crush the in-
famous thing."

Combined as it is with the threat of the fusion bomb, biological warfare,
and many other fearful threats, the fact of modem nationalism is most cer-
tainly one of the major problems the moralist faces today, and we shall return
to it. Here we may content ourselves with trying to put nationalism into its
proper historical perspective by asking the obvious question: Is the compo-
nent added to international politics by the cosmology of the Enlightenment as
what we call "nationalism" of such innovating importance that it makes a
radically new situation?

The answer is, I think, no. There has long been debate over why men
organized in groups kill, maim, imprison men organized in other groups in
what we call warfare, and over the right and wrongs of warfare, ultimately

8 Lip service is, of course, a kind of tribute; but our conscience even as nationalists does
bite deeper than the prophets of doom allow. The famous toast of Stephen Decatur at
Norfolk, Virginia, in 1816, "Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may
she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong," admits a difference be-
tween right and wrong, shows, as a matter of fact, a conscience at least faintly dis-
turbed. I do not think you will find in the early days formulas like "Athena, may she
always be in the right, but . . ." or "Jehovah, right or wrong!" The ardent nationalist
today realizes he is on the defensive. The familiar quotation from Decatur will be found
in almost any dictionary of quotations.

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as to whether it is an evil or a good.9 As a matter of fact, we shall in the very
next section of this chapter take up one of the sharpest and most novel phases
of the intellectual history of the warfare over warfare, that brought to a head
by the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. The anthropologists
leave us in no doubt as to the fact that, in spite of the noble savages who
practice hospitality toward the stranger, many, if not most, territorial in-
groups will fight with others. And here another piece of folk wisdom obtrudes
itself: "All's fair in love [that is, male Western pursuit of female] and war."
We must be clear on this matter: the morality, or immorality, of organized
warfare is no new thing.

The historian of the West can leave no doubt as to the empirical facts.
From the days of Homer and Moses on, even from much earlier, warfare has
been endemic in the West. There have been variations in the material and
human damage war does, in the extent to which war has been in effect regu-
lated by law, convention, the "rules of the game," by notions of what is right
and wrong in warfare. But, as with most of these variations in history, the
sorting out of the variables, the plotting of the curves, is a difficult and often
impossible task. A glance at the account Thucydides gives of the violence at
Corcyra that got the Peloponnesian War off to its worst phases should con-
vince anyone that, weapons apart, there is precedent for all the moral horrors
of our contemporary warfare.

Certainly from a survey of war in the West one cannot conclude that the
human, the moral, elements that enter into warfare vary in any one sure
direction, forward or backward. Two tendencies which, if they could be firmly
established as such, are worth noting as possibly valid analyses may be sug-
gested. First, wars that enlist the active emotions of the many, that employ
the many as actual fighters, tend to be more ferocious, above all, harder to
settle with a tolerable peace, than wars fought by the few, the professionals.
Modern democratic nationalist wars are "worse" wars than the "limited"
wars among eighteenth-century dynasts, but they are not the first or the only
wars that have so enlisted the emotions of the many. Second, and closely
related, wars we used to label "ideological," wars fought to make the true
God, or dialectical materialism, or the Nordic myth prevail over unbelievers
are worse wars than wars — say, like our Mexican War — which are wars of

9 Here is a fine bit of Hegel: "Just as the movement of the ocean prevents the corrup-
tion which would be the result of perpetual calm, so by war people escape the cor-
ruption which would be occasioned by a continuous or eternal peace." Philosophic
des Rechts, §324. Such a sentiment is clearly that — a sentiment, not to be disproved,
but simply disapproved.

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The Nineteenth Century

mere aggression with a minimum gloss of moral justification. Both these ideas
are suggestive as leads for further study, a study not assured in the beginning;
that they would prove true. They are, however, by no means the assured
truths they seem to be to many of our contemporary proponents of a brand-
new international order. And even if they are diagnostically true, we have
surely no ready remedy at hand.

On one count, at least, the Enlightenment can be cleared of responsibility
for one of the moral weaknesses of nationalism. The doctrine that the agents
of the state in their dealings with agents of other states are not held to the
rules of ordinary morality, indeed not held to any moral code, but are con-
cerned solely with the success of their states in war and diplomacy is no in-
vention of the eighteenth century; it is, indeed, specifically opposed by most
of the philosophes. As we have noted, in its specific modern form of the
doctrine of "reason of state," it is well formulated in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries and well practiced. At least in the sense of accepted
formal obligations to a growing body of international law, the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries in the West saw a comparatively good period in the
morality of international politics. There has been, no doubt, an obvious lapse
in the last twenty years, but one scarcely attributable directly to the Enlight-
enment.

It seems hardly possible for even the most extreme nominalist to deny
that the "nation" that gives us so much trouble is real, that differences in
language, art, the whole reach of culture among nations are real. There are
moral differences among the nations of the West, nothing like as great as the
convinced nationalists think they are, and like other aspects of the national
character, difficult of definition, almost impossible of statistical definition.
Most Anglo-Saxons believe that the French in particular are loose, promiscu-
ous, in the matter of sex; and it must be admitted that many articulate French-
men do their verbal best, and sometimes more, to give support to that belief.
Yet any one who knows the French knows well that the actual range of
conduct in such matters is probably much the same as elsewhere in the West,
and he knows that many Frenchmen are chaste and continent. The Russians
since the Bolshevik revolution have done their puritanical best to banish the
familar traditional outward and public allurements and display of sex, much
as in other outbreaks of puritanism, or rather Vulgarpuritanismus, in Savona-
rola's Florence, in Cromwell's England, in Robespierre's France — and they
have held the line longer than most of their predecessors. On the other hand,
in twentieth-century America the mass media concentrate with increasing

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A History of Western Morals

frankness on all that used to be known here as "sex appeal." Our rare Sovie
visitors are apparently as shocked at one of our newsstands as our grand-
fathers used to be at Parisian ones.

We are back at one of the unsolved puzzles that confront tLe historian oi
morals: Just what is the relation between profession and performance, be-
tween word and deed? Even in the comparatively simple matter of sex rela-
tions, no firm answer can be given. I feel very sure that the Russians have
not risen above sex, and equally sure that we have not sunk — as Mr. Sorokin
holds we have — into obsessive indulgence, both direct and vicarious, in mat-
ters of sex. The Russian moral style has for a surprisingly long time been out
of line with Western, if not with human, traditions in such matters; someday
cheesecake and gow will come to Russia. Our own in the United States has in
the last generation or two, perhaps, as liberals think, under the pressure of
selfish commercial interests, but more likely from a whole syndrome of causes,
including what may well be called Vulgdrfreudismus, been out of line with
our own traditions, and may be expected to return at least part way back to
the old restraints.

But we cannot here allow ourselves to get involved in the concrete facts
and the fascinating theories of the national character. They are worth all the
careful study they can be given, for they are real even when they are part of
a myth, above all, when they are part of a myth. We may content ourselves
here with a few general cautions. First, each nation has an image of itself,
slowly built up and hard to change, and images of other nations with which
it has relations close enough to permit the building up of such images. Where
specifically moral elements enter into these images, they are bound to be
greatly simplified and exaggerated, and, it goes without saying, tend to reflect
moral credit on one's own nation, moral discredit on others. Yet the enemies
of nationalism go too far if they pursue the line set by the definition of
nationalism as "pooled self-esteem" to the point where they maintain that
the nation as an entity — or, if you prefer, national public opinion — is wholly
incapable of self-criticism. To drop into metaphor, there is such a thing as
the national conscience. It is not as sensitive, or as varied, as the conscience
of sensitive individuals, it is not a unanimous feeling among all nationals, and,
perhaps even more than an individual conscience, it finds that success is
usually good. Still, the best observers grant that a large number of Germans
really felt guilty about Nazi excesses; and there are stirrings of national guilt
over Hiroshima even in the United States.

Second, national differences in conduct are apparently greater in public

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The Nineteenth Century

morality than in private. In such matters as sexual conduct, the big and little
vices, personal honesty, all of what I have called conventional morality, 1
should think it pretty certain that actual differences among Western nations
are not nearly as great as our national images or myths or cliches make out.
In a matter actually marginal to public morality, that of ordinary commercial
honesty and trustworthiness, most Americans thinlc most French businessmen
are untrustworthy, and most Frenchmen thinlc American businessmen are
excessively sharp and unprincipled. The British in these matters are likely to
feel, and, in spite of their reputation for reticence, to express, a greater holi-
ness-than-thou. Actually, formal bankruptcy, for instance, which Americans
take in stride, is morally a disgrace in France. In such matters as law-abiding-
ness, honesty in the face of the tax gatherer, public neatness, and general
civic goodhousekeeping, on to actual crimes of all sorts, there are no doubt
among Western nations real and sometimes measurable differences, some-
times almost as great as they appear in the images, myths, and cliches to be.
But even in such matters, an all-inclusive national moral peck order based on
the facts of human conduct cannot really be established. There is a very rough
moral peck order based on general Western opinion, or, rather, many versions
of such a peck order varying with each national opinion. Perhaps there might
be tentative agreement among good non-Western observers not committed to
either of our great conflicting secular faiths of Communism or Democracy to
put Britain and the virtuous little democracies of Western and Northern
Europe on top, the unhappy French rather lower than they deserve to be, and
neither ourselves nor the Russians as high as we think we ought to be.

To sum up, necessarily inadequately, this vexing and important question
of the morals of nationalism: in the pure and exacting moral tradition both
of Christianity and of the Enlightenment, the worship of the nation-state that
has grown up in the contemporary world is a poor thing, a shabby thing, at
best, at worst, a wicked pooling of the selfish, the prideful in human nature.
Even in its more subdued manifestations, even in the most virtuous of democ-
racies, nationalism is a denial of the Christian equality of all souls before
God, of the Enlightened equality of all men before a righteous Nature; in the
best of us it is a form of Pharisaism, what the Christian tradition calls a
snobbish claim to a high place in a peck order, a blindness, a failure to see
ouselves as others see us, a hypocritical assumption of a burden — "the white
man's burden" — which is, in fact, a prize of victory in the agon. In its madder
forms, in the posturings of a Mussolini or the frothings of a Hitler, it is one
of the great degraded moments of our history. Surely there can be no doubt:

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A History of Western Morals

whatever it is that has in our Western past made saints or philosophes must
drive the best of us to fight against, crusade against, this evil thing.

And yet, and yet ... crusades, too, break heads and hearts. The strain
of moderation, of acceptance of the world as not radically and immediately
alterable, is a real, if, among contemporary intellectuals, commonly under-
valued, part of Western moral traditions; the moderates, too, even the mod-
erates who have no other principles than moderation, are not outside our
ethical tradition. In that tradition, one must note that nationalism has long
and deep roots in the Western past, however recent its actual present flower-
ing; one must note that nationalism is somehow "natural" to the West, and, to
judge from twentieth-century developments, a part of the Western culture
most attractive to the rest of the world. Perhaps men have got to pool their
self-esteem somehow, and perhaps the noblest crusader can do little to change
the nature of that pooling. We have not yet found in the concept of mankind
any such pool. For the present, we may do well to try to palliate the evils and
excesses of nationalism, reading the famous aphorism of Francis Bacon — no
saint, and no philosaphe — as "Nationalism is not to be conquered save by
obeying it"10

There is still more to say. Into the service of the nation-state there have
gone loyalty, courage, devotion, hard work, and a good deal more that we
should all accept as morally good in our tradition. One need not agree with
the naive apologists for war and struggle to admit that our moral history
would be poor without the record of these imperfections. Here is one more
of those moral paradoxes that are strewn so liberally in our way in the modem
world: If the kingdom of God or of Nature is at all to be realized here on
earth, must it not be so in a place, somewhere before it is everywhere? This
moral difficulty is at its gravest and most concrete in our world for the Jew.
To many Jews, the Zionist movement, even — indeed, above all — in its present
partial success in Israel, has been an immoral betrayal of the mission for
which God long ago chose the Jews. For them, Zion is no hill on this earth,
and certainly no nation-state with flag and army and a seat in the United
Nations. To others, Israel is truly the earthly Zion, without which no heavenly

10 Bacon wrote Natura non vincitur nisi parendo. Of course, thinkers have long sought
a way to pour into the concept of mankind as a whole the kind of emotions and senti-
ments that men have always poured into some concept of more parochially grouped
human beings. See the work of an interesting contemporary, Gerhard Hirschfeld, Di-
rector of the Committee for the Study of Mankind, 53 West Jackson Blvd., Chicago,
Illinois.

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The Nineteenth Century

one, without which, indeed, no chosen people. I do not think the mere histo-
rian can chose here, for them or for us.

in

I have said that the nineteenth century produced no such completely revolu-
tionary new idea as the idea that the eighteenth-century Enlightenment fash-
ioned into a new world view of a universe without God, a universe where
everything was natural, nothing supranatural. This is true enough, but the
nineteenth century did produce a major corollary to the great theme of the
eighteenth, or, better, a great explanation and justification of that notion of
Progress which had played so great a part in the world view of the Enlighten-
ment. Darwin was the culture hero of the nineteenth century as Newton had
been of the eighteenth. Especially as philosophers, moralists, and publicists
developed what seemed to them the correct social, moral, indeed metaphys-
ical consequences of Darwin's work as a biologist into social Darwinism, the
somewhat static and un-Faustian picture of the universe provided by the
Newtonian world-machine gave way to a picture of a vast organic universe,
growing, evolving, and, above all, improving, with improving man, Homo
sapiens, at once its master and its creation.11

Darwin himself, though he was quite aware of what men were making of
his work, kept pretty much to his biological last. The Huxleys, Spencers, Wil-
liam Graham Sumners, and many others showed no such restraint; they went
straight to what has come to be called "social Darwinism." Given the multa-
nimity of the nineteenth century, social Darwinism could not be a simple,
agreed-on set of dogmas, but the major articles of its faith are clear. Briefly,
the social Darwinist held that men, like other organisms, compete among

11 1 must emphasize that in moral, intellectual, cultural history — I suspect in any kind
of history, except the history of an individual — change is slow and incomplete, not to
be given even the kind of dramatic force of, for example, 1859: Darwin's Origin of
Species. The "Darwinian" controversy in its broadest sense — the old "Conflict of Re-
ligion and Science" — goes back to the eighteenth century, and still goes on, though
not quite in the same verbal forms as in the nineteenth century. Compare the follow-
ing from 1785, not 1885:

Some drill and bore

The solid earth, and from the strata there

Extract a register, by which we learn

That He who made it, and revealed its date

To Moses, was mistaken in its age.

— Cowper, The Task, Book EEI, lines 150-154.

The form, I grant, could only be eighteenth century, even though Cowper did not
write heroic couplets.

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themselves for food, shelter, and the chance to reproduce their kind. Varia-
tions, very slight ones in a given generation, allow some individuals to suc-
ceed better than others in the competition, and to reproduce themselves more
successfully. Their progeny will tend to inherit these advantages, and in the
long slow course of evolution will add to them. On the other hand, those not
adapted genetically, constitutionally, to their environment will tend to fail to
reproduce themselves. In the long run, this "struggle for life" which we human
beings must take part in along with other organisms — though we are so far
the most successful of them, and are able to make planned use of many of the
other organisms to further our own evolution — makes for the continued im-
provement of the species through the "survival of the fittest." All you need
now do is translate into simple ethical terms: if in the inevitable competition
among human beings we let nature take its course, the good will prevail, the
bad die out, and once more we shall all — yes, in a sense, even the failures, the
defeated — live in the best of possible worlds.12

Now one important radical wing of the social Darwinians went on to
draw some simple conclusions from this analysis of the struggle for life. The
struggle must be, among men, as "free" as it is among, say, wildcats. A wild-
cat born with good muscles and just that extra sense of timing in his spring
gets the extra rabbit; a wildcat born with weak muscles in his hind quarters
gets no rabbit, and dies young. No misguided Christian wildcats, no senti-
mental eighteenth-century Enlightened wildcat lovers of their kind, no "lib-
eral" wildcats, can take care of and feed the weak-muscled cat. Wildcats
remain, then, perhaps, from our human point of view, not altogether admir-
able creatures, or at least not useful ones for us, but splendid examples of the
working of evolution. We moderns ourselves, these social Darwinians insist,
have somehow managed to interfere with the natural and normal course of
evolution of our own species (that absurd problem of the origin of evil will
keep cropping up, but here is a place we had better not notice it) . We protect
the weak, allow them to mature, and even to pass on their weaknesses to prog-

12 1 want to underline once more that I am writing as a historian of morals, not of
natural science. As biologists the Darwinians were fully aware of the complexities, of
unfavorable turns in the process of evolution in a given species, of degeneration, of
much else that many, certainly, as moralists tried to shrug off, or explain away, or,
better yet, just not notice. Not noticing is fatal to the scientist — in fact, it is to him im-
moral. Those naive persons who still think natural science itself is a complete and
adequate morality are likely to put undue stress on the scientist's "intellectual honesty."
Compare Huxley, "The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with
lying." T. H. Huxley, Science and Morals, quoted in Mencken, Treatise of Right and
Wrong, p. 197.

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The Nineteenth Century

eny whom we also protect. Poor relief, hospitals, a medical profession with a
simple ethical imperative, "keep them all alive as long as you possibly can,"
and nowadays full social security — well, the list of what we do to stop evolu-
tion, stop progress, would be a socio-economic history of our modern West.
But Western intellectuals being what they are, this last fact only served to
sharpen the zest of the radical social Darwinians; they were going to get
evolution back on the track through revolution.

I simplify, but do not really caricature, let alone satirize, the theoretical
position of these devotees of untrammeled struggle among individual men.
They realized, of course, that Homo sapiens has a most complex central nerv-
ous system, that variations in it added to the complications of successful adap-
tation, that sometimes an unusually sound mind in an unsound body might
triumph even in the struggle for life, as Evolution (the capital letter is needed
here) intended it. But since they thought that the sound mind in a sound body
was no doubt the real intention of Evolution, they believed all would come
out right in the end. Meanwhile, they saw the struggle for life as essentially
an economic one, and took their practical stand on an extreme economic
laissez-faire; the entrepreneur who fails, the worker who loses his job, are
both "unfit" to survive, and ought — the "ought" is here clearly the old moral
ought — to die.

Actually, most of the radical social Darwinians were also aware of the fact
that, whatever his origins, Homo sapiens has in fact evolved into a kind of
social animal, and that "culture" and "society" as well as individual mind and
body must be taken into account. Their usual minimum allowance for these
factors was to grant to governmental institutions the functions of defense of
the national group (until the world state is achieved), policing against crim-
inals (again, until we breed out criminals, for they must not be allowed to
reproduce), and enforcing contracts; on the role of religious and educational
institutions they were less certain, but these should, of course, promote the
cause of the faith in Evolution. Finally, though these thinkers might feel that
ideally the unfit as tested by free economic competition ought to die a useful
natural death, usually from starvation, they were quite aware — after all, most
of them were Englishmen — that the ideal is not yet the practical. They tended,
after the model set up by the English utilitarians, to advocate that the demon-
strably unfit, the poor, the criminal, the defectives, be, as far as possible,
isolated, kept from reproducing their kind, and maintained at a minimum
cost. Such, substantially, was the view of many by no means cruel Westerners

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A History of Western Morals

in the Victorian heyday. It is well reflected in much of Herbert Spencer's
work, especially his angriest, The Man versus the State (1884).13

Yet for most men of good will in the nineteenth century, even in Man-
chester, even for the less-angry Herbert Spencer who wrote the Principles of
Ethics (1879-92), what they drew from Darwin's work conflicted with ideas
and feelings they had been brought up with, which they knew were part of a
long and valued cultural heritage. They were genuinely, honestly, and deeply
disturbed by the contrast between the concept of a fine free-for-all in which
the defeated simply went down and the gentle altruistic concepts of the Ser-
mon on the Mount, or of the Enlightenment. Confronted with this difficulty
they went to work with the laudable and very human intent of smoothing it
over, of reconciling its oppositions, of having their cake and eating it. They
did not do nearly as bad a job as the first anti-Victorian critics of the 189Q's
and the early twentieth century thought they had done.

Their great discovery may easily be made to seem naive; perhaps it is
naive, now. They discovered that Christian and humanitarian ethics, properly
understood, were a part of nature's plan all along, fully consonant with Dar-
win's discoveries, indeed, a necessary adjunct to the workings of Evolution
among men. Our ethical inheritance is basically a set of rules for conducting
the struggle for life as nature certainly, and perhaps even the Unknowable
(Spencer's very Victorian effort to hedge a bit on Pascal's wager), intended
all along. The traditional virtues, honesty, loyalty, law-abidingness, obedience

13 Those interested in the affiliation of ideas, in a sense more a part of intellectual
history than of the history of morals (the two cannot and should not be rigorously
separated), will note that nineteenth-century radical laissez faire of this sort is a stage
in the development and paring down of **pure" anarchism. The pure doctrine (see
above, p. 300) accepts complete environmentalism, and insists on no interference what-
ever with the "free" natural response of the human organism to stimuli from the en-
vironment and on no "rigging" of the environment. The laissez-faire variant of the
nineteenth century accepts the "fact" of hereditary variations, and comes somewhat
reluctantly to the conclusion that government, society, in the hands of the strong, must
rig the environment a bit to dispose of those with "bad" heredity, but leave those with
"good" heredity in an anarchistic freedom. In the twentieth century the basic idea of
anarchism has been further altered, though it still maintains its close affiliation with
those agreeable symbols Nature and Liberty. I thinfc in our own time the anarchist
theme is heard chiefly in the form that takes backing from biological concepts of eco-
logical balance, of a natural homeostasis or equilibrium, of "do no harm," of preserv-
ing the elaborate existing nexus of social relations. The modern of this sort, taking his
cue from nature's by no means simple plan, would argue that we must not destroy the
wildcats and other predators, or we shall have too many deer and rabbits, and perhaps
a horrid epizootic, which might spread as an epidemic to us human beings. Besides,
Nature wants variety, wants even wildcats. What was once a radical has become a con-
servative doctrine.

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The Nineteenth Century

where obedience is due, even honor, tainted though that virtue is by medieval
knightly abuse, all these reinforce the strong man in his struggle, help prevent
the victory of the merely clever, the sly, the rule breaker, the man who might
even set Evolution back a stride by winning — temporarily, of course, but still
regrettably — by means of dirty tactics. But there are other traditional virtues,
especially emphasized both by conventional Christianity and by the new hu-
manitarian ethics. How about gentleness, pity, loving-kindness? Spencer and
his fellows had room for some of these, though they could not, of course, go
quite as far as our Lord went in the matter of the meek inheriting the earth,
and could not quite accept a great deal else in the Sermon on the Mount.
Man, they pointed out, is a social animal, and in particular his institutions,
less grandiose in scale and less dangerous to Evolution than the state — no-
tably the family, but also the school, the vocational group, the neighborhood
group, and the like — are actually held together by the hard cement of what
looks at first to be softness, by love, by mutual aid, by self-sacrificing altruism.
Our natural sympathies are useful. There need be no transvaluation of values
to carry out the work of Evolution.

But on the other hand there must be no exaggeration. We must be firm
about the unfit, firm, above all, not to let the marginal person slip up the
wrong slope. We must listen to the voice of our conscience, and feed the poor
— but we must not feed them so well that the naturally lazy will not mind
being poor. Nature has implanted feelings in us, which, distorted and cor-
rupted by Christianity in the past, we must cleanse of their impurities. "Per-
vading all Nature," wrote Spencer in a famous sentence, "we may see at work
a stern discipline which is a little cruel that it may be very kind."14 We must
not be misled into a perverse sympathy for the unfit. Loving-kindness must
not flow out, as so often it does, in an uncontrolled stream over the just and
the unjust, or, as we now in the nineteenth century say more clearly and
scientifically, the fit and the unfit.

Finally, another group of social Darwinians found a formula that gave
rather less logical difficulty than did the middle-of-the-road formula we have
just discussed. These thinkers decided that for Homo sapiens the struggle for
life among individuals of the same species, which the Darwinian biology had
emphasized, is actually a struggle for life among groups or societies of indi-
viduals. In the late nineteenth century, the in-group that inevitably was chosen

14 Social Statics (1851), p. 149. Another Spencerian aphorism: "The ultimate result of
shielding men from folly is to fill the world with fools." Autobiography (1904), Vol.

n,P.5.

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A History of Western Morals

as the key competitor was, of course, the nation-state; but as the twentieth
century progressed, the most vocal of the school turned to an even vaguer
in-group, a "race," the Nordic, Germanic, even the "white" or "Caucasian."15
Whatever the in-group chosen, the formula was simple indeed: Within the
group, the struggle for life among individuals was called off — by Nature, of
course; but the same sovereign mistress had ordained that among groups the
struggle should go on with unsparing ferocity. War was the final and most
satisfactory form of the struggle, and in war the fit group won and the unfit
group lost. Within the group, then, there must be co-operation among indi-
viduals. If only because these writers put so much emphasis on war, an
activity not effectively carried on, as a rule, at least not in the modern mass
armies, by warriors indulging in democratic egalitarian discussion, they
preached a kind of discipline we now call authoritarian, a hierarchical society
of strict discipline and conditioned obedience, not by any means the "natural
mutual aid" of anarchists like Kropotkin. Success in war, they held, went ob-
viously to the group best disciplined, best able to meet the test of the battle-
field. And yet in the nineteenth century it was clear to the most benighted
surviving feudal warrior that the factory stood behind the armed forces; and
in economic and industrial life the fashionable pattern was unbridled compe-
tition among individuals. It was all very confusing.

Racists and their like were chief among the social Darwinians to empha-
size an obvious conclusion from the scientist's own direct work in biology. The
good and the bad (fit and unfit) variations are constitutional, and therefore
genetically determined. Obviously a fit human pair is likely to produce fit
progeny, if not fitter progeny than themselves; the unfit, too, tend to breed
true. The racists and other conservatives were all for proper human breeding.
Blonds, being better, should marry blonds. There was a good deal of what
we now know was erroneous genetic theory in all this, and even more in the
work of a small and never more than mildly lunatic fringe group who saw
heaven on earth as attainable only through planned breeding of humans,
through what came to be called eugenics. Moreover, the general influence of
Darwinism in matters of social ethics was definitely not in the direction of

15 There is a huge bibliography for this nationalist and racist variant of social Darwin-
ism. A start may be made from Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American
Thought, rev. ed , Boston, Beacon, 1955. It must not be assumed that the Germans were
the sole or even the most important of the school. In the present revulsion of "Afro-
Asians" against "Caucasians" the writings of English-speaking peoples, including
Americans like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, figure most conspicuously. An
American who feels surprised and grieved at the attitude of these Afro-Asians toward
us will do well to dip into this literature.

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The Nineteenth Century

redressing the balance between heredity and environment, nature and nur-
ture, upset by the environmentalism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
Logically, perhaps, the social implications of Darwinism should have brought
home to men the immense difficulty of making rapid changes in the human
material with which the reformer works. In the long run, it is not impossible
that the influence of the natural sciences on the social sciences will go toward
curbing the Utopianism still marked in the social sciences; indeed, there are
signs that this is happening.16 But for the nineteenth century the natural sci-
ences implied, above all, human control of the environment: the science of
Darwin meant then clearly that, knowing that progress is adaptation to en-
vironment, we can rig the environment! Products of Evolution, we can alter
what produced us.

None of the schools of social Darwinians, not even the most intransigent
of laissez-faire economists nor of the all-out-f or-war school, could quite avoid
the nagging difficulty: human beings did compete among themselves, to the
point of killing, to the point of confirming the view of nature as "red in tooth
and claw"; but they also did co-operate among themselves, did display the
emotion called love, seemed at times to confirm the view of nature as a wise
and kindly "impulse from a vernal wood." Men seemed not quite to behave
like wildcats, nor even, in spite of Thomas Hobbes, wolves; on the other hand,
they clearly could not be trusted to behave like soldier ants. The wiser
thinkers realized that men were both competing individuals and collaborating,
or at least obeying, members of groups. Walter Bagehot's prescient Physics
and Politics (1875) — we should call it Biology and Politics — is a work still
worth reading, not just by the historian of ideas, but by anyone interested in
the attempt to study human behavior, human relations, in something of the
same way the natural scientist studies the behavior of the birds and beasts.
Especially on the problem of why some organized human groups — tribe,
state, and the like — do subdue, control, and sometimes absorb others in what
certainly looks like a kind of Darwinian struggle, Bagehot is wise and tem-
perate.

Three general comments on the place of Darwinism in our intellectual

16 One ironic sign: Sir Charles Galton Darwin, grandson of the naturalist and himself
a distinguished physicist, has written a little book, The Next Million Years (London,
Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952), of which the burden is that man as a 4twild" creature can-
not improve himself through planned breeding, and has already had a long-enough
history to show all he can achieve. Since it takes roughly a million years to evolve a
new species, we shall have to face another million years much like the last few tens
of thousands.

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and moral life may conclude this brief account. First, although perhaps our
received tradition of historical writing, right on down to the textbooks, does
perhaps exaggerate the extent and importance of the specific theological and
cosmological debate started by the publication of the Origin of Species — there
were millions of printed words, and heaven knows how many spoken — still,
the shock of Darwinism on Christianity was a great one. No doubt the
eighteenth century had marked the spread to the educated many of what
Galileo had begun; no doubt the continued development of geology and
paleontology, of the whole world view of the Enlightenment, should have
meant that Darwin's ideas brought no surprise. But the fact is that Darwin's
work widened and sharpened the difficulties many Christians had with their
orthodox cosmology; they even made serious what in the eighteenth century
with Lord Monboddo had seemed a rather bad joke, the possibility that men
are "related to" monkeys and apes. For the Protestant countries, and the
English-speaking ones in particular, which had never quite known the anti-
Christianity (miscalled anticlericalism) of the French Revolution as it was
known in Catholic countries, Darwin, kindly, unironic, uncomplaining though
he was, did the work of a Voltaire; he challenged dramatically the old estab-
lished religion.

Second, Darwin's whole work and influence served to bring to the eternal
Western preoccupation with the agon, with the organized struggle for prize
among men, the immense prestige of that natural science and its ally tech-
nology which had first made the doctrine of Progress seem a fact of life. The
theme of struggle — profitable, desirable, struggle, not, if you had the right
perspective, tragic, even for the losers — dominated Western thought for years,
and, in shapes not quite those given it by the nineteenth century, still domi-
nates it. Much as the Marxists dislike to admit it, the Marxist concept of the
class struggle is deeply indebted to the climate of Darwinian thought. Much
as Nietzsche in the flesh refused to admit it — he thought of Darwin as an
ignoble English shopkeeper — there is much more of Darwin in Also Sprach
Zarathustra than of Zoroaster. The basic concepts of social Darwinism are
hard to get out of our minds: we want a society ever-changing, dynamic,
progressive, and we see in competition among variously endowed individuals,
or even groups, a necessary condition of such a society. We feel and think of
Progress in a frame essentially Darwinian.

Third, with Darwin the doctrine of Progress took almost complete posses-
sion of the Western mind. Darwin's ideas, as we have noted above, gave an
explanation for the dynamic or changing element of human historical experi-

348

The Nineteenth Century

ence, an element not well explained in terms of Newtonian mechanics. But they
also gave directions, purpose, a teleology, something barely short of an escha-
tology, for these observed changes. In the mind of the educated man in the
street — there were millions of him — in the West, Darwinian terms, originally
used with scientific caution, and without teleological implications, terms like
"fit," "unfit," "adapted," even "higher" and "lower," came quite simply to
be translated into simple ethical terms, into "good" and "bad." Organic life
started low, primitive, and, though blamelessly, of course, at that stage, bad;
it has evolved ever since, perhaps with a few backslidings, but on the whole
in a regular way ("unilinear evolution") toward the higher, more civilized,
and therefore good; its high point so far is the species Homo sapiens.

This neat unilinear ranking guided the first anthropologists, and gained
widespread acceptance among the many in the West. In this view, there were
three stages of human social progress, that of the savage, that of the barbarian,
that of the civilized man. Auguste Comte translated this into more abstract
terms. The intellectual evolution, which, of course, paralleled, probably even
"caused," the moral evolution, was one from theology to metaphysics to
natural science (positivism). Of course, there were many in the nineteenth
century who felt that the fact of moral progress among men was much less
clear than was the general course of organic evolution, and less clear than
"material" progress since the cave men. But still, for the confident Victorians,
even when with Spencer they put the matter in weighty social-scientese, as
progress from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from militant societies
to peaceful industrial societies, or as progress from adherence to the "cake of
custom" to innovating individual liberty, to "freedom slowly broadening down
from precedent to precedent," the process was one that made sense, moral
sense, as progress from the lower to the higher, world without end.

IV

There is no grave inaccuracy, and much convenience, in using "Victorian"
as an epithet for Western culture in the nineteenth century. Great Britain set
the tone for the West in many matters of morals, manners, and even of taste,
something in the way the France of Louis XIV set the tone in the seventeenth
century. The alternative to "Victorian" is "middle class" or "bourgeois," both
overworked, and both too closely tied with the economic interpretation of
history. I shall use Victorian, without further apology, as a label for the
predominating, or characteristic, or typical set of attitudes of the nineteenth-

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A History of Western Morals

century West. Whether there was any such characteristic set of attitudes in-
volves the old and still-unsolved problem we have dodged so successfully thus
far, the problem of generalization from complex data and, perhaps, even the
philosophical problem of the "reality" or "truth" of universals.

The Victorian era is coming back into good repute, if only because it was
in bad repute forty years ago, and there seems to be in the modern West a
tendency for a given cultural generation to scorn its immediate predecessor
and admire the cultural generation one or two removes from its immediate
predecessor.17 Beginning in the 1890's and culminating in the 1920's there
was a great condemnation of the Victorians, one that put special emphasis on
Victorian prudery and Victorian unnatural restraints on everything natural
and especially on good unashamed genital sex life. More profound critics went
on to condemn as unlovely, or unheroic, or unjust, almost everything the
Victorians most prized. The condemnations were many, varied, and, taken
as a whole, full of contradictions. Still, the central themes were clear: the
Victorians were middle-class, middle-of-the-roaders, middle always in the
sense of mediocre — and intolerably satisfied with their mediocrity.18

We must admit at the outset that the Victorians were indeed Victorian.
The social historian who cares to dig up instances of what must seem to almost
all of us incredible prudery can fill volumes. Perhaps the original of the com-
mon verb to bowdlerize will do for us, who have more important concerns in
this book. Thomas Bowdler published in 1818 a book entitled and subtitled:
The Family Shakespeare in Ten Volumes, in which nothing has been added to

n The above is a grave oversimplification. But the problem of the cultural generation
— which includes the problem of whether there really is such a thing, since the annual
supply of young humans is relatively constant — is rather one for the historian of ideas
than the historian of morals. It does seem likely that our contemporary willingness to
recognize that the child — the real individual child as well as the figurative child, the
cultural generation — "naturally" rebels against the parent, even hates the parent, has
some moral implications for our culture. On this problem of the "cultural generation"
see Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, New York, Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1952, pp. 276-322 and J. Ortega y Gasset, Man and Crises, trans, by
Mildred Adams, New York, Norton, 1958.

is There is a whole library of books in which the early twentieth century damned the
Victorians but not to my knowledge any single critical study of this theme. For the
cheap criticism of the Victorians as prudes, sex-starved and repressed but scandal-
loving, see Leo Markun, Mrs. Grundy, New York, Appleton, 1930. For serious criticism,
G B. Shaw seems to me the best single example, and of Shaw a good sampling is the
following prefaces and plays: Man and Superman, Pygmalion, Candida, Major Barbara.
Shaw himself was a good Victorian in many ways; see H. M. Jones, "Shaw as a Vic-
torian," Victorian Studies, I, no. 2 (December 1957). For the feeling of a cultural
generation in revolt, see Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return, new ed., New York, Viking,
1951. Note how firmly established is our American feeling that even decades — the *20's,
the '30*s — vary in spirit.

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The 'Nineteenth Century

the original text, but those words and phrases are omitted which cannot with
propriety be read in a family. He later did a Gibbon, cutting out the author's
cold and erudite obscenity and his more inescapably anti-Christian ironies.
Or, we may take Byron's indignant poem "The Waltz" (1813), in which he
condemns this indecent dance as though it amounted to fornication, or rape.
The worrier can make a sequence of shocking degeneration from minuet
through waltz to fox trot and rock-'n'-roll. But I do not rtrinlc that sequence is
one of moral degeneration, and certainly not one of increasing sexual prom-
iscuity. I think such matters are matters of taste, concerns of social history,
and only partly and indirectly of the history of morals.

One final instance and we shall have done with this all-too-obvious sub-
ject. We were prudish in the United States. Here is the virtuous Frances E.
Willard, writing with something less than innocence:

When I was first a boarding school pupil at Evanston, in 1858, a young woman
who was not chaste came to the college there through some misrepresentation,
but was speedily dismissed; not knowing her degraded status I was speaking to her
when a school-mate whispered a few words of explanation that crimsoned my
face suddenly: and grasping my dress lest its hem should touch the garments of
one so morally polluted, I fled from the room.19

There were also protests against prudery. "Indelicacy is often manifested by
affectations of purity. The woman who talks about 'limbs' of the table and
the 'bosom' of the chicken is unrefined, and exposes herself to merited ridicule
and contempt."20

It is surely much more important, and more fair to Victorian culture, to
see as the central theme of their moral struggles an effort to reconcile the
Enlightenment and Christianity; or, if you prefer, an effort to arrive at a
working compromise between the heroic, the Utopian, the chiliastic in the new
religion of humanity and progress and the apparent need of ordinary folk
to lead ordinary lives, a compromise that involved the salvaging of much of
conventional Christianity. The compromise was often, especially among the

ld Glimpses of Fifty Years, quoted in Leo Markun, Mrs. Grundy, p. 506. Each age,
each group, has its necessary Pharisaism. The reader of the mid-twentieth century who
goes back to Markun's book ought to be quite as impressed with Markun's own kind,
exhibited on his next page, where he notes that the employers of the Lowell mills in
the early nineteenth century housed and supervised carefully the girls they employed
— not, of course,, because they really wanted to protect their virtue, but because they
wanted to keep them away from trade unions and efforts to raise their wages! Mrs.
Grundy, p. 507.

20 Alexander M. Gow, Good Morals and Gentle Manners for Schools and Families,
New York, American Book Co., 1873, quoted in Leo Markun, Mrs. Grundy, p. 560.

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A History of Western Morals

intellectuals, one that left tensions, doubts, all sorts of spiritual discomforts, as
with Arthur Hugh Clough, who lost his faith but felt he had to keep on
hunting for it; yet more often it was, at least for the time, a consoling com-
promise, and one that guided many useful lives.

The nature of the compromise is clear in Victorian ethical thought, neatly
symbolized by T. H. Green, from Tory Oxford, home of lost causes, idealist
in metaphysics, much influenced by the Germans, a moderate liberal reformer,
and Henry Sidgwick, from progressive Cambridge, usually listed as the last
of the English utilitarians, much influenced by everything gentle and worthy,
including psychic research, a moderate radical reformer. Ethically, the two
seem at this distance to be in almost identical positions. Of course, the range
or gamut of nineteenth-century ethical ideas seems, if only, as I have noted
above, because of the abundance of our surviving source materials, very great
indeed. To the usual schools of Western tradition there were now added more
conspicuously than ever before — though still well short of full cultural
interpenetration — all sorts of Eastern influences. Westerners were converted
to Islam, or to Buddhism, or to a great number of theosophies of varied in-
tellectual and geographic lineage. Two of the more striking Christian sects
originating in the nineteenth century, which was not a fecund one in the
creation of major sects, both have exotic elements; with the Mormons this
exotic touch is contrived and superficial, vanishes under examination, but
with the Christian Scientists it is truly theosophic, out-Hegeling Hegel.

We shall return to some of these variants, but for the present we may
continue with the core, the center, of the Victorian ethical attitude. Sidgwick
puts, perhaps more wistfully than usual, the initial difficulty that faced the
seeker: how to find a moral order in a universe in which the work of Newton,
Darwin, and their like has found only a physico-chemical order and nothing
else, found only nature — lower-case nature, at that — and lost God.

I don't know whether I believe or merely hope that there is a moral order in this
universe that we know, a supreme principle of Wisdom and Benevolence, guid-
ing all things to good ends, and to the happiness of the good. I certainly hope
that this is so, but I do not think it capable of being proved. All I can say is that
no opposed explanation of the origins of the cosmos — f or instance, the atomistic
explanation — seems to me even plausible, and that I cannot accept life in any
other terms, or construct a rational system of my own conduct, except on the
basis of this faith.21

21 A. and E. M. Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick, a Memoir, London, Macmillan, 1906, p. 347.
From an autobiographical fragment. Note that Sidgwick wrote "happiness of the
good," not "of the greatest number."

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The Nineteenth Century

Sidgwick, whose father was an Anglican clergyman, had resigned a college
fellowship on the ground that he could not claim to be a Christian; yet he
never ceased to consider himself a theist, and he seemed all his life to be a
happy man. This search for God, enjoying the search even though not finding
Him, and confirming one's ideas of the good on the way is very Victorian.
Sidgwick was a member of the Metaphysical Society, a group of English lead-
ers with backgrounds and commitments running from Roman Catholicism to
Unitarianism and agnosticism which met in the 1 870's in a London restaurant,
dined well, and discussed the Ultimate in comfort and equanimity — itself
a very Victorian procedure, and one that may tempt a critic in the 1950's to
the unfair conclusion that these men were not really what they professed to be,
Catholics, Anglicans, agnostics, that they were just successful Victorian in-
tellectuals, safe in London. They were, rather, honest Victorian intellectuals
who still hoped, having found that compromise worked so well so often in
politics, in economic and social life, in morals, to find the Ultimate Com-
promise. We today have either given up the hunt for the Ultimate or feel
convinced that the Ultimate, once more, is no matter for compromise.

Yet there is a real problem here, one we may well symbolize by this
Metaphysical Society: Why do men with mutually incompatible sets of ideas
of ultimate concern to them (you may say to yourself, with differing "ideolo-
gies," but do try to keep an open mind) at times try to exterminate one an-
other, at times accept one another in apparent respect and even liking, at
times dwell uneasily together in all sorts of degrees of toleration and mutual
adjustment? The likes of Cardinal Manning, T. H. Huxley, J. A. Froude, and
Henry Sidgwick could hardly have dined together in London in 1645; their
likes in Italy could not have dined together in Rome in those very 1870's.
Any very close equivalent of the Metaphysical Society seems unlikely in the
United States of the 1950's, not because we do not accept multanimity, but
because we feel a bit ill at ease about admitting that we do not, as Americans,
agree on fundamentals. We accept, but we do not cherish, our multanimity.

Now I find unsatisfactory any answer to the central problem of conflict
over ideas which insists that the conflicts are not at all over ideas, that ideas
are pretexts, fakes, window dressing, in vulgar Marxist language "ideology,"
perhaps most damning of all, "abstract." Ideas are at least necessary battle
cries, army uniforms, ways of distinguishing the fighters; no civilized groups
ever fought without some differences of ideas. But the naive "materialist"
position in this matter does serve to remind us that the ideas are neither
independent of human beings nor absolute masters of human beings. The

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A History of Western Morals

central problem can perhaps be put: What feelings, attitudes, compulsions
work on human beings in ways likely to sharpen the prick of ideas, or what
ones so work as to diminish the prick of ideas? This is surely one of the
critical problems of our own age, which loves formulas like "the world cannot
exist half x and half y — to say nothing of the poor n V

We do not know nearly enough to give even a partial answer to the
problem. If we wish to approach it as a problem to be studied in the
way the scientist works, we shall have to go at it by the method of case
studies. The Victorians make a fine study of this sort, for theirs was a
society full of stresses and strains, class conflicts, a rapidly growing society,
certainly a dynamic one in economic terms, by no means an old and tired
society, in fact, a society pursuing to the full the Western hunt for prizes.
Yet it was not a murderous society, not even, in the perspective of West-
ern history, a very warlike one; the nineteenth century was not in terms
of international politics quite as peaceful as it thought itself, but even here
it was a society that put limits, "rules of the game," on much conflict that
nowadays has very few such rules. We are back to Manning and Huxley,
Catholic and freethinker, not just appearing together on a platform in public
for a worthy and harmless cause — their corresponding personalities have done
that even in the United States — but in private, unnecessarily, not at all,
perhaps, for show.

But is not the clue in that phrase "rules of the game"? These prosperous,
educated English gentlemen were, after all, at play. They did not suffer
deprivations, a sense of inferiority either as individuals within their own
nation-state or as members of such a state in relation to members of another;
their self-esteem, separate or pooled, was satisfied; above all, they did not
have the fears so common and so justified in our own world. No doubt much
of all this must figure in the equation — if it can ever take a form even remotely
like that of an equation. The Victorians themselves would have insisted that
they had a positive, vigorous belief in toleration of all sorts of differences,
from differences over theology to differences over taste and fashion, not a
weary acceptance of human differences as incurable, but a real delight in them
as the spice of life. Most Victorians would have added, with J. S. Mill, that
they welcomed differences of opinion right on up through matters of ultimate
theological and metaphysical and ethical concern because they were convinced
that in the open forum of public discussion the truth will in the long run —
and not in such a fearfully long one at that — prevail. Though the Victorians

354

The Nineteenth Century

made many a compromise with the immediacy of the rational optimism of
the Enlightenment, they remained true to its belief in process as Progress, in
its own rationalist version of "ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make
you free."22

The members of the Metaphysical Society would, however, have been in
quite substantial agreement not to differ in their conduct in most important
respects. Indeed, their ethical difference would have been largely a matter of
metaphysical foundations of belief, not a matter of code. Perhaps in their
freshness and bitterness of youth, metaphysical beliefs incite to violence, as
theological beliefs most surely have done. The idealist may seek to rid the
world of materialists — and, of course, the materialist may seek to get rid of
the idealists. Or, as we are told of the East, the thinker who thinks the world
is an illusion may behave, briefly but critically, as if he thought it an illusion.
But nothing of the sort for the Victorians. For one thing, the Western tendency
to take the sense world as real, or at least as worth fighting over, has meant
that, save for the very few addicts of what Aldous Huxley hopefully calls the
"perennial philosophy," most Western idealism, transcendentalism, "tender-
mindedness," has so far compromised with the sense world as to welcome
a fight. Our Western believers in nonresistance, in absolute pacificism — the
early Christians, the Quakers, Thoreau — turn a ferocious other cheek. For
another thing, the Victorians found that the idealistic formulas of conduct —
say, the Kantian universal imperative — and the nonidealistic formulas — say,
the Benthamite greatest good of the greatest number — cried out for reconcilia-
tion in their code of morality.

Once more, the code is basically the standard Western Christian code,
modified a bit by humanitarian concern, a bit less exacting of the flesh in
some ways, more so in others, than at more difficult times, in my opinion
rather better observed on the average in conduct than at most times, but
still the standard code. Not even in matters of sex relations is the code greatly
out of line. What the rebel generations from the 1890's all emphasized as
Victorian prudery is more a matter of taste and fashion than of morals. The
Western code had always frowned on fornication, adultery, perversion, had
at least since Christ always insisted on monogamous marriage; in its un-
officially emended form it had long accepted the so-called double standard,
whereby conformity was more rigidly insisted on for the female than for

22 John, 8:32. In the previous verse, Jesus had said to his disciples "if ye abide in my
word." This was just what worried the Victorians.

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A History of Western Morals

the male; but in Victorian times a John Stuart Mill, who thought all sex
intercourse low and disgusting, is more of an exception in middle-class
circles than he would have been in this respect among the early Christians.23

In this, as in so many other ways, the Victorians were authentic mod-
ern descendants of the Puritans, who did not so much seek to subdue the
flesh as to control it. Perhaps among the many in the nineteenth century
the motive behind the control, and the inspiration for ways of control, is
best described as respectability rather than as conscience. Yet one may
suspect that even in the seventeenth century, Puritan conduct among the
many was conformity; and as for the sensitive few, a nineteenth-century
Arthur Hugh dough is as much hounded by conscience as anyone in the
seventeenth century. For the many, the virtues are the virtues Weber has
made us so aware of — and doubtful about — those of thrift, hard work,
cleanliness, self-restraint, self-help, high-mindedness. There is more than
a trace of holier-than-thou, of course; one would not try to revise out of
existence the anti-Victorian view of the Victorians. It is hard to thinfr of
the many in the West save in terms of x-than-thou; and "holier" may come to
seem rather better in the formula than "more interesting," or even "more
natural."

Nor was the Victorian code nearly so heartless in its insistence on laissez-
faire economics as we have been led to believe. After all, even Darwinism
was no more than a theory; but by Victorian times, especially in England,
humanitarianism had become a fashion and a habit. The very indignation
that filled the "condition of England" debate is a sign of the times. We are
misled by the no-doubt-useful unscrupulousness with which the proponents
of the New Order, from socialists of all stripes to just plain lovers of the
underdog, attacked the existing order; and, of course, neither we today nor
their opponents then really bothered to read those cruel and inhuman advo-

23 Mill's belief that among women pleasure in sexual intercourse is limited to the pro-
fessional few is actually a fairly wide-spread Victorian belief. Modern studies of
frigidity in women do give some basis for a statistical difference between men and
women in this respect, but the grounds of the Victorian belief remain a bit of a
puzzle. There is in terms of intellectual affiliation perhaps a line, difficult to trace, from
the medieval exaltation of The Woman. But this is in the Middle Ages an upper-class
attitude, very ambivalent, as we have seen. Medieval commoners were nearer the
Chaucerian Wife of Bath. For that matter, Victoria herself enjoyed the pleasures of the
bed very much; by a nice irony, the Empress Eugenie was almost as frigid as Mill's
Mrs. Taylor. F. A. Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor; Simone Andre Maurois,
Miss Howard and the Emperor, trans, by Humphrey Hore, New York, Knopf, 1958.
On the Victorian "double standard" see a long chapter of Westermarck, Origin and
Development of the Moral Ideas, Chap. XLIL

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The Nineteenth Century

cates the Classical Economists. From Adam Smith through Mill, in fact, the
economists were by no means fanatically insistent that government must
have no role even in economic life.24 As for the ordinary Victorian, he was
too sure that human suffering was an evil, one that now for the first time
might be overcome, to follow Darwinism to its logical conclusion and let
the incompetent suffer as they should. He would, of course, be against
pampering the poor and the unfortunate, and he would not, unless he were
a radical, sympathize with efforts to achieve social security by state action;
but he might be all the more willing to back up his numerous charities.

The Victorian moral code is in its main line clear enough; the Victorian
moral ideal, the admired figure, is not. At any rate, the grammatical singu-
lar here would be an even more dubious construction than usual. For the
men of the nineteenth century, history was already an enormous warehouse
full of attractive ideals. In the freedom and intellectual promiscuity of the
times, one could always find a cause and a hero. In effect, all the ideals we
have hitherto encountered in this book found admirers, even followers, some-
where in the multarnmous West in these years. From this distance, the result
looks not like any effective synthesis or syncretism, but, as in nineteenth-
century domestic architecture, a mere juxtaposition. The medieval knight
seems as ill assimilated in the nineteenth century as the Gothic style of
architecture; the beautiful-and-good of Athens, the Roman Stoic, as unnat-
ural as classical place names in the land of the Iroquois Confederation. The
Greeks and Romans that the liberally educated of the West — some of them
— came to love and admire were surely not the Greeks and Romans who had
made their own moral ideals; the world of the Waverly Novels was not the
world of the Middle Ages.25

A full-scale history of morals, quite as much as a full-scale cultural or
intellectual history, would have to try to sort out these many "uses of the
past," try to put into the complex whole — if it was a whole — such varied
parts as political Philhellenism, which enlisted strong moral sympathies, the
attempt to revive as moral guides the heroic ages of the Germanic, Celtic,

24 Lionel Robbins, The Theory of Economic Policy, London, Macmillan, 1952; espe-
cially Lecture n, "The Economic Functions of the State," pp. 34-61.

25 \Ve are here at the very real problem Spengler saw only to try to dismiss it under
the phrase "pseudo-morphism." This problem, we cannot get entangled with here; suf-
fice to say that the beautiful-and-good as it appeared to Pericles was not the beauti-
ful-and-good as it appeared to Matthew Arnold. The two beautiful-and-goods are
sometimes related, to use a misleading and certainly dangerous metaphor, genetically;
sometimes the relation appears to be no more than verbal association. But there is a
relation — even though as with the sirens of Homer and the sirens of our modern fibre
engines, the relation seems tenuous, even absurd.

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A History of Western Morals

and Slavic peoples, European fantasies about America, and about Asia, the
persistence, though not generally in a form quite so innocently ignorant of the
facts of anthropology, of the eighteenth-century "noble savage." We cannot
here do more than note their existence, and make one comment. "Escapism"
does not explain them, any more than "pseudo-morphism" does; or if you
must use concepts like "escapism," then grant that all the arts always have a
touch of escapism. Once more, the Victorians were not unique.

The problem of the existence of the varied gallery of the nineteenth-
century moral ideal persons is not so much that of their historicity, nor of
what needs they satisfied, but of their variety, of their being a gallery, not
a pantheon. Anyone who could solve this problem would know more about
human relations than is now known. That obsessive parallel with the late
Greco-Roman culture is hard to put down: the nineteenth-century hash of
beliefs and ideals, these archaisms and futurisms, this cultural free-for-all
can look like the beginning of the end. But it is worth noting that it did not
look at all like this even to most Victorian intellectuals, who nonetheless
were great complainers. And the man in the street took it in his stride.
Somehow, the free-for-all among ideals had marvelously got translated into
the decencies, the orderliness, the respect for the rules of the game you may
symbolize, if you like, by the English Victorian bobby, the only policeman
so far in Western history beloved by all.

There is, then, no single nineteenth-century ideal moral figure; national,
class, professional, indeed, in a sense, individual, differences are too great,
make for a bewildering variety of such figures. But the century did have its
own originality, molding some of these figures from the past into shapes
never seen before. We may sample some of these briefly.

Two we may take from the sphere of the mind — or, in sociological terms,
from the intellectual classes. This is the great century of the romantic hero,
who turns out on examination to be almost as complex as that Protean "ism"
romanticism itself. He may be the lonely Stoic aristocrat — de Vigny; the in-
effably sensitive loving soul, a St. Francis seen through the secular distortions
of the Enlightenment — Shelley; the far-from-lonely and not very aristocratic
aristocrat, laughing ironically through ironic tears and always very visibly —
Byron; the man of letters, man of the world, man of affairs who has lived all
life, all lives — Goethe, Hugo (the English appear to have refused to have
produced such). Even in its more vulgar forms the ideal has range and
variety. Perhaps its central form is the Bohemian artist, upholding nature
against the unnatural Philistines, merrily, tearfully starving in his chilly

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The Nineteenth Century

garret, but still warming his Mimi's cold little hand. But there is also the
excessive individual, the super-something, who was a people's hero long
before Nietzsche fooled the high-brows into thinking his Superman was one
of them; there is the explorer, the record breaker, the lay saint of social
service, nursing, and many more.

For the historian of morals, the most obvious fact about the romantic
ideal in all its phases is that it sets up the rebel, the man who will not take
the world at all as he finds it, and who usually will not even trouble to notice
what this world is like. The romantic is the seeker, the man who, in the fine
simple words of the most romantic of romanticists, Nietzsche, wants etwas
mehr — something more.26 He is often not very critical in his choice of "more."
And he is a good child of the Western struggle for distinction; he wants the
prize, wants to be noticed. We have met him often before in these pages, in
cultures by no means usually called romantic. What distinguishes him in the
nineteenth century is the amazing variety of his activities, which, as we shall
shortly see, include many the ancients would have thought hopelessly banau-
sic, and some the Christians think immoral- As an ideal, however, even the
excessively active romantic ideal of the perpetual rebel and seeker had for the
many its pleasantly quieting side of vicarious enjoyment. The moralist of the
school known in the United States as the new conservatives — Edmund Burke
gives them their start — holds that men need curbs, not spurs, calming, not
exciting, and that our cultural inheritance from the romantic movement is a
dangerous excess of spurring for a beast already galloping off wildly. There
is here one of the innumerable unsolved problems we have encountered in
this study. Is the immense body of Western art, good and bad, that we may
call, with no intent save a classifier's, "erotic," a stimulant, or a sedative, or
merely a surrogate? The search for a few concrete instances — Madame Bo-
vary, Tristan und Isolde, a more-than-nude of Boucher's right on down to the
latest American novelist attempting to be a clinician — is enough to indicate
that the answer must be all three at least, and more, the mixture varying
greatly with time, place, and person. I incline to believe that for the Vic-
torians, at least, the net effect of the romantic ideal was to a great extent
consoling, quieting, even a kind of discipline, something to keep them from
actual adultery, lawlessness, and other interesting sins.

Yet the conservatives may in the long run be right. The mutually rein-

26 Nietzsche said this, naturally not without irony, of the German people — wz>
Deutschen wollen etwas von uns, was man von uns noch nicht wolte — wir wollen etwas
mehr, The Will to Power, p. 108.

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forcing ideals of romantic individualism and romantic love, old as the trouba-
dours, the great Western tradition of the prize contest, the agon, reach down
at last in the nineteenth-century West to the millions. If even a few of the
millions really attempt to translate these ideals into action, our gloomiest
prophets may well be right. All for love or the world well lost may do for
Anthony and Cleopatra (though only on the stage) ; for Jack and Jill, ro-
mantic love — unless it gets worn out soon in the daily rubbing of the world
— will end, not in high tragedy, but in the divorce court, or in some other un-
pleasantness, from which no one gets catharsis. We of the twentieth century
have certainly inherited from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries an
unsolved problem: how to put up with millions of would-be heroes and
heroines.

A second moral ideal taken from the work of the intellectual classes
was no doubt often assimilated to the ideal of the romantic artist, but not
always; and it has a somewhat different afterlife in our time. This is the
ideal of the hero as scientist, which can, not unfairly, be put impersonally as
the ideal of Natural Science. This ideal is a direct descendant of the ideals
of the Enlightenment, and must be considered as part of the effort to create
a new cosmology as independent as possible of traditional Christianity. But
with the nineteenth century it focuses more closely than in the eighteenth
on the natural scientist, as contrasted with the philosophe, a process indicated
by the substitution of the word "science" for the older "natural philosophy."
As a folk figure, the scientist grows in stature all through the century, and
has not diminished in our century. We must return to him and his Science.

Outside the intellectual classes, the nineteenth century found a hero
where he had not been found before, though the way had been prepared for
him by previous centuries. This is the hero as the practical man in fields of
activity not those of statesman or soldier. I phrase this last awkwardly and
deliberately, and do not say the hero as businessman. In spite of what many
contemporary American liberals believe, the many have never looked upon
business as a heroic activity, nor have they made the businessman a hero.
What has happened is that in modern times the agon has been extended to
many activities once thought beneath it, and those successful in certain
specific phases of economic activity have attained honor and esteem, or envy
and admiration, have helped by their lives to set up new moral patterns of
the ideal. The nineteenth century is so obviously in this respect a seedbed for
our own century that I shall here but note some of the seeds that sprouted
then.

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The Nineteenth Century

The most striking is the ideal of the "self-made man," nicely embodied
in the work of the Victorian Samuel Smiles, nicely exaggerated in good
American fashion by Horatio Alger. A great deal of Calvinism, at least of
Calvinism a la Max Weber, gets woven into the ideal, which survives vigor-
ously in our contemporary America long after the intellectuals have pro-
nounced it dead. A great deal of Victorian belief in progress through free
competition, in democracy as essentially the career open to talents, as well
as a great deal of the essential belief of the Enlightenment, the romantic doc-
trine that Nature doesn't really approve of any system and certainly not of
established social hierarchies, will be found in this self-made man. Another
seed sprouts in the United States more clearly than elsewhere, though it can
be found in Balzac and in real life as well; and it is full-grown in the familiar
Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century. This is the unscrupulous great
entrepreneur, the manipulator of finance, rich and rich-living, James Fisk,
Jay Gould, and their slightly more decorous European counterparts. These
men are not moral ideals, any more than Robin Hood or Captain MacHeath,
but they are envied and even admired, and they help make up the strange
gallery of Western heroes. They remind us once more that our great Christian
tradition has always made the Devil interesting.

Finally, and as merely one sample of a particular national form of the
moral ideal, we may consider briefly that familiar American figure the
Pioneer — or, since he often appears in more special shapes, the hunter,
trapper, mountain man, scout, prospector, miner, cowboy, herder, and very
first — but only the very first — farmer. There is a whole folklore, a whole
tangle of something only a cultural anthropologist could begin to disen-
tangle, that has grown up around the American frontier; there is — the al-
ready old-fashioned and somewhat disapproved word has to be used — a
fascinating myth of the American frontier, the West. Bernard De Voto has
taken the myth of the frontier apart, lovingly, skeptically, and with a fine
indignation for those who have in our time sought to make it an exhibition,
a piece of advertising, synthetically folkish — and foolish.27 I do not dare
engage us in this subject here. We all know the virtues the frontier taught —
or imposed: self-reliance, ingenuity, distrust of established authority, dislike
of all but the democratic snobberies, refusal to accept the conventionalities

27 See especially his "The Anxious West," Harper's Magazine, December 1946 (CXCII),
pp. 481-491. Note that De Voto, who was no man to use concepts just because they are
fashionable among intellectuals, could not avoid that word "myth.'* I'm afraid none of
us can.

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of law, order, and hereditary rank, the masculine tradition of egalitarianism
which, nevertheless, knew well that all men are not equals with the six-shooter
or at poker. We all know that the virtues of the frontier are not by any means
the virtues of an old, established, complicated society, such as that of present-
day San Francisco, Denver, Reno — or even of Monida, Montana. But they
survive, and not only as myths, nor perhaps only as examples of cultural
lag. Franklin D. Roosevelt's favorite song was "Home on the Range."

V

We come with the nineteenth century full into statistical riches. And yet for
the historian of morals who would like to be able to make sociological gen-
eralizations about the actual conduct of masses of men and women, the
statistics are still by no means enough. Especially for the ordinary private
vices — sex once more will stand well enough for the lot — they remain inade-
quate. There are, for instance, statistics of illegitimacy. But how many cases
get well covered up? And, of course, illegitimate births are no measure at
all of deviations from strict Christian monogamous marriage. There are
statistics of all sorts of "sexual offenses," where these are formal crimes.
But whether or not they are crimes depends on the country concerned; there
are variations as between, say, Scotland and Sicily, Massachusetts and So-
nora. There are variations in accuracy of reporting, in the statistics themselves.
But we may come to the now-classic example, the Kinsey reports. Who can
be sure how true the replies of the persons interviewed, of just how much
allowance should be made for what the historian — especially the historian of
art and letters — knows is the firm Western tradition of honoring sexual
prowess?

We are back at the rough generalizations which are all that is possible.
The Victorian moral ideal was premarital chastity for both partners, with
some lessening of the rigors for the male, and complete fidelity for both
partners after marriage; and, in the strictness of the ideal, no divorce. There
were the usual and expected variations by country within the West, and the
usual attenuations and permitted but not encouraged lapses, notably for the
males. But even in France, Anglo-Saxons should be reminded, the code was
basic Christian monogamy; the exceptions were most interesting, and without
them there would be few novels or plays; but this, as I have just pointed out,
is the traditional role of Satan. As for sexual deviations, they were all, from
simple masturbation to the worst a Sade could devise, morally wrong.

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The Nineteenth Century

And actual conduct? Surely nothing that had been done before in this
field lacked imitators in the nineteenth century. I think it extremely likely
that on the whole there was, in the nineteenth-century West at least, less
sexual promiscuity of all sorts, less deviation from the moral code in this
respect than in the immediate previous centuries, the usual difference of a
few percentage points. For one thing, the lives of most Westerners of the
middle and upper classes were more closely surveyed in this century of
publicity, police, family discipline. Middle-class standards of propriety,
which in England reached as high as the throne, had a far greater influence
on the upper classes than most of us, victims of cliches, will admit. There was
no great and conspicuous group in the West that could quite equal some of
the famous loose-living groups of the past, imperial Roman, Renaissance,
Restoration. There was indeed much loose living in the nineteenth century,
many centers of vice, attractive and unattractive, from one end of the Western
world to another. But much that in earlier centuries could be public had in
the nineteenth century to be hidden; and if only because hiding is always a
burden, even if sometimes an added excitement, one can conclude that what
the undeniable refinement and strictness of manners did set up as external
standards were not wholly flouted in private. In fact, the generation of the
early twentieth century used to reproach the Victorians with having repressed
rhomme moyen sensuel et sexuel too successfully. I think it more likely that
this reproach is partly true than that the Victorians were all complete hypo-
crites, symbolically destroying at night, like Penelope, all they had built up
in the day — though the anti- Victorians of the early twentieth century were
fond of maintaining that the Victorians had both suppressed their drives in
public and in words and had shamelessly and hypocritically let them loose in
private and in deeds.

The debunkers of the era of Mencken loved to discover the seamy side of
Victorian life, a discovery that certainly required no great ingenuity or pa-
tience in research. Of course there were prostitutes in Victorian London;
there are always prostitutes in Megalopolis, whether it is called Alexandria or
Rome or New York or even Moscow. But here is a good debunker at work:

Taine thought there were about 50,000 harlots in London in 1870. . . . Colqu-
houn, a magistrate of the City, estimated there were 50,000 prostitutes as early as
1796. The estimates for 1840 ran as high as 80,000. Sometimes the figures were
much lower. For example, the London Metropolitan police thought there were
2,071 well-dressed prostitutes in brothels in 1841, only 921 in 1857; 19,994 well-
dressed prostitutes walking the streets in 1841, 2,616 in the latter year; while the

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A History of Western Morals

number of harlots "infesting low neighborhoods" went down from 5,344 to
5,063 in this same period.28

At any rate, what in the last chapter we discerned as definite and even,
in terms of public health and the like, statistically measurable improvements
in conditions of human lif e surely of concern to the moralist continued in the
nineteenth century at a greater rate than in the eighteenth. Some good psy-
chological measure of how far Westerners had come, hi the more favored parts
of Europe and the New World, to expect good public order, freedom of travel,
safety, relative cleanliness, the many decencies of a free and tolerant world —
or, negatively and importantly, absence of the perpetual and overriding vio-
lence of life in earlier Western centuries — is afforded by the well-known fact
that most of us in 1914 really did feel that what has become in our current
vocabulary World War I was not possible; we were honestly surprised by
the outbreak.29

In spite of the dissenters, to whom we shall come in a moment, the nine-
teenth century was the great century of reform, enacted in legislative bodies
after long and ardent campaigns, thoroughly in the spirit of the Enlighten-
ment. Ye shall make the law, and the law shall make you free — and good.
It was the victory of those who took the side of planning, regulation, good
shepherding as against those who believed that freedom meant philosophical
anarchy. The range of this regulation had already begun to horrify an old-
school liberal like Spencer well before his death in 1903. We are all familiar
enough with it, from police measures against vice to complex social-security
legislation of the kind the English love to joke about as protection "from
womb to tomb." In some senses, its culmination in the United States, at least
as far as direct and large-scale attempts at moral reform of private lives go,
was, of course, the famous Eighteenth Amendment. But the failure of this
attempt to eliminate entirely one of man's oldest temptations, the obvious
persistence of much else, gambling, prostitution, crimes of all sorts, the steady
chorus, particularly in the United States, of publicists' complaints about
juvenile delinquency, sensual self-indulgence, general moral letdown, should
not blind us to the fact that the nineteenth century did achieve in human con-
duct some of the reforms its leaders sought — and that in many ways these
reforms have endured.

28 Leo Markun, Mrs. Grundy, p. 268. My own conclusion from these figures is that
figures are not much use in a history of morals — and also that the term "prostitute"
presents certain semantic difficulties.

29 1 do not mean to deny the tensions, the "sword of Damocles," especially of the
decade 1904-1914. Still, Norman Angell's The Great Illusion (New York, Putnam,
1910), remains symptomatic.

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The Nineteenth Century

Through most of the West, outright physical cruelty to men and animals
was vastily lessened in the two centuries from 1700 to 1900; the notion that
most pain, especially the pain of disease, is natural and inevitable, and even,
in some Christian thinking, good, had almost wholly vanished by 1900.
Refinement of manners had spread far down in the social scale, to the point
where the conventional vices were at least concealed, or even, as seems to be
probable, statistically somewhat diminished. Public order in most of the West
had been greatly improved. Public morality had at least reached a point where
such affairs as the Credit Mobilier in the United States, the Panama Canal
affair in France, the Marconi affair in England, were outright scandals, occa-
sions for legal prosecutions, not, as they would have been in the era of Wai-
pole, accepted practice, condemned only in satire. The effort to bring heaven
to earth had apparently succeeded at least in diminishing some of the more
hellish aspects of life on earth.

VI

The moral and intellectual history of the nineteenth century is by no means
summarized as a compromise between the immediate Utopia of a Condorcet
and the spotted reality of human nature. The major line of development, the
orthodoxy of the new faith in progress, happiness here on earth, bigger and
better all around, is the one I have called the Victorian compromise, and
which I have outlined briefly on previous pages. But the orthodoxy was chal-
lenged on many fronts. First, there were those who wanted to widen the break
with a Christian past and develop ever more radically the religion of the En-
lightenment with its belief in the natural goodness of man; second, there were
those who sought to preserve the essential pessimism of traditional Christian-
ity as to human nature and human perfectability here on earth; third, there
were those who repudiated both Christian and Enlightened world views and
sought to develop a non-Christian, even anti-Christian, pessimistic outlook
on human nature, on democracy, on progress. Like all such classifications of
human attitudes, this one is subject to all sorts of variations, exceptions, con-
tradictions; there is possible a paradoxical membership in all three classes
at once. I note this fact dutifully, and pass on.

First, those who push beyond Enlightened orthodoxy, the heretics, are
indeed many and varied. The historian of political ideas or of economics can
find a crude blanket word here: "socialism." Most "socialist" and related
systems find that the nationalist-democratic orthodoxy of the Victorian
compromise fails to translate "liberty, equality, and fraternity" into reality

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A History of Western Morals

because it does not really believe in fraternity, gives to equality the inade-
quate— and, in fact, incompletely realized — meaning of political equality
in the vote, legal equality before the law, and means by liberty the Darwinian
free-for-all. The historian of morals will content himself with a simpler for-
mula: Socialism and its allies are all efforts to preserve, even to increase,
the extreme, the violent, the Utopian effort of the Enlightenment to bring
heaven to earth, to end moral evil and achieve moral good, here, now,
completely. The socialists and the other radicals are the protestants of the
new faith in the principles of 1776 and 1789, principles tarnished, com-
promised, in the eyes of these protestants by the new Rome of nationalist
popular governments or semidemocracies, of societies without the funda-
mental equality of the new religion — equality of income, "material" equality.

Like the Protestants of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the social-
ists show a marked tendency toward sectarianism. Out of Marx's life and
work there develops as the nineteenth century comes to an end what begins
to look like a church, not merely a sect. But the development of social
democracy and communism must await our next chapter. Here we may be
concerned all too briefly with what for the "behavioral scientist" is one of
the fascinating pages of recent history, the many attempts, some of them
of Christian rather than of Enlightenment inspiration, to achieve in the "con-
sociate family," the small experimental community, that complete reform of
human conduct the eighteenth century had clearly not achieved in the great
society. What the Marxists often contemptuously dismiss as "Utopian so-
cialism" is surely one of the most important beginnings in Western moral his-
tory. These communities were the first experiments in what we may call
"social or cultural engineering."

They were not, the historian is bound to note, entirely new. Even in
ancient times, groups of men — sometimes, even, of men and women — had
left their parent societies, not just as colonists expanding, but with intent
to flee what was in their minds a bad or at least defective society and found
a better one. From the Jewish Essenes, the Greek Pythagoreans, and on
through the many Christian monastic movements, men had sought to live in
small groups a better life than they thought possible for the many in the great
society. Plato's Republic is a planned society, at least on paper. Yet the com-
munistic experiments of the nineteenth century were new in many ways, more
particularly in the way suggested by the very term "cultural engineering."
The Jesuits in Paraguay had accomplished remarkable feats of such engi-
neering with the Guaranf Indians. Some of these consociate families were ef-

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The Nineteenth Century

forts to flee rather than reform the world; but even such groups as the Mor-
mons, who had an "ideology" not at first sight obviously related to that of
the Enlightenment, were quite clearly making social experiments.

Of them all, those of older and more direct Christian inspiration lasted
longest and fared best; but Shakers, Amana, Amish, Hutterites, and suchlike
groups are fossil remnants of the great sectarian drive of the late Reformation,
less compromised with the world than groups like the Quakers, who stayed in
the great society. These small and relatively isolated religious groups were dis-
ciplined into simplicity, living evidence, if that were needed, that closely knit,
tradition-directed, small groups, their members' conduct open to their own
community supervision, their morals defined and sanctioned by supernatural
authority, their minds closed to what we may loosely call "major innovating
ideas," at least in morals and politics, can survive very well in a great society
that tolerates them. They did not, in nineteenth-century America, much af-
fect that great society.

All the groups directly inspired by the Enlightenment, such as the Fourier-
ist, Owenite, and Icarian, or by the Enlightenment with Christian gloss, like
the Oneida community, were, as consociate families, as efforts to surpass the
conventional democratic society around them, dismal but often fascinating
failures. There can be no one reason for that failure, no one overmastering
defect of the kind the simplifiers seek; their members were not all eggheads,
not even at Brook Farm; they were not all victims of persecution by their
conventional neighbors; they were not all lazy, maladjusted, incompetent;
they did not all aim at standards of conduct impossibly lofty, even for Chris-
tians; they were not all seduced away from consociate living by their success
in producing marketable goods; they did not all break down under the strain,
so hard for good Americans to bear, of being different. Certainly all these
factors bore a part in the failure of some of these communities. But perhaps
the success of the great society in providing many of the comforts, the satis-
factions, the measurable "progress" these secular groups sought has the
largest part of all to play in their disruption.30

As for the second current, few major organized Christian churches were
able in the nineteenth century to maintain intact the traditional Christian
attitude toward nature and human nature. All had to go part way in com-
promise with what the Enlightenment had brought to a head. Even the so-
so On these "consociate families," see Mark Holloway, Heavens on Earth: Utopian
Communities in America, 1680-1880, London, Turnstile Press, 1951, with a good guide
to further reading, pp. 232-234.

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A History of Western Morals

called Catholic reaction to the French Revolution, though it produced in
Joseph de Maistre a writer who did seek to undo the work of the eighteenth
century, gave way as the nineteenth century went on to mild modernism, to
Christian socialism, to all sorts of compromises with the facts of the new
democratic society. I do not wish to be misunderstood here. I am not assert-
ing that nineteenth-century Christian leaders abandoned all their positions,
sold out to the new world of the improved flesh. On the contrary, the great
majority of the Christian churches maintained the reality of the supranatural,
the fallen nature of man, the minimal Christian moral puritanism of the
"civil war in the breast." Most Westerners were Christians of one kind or
another, Christians enough not to expect heaven on earth at once, for all, or
even for themselves. Still, leaders and led alike among Christians in the nine-
teenth century seem either to have gone at least halfway toward the new
world view of nationalist democracy or else to have been fighting a defensive
battle, to have been "reactionary," in the nineteenth century a deadly term
indeed.

The third current that swung against the optimistic assumptions of the
Enlightenment was one that reaches full development in practice and in ideas
only in the twentieth century; it is a current of many eddies and branches,
many by no means new. It bears no clear name generally accepted. I thmV
it can best be understood as centering on a fundamental repudiation of the
eighteenth-century belief in the natural inborn ability of all men to reason
clearly and well, as the mathematician or the natural scientist reasons; or,
put metaphysically instead of psychologically, it repudiates the eighteenth-
century belief that the universe is so organized that all "rational" men can
agree in a description and evaluation in whole and in part of that organiza-
tion. It is often, in an obvious sense, pessimistic about man or nature or both,
but this pessimism has overtones very different from that of Christianity. This
current is usually at least as hostile to Christianity as was the Enlightenment.
I shall call this current, with much regret that I must use a negative and in
many ways unsatisfactory term, "antirationalism."31

31 Semantic accuracy is difficult here. The essential thing to note is that this current of
thought and feeling tends to repudiate both Christian and Enlightened concepts of an
order in the universe which is 1) at bottom friendly to men, and 2) understandable by,
or at least somehow communicable to, men. But it is not really skeptical about the
existence of such an order; it knows there is no such order, knows the universe is
hostile to man. I may add that I personally find the concept of "Christian existentialism"
— as far as I can understand it — a difficult paradox of the emotions, or, in common-
sense terms, an impossibility.

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The Nineteenth Century

In its first fashionable form, antirationalism appears as nineteenth-cen-
tury romanticism. Now romanticism is many things, but in this context it is
an assertation of the primacy of feeling over thought, of the unfinished, un-
ending, infinite over the finished, the completed, of the unknown over the
known. The romantic will take over from the eighteenth century the concept
of process, even that of Progress, but he will insist that it is not a process
that can be planned, thought out, or even, in the sense the word has for the
mechanist, invented. It is a process that can be guided, perhaps, by human
will, but only by that will itself guided by intuition, instinct, the hunch that
will not be put into words, and certainly not into logic. The immediate moral
effect of romanticism as a fashion was no more than a reinforcement of that
phase of the Victorian compromise that sought vicarious satisfaction in art
and literature, that tried to balance nature and society, dreams and reality.
Quite early — in German culture, in the eighteenth century — the romantic in-
sistence on the variation, the uniqueness, the organic quality of givenness that
made each nation a thing in itself came as a strong reinforcement to national-
ism. But romanticism itself was hardly an explosive. It could reconcile the
romantic with his lot, give him the satisfaction of knowing that he was more
sensitive, more unhappy, more misunderstood, than the vulgar satisfied
philistine. It made him sure that the eighteenth-century philosophes were a
shallow lot, but it did not drive him to conduct markedly out of the Western
tradition. This is true even when as a romantic artist or art lover he became
a Bohemian rebel, an alienated intellectual. Even then, he had no desire to
blow things up; that desire was to come in the next century, when antira-
tionalism had become anti-intellectualism.

In retrospect, however, it is clear that at least for the intellectual classes
who had been most markedly affected by the Enlightenment itself all these
confused nineteenth-century currents of thought that questioned or pushed
further the world view of the Enlightenment had by the end of the century
begun to have a cumulative effect. The famous decade of the nineties was
among the intellectuals a decade of doubt, wit, sophistication, even, in what
must seem to us a mild way, despair, a fit prologue for the twentieth cen-
tury. The Victorian synthesis, the genteel tradition, was beginning to break
up. The intellectuals were bracing themselves to face the facts of life once
more. But all this is no more than a prelude to our own times. What is more
important for the understanding of the direct tradition of the Enlightenment
— the tradition we like to think as the true democratic one, the tradition that
edges over clearly on the side of freedom for the individual to go his own

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A History of Western Morals

common-sense way — is the growth of serious doubts among the Enlighten*
as to whether the common man, free, and free in particular from the fear «
punishment in an afterlife, free from the "irrational*' but real sanctions tl
traditional religion had given to the necessary public and private virtue
would actually conduct himself suitably.

These doubts no longer took, in the nineteenth century, quite the simp
form of the eighteenth-century debate as to whether an atheistic comma
people could be a satisfactorily moral people, though essentially the problei
is closely related to that old one. In the work of a now nearly forgotten mora
ist, Benjamin Kidd, who in his own day saw his Social Evolution (1894)
best seller, the problem is, rather: Now that most men clearly believe i
Progress and Evolution, now that their minds are at least in part swept clea
of the old static world view, will they in fact make the sacrifices, the absten
tions from complete self-indulgence, the savings, necessary to just this proc
ess of social evolution we call "Progress"? Or will they not in effect say t<
themselves: We can enjoy the fruits of our labor only here and now, sinc<
there is no afterlife, since we are in no useful sense immortal as individuals
so let us do so; in a good short cliche, after us the deluge. Kidd was greatb
worried over this possibility, and as a simple-minded accepter of the ration-
alist belief that men are motivated by clear economic self-interest, he coulc
see no reason why John Jones should work hard, save money, pay taxes, anc
in general act as a responsible citizen, unless he could somehow be induced
to believe that such conduct would pay off. He therefore worked out the out-
lines of a fine purposeful religion of humanity, in which the individual would
be motivated to the proper moral conduct by a worship of the future, a pale
god he called "projected efficiency."32

We know now — or should know — that John Jones in his millions, and in
particular the John Jones of the better neighborhoods, is in no danger of
living up to the maxim "after us the deluge." The more extreme of Keynesian
economists in our times have expressed regrets that poor John is in fact such

32 There were, of course, many attempts in the nineteenth century to make the religion
of the Enlightenment into a somewhat better organized church, above all, one better
equipped with a cosmology and a dependent moral code than the loosely organized
democratic society and the nation-state, buttressed by surviving Christianity, afforded.
Comte's positivist religion is the most famous, and indeed survives today as a very
small and ineffective sect. For a sympathetic but not quite worshipful treatment of
Comte see F S. Marvin, Comte, London, Chapman and Hall, 1936. For true wor-
ship, see Jane M. Style, August Comte, Thinker and Lover, London, Kegan Paul,
Trench, Trubner, 1928.

370

The Nineteenth Century

a cautious, saving, hard-working fellow.33 It is fairly clear that the fear of
hell-fire does not in our time really get into the emotions of a very large num-
ber of individuals who nonetheless conduct themselves reasonably well. The
focus, the conditions, of our moral problems and our thinking about them
have changed greatly with the twentieth century. The generation that has
grown up in the great vogue of psychology, which is to our century what
physics was to the eighteenth century and biology to the nineteenth, has got
used to the notion that men, for good or for evil, are not calculating ration-
alists. But there is enough of the old eighteenth century alive in us so that a
great many intellectuals still wish they were, and still hope they soon will be.

33 The best economists continue, of course, in spite of the claim of some of them to be
nothing but scientists, to be good moralists. As such, they by no means advocate a
complete trans valuation of our traditional values. If they rarely take the ant ("go to
the ant, thou sluggard") as their moral symbol, they do not want us to be butterflies,
or grasshoppers, or insects of any sort. Note the sound moral basis — even in conven-
tional senses — of the deservedly successful recent book by J. K. Galbraith, The
Affluent Society, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1958.

371

The Twentieth Century

WE CANNOT SEE OURSELVES as others will see us. It is one of the marks of
our own time that there are probably more people than usual in Western cul-
ture since the hope-fear of the Second Coming of Christ really faded for most
men, who hold that we shall not be seen at all, our history having ended,
after our prolonged whimpers, with a grand bang. We do indeed label our
own times quite freely and with self-conscious scorn the Age of Anxiety, the
Aspirin Age, the Age of Confusion, the Age of Tranquilizers, and much more
of the like; and we underline such labels by thinking — if we think at all about
such matters — of the quite recent past as a time of faith, optimism, security,
the Age of Reason, the Century of Hope, the Victorian Age. I do not seek to
make light of our present difficulties; but here I shall risk a somewhat differ-
ent emphasis, and shall even go so far as to suggest that future historians — I
am confident there will be such — will see us as essentially part of a "period"
continuous with the last two centuries, as grandchildren of the Enlightenment,
as wrestlers with problems set us by the last two centuries.

We have added little save our fears to the mixture; and it is indeed a
mixture. There are those — I am writing solely of the West — who still think
the world is flat, and those who think the world is an illusion. There are
those who hold that homosexual intercouse is a sin, which will be punished —
unless duly and ritually repented — by an eternity of hell, those who think it
an unfortunate abnormality, and those who think it nobody's business but
the participants'. In this matter of homosexuality there are those who make
all sorts of variant diagnoses, recommend all sorts of variant action, or

372

The Twentieth Century

none at all, who really hold a greatly varied set of moral sentiments in the
matter. Denis de Rougemont has written:

For all, the whole lot of us, lead our lives of civilized people quite without sus-
pecting that those lives are being led amid a strictly insensate confusion of re-
ligions never completely dead, and seldom altogether understood and practised;
of moral teachings which once upon a time were mutually exclusive but now are
superimposed upon one another; or else combined in the background of our ele-
mentary behaviour; of unsuspected complexes which, because unsuspected, are the
more active; and of instincts inherited less from some animal nature than from
customs entirely forgotten, customs which have turned into mental furrows or
scars, that are unconscious, and, on that account, easily confused with instinct.1

This quotation can do more for us than point up what a moment's re-
flection should drive home to everyone, the fact that ours is a world of great
multanimity, a world of which it can perhaps be said that almost no general
statement or "proposition" can be made and get complete, unanimous ac-
ceptance— not even, as conventional educated Americans need to be warned,
a statement labeled as "scientific truth." M. de Rougemont's words, few as
they are, bear the mark of two phases of the intellectual life of the twentieth
century rooted in the past but characteristic of the turn our century has taken,
at least among the intellectual classes. These are pessimism about man's fate,
and awareness of the relatively small part rationality plays in men's lives.
We cannot here attempt an analysis either of contemporary pessimism — it
sometimes goes so far as a pervasive sense of doom — or of what, for want of
a better name, must be called contemporary anti-intellectualism.2

Both attitudes are, of course, responses to what two centuries of experi-
ence have done to the dream, the ideal, of the eighteenth-century Enlighten-
ment, to the hope of a heaven on earth. Let me repeat: a great number of
men had by 1789 come to believe, with Condorcet, that — I put this mildly
and cautiously — at the very least a large proportion of what most men most
of the time thinV and feel as evil, wars, physical suffering, poverty, frustra-
tions, above all, frustrations clearly assignable to human willing and human
power, would cease to be. But the matter deserves to be put more sharply, in
no mere loose comparison, but in terms of lasting human sentiments: the
true believers in the religion of progress and humanity at the end of the
eighteenth century, like the Christians of the first few generations, were mil-
lenarians who believed there would be an immediate and total alteration of

1 Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, p. 115.

2 1 refer once more to my Ideas and Men, Chapter XIV, and the books therein sug-
gested for supplementary reading.

575

A History of Western Morals

man's state. For them, the French Revolution of 1789 was a true millennial
event — a First Coming of Reason. We and our nineteenth-century predeces-
sors have been struggling with the task of adapting the new faith to an old
world that would not totally alter, would not, in fact, alter anything like
enough to satisfy any dreamer.

But we must not expect our history to follow in detail in any useful sense
the history of the first three Christian centuries. To make an analogy on an
analogy: no clinician would expect a complicated illness to take an identically
or even necessarily very closely detailed course in two quite different in-
dividuals. He would try to use a finished case to help him understand a cur-
rent case, but he would be at least as alert to note differences as to note
similarities,3 The differences between the first three Christian centuries and
the first three — or two and a half— Enlightened centuries seem already
marked. Our present-day Christianity seems more persistent under Enlight-
ened attack, above all, more adaptable, than was paganism under Christian
attack. The new faith of the Enlightenment is related, subtly and in complex
ways not understood of the many, or indeed of the few, to a way of using
the human mind relatively little developed in the Greco-Roman culture,
that of natural science. The new faith is related to a political organization,
the modern nation-state, that did not exist in the One [Western] World of
the Roman Empire, and that, in spite of the Toynbees and other prophets of
doom, is still a very sturdy political organization. To have been even approxi-
mately parallel in this respect, Christianity would have had to appear during
the great balance-of-power struggle among the superpowers after the death of
Alexander the Great, that is, three centuries or so earlier than in fact it did
appear. The new faith has an ethical code that makes material satisfactions in
themselves a good; or, to put it negatively, the new faith has no distrust of
the flesh as such, no anchorites who flee the world, no condemnation, at least
in its orthodox forms, for the world as such. The new faith has a melioristic,
even an idealistic, ethics, and makes a somewhat illogical recognition of what
in Christianity is minimal moral Puritanism; and in its orthodox form of
nationalist democracy it has made the kind of compromise with its ideals
that the rigorous, the pure Christian holds Christianity had made by the
time of Constantine, if not before. Yet the heresies of the new faith lack the
variety of early Christian heresies, even seem in the twentieth century to have

s My conscious mind tells me firmly that I do not mean that a religion, or a cosmology,
is a kind of disease; as a good child of my age, I cannot wholly disavow my uncon-
scious mind, which may mean just that, or worse.

374

The Twentieth Century

been incorporated into a single one, Marxism, which in its turn has made
extraordinary compromises with the nation-state. In short, the differences
between the total situation of early Christianity and the total situation of the
new faith in progress, democracy, material satisfactions, the natural goodness
and reasonableness of man, science culminating in cultural engineering — in
short, the faith of the Enlightenment — are very great indeed, so great that
no sensible person would attempt to predict the future of the new faith from
the past of the old.

One cannot, as I have insisted, even name the new faith, which has no
single name of its own, and no single church, and to many does not even seem
to be a religion. Democracy, which both the free world and the Communist
world claim as theirs, is perhaps the most current term for the new faith and
the new church. But in the free world Christianity and democracy have made
mutual adjustments, and the word "religion" is for most people reserved for
Christianity and other theisms, and for what the anthropologist calls reli-
gion. In the Communist world and among the anti-Christians in the free
world rebellion against Christian theism is so strong that the word "religion"
is for them an indecent word. It would be nice if we had another word that
would do the work of "religion," and tie together instances of human behavior
that the classifying intellect finds it useful to put together, not at the species
level, but at the genus level. But I know of no such useful word, and refuse
to coin one.

It may, however, be wise to avoid altogether the Toynbean pitfalls of
comparison between the Greco-Roman world and our own and simply put
the matter in terms of our modern history. In the eighteenth century an im-
portant number of human beings in the West came to take toward man's
fate here on earth an attitude only a few human beings had taken previously,
an attitude nowhere better summed up than in the words of one of the leaders
of those who took this new view: all men on earth have rights to "life, lib-
erty, and the pursuit of happiness." These rights were the more important
because Jefferson and many of his fellows were fairly sure that no one had
any other life anywhere save his own present one on this earth. They held
that these rights could be realized here on earth by reforms in political,
educational, economic, and social institutions, reforms men could agree on
if they were allowed the free use of a faculty hitherto cramped and perverted
in most men, the faculty of Reason, which has to be given an initial capital
letter. The more extreme of them held that the reforms must include a reform
ending forever the kind of institution known as "churches," which had in

575

A nisiory of Western Morals

their eyes been chiefly responsible for the cramping and perverting of Reason
in men; even the more moderate among them looked forward to a gradual
withering away of the Christian churches, or to their transformation into in-
stitutions of the kind Americans will recognize under the term "Unitarian."
Now I shall call this set of attitudes toward man's fate the "faith" of the
Enlightenment, thus dodging temporarily at least the word "religion," though
clinging through the word "faith" to what seems to me inescapable in man's
fate: for us all, both "seeing is believing" and "believing is seeing" are true
and necessary statements, but the latter usually prevails in a conflict. The
rationalism of the eighteenth century of course denied the second proposi-
tion, partly under the mistaken notion that the natural scientist denied it in
his practical life. I propose in this chapter to examine in very broad lines
what has happened to this faith in the West in the twentieth century, as I
have already done for some of the things that happened to it in the nineteenth
century.

ii

First of all, the continuities of the faith of the Enlightenment need emphasis,
if only because so many twentieth-century intellectuals, especially, but by no
means solely, in Europe, have bemoaned or cheered its extinction. It is very
much alive, and growing as faiths grow, in the midst of setbacks, quarrels,
and adaptations to changing conditions. The twentieth century, as we all
know, confronted the new faith with two general wars separated by a great
world-wide depression, and with an ever-present threat of a third general
war to be fought with weapons that many experts believed were powerful
enough to destroy the human race, or, at the very least, to make what we call
"civilization" impossible after the apocalyptic horrors of this general war.
Nearly two centuries after Condorcet, his "tenth epoch" to come could, now
that it has come, be made to look even worse than the "ninth epoch" he be-
lieved was ending in his time. No one in his senses would call the world in the
1950's heaven on earth, Utopia, the realized promise of the Enlightenment;
few intellectuals at least, even in the United States, would be willing to call it
morally a clearly better world than that of 1750.

And yet in some ways, if he could analyze parts instead of facing the
whole, or the defective parts, that would probably first strike his philosophe's
mind, a Condorcet brought back to earth would not be altogether disap-
pointed. With respect to what had been achieved by "Reason," as he would

576

The Twentieth Century

call it, working through science and technology to increase human ability to
get some of the things men want through command over natural resources,
Condorcet would surely find his greatest hopes fantastically exceeded. This
hardly needed saying, but let us say it. I incline to the belief that he would
be impressed with what "Reason" has achieved even in the fields of social
or behavioral science. He would, of course, be shocked at the evidences that
superstition, the fanaticism called "Christianity" had not been wholly elim-
inated; but he would meet many kindred souls well above such superstition,
would perhaps recognize that for the faith of the Enlightenment, also, the
blood of the martyrs — of which he was one — has been the seed of the church.
He would find millions who believe that they can and should be happy here
on earth, that happiness consists, in important part, at least, in the satisfac-
tion of what common sense has long regarded as normal or natural human
wants for good food, good shelter, good sex life, good family life, good work,
good amusements, good self-esteem, that they and their children and their
children's children will get increasing increments, so to speak, of such hap-
piness, that this process is Progress, world without end, and a good thing, an
end, a purpose, an eschatology.4

Concretely, some of what I have noted above, with no ironic intent, has
been achieved. In many parts of the West in the 1950's — not by any means
solely in the United States — more people have more material satisfactions
than ever before. For many, many people the simple, clear, indubitable forms
of actual physical suffering which, as I have insisted throughout this book,
have been endemic in all Western history — the violence and uncertainty of
life men long took as simply given — have been greatly reduced. And as part
of this reduction there has come the whole set of changes in our moral at-
titude I have summed up as "humanitarian." Actual cruelty and, more im-
portant, indifference to suffering felt unavoidable have indeed greatly dimin-
ished in the last few centuries. Belsen and Hiroshima, the threat of the
H-bomb, are real enough, and as symbols must stand for grave and con-
tinuing moral dangers. But they do not make a paradox; we have not grown
crueler as we have grown more secure from violence and sudden death in
the daily round of ordinary life. We have not been able to eliminate the moral
evils of war and race conflict, but the new faith, like Christianity, does con-
sider these as evil, an evil to be resisted, destroyed.

4 On the strength of these beliefs in the United States, see C. A. Chambers, "The Be-
lief in Progress in Twentieth Century America," Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol.
XIX, April 1958, pp. 197-224.

577

A History of Western Morals

That whole aspect of the new faith summed up by the word "democ-
racy"— it is, of course, an aspect that is separable only in analysis from the
ethical and cosmological attitudes I have just discussed — is one of the con-
tinuities that link the twentieth with the eighteenth century. Here, too, one
can argue that twentieth-century opposition to what we Americans understand
by democracy is, save for a few intellectuals, rather heresy than denial of the
faith. Certainly the Communists continue to insist that theirs is the only real
democracy; and even the various fascist sects, though they insisted that our
parliamentary democracy is corrupt and decadent, though they were chary
about claiming themselves to be true democrats, nonetheless paid firm trib-
ute to one of the fundamentals of the new faith: the individual here on earth
should be happy, secure, well-off. Highest happiness is, indeed, in some of
these totalitarian theories the service of the state, self-sacrifice for the state.
But this concept, too, is not strange to the Western democracies, and is clear
already in Rousseau. And the relentless pressure from the many to translate
their right to happiness into material goods, consumer goods, is clear where-
ever the Western culture has penetrated — that is, throughout the world.

It is hardly necessary to dwell on the fact that nationalism is still very
much alive, that the nation-state is all over the West the nearest thing to a
church for the new faith. The normal Western way remains in this respect,
as in so many, a middle way. The extreme fascist position that the nation-
state, always in essence at war with other nation-states, should be for the
individual the whole of life, a Sparta of the soul, hardly was real even for
the most consecrated devotees. In this modern Western world, the paradox
of a comfortable Sparta, or of a self-denying devotion to the delights that
modern science and technology have made available, was too great for the
many. On the other hand, complete transcendence of the nation-state in some
form of world government or world federation, the actual concrete limitation
of national "independence" or "sovereignty" was still in mid-twentieth cen-
tury the aim of a relatively small high-minded minority everywhere. Pacifism,
conscientious objection, passive resistance of the sort associated with the
name of Gandhi, all such efforts to live down the long Western tradition
that makes the struggle for prize in the end a fight are still in the West the
views of the crank, views of a not very effective minority. Meanwhile, as
Western culture spreads around the world, nationalism in its characteristic
Western form spreads around the world. To most Americans, this spread
seems a good thing. American sympathy goes out to Arabs and Asians as it
once went out to Irish and Greeks and Poles struggling against their foreign

375

The Twentieth Century

masters; and not the least clear of the survivals of the optimism of the En-
lightenment among us is the belief that a self-conscious oppressed national
group, once it has become a free nation-state, will get along with other nation-
states in the concord Nature intended.

Most important of all, there survives, and at its strongest, no doubt, in
North America, the belief in the natural goodness and reasonableness of man.
This belief has certainly been qualified, chastened, stripped of its revolu-
tionary implications of immediate revolutionary perfectability of man. It has,
as we shall soon see, been very seriously challenged by many modern thinkers.
It was never held as an absolute by the man in the street, certainly not held
as a description of the way he and his neighbors conduct themselves. But it
does survive as a negative in a strong distrust of what I may crudely symbolize
as any form of the shepherd-sheep relation among human beings, including
that of the planner to those for whom the planning is done, and it survives as
a positive in the conviction that somehow or other out of long, free, com-
plete discussion there will result, even on the scale of the populous nation-
state, a "sense of the meeting," decisions, on the whole, wise, certainly the
best available.

Democracy — a fine, loose, accurate word here — has in the nation-state
its church, with, of course, its rituals, in happiness for all here on earth, its
eschatology, by now no longer chiliastic, and a most complicated and elabo-
rate network of approved ways of reaching its ethical ideal, the "sense of the
meeting." Much of this elaborate network it owes to the long past, and partic-
ularly to Christianity. To Christianity it owes the feeling for the individual
as an end, for the "dignity of man."5 To Christianity it owes the form its
moral awareness takes, the form I have called "minimal puritanism." Noth-
ing is more striking than the persistence through the last two centuries of
this feeling of conscience, moral responsibility, the civil war in the breast.
The Owen we took in Chapter XI as a sample of the logical extremist of the
Enlightenment (see p. 299), the Owen who carried the simple environmen-
talism of the age to the point of fixing on the inculcation of a sense of in-
dividual moral responsibility as the source of all evil has never been taken
seriously by many in the West. The complainers have seen this individual
sense of moral responsibility disappearing under the influence of belief in the
natural goodness of man, or belief in utilitarian ethics, or belief in progressive
education, or belief in Freudian psychology — or even belief in economic

5 1 see no need to apologize for this language as vague and woolly; it is very precise.

379

A History of Western Morals

detenninism. The man watcher can only note that under any and all modern
systems of belief in the impossibility of the individual's choosing between
good and evil, better or worse, and of belief in the irrationality of guilt
feelings, the individual goes on choosing between what he thinks is good and
evil, and goes on feeling guilty if he chooses what he thinks is evil.6

The individual in our society does not by any means agree with other
individuals completely as to what he thinks good and what he thinks evil.
Our modern Western democracy is, in fact, reconciled to, perhaps can be said
to rejoice in, sometimes and in some ways, a good deal of ethical relativism.
In practice, it has a strong instinct, or, what may be better, a habit, histori-
cally developed or "cultivated," for accepting variety. It has also, as a system
of regulating human relations, a good many ways of promoting uniformity. In
big broad lines, democracy, developing the healthy ambivalences of real life,
values both variety and uniformity, both liberty and equality. One has to live
in a given democratic society to know where it draws the line between these
two apparently antithetical aims. The bulk of recent critical literature finds
the achieved balance less than happy, and insists that modern democracy,
notably in its dominant American form, leans unduly toward the side of con-
formity, equality, leveling toward a dead, if materially fairly high, level.7

I do not greatly quarrel with this verdict, but I should like to point out
here that in practice so far democracy has meant no end to the various tradi-
tional Western ways of giving external emphasis to the "fact" that men are

6 Of course I cannot "prove" this assertion, but I do not think it is a mere obiter dic-
tum. Any alert observer of current events, any reader of the miscellany we call litera-
ture over the last few centuries would come to a similar conclusion. Note that I am
not discussing the relative prevalence of the Thrasymachan doctrine: the good, the just,
is for the individual what he can get away with. I shall try in the next chapter to come
to grips with the question of how far this moral "cynicism" (the popular name for it,
adequate enough, though not fan* to the original Greek Cynic school) does prevail at
different times and places. If I may briefly anticipate here, it clearly cannot prevail in
a simple, well-knit small society (early Rome, early Boston, or, with respect to the
ethics of the group, such a group as officers in the armed forces or physicians). On the
other hand, this "cynicism" is always present and often preached in any great, de-
veloped, complex civilized society, but is rarely if ever dominant. Really frantic "moral-
ists"— Mr. Sorokin will do as a sample — who hold that our entire "sensate" culture has
gone to the dogs morally seem to me simply not to register, not to see what's there, not
to be man watchers at aU.

7 Two examples, from very different points of view: David Riesman, The Lonely
Crowd, New York, Doubleday, 1955, and Eric von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Liberty versus
Equality, London, Holhs and Carter, 1952. Good reporters like F. L. Allen, The Big
Change (New York, Harper, 1952), and Max Lerner, America as Civilization (New
York, Simon & Schuster, 1958), are aware that ours is indeed a pluralistic society, full
of human variation; but both tend to emphasize the leveling of the last fifty years
which has made us all, from millionaire to sharecropper, "middle class."

380

The Twentieth Century

by no means identical, no end to the struggle for prize — indeed, its extension,
rather — no end to the economic pyramid, the peck order, heroes and hero
worship. The century of the common man so far has turned out to be the
century of the record breaker, the century of Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, stonners
of Everest, spreaders of charisma in all directions. We in America are still
against dukes, but not against "brand-name" aristocrats.

In sum, in the rather less than bird's-eye view we have in a book of this
sort been able to give to the record of Western man as a moral person, he still
looks recognizable, looks almost natural, in this mid-twentieth century. He
still looks more like that man of Alexander Pope, still on the isthmus of his
middle state, than the lower-case god that the Enlightenment hoped for, or
any of the numerous creatures — ape, lion, ass, dog, worm — he has been
compared to.8

in

No one, not even a hearty, cheerful complainer like Mencken, sure that this
is the worst of possible worlds, and a damned good thing, ought in these days
to make light of the temper of Western thinkers. In my first chapter I insisted
that there is indeed a gap, of the sort Mencken himself loved to emphasize,
between the common man, worried perhaps over his little concerns, but
clearly not harassed by world trouble, and the intellectual classes, some of
whom are always Platos, always Juvenals, always Abelards, always Luthers.
But the gap is not a wall; there is always some communication, better or
worse, across it. There are also great variations in the temper — let us simplify,
and say in the quantity and quality of complaining — among the critical intel-
lectuals of a given age.9

8 Once more, I do wish to drive home the Utopian implications of the pure faith of
the Enlightenment. We might get an effective symbol if we telescoped the titles of two
well-known books by twentieth-century Enlightened believers: Man Makes Himself
by V. Gordon Childe and Men like Gods (New York, Macmillan, 1923) by H. G.
Wells, into Man Makes Himself like Gods. Let me repeat, this faith does survive in
our culture.

9 There is great need for a good modern history of the intellectual classes in the West.
Such a history would at least attempt a morphology of such classes in historic societies,
and, an even more difficult task, an account of relations in time among them, that is, a
genetics or dynamics of their evolution. Or if this is too ambitious — as I guess it is —
it would be helpful to have a comparative study of samples of intellectual classes in
different societies from the point of view of the nature and extent of their "alienation" —
what they complain of, and how vigorously, what they want in place of what they dis-
like, and how much success they have in furthering their hopes.

381

A History of Western Morals

Ours would seem to be an age of grave fears. The intellectual temper of
our age is a gloomy one — an indignant gloom, for we are still children of the
fighting West. The well-trained scientific mind distrusts the single instance,
above all, when it is made to carry symbolic weight as a generalization. But
the nonscientist may still be quite impressed by putting Condorcet, after all,
a philosopher of history of a sort, square up against our own Toynbee. The
difference is one of those immeasurable differences that confound the meas-
uring mind. I contrast them, not so much for their views of what the future
will be like, but for their feelings about their present. Condorcet in the midst
of the Terror, outlawed and in hiding, death at hand, seems ready to burst
into a prosaic freethinker's version of Pippa's song:

Reason's a-working —
All's right with the world

Toynbee in the midst of the highest standard of general prosperity the West
has ever known shudders at the horrors around him.10 Toynbee has lived his
life in our paradoxical day of great material improvement for the common
as for the uncommon man, two shocking wars, a world depression, and the
threat of another war of apocalyptic horror. As a sensitive man, he could
hardly help contrasting this reality with the hopes, not only of the Enlighten*
ment, but with those of his own Victorian teachers. Something had gone
wrong.

It is by no means clear as yet whether the numerous critics of the world
view of the Enlightenment and its Victorian emendations have in our time
gone very far toward a shared world view of their own. They are not in
agreement The "return to religion" — that is, to some form of Christianity —
has hitherto been far from universal, though it is certainly in mid-twentieth
century real enough. There remain throughout the West solid groups of free-
thinkers, all reluctant to give up the eighteenth-century dream. There are less

10 Simply as historians of civilization, there is an interesting difference. Condorcet clearly
has no explanation at all for how one of his epochs grows into another, no notion of a
dynamics of civilization. Toynbee is acutely aware that he has to explain just how one of
his climbers on the cliff hoists himself up; he has to account for change by something
less vague and more consistent with evidence than Condorcet's "reason" or "enlighten-
ment." Toynbee's debt to Darwin, however, clashes with his hopes from Jesus and
Buddha, and he takes refuge in a vague eschatology. But he cannot quite escape the
intellectual heritage of much scientific work of the last two centuries, a sense that
cultural evolution among men is a long, slow, irregular process, timed and worked out
on a different scale from our human hopes and fears, our dramatic, and our moral,
senses. He wants a miracle, but unlike Condorcet, he cannot quite believe in miracles —
or, rather, he has to try to persuade himself to a belief in miracles.

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solid but more numerous groups of the indifferent, worried often enough, but
hearing no good news. A great number of churchgoers, especially in North
America, are still firm adherents of a belief that ought — if "ought" were a
part of ordinary logic — to separate them from the class of Christians; this is
the belief that "man makes himself." There are indeed nuclei of traditional
Christians in the Roman Catholic and in other communions; and in neo-
orthodoxy there has been a revival of traditional Christian insistence on orig-
inal sin.

The major philosophical movement of our time most directly set against
rationalist optimism is secularist existentialism, a revival of Stoicism peppered
with heavy dashes of modern aesthetics and psychology. The two obvious
general currents of mind in our time, historicism and anti-intellectualism, are
both currents set against the rationalism and optimism of the eighteenth
century, but they have not yet flowed into any great common reservoir. Our
awareness of history has so far not gone very far toward putting limits on our
inherited belief in comparatively sudden, even planned, permanent change;
indeed, the simplifier might be tempted to say that for the eighteenth-century
hope of immediate universal bliss we — or, rather, our intellectuals — have
substituted fear of immediate universal catastrophe. Similarly, some currents
of modern anti-intellectualism, though they are free enough from belief in the
natural reasonableness of ordinary men, have ended up with programs of
cultural engineering, the skilled engineers working with Madison Avenue
methods but fine humanitarian ideals on the raw irrationalities of human
beings to produce just what Condorcet foresaw. No doubt our awareness of
history and our awareness of the role that drives, prejudices, sentiments,
habits, all the long role of unreason, play in all we do have combined to make
a great many modern Westerners aware also that the hope of heaven on earth
was itself unreasonable and unhistorical. But all this has not by any means
been molded into what I must continue to apologize for calling by the unlovely
term of "world view." Our Western faith has not in mid-twentieth century
been given the organization, the codification, the clarity of central beliefs,
that we should have if we are to find in our faith, our world view, the moral
guide, above all, the moral support we need. But to this topic we shall return
in conclusion.

Meanwhile, the specific moral evils our prophets call to our attention must
be briefly noted. One whole class of such evils one may hesitatingly call the
"private vices of self-indulgence." It should be clear to the reader that I find
the realistic study of the extent of these vices in any society difficult indeed.

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They are not even very private, for indulgence in them affects all those close
to the indulger; moreover, especially since the current of eighteenth-century
humanitarianism mingled with that of puritanism, society through govern-
ment has in many parts of the West sought to regulate and sometimes prohibit
such familiar human conduct as gambling, fornication — especially in the form
of organized prostitution — consumption of alcoholic drinks, cruel sports, the
duel, and many others. I doubt if the most extravagant philosophic anarchist
would maintain that the sum total of these efforts has actually increased the
sum total of human self-indulgence they were directed against. On the con-
trary, it seems clear that inmost of the West sports like bearbaiting have been
eliminated, the duel reduced to sheer eccentricity, and gambling somewhat
reduced. The extraordinary attempt to prohibit entirely the use of alcoholic
drinks in the United States by constitutional amendment is now accepted by
all save fanatical prohibitionists as a failure; but in most of the West more
moderate regulation of the use of alcohol has, if one takes the early eight-
eenth-century West as a point for comparison, greatly reduced public drunk-
enness. We are beginning to recognize chronic alcoholism as a form of mental
disease.

Those who believe that conduct in the twentieth-century West has fallen
to a low point as measured by our traditional — or at any rate by our modern
best — standards of morality usually place great emphasis on our modem atti-
tudes toward matters of sex.11 There is no doubt that we talk, write, and print
more freely on all aspects of sex relations than did our nineteenth-century
predecessors. There is a great deal of pornography in print and illustration
which seems to me fairly constant over the centuries, and which has been
under the moral ban of Christianity from the beginning, and was certainly
not held consonant with the beautiful-and-good of the Greeks. Most of this
material has come under the ban of the kind of humanitarian-puritan legisla-
tion I have mentioned above, and has been driven in our day even further
underground than in the past; but of course it is still there. What our moralists
are really concerned with is the extent to which seriously meant art and liter-
ature— not necessarily good art and literature — and the conventions of good
manners are infiltrated by words and sentiments that to them bear the stamp
of pornographic concern. As far as externals go, it is clear that the twentieth
century permits much the nineteenth century forbade. Whether we have got

11 1 shall in this bird's-eye view of this whole phase of morality — sex, family, divorce,
juvenile delinquency, crimes of violence — concentrate chiefly on twentieth-century
United States. If we may believe our European critics, we set the pace in these matters,
and should therefore provide a fair sample.

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back to eighteenth-century standards is a nice point for critical discussion.
That latter century for the most part enjoyed the salt of sex in its art and
letters, but it liked a gloss of refinement, and avoided what we call "realism"
— no four-letter words, at least, not in print, no uncomely nudity, no pseudo-
clinical relish. We have not, in my opinion, got back to the grossness of the
late Middle Ages, nor to the extraordinary frankness of a Latin writer like
Martial.12

But the ultimate concern of those who feel we are far sunk in sexual
excess goes deeper than the externals of old-fashioned pornography. They
hold, though they might not put it at all this way, that the tradition of courtly
love and romantic love has in the twentieth century got vulgarized, has spread
through popular literature, the movies, and even through the popularization
and simplification of the work of Freud and other psychologists, and now
holds the many in its obsessive coil. American youth, in particular, assaulted
by all the mass media, encouraged even in formal education, has come, it is
maintained, to regard the pleasures of sex as a kind of supreme good. Sexual
prowess, always in the West a form of distinction, part of the struggle for
prize, has for the many been lifted to the highest prize of all, within the reach
of all. The result is sexual promiscuity, frustration, failures, rivalries without
end, a grave moral contagion in a world already sinking.18

With this alarming diagnosis the historian will hardly agree. Much of the
actual conduct reported in the two Kinsey reports cannot have surprised him,
and must have surprised even less a practicing physician, a counsellor, any-
one exercising cure of souls, or anyone who knew anything of Western world
literature since Homer and Moses. Today, as in the long past, much human
concern with matters of sex remains vicarious, a consolation, a surrogate, and
not a stimulus. The high-minded in a democracy have difficulty forgiving the
low-minded, who in our modern times are very numerous and very noticeable.
Moreover — and this is most important — a moderately high-minded observer
of the American scene in particular ought to recognize that many of the
young today are high-minded indeed about sex relations, children, the family.
They want what they consider normal genital satisfactions, they want children

12 The reader of German — and anyone who can look at pictures — can follow this line
between art and pornography for the centuries from the Renaissance through the nine-
teenth in Eduard Fuchs, lllustnerte Sittengeschichte, Munich, Albert Langen, 1909-
1912. The text is a very full social history of sex mores in Western Europe, but it is
not a history of morals.

13 1 refer once more to P. A. Sorokin, The American Sex Revolution, a most un-
clinical and unrealistic study.

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A History of Western Morals

— the sudden leap in the birth rate among the American upper classes in our
time is surely a challenge to the naive alarmist as it is to the demographic
behavioral scientist — and they want a successful married partnership. The
books on sex and marriage that they read, part of the great American do-it-
yourself literature, are essentially manuals of piety, and indeed many of the
young succeed in being most unco' guid about sex. In all seriousness, I think
an objective reporter on the American scene would have to conclude that,
with the exception of what is sometimes called "cafe society," or "Holly-
wood," that characteristic modern American equivalent of a fine corrupt old-
fashioned aristocracy, the sexual morality of modern America is rather
stricter than at many periods of Western history. And even cafe society
itself, in these days when more of the middle-class proprieties survive than
the alarmist will admit, cannot indulge itself as freely and publicly as many
such privileged groups in the past. Messalina could not survive long even in
Los Angeles.14

But the divorce rate? The rate is high indeed, particularly in the United
States, and reflects in part, surely, the inevitable disappointments of a sexual
relation exalted into something ineffable. It also reflects the gradual loosening
of religious sanctions for strict monogamy, the gradual development of hedo-
nistic ethical attitudes, the wide acceptance of the view that marriage is simply
one of many forms of human relations — a job, a club membership — which
can and should be broken off if either or both parties find it an unsatisfactory
one. All this is true. It is true also that divorce is often bad for the children.
But in itself our high divorce rate is not a sign of sexual looseness or promis-
cuity; indeed, as continental Europeans accustomed to such age-old institu-
tions as the mistress like to point out, our American addiction to divorce is in
itself a tribute to our high standards for marriage. The really grave aspect of
the whole American sex problem is not so much one of sex morality in its
narrow sense, but of its part in the larger context of our discontents and fears,
to which I shall come at the end of this section.

Juvenile delinquency? Statistics would seem to show an increase here. The
increase comes for the most part, however, not from precocious crimes of
serious nature, robbery, murder, gangster violence, but, rather, from a great

u My guess is that we have passed in this country the peak of serious-minded pseudo-
"Freudian" sex. Frigidity in women — or, at least, inability to get a fine explosive or-
gasm— is beginning to seem not quite so immoral as it did a few years ago. Even light-
minded folk sex may well be receding, not to Victorian suppression, but, still, to
somewhat less conspicuousness in American life.

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The Twentieth Century

increase in just old-fashioned bad behavior, from truancy and showing-off to
indiscipline and what Hollywood has christened the "blackboard jungle."
Here, too, there are obvious explanations. The movement for permissive or
progressive education, like most social experiments — perhaps I should write,
like most experiments — has borne fruits not expected by its pioneers. Parental
discipline has surely been greatly relaxed. Some of the blame put on the mass
media belongs there, belongs on the makers of movies and on television. But,
above all, we have here in the United States attempted to occupy several
hundreds of thousands of adolescents in what, with all the abatements made
by educators in the rigorous classical training of Western tradition, with all
the basket weaving, ceramics, physical education, and preparation for twenti-
eth-century living, is still a formal schooling. Never before in the West has
there been anything like such universal formal education. It is pretty clear
now that for a very significant number of these young people such education
is too great a strain, affords a constant temptation, granted the whole atmos-
phere of our culture, to active rebellion. If we can afford to "educate" them,
we must surely educate them even less classically than we try to.15

Crimes of violence? Those who complain that such crimes are the mark
of our age, those who are shocked and surprised by continuing gangsterism,
by the criminal elements in American labor unions, and all the rest show
even more than the usual American unwillingness to recall the unpleasant
past. Two strands of violence go far back in our relatively brief history; there
is the violence of the frontier, caricatured as well as glorified in the "Western,"
and there is the violence of our great cities packed with a steady stream of
immigrants ignorant of our ways. One of these strands, that of lynching, has
almost disappeared from American life, and has not yet re-emerged even in
the current crisis over integration in Southern schools. The dramatic drop
from a high point of 130 lynchings in 1901 (mostly Negroes) to zero in 1952
is difficult to explain, and impossible to explain if you take the position of the
prophet of unrelieved doom. Actually, with continued improvement in police
methods there has been over the last few generations a gradual relative less-
ening of crimes of violence in the United States. We are still the most dis-

15 1 am not making light of the conditions revealed in such studies as that in the New
York Times in March 1958, which showed how the well-meant slum clearances in
New York had helped breed new adolescent gangsters. But first, these problems are
not at all new; they have always been part of great urban complexes. Second, we are
very aware of them, and work hard to do something about them. The Western drive
to reform, to clean up, seems to me in no sense diminished in mid-twentieth century. We
are still very moral people, in no field more desirous of doing the right thing than in
education.

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A History of Western Morals

orderly country in the West, but we have by no means got back to our own
frontier days.

Finally, there is a whole broad field of public morality, ranging from
sharp commercial practices through the vast reaches of what Americans call
"graft," through mink coats and paid-up hotel bills, and on to treason. Here
once more common sense, and perhaps the social sciences, must reach a
whiggish conclusion: the total situation is not as bad as the professional com-
plainers make it out to be, nor as good as the professional happiness boys
make it out to be. In a culture as competitive and as multanimous as ours
there is bound to be a good deal of cheating, a good deal of pretense. But the
growth of public regulation and even, in part, the very competition that spurs
on the evil help correct it. Public-health measures, and especially regulation
of food and drugs, have in a major field reduced the evils summed up in the
old phrase caveat emptor — a traditional phrase which, by the way, should
give pause to the lovers of the economic past. All but the very "liberal" would
agree that American business morality is, notably in regard to trusts, better
now than, in 1900. The era of the Robber Barons is well over. Political and
economic competition, if it heightens the nervous tension of our lives, also
makes it difficult to continue for long any major fraud save what to a few West-
erners must seem the fraud of all life on this earth. The voice of a modern Cic-
ero against a modern Verres gets magnified and broadcast by all the means
technology gives us. The whole apparatus of publicity, the sales apparatus, that
terrifies or disgusts an Ortega, an Orwell, a Koesfler, can be, and sometimes
is, used on the side of the angels; indeed, some of our most articulate angels of
the Enlightenment have learned to use the apparatus of the mass media with
almost as much skill as the demons.

There is, however, a different category of moral ills of our time as the
exacting critics see them, a category even less easy to observe and measure
than the conduct we have been surveying. This category may perhaps be
grasped best as failure of morale, as not so much indulgence in evil as apathy,
Laodiceanism, lack of moral fervor. One whole aspect of this approach to the
ills of the modern West has come up often already in this study: the view, to
state it at its broadest, that we are getting to be too conformist, too much
alike, too much social animals, and that, conversely, we are losing our indi-
viduality, originality, our interesting wildness. This view is often, perhaps
usually, coupled with the view that although within the state or society — the
given beehive — we are taming the agon, there has grown up among the new
beehives, and particularly between the two biggest, busiest, and best organ-

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The Twentieth Century

ized, the wildest and most murderous competition ever yet known. To this
last point I shall shortly return. In the meantime, the broad assertion that
modern Western society is getting too conformist, too "security-conscious,"
too "other-directed," is in fact so broad, so vague, that assent to or dissent
from it must be a matter of one's sentiments, indeed of one's moods. Even the
sketchiest attempt at empirical testing of the thesis is difficult and confusing.

One special phase of the master generalization, the assertion that in the
United States the younger generation want security, not adventure, want a
job, better, a position, not to be their own boss, that they want to be "organi-
zation men," not "captains of industry," might be tested along such lines as
the following: first, a historical approach, comparing the United States with
the older countries of Europe, from which it might appear that some of what
the complainers dislike is due to economic and social maturity, which is not
necessarily senescence; second, an analysis of the way inventions, innovations,
improvements of all sorts, do get made today, for they undoubtedly do, and a
further analysis of the almost innumerable forms of real competition in our
society and our economy; third, a good study of the extent to which the young
actually do succeed in one way or another in being their own bosses, in being
nonorganization men — for nothing is commoner in the study of human rela-
tions, even among those hardheaded men the economists, than the premature
announcement that "x is no more."

I incline personally to the judgment, certainly a subjective one, that Homo
sapiens, even in his American variety, is still closer to his mammalian cousins
— and not to the most sheeplike of these — than to the social insects. The
publicists, sometimes the same ones who find the young lacking in adventur-
ousness, in true competitiveness, complain that they accept no moral re-
straints on their will to win, on their part in the struggle for prize. Here the
favorite instance is the one of the West Point football players who cheated on
examinations even though this was against their officer's sense of honor. The
historian might here be tempted to point out that the Roman or medieval
military honor from which that of our officer's caste is derived would not have
been as exacting in an analogous case — the field of an examination of this
sort is banausic, vulgar, and the temptation of winning is, after all, the strong-
est of temptations — as in one that equated honor and physical courage. There
is no doubt however, that these young men violated a real moral law of our
culture. True enough, they were themselves a group, and, within that group,
no doubt very imitative and inner-directed. And the essential element in their
behavior was the old and human desire to come out on top; one even hears

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A History of Western Morals

remotely the echo of the Homeric den aristeuein — always to be best in mascu-
line excellences. This, one supposes, never comes out in the beehive or ant-
hill, not even among the warrior insects.

We have yet to face what is to the prophets of doom, and to many publi-
cists who do not merit that emotion-charged label, the full horror of our age,
the ultimate source, the final justification, of our doubts, our worries, our
despair. Specifically, this is a threat of what the journalists call "World War
III," a war that, to judge from the precedent of the last two and the known
achievements of technology, might destroy so many people and so many
things that what we call civilization would be impossible anywhere on earth,
war that certainly would bring about fearful suffering of the sort repugnant
to our whole moral tradition. The human imagination has had its full range
on the possibilities, which at the most extreme include the extinction of all
forms of life, plant and animal, on earth. The point I wish to make here is
simply that once more the horrors of the Book of Revelation begin for many
to seem real and present.

Yet only an alarmist would detect in our Western society sure signs of the
apocalyptic moral abandon, the collapse of morale our best cliches from
history illustrate well enough: "after us the deluge," "fiddling while Rome
burns," je-m'en-foutisme, "the handwriting on the wall," the death's head at
the feast. I have perhaps already insisted sufficiently that diagnosis of the state
of mind and heart of a whole contemporary culture is exceedingly difficult,
and in any scientific sense, impossible. But I do not feel around me today the
atmosphere of mass despair Huizinga and his fellows have described for the
late Middle Ages, nor the seething of mass unrest that comes out of almost
anything written in and of the decades just before and just after the birth of
Christ. It is, indeed, possible, if one may apply to large groups, even to a
whole culture, the terminology of a science based on the study of individual
behavior, that there may be states of collective psychopathology, and that
we may now be in one even more widespread and serious than that of the
fifteenth century.16

The fear of a third World War may, then, be driving us all — all of us
Westerners at any rate — into mass madness. But if so, that madness is not yet
reflected in the sum totals that record man's daily round of work, of social
routine, of conventional behavior. That sum total, as I have tried in this

18 In a perceptive essay, "The Next Assignment," American Historical Review, Vol.
LXIII, January 1958, Mr W. L. Langer suggests that the collective trauma of the Black
Death may well have been an important determinant of the behavior Huizinga and
others have recorded.

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The Twentieth Century

chapter to urge against the newspaper headlines, comes out at least no worse
in terms of conventional moral standards than at other times in Western
history. Let me attempt a final symbol: in the United States some hundred
million individuals, many of them adolescents, their skills, their bodily and
mental health and capacities subject to no more than most casual testing,
have each at his command on open roads vehicles capable of greater speeds
than their grandfathers' steam locomotives, which were tied to rails and driven
by trained professionals subject to rigorous and frequent tests of health and
ability; yet these millions of automobile drivers in 1956 killed only one per-
son for about every ten million vehicle miles they drove in the state with the
worst record, one person for about every forty-three million vehicle miles in
the state with the best record. There are, of course, many variables involved
— the work of automotive engineers and of highway engineers, the education
and conditioning of Americans from youth up, and many others. But I think
it hard for anyone to deny to our old mythical friend the "average" American
some sense of moral responsibility in his dealings with the almost incredible
power he commands at a touch. What the alarmist finds a very bad sign of
human failings seems to me, in fact, a sign of human capacities and sense of
responsibility. If men were as bad as some moralists hold, we should kill many
more than 40,000 a year on our roads.

Our moral tradition insists that we refuse to accept any death in an auto-
mobile accident as necessary; it insists, indeed, that we must not even put the
statistics as above, but that we recoil with horror and indignation from that
simple net figure of some 40,000 traffic deaths per year, that we feel the need
of all sorts of concerted measures and campaigns to reduce that figure. No
one should complain of this very human and probably very useful moral
attitude. If it is true that the statistics show that juvenile delinquents, sexual
psychopaths, kidnapers, wife beaters are still in the United States relative
to the total population very few indeed, it is also true that our horror and
alarm at the conduct of such persons is in full accord with our moral tradition,
and in particular with our Christian tradition as modified by the humanitarian-
ism and hedonism of the Enlightenment. Modern Western democracy is, its
critics notwithstanding, at least as much committed to the "better" as to the
"bigger."

IV

It would seem likely — though I should guess almost impossible to prove
empirically — that the moral anguish of our age is rather the mark of the

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A History of Western Morals

intellectual classes in our West than of the many. We must at least attempt
here a cursory sketch of a problem worth careful and objective study: the
problem of the attitude of the intellectual classes in our own age and in its
immediate predecessors toward the universe and man's fate in it. Unfortu-
nately, neither historians nor sociologists have yet given us a really good base
from which to start such a sketch: we cannot be confident about the normal,
the customary, position of such classes in the West, nor even of their constitu-
tion, their make-up.

As a rough definition, we may call the intellectual classes those who
write, teach, preach, practice the fine arts, music, drama. These people are not
by any means the only ones in the West who use their minds, their "intellect,"
nor are such people the only intelligent ones in our society. Americans, for
whom, as for most Westerners, all derivatives of the Latin intelligo carry
favorable connotations, make, in fact, a pejorative distinction to mark off
intellectuals they do not like — or toward whom, to be fairer, they have ambiv-
alent feelings: the slang terms "high-brow," "longhair," "egghead" do this
work, and we may without bitterness let them do the work for us. I am, in the
next few pages, substantially writing about eggheads, an imprecise and socio-
logically accurate term.

It is difficult to define for the whole course of Western history any normal
attitude of these intellectuals toward the society they live in. A great many of
them in any society at any time tend to take toward some part at least of the
doings of their fellows an attitude popularly known in the American language
as "critical." But the degree of their censoriousness, the nature and the im-
mediacy of the changes they demand, the targets they aim at, their basic ac-
ceptance or denial of the goodness of their own society and government, vary
greatly in time and space. Again very roughly, the now-fashionable phrase
"alienation of the intellectuals" can be applied to this basic attitude of the
class at certain times in the Western past. The early Christians, some of whom
were eggheads, were alienated from the pagan culture against which they
revolted; the Schoolmen, on the whole, were quite as clearly not alienated
from their thirteenth-century world. One might even defend the generalization
that the intellectuals during the great flowering times of our Western culture in
most of the past, during the "Golden Ages," were not basically alienated: the
records of Periclean Athens (but not the slightly later Athens of Socrates-
Plato), Augustan Rome, Elizabethan England, the France of Louis XIV,
back up this statement. Perhaps better, the intellectuals of these flowering
times were proud, confident, hopeful of the future of their society, moralists,

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capable of irony and satire, but not addicted to despair, and even — or so it
looks from this distance — roughly in agreement as to good and bad, beautiful
and ugly, true and false.17

Now the intellectual classes of the eighteenth-century West were substan-
tially hostile to the existing order; and the philosophes of France, which
shared with England the intellectual leadership of the tune, stand as a classic
instance of a group of intellectuals almost — not quite — unchallenged in their
supremacy, and sure that the religious, political, social, and economic institu-
tions of the West added up to a very bad environment indeed, one that had to
be radically changed at once. Yet the philosophes were sure of themselves and
the future, alienated from what they held to be the bad past of their society,
but confident they could guide their society to the good life for all. They were
not alienated as our modern eggheads — even those ostensibly and ostenta-
tiously recently converted to the American Way — are in part alienated from
ordinary Western men and women. We have been over this ground in Chapter
XI. Whether they were anarchists or planners, the intellectuals of the eight-
eenth-century Enlightenment felt no real hostility toward the many, their
fellows; indeed, they felt at times that warm glow of love for all men, that
humanite, their too rarely realized agape.lB They were the true, the recognized
leaders of the many, in due rapport with them, in that happy — and, I am
afraid, not very common — position Toynbee calls that of a "creative minor-
ity" admired by the many linked to it by "mimesis."19

The intellectuals themselves came in large part, after they became aware
of the melodramatic failure of the French Revolution to follow the course

17 1 apologize for introducing so briefly and inadequately this enormous and difficult
subject. I do not wish to be understood as saying that the intellectuals of the flower-
ing periods were optimists, those of our own pessimists. There is a sense in which
it may be said that all intellectuals always in the West are discontented people; there
is a sense in which the extreme romanticism of Thomas Hardy's "thought is a disease
of the flesh" comes to plague us all; perhaps it is true.

18 1 think it hard for the most devoted lover of mankind to maintain that the new
religion of the Enlightenment did really achieve the loving-kindness that shows itself
now and then in Christianity. The French Jacobin effort to achieve surrogate love feasts
in their ritual was contrived indeed. See my The Jacobins, Chapter IV.
19 Toynbee, who is, above all, a moralist, holds that the unmistakable sign of failure
in a civilization (or society) is the breaking of this link of mimesis, or admiring imita-
tion, between the many and the few, after which the creative minority becomes merely
a "dominant minority," and the many become a "proletariat," hostile to their superiors;
the good integrated society becomes then a class-struggle society, on its way to death
and dissolution. Whatever the objective value of this scheme, it is surely a significant
one for the understanding of the temper of many intellectuals of our age. They think
our conflicts are death throes, not signs of life and growth.

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they had plotted for it, to lose their feeling of identification with the lot of the
many. It can be argued that the many, even in the America which has coined
those scornful epithets of high-brow, longhair, and egghead, have never ceased
to entertain toward the intellectuals sound ambivalent feelings, part of which
were admiring, if not quite respectful. I suspect there is even today as much
mimesis among the many toward the varied few as the interlocking peck
orders of a democracy can bear. But there is little doubt that the intellectuals
have, though with frequent attacks of conscience, and with a great deal of
rationalizing, turned against the many, the many who obstinately refuse to
live up to the standards the Enlightenment had set for them. In the nineteenth
century, the intellectuals generally held that they were turning not against the
people, who were sound at heart, but against the middle class, the new and
unforeseen obstacle to heaven on earth. For the first romantics, the middle
class was, above all, an enemy to beauty and sensitivity, the Philistines against
whom to the sounds of the new music the Davidsbiindler marched forth to
an assured formal victory. It is with these romantics that the artist, the writer,
the intellectual, though he existed in his harsh world of economic necessities
only because of the patronage of the middle classes — exercised, it is true, not
in the old direct noble way, but through the horrid mechanism of the market
— became more clearly than ever before in the West a misunderstood person,
misunderstood most of all by the many.

For a great many intellectuals, especially, perhaps, in this country, the
continuing mess they find this world to be in could be explained still, as the
philosophes had explained it, by the continuing existence of a bad environ-
ment, not yet overcome, and by additional new villainous institutions, classes,
entrenched evils. The good fight could and must still be fought. The Marxists
are the clearest example of these surviving heirs of the Enlightenment, and
so, too, are many of those known in the United States as "liberals." But even
in the nineteenth century there were signs of the great disgust, a feeling of
anger and despair at the stupidities, the inadequacies, the dullness which the
intellectual finds in his less-gifted fellows. Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet, in
which the efforts of two stupid — and, what is worse, well-intentioned — men
to educate themselves result in dismal failures, reminds one that Flaubert, too,
felt something like the great disgust that sent the anchorites to the desert —
and a great deal of the pride and love of exhibition that sent them there too.

It will not do to exaggerate the alienation of the intellectuals, nor their
sense of doom. Many of them, indeed most of them, lead lives not usually, not
continuously, ridden with despair. The weight of the universe lies less heavily

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on them in the United States than in France; in Russia — clearly a case apart
— they are presumed to be cheerful and unalienated, and not even to hold the
cardinal tenet of their fellows in the free world that nothing fails like success.20
There is clearly still a public in most of the West for the literature of rosy
optimism, for the kind of thing the 1920's associated with the name of Edgar
Guest — though one suspects that many of the purveyors of this comforting
literature suffer acutely, as do those who provide fodder for Madison Avenue
and Hollywood, from a guilty conscience that puts them firmly on the side of
the alienated. The creative intellectuals are still complainers; but there are
signs they are beginning to complain about, or at least analyze, their own
class. We have heard a lot recently about conforming nonconformity, about
stereotyped thinking among intellectuals, about minds open in ideal, closed
to reality.21

For the serious writers, thinkers, artists, for those who set the mood and
spirit of the high culture of the age, there can be little doubt; the stamp, the
style, the flavor is dark indeed, angry, protesting, despairing, sometimes dig-
nified, noble, sometimes — inevitable, symptomatic word — just neurotic. Call
the roll, from Faulkner and Hemingway to Sartre and Jaspers and on to Colin
Wilson and the latest of the incompletely self-made angry young men of
Britain; they are always oppressed, never amused, though often bitterly bright.
The best of them, Camus, in his moving acceptance speech of the Nobel
prize for literature in 1957 cannot for a moment drop his burden:

... As the heir of a corrupt history that blends blighted revolutions, mis-
guided techniques, dead gods, and worn out ideologies, in which second-rate
powers can destroy everything today, but are unable to win anyone over, in which
intelligence has stooped to becoming the servant of hatred and oppression, that
generation [Camus's own], starting from nothing but its own negations, has had

20 Boris Pasternak's novel Dr. Zhivago (New York, Pantheon, 1958), smuggled out
of Russia through an Italian translation, shows amply that there are alienated in-
tellectuals even in the Soviet Union, and that one of the prime Western moral senti-
ments the intellectual incarnates and cherishes has survived there. I mean the deep
feeling that the ordinary, dull, unpoetic, regulated, satisfied, routine life is somehow
evil, as well as "joyless," that the artist must always press the attack on the Philistines,
whose joylessness and lack of depth stink in the nostrils of the deeply joyous. Note the
rash of recent American books on the horrors (moral evils?) of life in suburbs and
exurbs by such writers as A. C. Spectorsky, John Cheever, and many others. The
dogma that the ordinary, the conventional, is in itself evil is one of the really extraor-
dinary products of Enlightenment.

21 For example, Morris Freedman, "The Dangers of Nonconformism," American
Scholar, Vol. XXVIII, Winter 1958-59, pp. 25-32; Paul Pickrel, "The New Books,"
Harper's, Vol. CCXVII, December 1958, pp. 88-92, reviewing Paul Lazarsfeld and
Wagner Thielens, Jr., The Academic Mind.

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to re-establish both within and without itself a little of what constitutes the dig-
nity of life and death. Faced with a world threatened with disintegration, in which
our grand inquisitors may set up once and for all the kingdoms of death, that gen-
eration knows that, in a sort of mad race against time, it ought to re-establish
among nations a peace not based on slavery, to reconcile labor and culture again,
and to reconstruct with all men an Ark of the Covenant. Perhaps it can never
accomplish that vast undertaking, but most certainly throughout the world it
has already accepted the double challenge of truth and liberty, and, on occasion,
has shown that it can lay down its life without hatred. That generation deserves
to be acclaimed wherever it happens to be, and especially wherever it is sacri-
ficing itself.22

Even at their gloomiest and profoundest, then, these Western intellectuals
remain fighters; resignation is not for them. They are a long way from Nir-
vana. Not even Arnold Toynbee, who wants very much to learn from Buddha,
seems in his behavior very close to that transcendence of the agon he and his
Eastern masters preach. And in mid-twentieth century the intellectuals seem
as far from agreement as ever they were in the nineteenth. Our West has
surely never been more multanimous than at present.

It is at least as difficult to discern for the twentieth-century West a pattern of
moral ideals as it is for the nineteenth century. Some of the enthusiasms the
Victorians had for the moral as well as for the aesthetic ideals of particular
past ages have weakened. The Middle Ages no longer are in fashion; but
they are by no means buried, and there are still many who would like to have
us go back to the spiritual certainties of the thirteenth century. We have, as
the nineteenth century scarcely had, an architectural style of our own, and in
a sense we have our own moral style. But just as we are still eclectic enough
architecturally so that we can reach into the grab bag of history and build
colonial reproductions, or Cape Cod cottages, or other "traditional" styles,
so in our varied moral ideals we continue to let very little of the past die.
Even in the United States, and after a whole generation educated with almost
no Latin and no Greek, there are still those who would like to have us
achieve the Periclean beautiful-and-good — but for all, not for the few.

I shall try to outline some of the traits of our twentieth-century moral
ideals, concentrating, as seems fit, on the United States at its moment of
hegemony in the West. This is a huge subject, to which I cannot hope in this

22 Speech of Acceptance . . . of the Nobel Prize for Literature, New York, Knopf,
1958, pp. xi-xii.

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brief space to do justice.23 I shall try to take a line through the middle, but
the reader must never forget that American multanimity is very real, that we
have somewhere in our midst representatives of almost every "value," every
religion, organized and disorganized, every taste, every moral stance men
have taken. Nor must he forget that, no matter what worried intellectuals tell
him about the leveling mediocrity and potential tyranny of the masses in this
country, our present multanimity is bottomed on strong habits and strong
beliefs that make diversity — liberty, freedom, democracy, if you like — a solid
part of our pattern of ideals.

First, and at the risk of some repetition, must come a few needed nega-
tives. Pollsters, reinforced by a good many less formal observers, have made
it quite clear that Americans in general do not set up as an ideal anti-intellec-
tualism in the vulgar sense of the word — that is, the depreciation of the value
of the instrument of thought and dislike of those trained to make good use of
that instrument; and they do not set up the businessman as our national ideal.
In tests of opinion as to what calling in life is most prized among Americans,
judges, scientists, high elective officers, physicians, even college professors
and men of God come out generally better than do bankers and businessmen.
There are clear signs, not to be denied even in the midst of our national
reaction to the Russian launching of the first artificial earth satellite, that the
millions now undergoing for the first time in human history advanced formal
education are quite aware that they are not potential Platos, Einsteins, or
Pasteurs. They know they are not intellectuals, and they do not want to be-
come intellectuals. But this by no means amounts to their being anti-intellec-
tuals. They have toward us eggheads the irreverence that crops up in medieval
attitudes toward priests and monks, a saving irreverence that probably re-
lieves them of feelings otherwise subject to dangerous repressions. Actually,
"egghead" as a term of warfare is chiefly used in the civil war among the
intellectuals themselves, no doubt in an ideal world a war that would have to
cease, but in our own imperfect world perhaps also of some use as an outlet
for emotions best not bottled up. Finally, the American is no immoralist; he

23 Even before we attained our present position in the world, books on the American
national character, American civilization, the American "style," the American histori-
cal mission had been innumerable. Few of my readers can have been spared this sub-
ject in formal and informal education, and some of them I expect have had rather too
much of it. But it remains a must. There is omnibus treatment in Max Lerner, Amer-
ica as Civilization, by a liberal intellectual so conscientious in this book that he some-
times seems neither a liberal nor an intellectual in our usual American sense of those
words; and specifically on our subject, a thoughtful book, Roger Burlingame, The
American Conscience, New York, Knopf, 1957.

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wants to be happy, he feels, indeed, he has been taught to feel by the Enlight-
ened, that he has a right to be happy, but this happiness is no sodden immer-
sion in the mud of sensual self-indulgence, nor a fine Nietzschean transvalua-
tion of values. His moral code is still essentially the traditional Western moral
code.

Central to an attempt to understand what contemporary Americans ad-
mire, what they think is really good, is an understanding of how they view that
central theme of the moral history of the West, the agon, the struggle for
prize. Once more, let me repeat that admiration for the gangster or the
Thrasymachan man-who-gets-away-with-it, the mucker pose or the mucker
reality, are eternals of Western history which we have no good reason to
believe are in fact commoner now than in the days of Celadus, Crescens, and
Scorpus (see Chapter V, p. 133) or in the days of Robin Hood. The low-
minded are not more numerous, perhaps even not more powerful, than they
used to be; it is just that, especially since the eighteenth-century Enlighten-
ment, the high-minded have been rather more worried about them, and less
tolerant of them. The Christian finds many kinds of actual practical toleration
rather easier than does the Enlightened.

Now the agon in twentieth-century America, and, indeed, throughout the
free West, is a bewilderingly complex thing. Above all, it displays to the full
that state of inner contradiction, of impossible coexistence of opposites, so
characteristic of the West, a plaguing, pricking, prodding state of mind that
the more worried of us find intolerable. We want everybody to win the prizes,
and we do multiply their number and their scope and kind; but there are still
only a few prizes, and even fewer firsts. We firmly believe that in a quite real
sense one man is as good as another; and we believe quite as firmly that the
man who can bat .300 is a great deal better than the man who can bat only
.250 — and that only in the pitcher can defensive skill quite make up for that
deficiency. We very clearly believe that men are equal and that they are not
equal. In the daily round of living we have no trouble with the qualifying and
saving "in respect to — "; we are all equal in the eyes of the law, equal in the
waiting line for tickets, equal at the supermarket, where there are no charge
accounts, but not equal in the halfback position, or — let us be fair — not equal
as candidates for Phi Beta Kappa. There remains, however, in our final moral
summing up a troubled feeling that there is something wrong, something un-
American, even about so consecrated a formulation as "many are called but
few are chosen."

At least such seems to me to be the feeling of a great number of American

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intellectuals, a feeling that comes out in the unwillingness of many educators
to face in all its implications the problem of educating the exceptionally gifted
child. It is a kind of backwash from this emotional attitude that helps explain
the number and intensity of those who worry over the leveling tendency in the
modern West, over the tyranny of the majority, over what they feel is our
swift approach to deadening uniformity and mediocrity. If you are addicted
to conventional ratiocination, as intellectuals by definition are, and if you
believe that others are so addicted, as many intellectuals since the Enlighten-
ment unfortunately are, then from such an obvious premise as, say, the pre-
amble to our Declaration of Independence affords you can go on to conclude
that since men think they ought to be equal, they are going to try universally
to make themselves identical — and identical after the pattern of the many, the
majority, the average.

I do not think that the man in the street has any such difficulty with the
doctrine of equality. He accepts the contradictions and complexities in which
this doctrine is in fact embodied in our society and in our working concepts
of what that society ought to be. We have in this country set up our own
elaborate rules for the agon. First of all, and to my mind of great importance,
we have diversified it greatly, multiplied the fields in which it can be played
—or fought — out, have come in a sense somewhere near finding some kind of
prize for, if not all, at least for a great many. Our almost infinite number of
organized groups, from hobby culture to world-saving, seem silly only to those
of us who have not recovered from the 1920's. Even for the very top, where
the competition is most ferocious and, in societies like that of later Rome,
morally and sociologically dangerous, we have somehow taken much of the
sting out. In politics, even in business, the defeated rarely revolt or conspire.

This whole topic of the American agon, however, is worth some man-
watching work. Anyone who has glanced, for instance, at our varied litera-
ture on how to succeed at anything — say, at salesmanship — must be aware of
the curious parallels with the literature of the high, the noble agon, from
Homer on. The difficulty is to appraise realistically the loss of dignity, of
tragedy, of humility, of resignation, that has undoubtedly taken place in the
process of democratization. I feel sure that the moral and aesthetic atmos-
phere of an egghead product like the Death of a Salesman is not realistic, and,
indeed, no nearer high seriousness than the vulgar values it seems to pity and
scorn. But there is a problem here, and I repeat that we in the mid-twentieth
century have by no means solved it: Can we have a democracy of this world
and yet retain the age-old Western tradition of the struggle for prize? Can

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we find a substitute, a surrogate, for the Christian "many are called but few
are chosen," where men, not God, patently, overtly, make the choice?

We have done as well as we have in making men equal, even in combat,
in part through the comforting compromises we have made between the
realities of daily life and the tenets of the eighteenth-century Fathers — equal-
ity before the law, equality of opportunity, and the like, all, from the point of
view of the ferocious idealist, hopelessly softened into mere words, mere
consolations. We have done it partly by inculcating a genuine respect for the
rules of the game, rules that, it is true, the American likes to get around,
and that, unlike the Englishman, he will not usually treat as absolutes, but
that he firmly "believes in" in principle and that give him a basis for his eter-
nal argument with the umpire. And although in a crowd the American will
sometimes shout "Kill the umpire," he feels as an individual with rather better
reason than did Voltaire of his shadow deity that if the umpire did not exist
he would have to be invented. Again, we have carried the familiar safety
valve of free complaint — I mean, of course, free speech — to the point where
to some commentators our complaining seems a symptom of a widespread
neurosis. But apart from the fact that this term and many others from psychi-
atry and psychology have in our day become such smooth coins that sensitive
teachers of English composition are banning them all, I do not think that
Messrs. Drew Pearson, Westbrook Pegler, and Red Smith — and their devoted
readers — are in fact abnormal. Complaining is one of the great human habits,
which universal literacy and the famous mass media have perhaps simply
made more noticeable, not more common. Finally, in our American society
there are, contrived or spontaneous, complex gradings or frames ("structur-
ing") of the agon which bring us closer to a kind of realized egalitarianism.
One may symbolize this nicely in the world of boxing, with its careful grada-
tions from flyweight (not over 112 Ibs.) to heavyweight (anything over 175
Ibs.). Indeed, the American would no doubt amend the phrase from Homer
we have already found so useful, aien aristeuein, into "always to come out on
top in one's class."241

Socially, class or status in the contemporary United States must seem
sometimes to carry to a dangerous excess this multiplying and diversifying —
this democratization — of the agon I am here all too briefly analyzing. As
the innumerable novels of status, the almost as innumerable "anthropologi-

24 1 have long thought that we needed a good study of sport, professional and ama-
teur. There is the suggestive Homo Ludens of Huizinga, but this and most other studies
of the sort are too philosophical, too concerned with sport as play. What we need
is a sociological study of sport as work, as a seriously meant universe of its own.

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cal" studies of Muncie-Middletown, Newburyport-Yankee City, and the rest
must bring home to those of us who at least read, if we do not notice, or
man watch, our American peck orders are real and exceedingly complicated,
as well as subject to change, and most puzzling to foreigners, who sometimes
fail to take the word of our more innocent intellectuals that such peck orders
do not exist, or, at any rate, are of no real importance.25 Social workers who
have witnessed the sufferings of the middle-lower-class family finally con-
vinced that the boy they hoped would have the kind of career that would lift
them all into the lower-middle class cannot hope to get that essential B.A.
from even the lowest "college" in the local academic hierarchy, cannot hope
to raise himself, then, know that this form of the agon is very real indeed —
and know that even in our democracy all are not chosen. The career open
to talents in this country may be a source of more frustration, indignation,
and, ultimately, of sentiments disastrous to our social stability than of the
kind of satisfactions that help make us accept the universe and our place in it.
On that master question, as the reader will realize, I hesitate to pronounce
an opinion. We intellectuals can, I think, indeed have already "existentially"
begun to, adjust ourselves to the big cosmological difficulties of the failure
of the heaven-on-earth of the Enlightenment; their translation among the
many into the concrete hopes and fears of our individual microcosms sets
up a much more difficult problem for the would-be man watcher. Tentatively,
I should guess that so far we are managing, after a fashion. The next few
generations will be a real test of this moral difficulty: Can there be an En-
lightened resignation?

For the rest, it must be taken for granted that almost all Americans set
for themselves ideals and standards that, in spite of the bad connotations
the term has in the history of ethical thought, one must call "hedonistic."
I do not think the common preacherly reproach of "materialism" really
applies to Americans — nor, for that matter, to Russians, among whom the
word is said to be no reproach but a blessing. Still, the ordinary American is
far from any purely spiritual or ascetic or mystical ideal, far even from the
by no means wholly ascetic ideals of historic Puritanism. He does not — I
am, of course, dealing with this real ordinary conceptualized American, and
not with an equally but differently real extraordinary individual American —

25 Howard Mumford Jones tells me that one of the favorite questions from German
prisoners of war we were trying to "re-educate" in democracy — after the obvious one
about our treatment of Negroes — was: "How about your Greek-letter college fraterni-
ties and 'democracy'?"

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distrust radically any of his "natural" appetites. He believes that it is right
for him, that he has a right, to have good food, a good home, a good car, a
good family life, a good sex life, in short, happiness. His religion, even if he
is a professing Christian, does not tell him these enjoyments are bad, or full
of dangerous temptations, or — and this is a crux — difficult to obtain. He does
not, of course, by any means feel himself to be a hog from Epicurus's sty.
He believes there is a wrong satisfaction of desires, that there are desires he
ought not to have. He is still heir of a great deal of the Helleno-Judaeo-
Christian tradition of right and wrong. He holds, indeed, a democratic and
banausic form — a vulgarized form, if the word pleases you — of the old Greek
ideal of the beautiful-and-good. Heaven and hell are no longer quite as real
to him as they were to his forefathers, but he by no means believes that "man
makes himself." He is fond of a gesture, symptomatic and symbolic, which
he calls "knocking on wood." It is very old wood, already thousands of years
old when Condorcet grew up.

VI

The moral stance of the twentieth-century Russian calls for separate treat-
ment, for it is clearly not quite that of the other societies of the Western
world. I do not hesitate, however, to call Russia "Western." Both its old
religion, Christianity, and its new one, Marxism, are Western indeed. Of
course, as a nation-state it has its own style, and that style has been affected
by its "Asian" elements as well as by its "European" ones. Our own Ameri-
can style is itself a compound of Europe and our "frontier." From the point
of view of this study, as I have earlier noted, Russian Communism is the
latest of the great sects that have in the Enlightenment a common origin; it
is, if you wish to put it that way, the most successful heresy of orthodox
Western democracy, a heresy that, like most sturdy heresies, thinks of itself
as orthodoxy. Needless to say, these terms taken from the Western religious
vocabulary are repudiated with great vigor by all Marxists, who share with
the followers of a very different prophet, Mary Baker Eddy, 'the conviction
that they are scientists, that they understand the universe and man's fate as
scientists in the past understood somewhat more limited, or, at least, more
specific, more concrete, matters. Yet the religious parallel seems obvious.
The part of God as designer and ever-present cause is, for the Marxist,
played by a "theory" of the structure and dynamics of society known as
Dialectical Materialism. The good Marxist considers dialectical materialism

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as a "scientific" theory, analogous, say, to gravity; but certainly among the
many believers it is pretty completely hypostatized into something that is
at least a surrogate for God, a First and Final Cause. Man's fate as a race
here on earth is "determined" by the inevitable workings of dialectical ma-
terialism through the "mode of production" which determines class struc-
ture and, therefore, the ensuing "class struggle." This class struggle works
itself out (the reflexive verb is important) along the lines of the Hegelian
dialectic, rescued by Marx and Engels from Hegel's silly idealism about
"spirit" and put squarely on the solid ground of "matter." There has been
a long history of class struggles, but the one that counts for us is this last:
thesis capitalist versus antithesis proletarian, which, after the victory of
proletarians, a victory determined, inevitable, and a transitional revolutionary
"dictatorship of the proletariat," will produce the final synthesis, the "class-
less society."

I do not see how an outsider, or even a candid insider, can avoid the con-
clusion: all this is metaphysics, theology, and, at the end, a fine firm
eschatology. The classless society is heaven, a universalist heaven, unbalanced
in the end by any hell, a heaven-to-be in a certain if not quite unpostponable
future here on earth. The Marxists are increasingly unwilling to be very
explicit about either the nature of the classless society or the place and date
of its attainment. The orthodox, the official Russian, view does give a plausible
and logical explanation of why the classless society has not yet been attained,
even in Russia; the victory of antithesis proletarian over thesis capitalist is
not by any means complete, and the dialectical process cannot come to its
predestined end until proletarians are victorious all over the world — and most
notably in the United States. The classless society will be marked — this is
one of the most famous and by their enemies most derided of Marxist phrases
— by the "withering away of the state." There will in the classless society be
no police, no armed forces, no law courts, no compulsion of the sort we have
all been brought up to accept as normal. Meanwhile, in Russia and in the
lands of her allies, there is — there can be — nothing more than the dictatorship
of the proletariat. There is evil, the good Marxist must believe, even in Russia,
since there is evil in the United States and in the rest of the so-called "free
world." As to the nature of the classless society once it is attained, the
Marxists, and in particular their more subtle theorists, are reticent. They feel,
I think, that the concept embodies a lofty ethical ideal, that it is in some sense
a surrogate for the Christian heaven; but their whole moral and intellectual
background turns them away from the admission that they harbor any such

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concepts. M. Jourdain had talked prose all his life without knowing it; the
Marxists have talked idealism, knowing it all too well in their heart of hearts.

Moreover, Marxism-Leninism is the child or grandchild, not only of the
Utopian faith in human perfectability of the Enlightenment, but also of the
nineteenth-century feeling for process, for change, for an unending dynamics
of Progress, Now all the fashionable nineteenth-century explanations of this
process, from Hegel to the Social Darwinists, insist on a central dynamic
"cause": conflict, struggle, competition. Marx himself is most emphatic about
the ruthlessness of his own version of this dynamic, the master dynamic of
the "class struggle." But in conflict on this earth there are wounds, cruelties,
suffering, defeat, not only for the losers, but for the victors, too. So it had
seemed in the pure Christian tradition; so it seemed to the Enlightenment.
The whole Marxist eschatology is an attempt to imagine a set of human
relations on this earth in which there will be change, indeed Progress, rivalry
(or emulation, about the nicest word available), in short, some kind of con-
flict but no wounds, no cruelties, no suffering, no defeat, not even any mal-
adjustments, merely victory for all, and no tie games, either. The old Nordic
myths had done better; the warriors — it is true not in this world, but in the
next — fought lustily all day, and then, their wounds healed, feasted the night
in Valhalla.26

The Marxist-Leninist world view rejects all notions of a supranatural being
or beings, of an immaterial soul, and of an afterlife; good Marxists are infuri-
ated even by the Freudian concept of a psyche, and an unconscious, as viola-
tions of the "principles" of materialism. They reject, again on philosophic
grounds masquerading as "scientific," the concept of individual free will. But
Marxist moral practice maintains a powerful strain of minimal Christian puri-
tanism, of vigorous reforming zeal, of individual obligation among the faithful
to help along the inevitable work of dialectical materialism. The Marxist be-
lieves in, and puts into effect, systems of rewards and punishments, and, where
he has been put into power, goes in for a good deal of cultural engineering.
His dialectic tells him that the capitalist by necessity is helping the Marxist
cause, but his emotions hardly permit him to love, certainly not to forgive, this
enemy. In short, the Marxist, like the Calvinist, is a determinist determined

26 1 shall have to return in a concluding chapter to this problem. Our American democ-
racy has, I think, a much less explicit heaven-on-earth than the Communists have, but
we, too, have difficulty with our attitudes toward conflict, as I have noted above. Only
a very few die-hards can now accept Spencer's opinion that nature is often a little
cruel that she may be very kind, which is the essence of the Victorian "solution" of
the problem of evil.

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to follow what his conscience (a word the Marxist would not use) tells him
is right, and to avoid in fear and trembling what that God- or Dialectical
Materialism-implanted voice tells him is wrong. This is an old and cherished
solution of the insoluble problem of free will, perhaps a necessary one.

The concrete system of right and wrong that has emerged in orthodox
Russian Communism is essentially the ethics of the eighteenth-century En-
lightenment, rather strongly tinged with the same kind of puritanism that
comes out in the French Jacobins, and in the earlier English Puritanism. The
Russians were committed by their world view to hold that men's appetites
are natural and therefore good; they would have no nonsense about redemp-
tion through ascetic self-denial, no self-deprivation here on earth as a pass-
port to heaven. The Old Bolsheviks came to power laden with principles
opposed to bourgeois prudery, greed, love of display, ownership of women,
all the hypocrisy of middle-class morality; they came, more positively, with
all the baggage of free-thinking virtues they had accumulated in the nineteenth
century. They at once established at law equality of the sexes, complete
freedom of divorce and abortion, access to contraceptives, and they abolished
private property, and with it such bourgeois evils as gambling, speculation,
everything Veblen ticketed so effectively as "conspicuous consumption."
The Old Bolsheviks, Lenin in the lead, were by no means Rabelaisian
naturalists; they were, in fact, ascetics. They were, in terms of the old
antithesis of liberty-authority, in principle and ultimately on the side of
freedom; but they did not believe that the free man, the man of the final
classless society, would fornicate, gamble, drink, overeat, show off, dominate
others, fight, lie, steal, murder. These and other forms of misconduct, they
held, were the result of the mode of production of capitalism. But there these
evil doings were, and in the ensuing dictatorship of the proletariat, which
under Lenin's own expansion of Marx's thought meant the dictatorship of
the fit few, the Bolshevik elite, these evils, and the evil men who committed
them, had to be proceeded against by the use of authority. The few modest
libertarian or anarchistic measures of the beginning were soon withdrawn,
and the Bolshevik version of a Republic of Terror and Virtue began.

After nearly half a century, there is much in Russia that bears the stamp
of this Republic of Virtue. There have been, of course, returns to some of the
old wickedness. The attempt to abolish the use of alcohol has become under
Khrushchev no more than an attempt to lessen it by regulation, as with the
British; most travelers do, however, find actual drunkenness, except perhaps
at those famous diplomatic parties, less common or at least less obvious than

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in Western Europe and America. The Russian press has at times got alarmed
over juvenile delinquency, "hooliganism," all sorts of corruption seeping over
from the Western democracies, such as jazz, "modernistic" art, sex perver-
sions, and the like, not to speak of more serious forms of Leftist and Rightist
"deviations" — the current Russian word for "heresies." Clearly, after Stalin's
death there was left further room for the old Adam and the old Eve, more
chance for what have long been in Christian actuality venial sins of self-in-
dulgence. Yet it is still true that the rare Russian who comes west, and espe-
cially to America, is shocked by our mores, by the public lechery — so it seems
to him — of our advertising, by the exploitation of sex, conspicuous consump-
tion, downright Roman imperial luxury in our movies, magazines, television.
Ethically and aesthetically, Russian formal standards, as has often been noted,
have at least since the early triumph of Stalin carried overtones of Victorian
times. Even their luxury and display, for the most part limited, as befits a so-
cialist society, to such common wealth as the famous Moscow subways and
great new public buildings, seem to us heavy, old-fashioned, bourgeois, in
fact. Russian plain living and high thinking seem a still-further-cheapened
version of seventeenth-century "business" Calvinism, not an ascetic Chris-
tian revulsion from this world, not at all a mystic yearning for higher things,
but a driving, no-nonsense desire to produce and share the simpler material
satisfactions, the less tempting, less inebriating, less spiritual ones. Such stand-
ards are, of course, in the hands of nationalist leaders, a means of putting guns
well before butter.

Our own alarmists who insist that Russia and her allies are united in a
monolithic block while the free West is divided, hesitating, unbelieving, are at
least guilty of turning a difference in degree into a difference in kind. There are
clearly in the Communist world today many of those "inner contradictions"
the Marxists readily enough find in the free world. It seems most unlikely that
the Russians have solved the most obvious difficulty the new faith of the
Enlightenment ran into from the start — the fact that this universalist faith
never found effective major institutional expression save in the nation-state,
by its nature parochial, not universalist. It is not even certain that within the
U.S.S.R, the constituent national groups really are satisfied with nice cultural
autonomy in a political state dominated by Great Russians. The government of
the Soviet Union itself has hitherto behaved toward those states within its sys-
tem of coalition and those outside it in a thoroughly traditional, which is to say
by Christian and Enlightenment standards a thoroughly immoral, fashion.

But contradictions — unresolved tensions — abound in the Communist
whole. The classless society is so clearly and so definitely promised that its

406

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indefinite postponement will require something of the kind of adaptation in
ideas and ritual the Christians worked out with the indefinite postponement of
the Second Coming of Christ. It is difficult to imagine how such an adjust-
ment can be made — or come about — in Communist eschatology save by some
radical paring down of the Utopian promise of the classless society. The
radical egalitarianism of Marxist ideals, quite apart from the concept of the
classless society, or, to put it more simply, the specific economic egalitarianism
of "to each according to his needs," will surely also need compromise,
adaptation, the rationalizing, the glossing over that horrifies the idealist.
Orwell's bitter satire "all are equal, only some are more equal than others" will
have to have the rankle taken out of it. This can be done, as we in the West
know well. It can be made obvious, indeed scientifically true, that a Russian
ballerina needs more than a seamstress; or the formula can be reversed, "from
each according to his needs, to each according to his abilities."

Not the most unlikely prospect is that the Marxist heresy will slowly be
absorbed into its Western parent faith, that the present schism between
Communism and Western democracy will turn out to be a rivalry between
nation-states organized in traditional coalitions, not, as has sometimes been
suggested, a struggle deeply rooted in religion, like the long and still unre-
solved, though now and for some time apparently stalemated, struggle be-
tween Christianity and Islam. I am not suggesting that such a nationalist
power struggle would be without its horrors, but if it is true that the hatred
theological is the profoundest of human hatreds, it should prove a struggle
less likely to be fought to the bitterest of ends than would a religious war.
At the very least, it looks as though the Marxist religion must in the long run
follow the Western pattern from which it sprang: that pattern is one of a
ferocious initial moral determination — a shared determination among the
many — to abolish evil, followed by a gradual adaptation of the group to the
necessity of living with, coping with, in a sense accepting, evil. I state this
pattern with excessive and misleading simplicity, but it will stand stating thus.

VII

The historian of Western morals must attempt some account of how the two
great twentieth-century contestants for the leadership of the Western world —
of the whole world — fit into Western moral traditions. I spare the reader
further introspection by either of us as to the nature of scientific objectivity
or of intellectual honesty, though some meditation as to whether scientific
objectivity and intellectual honesty are in fact identical might be not unprof-

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A History of Western Morals

itable. I shall sum up one conclusion in advance: Some such attempt can
be made publicly in the United States, and cannot yet be so made in Russia.

First of all, to judge from the conduct and the expressed attitudes of those
in charge of public policy and those who comment publicly on it: by the
highest ethical standards of our Western culture, both sides in this great agon
of the two nation-states are almost equally immoral. We all are wise enough to
know that others do not live up to their ideals. Mr. Thomas P. Whitney has
no trouble showing, in an article entitled "If Marx Visited Russia Today — "
that Marx would not find there "the classless, unexploited society he envis-
aged."27

But one part of our Western moral tradition — it is most familiar even in
this age, which the bemoaners say does not know the Bible, in the form of
Christ's teaching on the mote in the brother's eye and the beam in yours
(Matthew 7:3-5) — requires that we face the facts: a hostile observer, or
simply an idealist, could also write most devastatingly on "If Jefferson
Visited Washington Today — " or, though one hopes the tone would be dif-
ferent, "If Jesus Visited Washington Today — ."

Let me then use frankly the word "idealistic." To the idealist of the
Christian tradition that sent the anchorites to the desert, that made St. Francis
embrace poverty, that inspired and still to an amazing degree inspires the
Society of Friends, the bragging, the posturing, the threats and recriminations,
the double talk, the militancy, the holier-than-thou hypocrisy (or, more
kindly put, the inability to see the other side), the really intolerable gap
between practice and profession on both sides must seem simply un-Christian.
But more: to the idealist in the strict tradition of the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment as well as to the idealist in the deviant tradition of Marxism,
the conduct of both sides must seem as immoral as it must to the Christian
idealist. This statement, which seems to me incontrovertible, can, of course,
always be taken as a condemnation not of the present moral position of the
United States or that of the Soviet Union, but as a condemnation of intran-
sigent moral idealism.

Moreover, Americans in particular can stand being reminded — it is al-
most certainly impossible that anyone could as yet so remind the Russians —
that to many Westerners not citizens of either of the great rival superpowers
the actual moral situation of the rivals does not look like clear moral white-
ness on one side and clear moral blackness on the other. These Westerners,
English, French, German, and many others, are unlikely to be intransigent
moral idealists — the type is rare — and they may well feel that in the balance
27 New York Times. April 27, 1958, Section VI, Part 1, p. 12.

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The Twentieth Century

one side is in fact "better" than the other. But they are in part outsiders,
and they can look at us and the Russians without that complete moral nar-
cissism that critics like Toynbee find particularly offensive hi "parochial"
nationalism, though no doubt they suffer from the same blindness as regards
their own nation-parish. At the very least, Americans must expect that quite
honorable and honest non-Americans brought up hi the Western moral tra-
dition will feel justified in pointing out that by the standards of that tradi-
tion our acquisition of the Panama Canal was immoral; that we are in Oki-
nawa and other Pacific islands practicing the "colonialism" against which we
preach; that even at home we are progressing but slowly in closing the gap
between practice and profession in the treatment of Negroes; that our actual
foreign policy since our rapid rise to leadership of one of the rival coalitions
has, in fact, been rather clearly in the old historic and not very moral tradition
set in early modern Europe, has been — or has aimed to be — "realistic"
balance-of-power politics, not a revolutionary new and virtuous extension
of the morals and morale of our own national in-group to the whole uni-
verse of man.

Now the above can be written and published in the United States by an
American; nothing like it about Russia can be written and published in
Russia by a Russian. This is a great moral difference. It is not, let me insist,
a difference that wipes out hi this real, imperfect, complicated, bewildering
world everything else, not a difference that wipes out all similarity, not a
difference that wipes out even similarity in metaphor; or, rather, it is not
such from the point of view of a naturalistic-historical approach to morals,
nor of a temperate transcendental-religious approach. I grant that for the
whole-hog absolutist the United States and the Soviet Union can quite ob-
viously be absolutely different morally — or absolutely identical.

For the rest of us — for the most of us — I think I can make some of the
implications of what I am trying to establish quite clear by going back to
a clear concrete instance to which I have already made brief reference (see
p. 103). In Periclean Athens, a city-state hi which the tie between the in-
dividual and the state was close, the Antigone of Sophocles was staged with
the approval of the public authorities. At our distance in time we cannot be
sure for just what cause Antigone seemed to these Greeks to have gone to
her martrydom. She was certainly no eighteenth-century enlightened maiden,
and she did not sacrifice herself for any clause in a Bill of Rights. She and
John Stuart Mill would have had a hard time understanding one another.
I grant that it is unlikely that the original Athenian audience felt that the
play was in any sense a hostile criticism of the Athenian state or of existing

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A History of Western Morals

Athenian institutions. I am even prepared to make the guess, which will
shock the true classicist, that some of the original Athenian audience may
have reflected: Well, this is the sort of thing that can go on in Thebes, but
fortunately not here. Still, Antigone did defy the "government" in the person
of the regent Creon in the name of a morality, a "right" that she felt — not
without a touch of hubris-pnde, for this Promethean contradiction is old in-
deed in our West — was in her and not in Creon, king though he was.

For what was inside Antigone — in her heart and soul, for her moral
sentiments, the contents of her conscience, her superego — we have as our
long inheritance many names and phrases, not quite synonyms, each stamped
with the particular historical circumstances in which it arose, but all central
to our moral being. Let me call up some: render therefore unto Caesar the
things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's, Ich kann
nicht anders, e pur si muove (even though this was but whispered), freedom
of conscience, freedom of speech, nan sub homine, sed sub deo et lege, due
process, habeas corpus, juridical defense, the dignity of man, the rights of
man, individualism, or just plain liberty. We have also many names for, as
we have had much experience with, what Creon has come to stand for.28
Tyranny has come to mean the immoral and unrestrained use of power; but
we have caesaropapism, despotism, might makes right, raison d'etat, Real-
politik, the end justifies the means, my country, right or wrong, the Fuehrer-
prinzip, totalitarianism, and that pathetic phrase of Rousseau's, as full of
Western contradiction as any ever uttered, but, to me, definitely on this
wrong side of a great moral fence, it may be necessary to compel a man to be
free.

Now all these words and phrases on both sides are expressions of deep-
seated and, within the brief course of Western history, comparatively un-
changing human sentiments. As signs or symbols they are imprecise, and
when the kind of analysis suggested by a term like "semantics" is applied
to them they can be made to seem "meaningless" just because they are so
full of meanings. In their totality, each set stands for human conduct directed
by very different estimates of what human beings are like and what they
ought to be like. In their modern embodiment in the United States and in
Soviet Russia, the historian must note that each side sets as its goal a society
to which the first or libertarian set of sentiments rather than the second or

28 Creon in the play is by no means an embodiment of the attitude that governmental
power is above morality, is "amoral"; indeed, he is in a sense converted by Antigone's
stand to the belief — or the fear — that he has in his stand violated religion; the conver-
sion comes too late to prevent the catastrophe, or there would have been no tragedy.
Perhaps I should use the Thrasymachus of the Republic as my straw man here.

410

The Twentieth Century

authoritarian set should best apply: the Marxist ideal, the Marxist escha-
tology, is still that of the "classless society" in which the state and all its
agents, all violence and all constraints have simply disappeared, "withered
away." But in fact and in the balance of reality, the free West is freer than
the Communist world, so free that in most of the West, Communists may
announce their agreement with the Russian Communists' own master con-
tradiction, may make their own firm effort to compel men to be free, to
achieve gentleness through cruelty, variety through prescription, spontaneity
through planning . . . but we need not go on — George Orwell in Animal
Farm has said it better, if more bitterly. There is, however, a limit to Western
contradiction and paradox, for though we can indeed believe because it is
impossible, we cannot believe because it is absurd. The Russian claim to be
on the side of freedom looks absurd; ours, no worse than imperfectly realized.

We have been dealing, certainly not with abstractions but with the big,
overarching general tendency of the free West toward what Antigone stands
for, of the Communist West toward what Creon stands for. There are those
in the West who stand with Creon, and they are sometimes at least as suc-
cessful as he was; we may hope that there are those in the Communist world
who stand with Antigone, but so far the outside world knows little about
them, unless they have fled from Russia. And an Antigone who flees is not
quite Antigone.

There are, however, less heroic, more mundane aspects of morality.
Honesty should make us admit that from what the travelers say the Russians
are closer than we to a morality that has played a great part in our tradition.
They are, partly but surely not wholly from lack of material means for self-
indulgence hi their daily lives, harder working, more austere, simpler, more
"puritanical." Dialectical materialism, the facts of national patriotism and the
elitist authoritarian inheritance of Leninism helping, has led them far from
the Epicurean sty. Make no mistake, the old Adam and the old Eve must
be as strong in Russia as anywhere else, and in the eyes of the moral idealist
rhomme moyen sensuel russe is still, in John Mill's words, a poor thing. I do
not think altruism, loving-kindness, the virtues of the Beatitudes, are any
commoner in Russia than elsewhere. But, if only because of the scarcity of
consumer's goods, and because they are probably still in the active state of
their new religion, the Russians do seem to be nearer the moral state, the
morale, of such societies as Sparta or early Rome than are we of the free
West. The danger that Russia may yet prove to have crusading zeal, a social
and moral discipline that will defeat us, has worried many of our publicists,
and not without reason.

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A History of Western Morals

Nevertheless, there are necessary qualifications. First, on our side, the
black picture of Western decadence which the more excited prophets of doom
paint is not a true picture. The facts of two World Wars show that though
many, even most, of us have been brought up to expect heaven on earth,
we can live with courage and dignity through hell on earth. In the last war,
even civilian populations, not only in the virtuous north of Europe, but also
in the lax south, stood up to the test of bombardment from the air far better
than the prophets had supposed. Second, on the Russian side, the mere pas-
sage of time must gradually lessen the intensity of their religious faith, then:
revolutionary desire to conquer and convert. Russians moved by nationalism
alone, by mere pooled self-esteem, may be less formidable than Russians
moved by a spiritual elan we do not really understand, but which we have
seen in the revolutionary France of 1794, in Christian crusades and in
Moslem jihads.29

Moreover, unless you can believe that a world view, ideas about the
nature of man and the universe, have no effect whatever on the conduct of
the many who hold them, you will have to conclude that the Russian world
view is ill-designed to preserve for long years the self-denying virtues and
the Spartan morale. In the symbolic conflict between guns and butter, the
Communist philosophical ultimates are all on the side of butter; and though
clearly men will put up with what to the pure rationalist seems an intolerable
gap between ideal and real, between profession and practice, there is a tend-
ency, confirmed by the historical record, for some men to try to close the gap
by trying to realize the ideal and live up to the profession. Such men may
not be many, but they make a difference in the long run. When that ideal is
material comfort, as it is with the Marxist, these exceptional men get a lot
of help from plain men and from ordinary human nature, that poor thing.
Russians, like Americans, "believe in" progress, and progress for the faith-
ful is something more, or something less, than the mere successful expansion
of the nation-state to which they belong. We have come to one of the central
problems that face the modern West, the doctrine of Progress.

29 1 am not suggesting that this special spiritual elan wins wars by itself alone, nor
even that this religiously derived 6lan is the only kind of elan that has in the past
brought success to aggressive, expanding groups; but it is possible that in our modern
world of mass organization some such spirit has to be added to mat6nel and good
leadership to make a successful "imperialist" expansion. No one who knows the record
of American armed forces in the last general war and in the Korean war can honestly
find much of that kind of elan or spirit even among the professional officer caste, and
certainly not in the ranks. Many of us in the United States would like to convert
the world— but not, and in this we are, I think, honest, by force.

472

The Problem of Moral Progress

WHO HAS NOT SEEN in recent years some form of one of the cartoonists'
favorite subjects: a monstrous, snarling, apelike, definitely subhuman being
holding, or about to manipulate or steer, a complicated machine, an H-bomb,
a guided missile, or the like? Perhaps there will be a symbolically good hu-
man being in contrast, a white-coated scientist, a kindly humanitarian, even
a minister of God, and a caption: Which will win? Verbally the problem,
which surely comes home to a great many people in the West today, is
commonly put as a contrast between the accepted fact of our great material
progress and the nowadays equally accepted fact of our much slighter —
perhaps nonexistent — moral progress. At its sharpest, the matter is pointed
to a clear dilemma: We have now the material possibility of destroying our
civilization, and, to judge by the recent record, our morals are such in prac-
tice that it seems by no means unlikely that we shall avail ourselves of this
possibility.

The reader need not be reminded that this problem is both old and new.
Western man has long lived under the shadow of impending disaster —
famine, plague, war, flood, earthquake. Under circumstances we by no
means fully understand, as in the early apocalyptic days of Christianity, or in
the troubled fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of our era, great populations
have been moved to mass madness by an almost universal sense of impend-
ing doom; and, if only because of the intellectual and emotional heritage of
primitive Christian belief in a Second Coming, small sectarian groups have
been hailing the immediate end of the world at intervals for two thousand

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A History of Western Morals

years. Indeed, American history affords many examples of groups setting
definite dates for the end of the world. One of the latest, when the end did
not come, decided that their devotions had swayed God to a postponement.
Man as an individual knows he is going to die, and one supposes that his
philosophic and imaginative gifts — or, as the real die-hard primitivist ro-
mantic would say, curses — have long made some sense of the possibility of
a collective death of humanity, or of a given in-group, natural and inevitable.

But the Enlightenment brought something new to the problem of man's
fate. In simplest terms it banished, for the fully Enlightened, God and the
whole complex of the supernatural from man's hopes and fears of the future,
and substituted what we call the "doctrine of progress."1 The doctrine of
progress, coupled with such tenets as that of the natural goodness and rea-
sonableness of man, democratic egalitarianism, humanitarian benevolence,
and a continued, even stepped-up, Western or Faustian awareness of history,
of process, of growth, had by the nineteenth century put past, present, and
future of man's fate in a strikingly new light. There seemed to the Enlightened
no longer any grounds for fears of a great, complete disaster. No personal
God, his ways inscrutable to man, was left to bring to a sudden end a world
he never created. Nature, it was now believed, never produced more than
local and occasional disasters; and, moreover, men, the favorite children of
Nature, were fast learning how to get around their parent. The willful might
still disobey Nature, and be punished for their disobedience; but disobedi-
ence, punishment, and, above all, guilt, meant something very different when
the power above was a Christian God and when it was the hypostatized Na-
ture of the Enlightenment. Men have always known in their hearts that
Nature is an invention of their own; they have not usually felt that way about
God.

In sum, though even in the eighteenth century and most certainly in the
nineteenth there were isolated intellectuals who held a doctrine of decadence,
not progress, most Westerners were confident that human beings everywhere
were getting morally better as well as materially better off. We must be careful
here: after the first bloom of the Enlightenment wore off with the French
Revolution, few expected heaven on earth at once. Most Victorian intel-
lectuals— a Mill, a Carlyle, a Tocqueville, a Matthew Arnold — had fearful
doubts as to whether the many could be morally improved, or "civilized,"

1 Once more, I ask. the reader to note my qualifying phrase, "for the fully Enlightened."
The main theme of Western intellectual and moral history since about 1700 has been
the coexistence and mutual interpenetration of two very different broad world views,
the Christian and that of the Enlightenment.

414

The Problem of Moral Progress

fast enough to forestall some disasters worse than that of the French Revo-
lution. They were quite aware of the dilemma: machine master of man or
man master of machine. Some of the Utopias of the late nineteenth century,
already beginning to sound like inverted Utopias, solve the dilemma by
doing away with the machine.2 Still, these are but premonitions. The central
belief of the West was still a chastened belief in progress, well represented
by Herbert Spencer of the 1860's among the intellectuals: moral progress
lags behind material, especially economic progress, there are still little wars,
still backward nations, and even the English still have dukes, foxhounds,
Oxford University, and cosmetics, but the majestic evolution of society from
the military to the industrial will go gradually on, as the geological record
tells us all change in Nature comes about, inevitably, happily, purposefully,
as we all should like to have it.

I have pointed out in my last chapter, what hardly needed pointing out,
that in mid-twentieth century few intellectuals, and one assumes few of the
other educated groups in the West, can hold such a world view without grave
doubts. On the other hand, I think it quite as clear that at least in the
United States and even among the many nonexistentialists in Western Europe
most people have difficulty jettisoning all the cargo of hope and apparent
understanding we may subsume in the symbol Progress. I have already
pointed out, what some of us do tend not to notice, that the Communist
world is deeply committed to a very special form of belief in the doctrine
of progress.3

Now no one questions the fact — though some may think it desirable
not to use in registering that fact a value-charged word like "progress" — that
men have in the course of known Western history gained increasing ability
to get from their material environment satisfactions of obvious human wants.
This "progress" can be measured. A simple instance is speed of travel, which
will range from human walking speed to the latest achievement in jet planes.
Plotted graphically to cover the last three thousand years, the line represent-
ing speed of travel will be nearly flat for most of the period, and then only
yesterday, with the railroad, start upward clear off the graph. As an index,
speed of travel may well exaggerate the extent to which this whole material
progress — man's control over his material environment, including most cer-
tainly over his own bodily health, mental and physical — has been very recent

2 Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872) and William Morris, News from Nowhere (1891) will
do as samples. But both of these writers sound like optimists if they are confronted with
an Aldous Huxley or a George Orwell.

3 See above, p. 404.

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A History of Western Morals

and very great. We are still, physically, less than supermen but no one can
question the reality of this change, this "progress," nor its measurability.

H there be an improvement in men's conduct in relation to their ethical
standards, or even an improvement in those standards themselves, over the
last three thousand years, such improvement can hardly be measured quanti-
tatively, can hardly be given numerical indexes of any sort. The most ambi-
tious effort to apply quantitative measurement to the data of historical
sociology, or sociological history, that I know is P. A. Sorokin's Social and
Cultural Dynamics:,4 and Sorokin, as a good child — an egghead child — of
our age, is trying to measure decay rather than progress. He does not suc-
ceed, save in affording evidence of "cyclical" movements in Western history,
and his indexes must look phony to anyone used to measuring the measur-
able. I propose in the next few pages the more modest goal of trying to make
some rough estimates of the nature and the degree of changes our brief re-
view of the moral history of the West makes possible. They will be but ap-
proximations, based on inadequate data, and on inadequate tools for analysis
of the data; for the moral sciences are not yet by any means well-developed
sciences. Moreover, the concepts of change, of difference, are full of philo-
sophical difficulties. There is good sound intellectual as well as emotional
ground for accepting as true such statements as "the morals that find expres-
sion in a Nazi concentration camp are different from the morals that find
expression in the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children," or "the
morals of the British aristocracy in 1670 were different from the morals
of the British aristocracy in 1870." But there are also good grounds, I be-
lieve, for the statement that there are relatively constant elements in the
history of morals in the West, some of which I shall shortly point out. A
cook knows that a very small quantitative change — a mere dash of another
spice — may make a great difference in the dish he is preparing, though the
quantity and quality of the staple he is using, flour, for instance, may remain
the same. The analogy is, of course, a more than usually imperfect one, as
well as undignified; but I suggest that a society which uses the familiar four-
letter words freely in "polite" intercourse is exceedingly different from one
in which they are strictly forbidden; and yet its members on the average
may, even "morally," conduct themselves in quite similar ways in regard,
say, to actual sex relations. The spice of language is important, but it is no
staple.

* Four vols., New York, American Book Co., 1937, especially Vol. HI, Fluctuations of
Social Relationships, War, and Revolution, with Statistical Tables.

416

The Problem of Moral Progress

ii

Both as to formal philosophic ethical writing and as to folk notions of ethics
incorporated in tradition, codes, aphorisms of folk wisdom, the three or four
thousand years of our Western recorded history show an unmistakable con-
stant element. Honesty, loyalty, kindness, self-control, industry, co-opera-
tiveness are virtues; lying, treachery, cruelty, self-indulgence, laziness, con-
spicuous and uncontrolled aggressiveness, and selfishness are vices. There
are indeed in-group limitations; lying to an outsider, cruelty to an enemy, are
vices only in lofty ethical systems which take in all humanity, not just West-
ern man, let alone just the tribe, as the in-group. Yet there is a strong note
of universalism even in popular ethical ideals in the West, a note that had to
be sounded both in Christianity and in the Enlightenment, and one that not
even the growth of modern nationalism has drowned out. There are varia-
tions, often great, in the degree of esteem placed on these common ethical
ideals, and on their interpretation. The Stoic notion of self-control and the
Irish folk notion of self-control as exhibited at a wake are far apart; but the
basic virtue I am trying to describe is there in both. Both try to overcome, to
achieve control of grief and despair.

The most striking constant in the history of Western ethical ideals is the
general reprobation that intellectuals, men of affairs, and the many alike
give to all extreme forms of ethical relativism, which in the West usually
takes the form of the doctrine that for the individual and for the group
success is right, failure wrong — and success, substantially in this pattern, is
doing what you want to do, getting power, wealth, prestige. Add to this the
notion that men and groups vary infinitely in what they want. Now from
Thrasymachus through Machiavelli to the latest sophomore to discover and
misunderstand Nietzsche, this theme does crop up constantly in the history
of Western thought, though it is necessarily muted in much of the Middle
Ages. Yet such doctrines of ethical relativism are surely never "popular";
indeed, the best-known exponent of one form of the doctrine in modern
times, Machiavelli, has become a common noun, a synonym of wicked
"realism."5 The doctrine, in forms such as "might makes right" or Real-

5 1 grant that Machiavelli was not a Machiavellian; he was not even quite an "in-
verted idealist," but a complicated and somewhat academic figure very aware of the
gap between human practice and profession, and a somewhat premature Italian na-
tionalist. Professor Garrett Mattingly argues, indeed, that The Prince is pure satire,
that Machiavelli means as moralist the opposite of what he here seems to preach.
American Scholar, XXVII, 1958, pp. 482-490. When you get down to cases, it is hard
to find a full, uncompromising ethical relativist, just as it is hard to find full, uncom-
promising philosophical anarchists, or solipsists.

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politik, or just just plain Nazism, and applied to a given in-group, may have
seemed sometimes in recent years to have attained respectability and general
acceptance among the many; but these ideas have certainly never gained full
acceptance throughout the West; and even among the Germans, who have
been the whipping boys for a long time for such ideas, they were far from
universally held. Indeed, as I have maintained in my first consideration of
modern nationalism (Chapter XII, p. 339), all but the most extreme of
nationalists are aware that Christian universalism cannot accept nationalist
parochialism as an absolute, and that even the one-hundred-percent patriot
ought to leave a few percentage points for Christianity or Enlightenment.
Western opinion generally holds that those who guide the group are not to
be held to all parts of the observance of ethical code; nor are they to be
held as rigorously to those that do apply as should the individual in his
actions as a private person; but it holds that the group, right on up to the
state, ought to conform to an ethical code by no means basically different
from the code for individuals. Not even reason d'etat has been widely ac-
cepted as dispensing a statesman from the morality of his society, except
perhaps among such professionals as the men who really run the state. And
even among these latter, and in a democracy, we should ourselves not be very
realistic if we dismissed their professions of virtuous intent as altogether
hypocritical. Even prime ministers, even secretaries of state, are often true
believers.

Still confining ourselves to ethical ideals, we may note as a balance
to the real constants above noted that there has always been, more partic-
ularly among writers on ethics, a great deal of variety in the expressed
set of world views on which they base their actual ethical precepts. I am
by temperament and certainly by training inclined to take the position that
the precepts which are relatively constant are more important — more directly
influence human conduct — than the world views, which vary with time,
place, and individual thinker. Yet I suspect it makes some difference
whether a man does the same thing under the impression that he is obey-
ing the will of God or whether he does the same thing under the impression
that he is maximizing his pleasure — his true pleasure. Indeed, I shall risk
being somewhat unfashionable and express doubts as to whether under
these conditions the somethings done are in fact the same thing. But to recur
to a figure of speech used previously, the differing world views here seem to
me to be at least no more than seasoning; only if the spice is poured on
wholesale are the dishes radically different. Excessive doses of either the

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Kantian categorical imperative or of the Benthamite felicific calculus can lead
certain individuals far astray in different and not always quite predictable
directions. Ordinary doses can sometimes drug, as notably with Kantian
idealism, become the conventional nineteenth-century German belief that
their philosophic national depth was all that Germans needed in the way
of conventional virtue. But for the most part, both the categorical impera-
tive and the felicific calculus led good middle-class nineteenth-century folk
to the same unheroic decencies.

Yet one may risk a few generalizations of the range of these approaches
to ethics, these "styles" in ethical world views. There have been in the West
two well-known periods of maximum range of individual and group variation
in this respect, the Greco-Roman world and our own in modern times. In both
societies, the variety of these approaches is striking. They range from reli-
gion-sanctioned absolutes through many kinds of ethical idealism, even
otherworldliness, to high-minded utilitarianism, rationalism, and on to
comparatively rare assertions of low-minded utilitarianism, complete ethical
relativism, and a cult of the Ego. In contrast, throughout the Middle Ages the
approach to ethics was through a generally accepted belief that the rules
of right conduct for men had been set by a supernatural power, a God who
administered rewards and punishments in judgelike fashion; this God did
administer a "natural law," but a law He had set and communicated to man
through His son, and the church, not a law or uniformity men made or
even discovered by themselves, unaided. In short, the commonplace is cor-
rect: formal ethics in the Middle Ages were based on an idealism transcend-
ing sense experience, empirical knowledge. Finally, and in spite of the vogue
of German philosophical idealism in the nineteenth century, there can be little
doubt that the weight of Western thought and feeling on ethics has in mod-
ern times fallen away from what William James called "tender-mindedness"
and toward what he called "tough-mindedness." Hedonism, utilitarianism,
pragmatism, even more ambiguous terms such as "naturalism" or "ration-
alism," though they invite the philosopher to long discussion, can be thrown
loosely as a blanket over the ethical world views of, I suspect, the majority
of educated Westerners in recent times. Even twentieth-century movements
away from what we may vaguely call "naturalistic" or "this-worldly" or
"tough-minded empirical" approaches to ethics seem to me not yet to have
got many to thinking and feeling very transcendentally. But, of course, the
whole Christian tradition in practice has always for the many made this
world — the world of sense experience filtered through and organized by

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millions of minds over many centuries — rather more real, or at least rather
more certain in all its variety, than any other.

It is perhaps harder to establish a kind of constant in human conduct
over the course of Western history. At any given time and for any given
group it can no doubt be maintained that there is a rough average conduct,
neither very good in terms of accepted ethical norms nor very bad in such
terms. Man's biological limitations, the economic limitations that have
hitherto pretty well bound the many, the hold convention and conformity
have on men, all combine to make real enough, no matter how the subtler,
or perhaps merely the protesting, mind may reject its reality, the concep-
tion of an homme moyen sensuel, a middle of the roader in all he thinks, feels,
and does, the man who keeps this world from being a heaven — perhaps, also,
from being a hell. From this point it is not difficult to extend such a concept
to the brief course of Western history, and come, with Mencken, to the
conclusion that in spite of the fantastic, amusing, infuriating, noble, igno-
minious conduct of some men over these centuries, the bulk of men have as
pagans, Jews, Moslems, Christians, freethinkers conducted themselves in a
way thoroughly unsatisfactory to most moralists; they have been bad, but
not very bad, good, but not very good. They have not for the most part kept
to the kind of middle ground suggested by the Greek adage "nothing too
much"; they have, rather, oscillated between unheroic bad and unheroic
good, never achieving the extremes of the saint or the sinner, but never
coming near the poise implied in the Greek ideal. Mencken would agree
with J. S. Mill that "ordinary human nature is so poor a thing/' but with the,
for him, saving comment, "thank God!" Homo sapiens, the good-natured
boob, can be led astray by reformers who play on his normally unexacting
sense of decency and sometimes get him to behave "unnaturally" for a
while; but he has sufficient moral inertia, which actually is a saving kind of
stamina, so that he soon goes back to his time-tried and effective normality.

Mencken's bluff assurance that "human nature doesn't change" is stated
in language that dates, but the historian of morals must record that some
such conception of a constant in human conduct has itself been a constant of
Western thought. He must, however, also note that the historical record it-
self is surely no straight line of any sort, up and down. Or, in an obvious
metaphor, the moral landscape history offers us is no even plain, no plateau,
but a varied one with great heights and horrid depths as well. It may well be
that the great expanse of the middling hills and rolling plains is more monot-
onous, life there more alike always and everywhere, than on the peaks and in

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the abysses. But men range everywhere. Alone, often, but sometimes in num-
bers, sometimes in their thousands, they leave Mencken's comfortable plains,
and take to the heights or the depths, or, like those almost medievally sym-
bolic lemmings, swim on in the seas until they drown.

in

But we must return from metaphor to the record. Seen from the mid-
twentieth century, the record of human conduct in the West does not seem to
be one of clear general moral improvement or progress, not a record of
unilinear evolution upward. Of course, not even such evolutionary theorists
as Comte or Herbert Spencer, insensitive though they were to the facts of
history, quite saw the course of history as an absolutely even straight line
or curve, always keeping the upward course. Some lapses, some failures,
some retrogression had to be admitted. Nevertheless, the term "unilinear
evolution" is not an unfair one to describe the form that the notion of prog-
ress applied to human conduct took with many of these eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century thinkers. An ordinary Englishman in 1901 had, in this
system, to be a morally superior being to an ordinary Athenian in 416 B.C.
The history-conscious observer will perhaps have noted that these dates
are those of Kitchener's organization of concentration camps in South
Africa to cope with Boer guerrilla warfare, and of the Athenian attack on
the little island of Melos; in the first, some 20,000 Boer women and children
died of disease, starvation, neglect, and despair; in the second, all Melian
males were killed, and the women and children enslaved. This was progress,
perhaps, for in 1901 formal institutional slavery had in fact ceased to exist
in the West; but not quite the progress Condorcet dreamed of.

With the recent vogue of Spengler, Toynbee, and other philosophers of
history the concept of cyclical variation in human conduct has come back
into a kind of fashion. The term "cycle," like the term "revolution," is taken
over from mechanics, and has at its root a concept of exact repetition, as with
the revolution or turning of a wheel, which is by no means applicable to
what we know of human history. Nevertheless, the two terms have both
been, in ordinary use, translated into the kind of appropriate impreciseness
that will do well enough at the present stage of our understanding of human
affairs. I shall use the words "cycle" and "cyclical" loosely to mean the
kind of variation that moves rougjily from one definable extreme to another,
though by no means usually in any repeated and exact time interval nor in

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equal distances, spiritual or material. We may perhaps get some light on
our problem if we consider some of these "cyclical" variations in human
morals.

The most all-inclusive of these variations or cycles inevitably must
smack of the philosophy of history, with all its often suggestive but, by
standards of professional historiography, quite unverifiable hypotheses,
hunches, big ideas. I shall, however, hazard the suggestion that there are
several forms of swings or cycles in the Western record, movements from one
polarity toward another.

The first is a polarity of conservatism, conformity to established ways,
on one hand and change, invention, entrepreneurship on the other. I should
guess that no one, from St. Augustine and Ibn Khaldun to Hegel and Toyn-
bee, has written on the philosophy of history without claiming as established
facts of Western social organization and behavior what he" seeks to describe
in these or similar polar dualistic terms. The most sweeping and intolerant
form that this polarity has been given, the Hegelian dialectic, covering
nothing less than all human civilization — the thesis of Oriental despotism,
changeless, timeless, then the antithesis of Greek and Western freedom, in-
novating but irresponsible, anarchic, and, finally the synthesis of Germanic
true freedom, progressive but orderly — this formulation is so far from the
facts as to be almost, but not quite, meaningless. (Not quite, for, unlike
the raw facts, just because it is a theory it is something more than mere
non-sense.) In more modest forms, applied to smaller societies, not held to
any rhythmic or inevitable beat, never taken as meaning that all members
of a given society are ever at one pole or another, the basic concept has
its own partial validity.

For the historian of morals, the polarity may most conveniently be put
in terms borrowed from Machiavelli and taken up by Pareto, terms I have
already referred to (see p. 239). In some societies and at some times the
feeling, the style, has been set by the lions; in others, by the foxes. The
Spartans were lions, the Athenians foxes, though these were contemporane-
ous societies. The medieval aristocracy of the West were lions; the American
plutocracy of the Gilded Age were foxes. Both these latter groups were
addicted to violence, and neither conducted life along the best standards
of our Western thought. But their moral styles were different. The lions at
their best are reliable and unprogressive; the foxes at their best are unre-
liable and progressive, are at least agents of all sorts of changes, some of

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The Problem of Moral Progress

which may be morally desirable. Most human societies in the West have
been mixtures of the two, with neither so predominating as to produce all
change or no change; moreover, lions and foxes alike have been minorities,
leaders — the majority, perhaps fortunately, remaining mere men. The lions
tend to be corrupted by the material prosperity, which good lion-led armies,
helped by a few foxes in government and even in military affairs, bring to a
society; the foxes, in the long run of their descendants, turn into lions, but
rather stale ones, lacking the fine fresh confidence of the original lions —
turn, in fact, into die-hard conservatives, full of radically archaic ideas. No
doubt there is something in Hegel, after all.

A second and most obvious polarity in our moral history is that between
periods, or groups — perhaps whole societies — of great moral laxity and
those of great moral strictness. Here even the relatively slight overtones of
mechanical regularity we have left in terms like "cyclical" are misleading. The
patterns discernible in our brief record are of bewildering complexity. Time
intervals between loose and strict periods are irregular; in a big Western
society, even in a single nation-state, loose-living and strict-living social
classes (to say nothing of individuals) may for a time at least exist side
by side; even before the modern nation-state, there have been within the
West great regional differences in respect to this polarity of strict and loose
morals. Finally, a group or class may in practice live reasonably well ac-
cording to a code that seems to us strict in many ways, loose in others.
Broadly speaking, Western aristocracies at their traditional peaks have had
family solidarity, female chastity within the class, children carefully dis-
ciplined, have practiced within their ranks the virtues of conventional Chris-
tion morality (not true Christian morality); but their males in particular
have been sexually loose — there were always plenty of women available
in other classes — addicted to drinking, gambling, and other customary male
vices, and caught up in an often unscrupulous form of the eternal agon.

Nevertheless, there are polar moments discernible, sometimes for these
very aristocracies, sometimes for wider groups. The pole of laxity is clear in
late-republican-early-imperial Rome and in the disorderly society that cul-
minates in the Italian Renaissance. It is not by any means as clear for the
West European aristocracies of the eighteenth century; nor do I think it at
all clear for the privileged wealthy classes of the twentieth-century West.
Indeed, even for the Romans and the men of the Renaissance, the extent of
their immorality is exaggerated by the moral indignation of later historians,

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by the human fondness for scandal, and by the need to have moral scape-
goats. For the last of the old European aristocracies, those of the eighteenth
century in West Europe, those of the nineteenth century further east, the
propaganda of their victorious revolutionary opponents (who in England did
not need a revolution to succeed) has given them a reputation they do not
entirely deserve. There were surely among them more Lafayettes and
Steins than de Sades, or even Mirabeaus and Charles James Foxes. Our
modern world has been spared from the extremes of moral laxity in part,
certainly, by the conversion of so many superior people in the moral re-
newal of the Enlightenment.

The polar moments of moral strictness are also clear: the early Christian
communities, the triumphant puritan communities of early modern times,
the brief moments of triumphant freethinking revolutionaries like the Jaco-
bins and the Bolsheviks. There are somewhat more spotted, less purely
Puritanical times of moral strictness, as in early republican Rome, in the
maturing feudal aristocracies, among the Prussian Junkers, and among the
Victorian middle classes. There is clearly much resistance among ordinary
human beings to any widespread attempt to achieve in practice a rigorous
moral order of the kind we must call, imprecisely but clearly, Puritanical.
It would seem from the record that a degree of moral looseness is far more
common than a corresponding degree of strictness. I shall come shortly to
the implications of this polarity of looseness-strictness for morale, for the
survival of societies.

Two striking examples of a kind of beat, of recurrence in time, again
not with mechanical regularity, are afforded by this particular polarity. First,
there is the marked phenomenon I have already mentioned, the sequence of
rigorous suppression of open indulgence in conventional vices by the English
Puritans of the 1640's and the French Jacobins of the 1790's, and the ex-
traordinarily corrupt — again in conventional terms — "restorations" or "reac-
tions" that followed them* There is a similar though not identical rhythm
in the rigors of the first Russian Bolshevik rule and the ensuing relapse into
Nep, the "New Economic Policy." These are sudden and dramatic changes,
which follow on a given political signal. Second, there is the long record of
reform within the Christian community. The record of Western monasticism
is familiar: an order is established to practice rigorous and austere morality;
it acquires wealth and standing, and begins to be less rigorous and austere,
even, in hostile eyes, loose and corrupt; within the order itself in a cell or

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The Problem of Moral Progress

a branch, or perhaps outside it altogether, a group of reformers initiate
a moral renewal, and once more the devoted lead austere lives of Christian
goodness — and once more the decline sets in, once more to be followed by
renewal. Protestantism itself, and its proliferation into sects, is in part a
manifestation of this same process of moral renewal.

There are clear and real regional variations in the Western moral rec-
ord (note that I am still trying to get that record straight, not yet to judge
or even to generalize to any great extent) . A familiar form of this variation
to us today — it is one that the purest liberal finds it somewhat indecent to
mention, or even to admit — is that between North European high morals
and South European low morals. The generation of 1900 wrote a good
deal of nonsense around his topic, extending the notion to a kind of world-
wide moral peck order correlated with a scale from blond to brunette, or
from fog to sunshine, or some equally simple measure. Cleanliness, which our
Northern folk wisdom ranks next to godliness anyway, served as a nice index
for these moralists; they liked to contrast in this respect Amsterdam with
Naples, or even San Diego with Tijuana. Now this contrast was real enough,
even if it could not entirely bear all the weight the racists put on it. No one,
not even an American liberal, who lived first in a North European com-
munity and then in a Mediterranean community could fail to see, not only
that the Northern community was cleaner, better house-kept, but that its
inhabitants were at least on an average, as far as an outsider could judge,
rather more chaste, more honest, more reliable, more self-controlled, more
civically responsible than the Southern. He might come to like his Italians
far more than his Swedes or Dutch or Scots; the Mignon complex itself is
common among Northerners, who sometimes need relief from their virtue as
well as from their fog. But that is another matter.

Tacitus does anticipate some of this theory of Northern virtue, but I
do not think that what we know of medieval social history allows one to
differentiate greatly between the regions of Europe in respect to these aver-
age levels of private and public morality. Chaucer's world seems as far from
the world of Victorian England as was that of the French jabliaux from which
Chaucer drew so much. The conduct of the Crusaders seems not to vary a
great deal, no matter where they come from. The Christendom of the Middle
Ages, if it was not quite the united world it seems to some to have been,
does seem to have been loosely one in morals as in faith.

There remains a polarity that can hardly help taking us into the danger-

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A History of Western Morals

ous regions ranged by philosophers of history, and to the fearsome problems
of the decline and fall of whole societies and civilizations.6 This is the polarity
of primitive-advanced, youthful-mature, simple-complex, innocent-sophisti-
cated. Now these polarities are not identical, and they are further confused
if one adds the moral one, virtuous-corrupt. Anthropology itself, one of the
youngest of the social sciences, has destroyed whatever credit was left to
eighteenth-century beliefs in a pristine and universal Golden Age, or to the
nineteenth-century belief that primitive cultures are simple, especially simple
in that they do not demand much from the human central nervous system.
Yet there does remain a kernel of truth in the notion, especially well illus-
trated in the history of Rome, that there is often a "stage" in the develop-
ment of a society when mores and morals alike are characterized, not by
simplicity in the sense of absence of rules, ritual, formality, but by simplicity
in the moral sense, rigorous observance of the rules, very little casuistry,
little mockery, no irony, firm belief that black is black and white white and
gray just nonexistent. But the tone of life in such societies is commonly
violent, coarse, masculine, in a harsh sense quite contrasted with the tone of
the Enlightenment. Much of its coarseness and violence and few of its virtues
appear in the history of the American frontier; but otherwise our Western
modern history has not in fact seen any society that at all resembles this
idealized simple society.

A closely allied polarity was until quite recently part of our Western
moral baggage. This is the contrast between the virtuous countryside and the
wicked city, long a part of American folklore, but not unknown in Europe,
indeed, originating there in its modern form in the eighteenth century. What-
ever basis in fact the contrast had was rather in manners than in morals, and
the debunkers were at work undermining the contrast even before modern
technology had almost erased it. The novelists found incest and other hor-
rors in New England villages well back in the nineteenth century; and, in a
fine display of the competitive spirit, Southern novelists in our own time

6 1 would not have the reader conclude from such occasional references that I con-
demn all attempts at generalizing broadly about the course of history. On the whole,
as should be clear from my own rashness in these matters, I am all for such at-
tempts. But they are dangerous. If you find such writers as Toynbee, Spengler, Sorokin
intolerable, I recommend A. L. Kroeber, Configurations of Culture Growth, Berkeley,
University of California Press, 1944, and also his general book Anthropology, new ed.,
New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1948. Professor Kroeber, a trained anthropologist, under-
stands both the strength and the actual present limitations of the methodology of
Western natural science — and he knows that science pushes inexorably toward the
highest degree of generalization the data will bear.

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The Problem of Moral Progress

have discovered even worse things among the magnolias. Like all cliches, the
contrast between the honest countryman and the city slicker was not without
some element of truth. Great cities especially tend to breed among the many
a superficial skepticism about the goodness and honesty of the race, an atti-
tude that in this country the word "sophistication" has been vulgarized to
describe. But the last war showed that in Europe and even in Asia the popu-
lations of modern great cities are clearly not lacking in the kind of moral
fiber that enables them to stand up against bombardment from the air.

IV

We come thus to the difficult problem of the relation of morals in the con-
ventional sense to the prosperity, the survival, of a society; or one may put it,
the relation between private and public morals; or, still more simply, the
relation between morals and morale.

At the outset, we can hardly avoid a truism: Western societies have
always sooner or later found themselves at war, and therefore in need of
good fighting men. To fight well, men need, of course, sustenance, weapons,
increasingly complex and expensive, leadership, and luck; but they also need
training, discipline, and what we may call simply the "military virtues." Now
these virtues can be developed in a professional class, either relatively few
mercenary troops, as in early modern Europe, or a relatively large profes-
sional army, as in later Rome, or a small professional fighting aristocracy, as
in the early Middle Ages. Such professionals can often do pretty well for a
society most of whose members clearly do not have the necessary military
virtues. At any rate, it is clear that in the One World of the Roman Empire,
throughout most of Europe in the Middle Ages, and to a degree right on to
the great French Revolution, the many were not directly involved hi fighting,
did not even, save as producers, have much to do with the ultimate decision
of war.

Yet the record of Western history shows many societies and many eras
when armies were citizen armies — those of the Greek city-states, of Repub-
lican Rome, some few medieval city-states, and that extraordinary phenom-
enon the modern Western mass army that dates from the French Revolution
and has gone on, hi spite of knightly aviation, to our own day. In such soci-
eties the way the masses of men think and feel about their station and duties,
their relation to then: fellow men, their relation to the fatherland, is of very
great importance. Weapons, supply, geography, leadership, and luck are

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A History of Western Morals

surely also of great importance, and one of these variables alone may deter-
mine victory or defeat. Still, most, even of these variables, seem somehow
related to the total strength of the society, a strength that is ultimately the
good will of the many as well as the few. No one should question the impor-
tance of grave technical military failings in the defeat of France in 1940 —
nor, indeed, the importance of the simple fact that France is not an island.
Yet, the general impression, which the French for the most part themselves
do not deny, is that the fall of France stemmed also from a "failure of nerve,"
from lack of heart and stomach for that particular fight, from a moral
failure.7 And it would seem that even in societies, like the Roman Empire, or
the France of the Hundred Years' War, where the many are not directly
engaged in the fighting, the feelings of the many, their sense of sharing or not
sharing in the common thing, has something to do with the survival of the
society.

What are these virtues, what is this state of feeling among the many that
makes for a society that can survive the test of war — hitherto, always, the
ultimate test in the West? They are clearly not those of conventional private
morality, and certainly not those of gentle, pacifist, idealist Christianity. Nor
are there in the record — admittedly brief and incomplete — decisive grounds
for correlating moral looseness, luxury, urban living with failure, old age,
decadence, and collapse of a society. Especially for our modern Western
world, the prophets of doom may not have it both ways: we cannot be today
completely sunk in sensual self-indulgence and also fine disciplined fighters.
And the overwhelming evidence of the last fifty years is that the West is, with
all its grave difficulties, by no means lacking in those qualities we associate
with youth, growth, even — blessed word — progress. In spite of Toynbee,
Sorokin, and all the rest, this society does not feel old and tired.

There are, however, on the relation between civic morality and the sur-
vival of society a few positive generalizations that seem to come from the
record. There is for one thing the striking fact of the expansive success, a
success not infrequently achieved in actual battle, of religious groups in what
I have called the active phase of a faith. Christianity itself took up the sword
as well as missionary work very successfully once it had got established; and
there are the Arabs in the almost incredible expansion of Islam, the Western

7 In our multanimous West, it has, of course, been denied that morals or morale had
anything at all to do with the fall of France. Certainly the matter is not as simple as
the soldierly tradition makes it out to be. Reluctant soldiers can be quite good soldiers,
as we Americans showed in the last general war. But je-m'en-foutisme probably does
not help win wars, or peace.

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The Problem of Moral Progress

Christianity of the Crusades, the secular crusades that followed hard on the
establishment of the two most active forms of the faith of the Enlightenment
that of the French Jacobins and that of the Russian Bolsheviks. Even plain
nationalism, not raised to very religious intensity, has inspired men to fight
and resist with more than ordinary persistence, fury, and intolerance. There
is no escaping the commonplace; men do fight best when they fight for a
cause, fight best of all to help God, or Reason, or Dialectical Materialism
bring about the inevitable.8

Yet these crusades have hitherto always been brief, have always burned
themselves out quite rapidly. It is much more difficult to account for the
place of moral factors in the long pull, in the general good health of a society.
Here surely the crux is not the question of how much ordinary wickedness
there is among the many, and especially how much gambling, whoring, drink-
ing, gluttony, and the like. These matters, and, even more, such matters as
honesty, loyalty, discipline, willingness to accept hardship and disappoint-
ment, willingness to collaborate with others, and much more of the sort, are
important for the good society, even for the going, reasonably good society.
But these matters themselves seem to depend in part on men's attitudes
toward their fellows and toward the universe, on just the kind of problem of
morals and world views we have been dealing with in this study. Their atti-
tude toward their fellows involves a whole series of problems, central to
which is the problem of conflict — class struggles, personal agon, the relations
between what men want and what they get, and hence the degree to which
they are satisfied, "happy." Their attitude toward the universe has an immedi-
ate and close relation to all the above complexities of conflict and co-opera-
tion.

Now the reader may well be tired of my frequent insistence that in human
societies nothing is ever pure X or its polar opposite pure Y, but always a
somewhat varying mixture of the two — not to speak of much else which we
may call N. But here, if ever, this insistence seems to me fully justified — to
the point, indeed, where I should believe that anyone who wholly disagreed
with me was not quite sane, or responsible. For in all Western societies on
the record, there has been conflict — yes, class conflict, bitter hatreds — at all
times; and at all times there has been co-operation — yes, co-operation, even

8 Conceivably they could fight best by not fighting. Yet few generalizations are clearer
than that in the West passive resistance, the "general strike," the noble gesture of
Lysistrata, just do not work. I suspect they do not work even in India as well as the
non-watchers say they do. Gandhi himself came to an unfortunately violent end.

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A History of Western Morals

love, between poor and rich, plebians and patricians, low-brows and high-
brows. There is no harm in using figures of speech drawn from arithmetic and
thinking of, say, some simple range like that of the thermometer, with, then,
a freezing point below which lack of conflict of any sort might mean disas-
trous lack of adaptability to changes in the natural environment, let alone
the human environment as represented in a rival society; and with a boiling
point above which conflict might be so excessive as to destroy the society
altogether. But do not let any such innocent metaphor delude you: even the
thermometer can mislead if, accustomed to boil your egg at sea level, you
have to boil it on top of Pikes Peak. The variables involved in the stability,
the good health, of a given society are never simple enough to be shown on
any single unilinear scale.

Nevertheless, we may fairly ask what our bird's-eye view does show us
in this matter of conflict, and in particular that of the "class struggle." Our
own time has seen two major contrasting interpretations of Western history
in terms of class relations. First, for the Marxist, there has been a series of
struggles between a smaller privileged rich class, beneficiaries of a given
"mode of production," and a larger oppressed poor class, victims of the mode
of production. Between these classes there is — at any rate, in Marxist tradi-
tion there ought to be — hatred, the good hatred of the lower for the upper,
the bad hatred and fear of the upper for the lower. Second, for Toynbee, the
successful responses by which a society achieves and improves its "civiliza-
tion" are always made by a creative minority (who are in fact an upper class
or an aristocracy); the rest of the society, however, the many, do while the
society is advancing absorb these civilized advances by a somewhat mysteri-
ous process Toynbee calls "mimesis," which, psychologically speaking, is
respectful, admiring imitation of their betters. Toynbee does not spell this
relation between the minority and the many out closely, but where he seems
to think it existed, as in fifth-century Athens before Cleon and the plague,
it looks a lot like nice English Tory democracy, the many guided by the
virtuous few, aristocrats in all of the good, and none of the bad, senses this
value-charged word has for us today. Then when the creative minority fails to
meet a challenge, as when at Athens this minority provoked or permitted the
horrid Peloponnesian War, this subtle nexus of mimesis gets broken, the
creative minority becomes a mere dominant minority, and the many sink
into a proletariat, hating their betters. You have, indeed, as Toynbee would
•admit, in such periods of failure of mimesis the kind of class feeling Marx
thought always prevailed, and would prevail until the achievement of the
classless society.

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The Problem of Moral Progress

Now once more, I think there is some validity in both these analyses.
Or, perhaps better, I think our bird's-eye view will show certain societies at
certain times almost — but not quite — as ineffably co-operative in class rela-
tions as Toynbee's term "mimesis" implies, others at other times almost —
but not quite — as desperately at odds as the Marxist class struggle implies.
Specifically, the relation among the feudal nobility, the "clerisy," and the
peasantry in the West was by no means the idyl it has often been made out
to be.9 Still, it is clear that something of the attitude reflected hi the familiar
medieval figure of society as an organism, with wise clerical head, brave
feudal heart, sound peasant digestive system, did get generally accepted
until, roughly, the mid-fourteenth century. If early Athens was not as free
from class conflict as the lovers of Greece make out, there is surely a time
after Solon when there is something like an era of good feeling; and in Roman
history the struggle between patricians and plebeians is by no means a neat
Marxist struggle, if only because it is clear that the many were, above all,
patriotic Romans. In our own times, Victorian England saw something like
partial mimesis among the gentry, the middle classes, and, in part at least,
the working class. The American feeling that the Marxist analysis has never
really been valid for us is basically sound, not so much because the many here
love and admire the few, but partly because so many of the many hope to
join the few, and even more because our democratic religion of the Enlight-
enment, which has always worked best in the United States, does almost as
good a job as medieval Christianity did in allaying the feelings that erupt in
class conflict.

On the other side, it is clear that the record shows many societies in
which class or group or factional conflict has in fact reached a point where
the society is on the way to dissolution, decay, death as an "independent"
society. What Thucydides describes as "stasis" is surely as desperate and
vicious a civil conflict, not quite the Marxist class struggle, as ever ruined a
society. The One World of the Roman Empire was certainly not a world of
happy mutual co-operation. Here Toynbee's analysis is at its best: the "in-
ternal proletariat" of the Roman Empire was profoundly dissatisfied, alien-
ated from its rulers, relatively ill-supported either by the props of the small
society (family, the old household gods, the familiar steady traditions) or by
the vaguer consolations of a higher religion that Marxists call "opium of the

9 1 have used "clerisy" in the sense given the word by Coleridge in his Constitution in
Essay on Church and State (1830) a brief book, and, for Coleridge, a clearly written
one, well worth the attention of anyone interested in political ideas. I give a short cut
in my English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Chap. II.

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A History of Western Morals

people." Christianity reflects its origins in a complex but decaying society.
The troubles that run from the Black Death to the Peasants' War and Luther
are the troubles of a society prey to excessive group conflicts, though until
quite recently historians saw these centuries as seedbeds of progress, not
decay.10

It is by no means easy to fit group tensions in our contemporary West
into these older patterns. Here once more we are forced to the conclusion, so
unsatisfactory to many minds, that there are signs of both class conflict and
of acceptance, by the underprivileged or little privileged at least, of the exist-
ence of more privileged groups. Of course, even in the United States there is
a social and economic pyramid, or, at any rate, a figure, and not the straight
line on a graph that would represent a completely classless society. The gap
between a Negro sharecropper — or an unskilled Negro worker in the North —
and a man in the upper income-tax brackets is very great. There is still a
right and wrong side of our railroad tracks, even though they can be crossed.
The contemporary American novel of status — John Marquand's Point of No
Return or Hamilton Basso's View from Pompeys Head, for example — seems
sometimes obsessively aware of social gradations, and of the frustrations
they produce. A great many American intellectuals clearly share with
A. M. Schlesinger, Jr., a firm conviction that most American businessmen
are fools or scoundrels, or both; and such alienation of the intellectuals has
in the past been a sign of instability in a society. As for the European West,
we have such clear signs of social discontent as the angry young Englishmen
who still find it hard not to be born gentlemen, the notorious perpetual
ripeness for revolution all American commentators find in strife-riddled
France, the grave difficulties encountered throughout a Europe in which the
haves and the have-nots are still morally separated.

Nevertheless, it would be premature to see the West as now hopelessly,
or hopefully, prepare for a long bout of overt, desperate, destructive class
warfare. There are still widespread sentiments — moral sentiments — of the
kind that work to hold societies together, to reconcile the many to their not
being the few. Everywhere in the West there are strong Christian elements;
and, as we have insisted, historical Christianity has on the whole worked to
strengthen those human feelings that make for acceptance of one's earthly
lot. Christianity in the realm of ideas denies the Marxist conception of the

10 They still do, overwhelmingly, though sometimes in the form of a transition era in
which the medieval society or culture was dying, and the modern rising out of this
death. Even Mr. Toynbee puts the beginning of our own end no earlier than the mid-
sixteenth century.

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The Problem of Moral Progress

struggle, but so, too, in its most characteristic Western form, does the
)lex of ideas and sentiments I have called the religion of the Enlighten-
. The good, nationalist democrat, even if he thinks he has jettisoned the
dices of Christianity, has been shaped by Christian culture, including

Middle Ages he despises as priest-ridden, to believe that force alone
- settles anything, not even the class struggle; he may suspect, after

and 1945, that force never settles the international struggle; and he
; that men can compromise even their conflicting interests if they will
stentiy distinguish between right and might, and that there is a natural
[ order in which violence is wrong. These views may seem to the ardent
al deluded, illogical, opium of the people indeed, but they are strong
nly in the English-speaking countries, but throughout the West, strong
jh to have withstood the great strain the two general wars of our time
put on victors and vanquished alike. They have not, of course, been
g enough to put a stop to all kinds of conflict within the states that make
Astern civilization; for nothing can be clearer in the record than that
*le, the agon, victory and defeat, make the burden of history,
he record is clear also in this respect: warfare among the constituent

of the West is endemic. Indeed, it is almost continuous. I have previ-
expressed my doubts as to the value of the imposing statistical reckon-
E the damage done by foreign and civil war assembled by Sorokin in
->cial and Cultural Dynamics (see p. 416), but there can be no doubt
he mere listing of these wars and other outbreaks of violence made by
in and his research assistants is impressive. Peace has been rare, war
ion. There are variations in the character of warfare. Sometimes, as in
riddle Ages or in 1914-1918 on the Western front, the defensive primes
fensive; sometimes, as with the Roman legions at their best, or the mass
rn armies of Napoleon, the offensive primes the defensive. Sometimes
re is limited to a professional fighting class, and the people, the many,

no more than the inevitable damages to Hfe and property the non-
atant incurs in a combat area, hunger, disease, the general horrors of
lometimes warfare and its attendant diplomacy are conducted according
es, open flouting of which is generally morally disapproved, as in the
d warfare of the Middle Ages and in the formal European warfare of
ghteenth and nineteenth centuries; sometimes warfare and diplomacy
ain but the shadow of lawfulness and morality, as notably in the Greece
ucydides and in our own twentieth-century Western world,
tie historian of morals seeking a clear pattern from the past will find
>r a definite cyclical movement from peace to war, or from relatively

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A History of Western Morals

humane to relatively vicious fighting; nor will he be able, with Spencer and
the Victorians of only yesterday, to discern a unilinear movement from the
warlike past to the less-warlike present and on to a peaceful future. Profes-
sional, limited warfare is certainly less disastrous and less destructive for the
whole society, but it is surely never humane, never in Christian or in Enlight-
ened ethics in itself a good. Modern mass warfare with its citizen armies has
had outrageous results more perhaps because of the destructiveness brought
on by our command of technology than because of the emotional commit-
ment of the fighting men to the cause of the fatherland. There is a tendency,
as I have noted just above, for warfare among states with citizen — that is,
amateur — armies to be rather more cruel and unprincipled than warfare
among statesmen, professional armies of mercenaries, or gentlemen, or of
both. Yet such a statement may be no more than a reflection of the last
horrors of the great amateur war we have lived through, a war that has
simply not begun to seem romantic. Our American Civil War, a highly ama-
teur one, is now hopelessly romantic. Detailed study of any war, even those
of the mid-eighteenth century, is likely to impress the student with a sense
of the great gap between Western ethics and Western conduct.

I have been considering public morality, or the morale of a society, in
relation to the survival and prosperity of that society in a competitive military
world. Had I proposed instead to survey the relation between such morality
and the artistic, literary, and philosophical achievements of the society, I
should have had an even harder task. There are certain obvious generaliza-
tions. A society that prohibits for religious — that is, surely, also for moral —
reasons most of the fine arts will not go down as one that produced a
flowering of such arts. Yet in the West radical puritanism, a puritanism that
condemns all art and letters across the board, has simply never existed
unchecked for long. On the other side of the ledger, there is always the Italian
Renaissance, a period of clear and pretty general moral disorder, yet a
period of great artistic flowering indeed. Once more, the conclusion is ines-
capable: we do not understand the causes of any cultural flowering in a
society well enough to correlate such flowering with the state of private and
public morality in that society. We do know — and it is something worth
knowing — that there is no perfect correlation, that the one does not wholly
"depend" on the other. Bacon and Milton, Sappho and Sophocles, and many
another contrasting pair are there to remind us of that fact.11

11 1 cannot here go into this vexing problem of the flowering time, the Blutezeit
its relation to morals and morale. Sorokin in Vol. I of his Social and Cultural Dynamics
refers to the important literature of the subject up to the 1930's. And see also A. L.
Kroeber, Style and Civilization, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1957.

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The Problem of Moral Progress

In sum, our rapid review of Western moral history has shown no clear
evidence that men are in their conduct getting closer to their ethical ideals.
There is variation as well as constancy in both conduct and ethics. But the
discernible patterns do not indicate any one-way relation between high moral
standards in a society and its survival, its material prosperity, or its literary,
artistic, and cultural achievement. Nor do such patterns wholly prove or
wholly disprove — insofar as empirical evidence is germane to such religious
beliefs — the nineteenth-century faith in Progress. They do, I think, make it
clear that the kind of change the Victorians labeled as "Progress" is more
uneven and jerky, more subject to lapses or "decadence," slower, and much
more unpredictable, than the Victorians thought. We may, then, attempt to
survey the ground from a somewhat different point of view, and attempt to
assess some of our own institutions, some of our own moral attitudes, in the
perspective of our brief Western past, knowing well that even our now-ap-
parent gains may not be permanent ones.

v

The prize exhibit of those who can still believe in moral Progress is the West-
ern achievement in abolishing chattel slavery. The achievement is undeniable,
not to be seriously weakened by rhetoric about still-existing "wage slavery"
and the like. Freethinking historians have made a great deal out of the failure
of Christianity in the Roman Empire to eliminate in fact the slavery that
Christian spirit and principles condemned, and even more of the failure of
Christianity during the great expansion of Europe after 1450 to prevent the
renewal of the institution in enslavement of colonial peoples, and, in par-
ticular, of Africans. The Marxists, and not only the Marxists, never tire of
insisting that slavery has always prevailed where it was economically profit-
able and has only been abolished after it has been demonstrated to at least
most of the slaveowners, condemned to immorality by the mode of produc-
tion, that slavery is unprofitable. The mere historian will content himself
with noting that abolition in our own culture was in fact sealed by a law, and
achieved only after long conflict of words — in the United States, of actual
fighting, as well — words somewhat beyond the conventional range of the
economists. Christians of all shades of opinion, from Catholics to Unitarians,
and freethinkers of an almost equal range, worked toward the end of abolish-
ing what they regarded as an evil. Indeed, the honest materialist would have
to admit that the completeness of the abolition can be explained only by the
fact that the overwhelming majority of Westerners came in a few generations

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A History of Western Morals

to feel that slavery is wrong. Otherwise, there would be in the West pockets
of chattel slavery as there are pockets of everything that mere technological
progress has condemned, survivals like archery or fencing, or even the horse.
There is, we have abundantly noted, always an absolutist drive in morals.

The mention of fencing should remind us that the last two centuries have
seen the channeling of some of the bloodier forms of the Western agon into
a "moral equivalent." We have not as yet found in sport what William James
hoped for, a moral equivalent of organized war. But we have abolished the
duel, and have driven underground into mere criminality most other forms
of private warfare. Even in the United States, that classic land of violence,
our clan feuds, gang wars, lynchings, are not what they used to be in the
last century. Prize fights, and even bullfights are but pallid and still-waning
survivals of the cruel exhibitions of the past; indeed, Christianity has never
witnessed anything as bad in this respect as the spectacles of the Roman
arena. We know and even give a name from pathology, "sadism," to the
human desire to witness or to inflict suffering upon other sentient beings. We
may even suspect that whatever it is that makes men sadistic is as common a
biological inheritance of men as it was two thousand years ago; and we
know from the experience of the West since 1939 that whole groups of men
can be as cruel in the twentieth century as in the first century. Yet there are
grounds for regarding these exhibitions of cruelty as relapses. They have
been subject to strong moral condemnation, even by the nationals responsible
for them. And over the whole sweep of possible human cruelty and violence,
there can be no doubt that we have devised institutional and legal restraints
with good roots in the Western conscience. The only form of organized
violence that has hitherto escaped some such controls is actual warfare, which
we are probably justified in holding to be the great, the critical, moral evil
of our time.12

There is a whole series of more positive efforts to cope with the evils of
actual human suffering on the record. Once more, we may note that not

12 1 confess that I had not until I began this chapter read any of the work of our
American de Sade for the millions, Mickey Spillane. I do not wish to make light of the
moral portent of these shocking — and puzzling — examples of vicious, vicarious, mere
paper cruelty, but I do not dare try to explain the fact that in inexpensive soft-cover
editions they have sold in millions. It is surely clear that their readers do not for the
most part take these books as counsels to go thou and do likewise. It is, however,
shocking that there should be a felt need for even vicarious satisfaction of such senti-
ments. But do not make the mistake of seeing only Mickey Spillane here; his greatest
rival in soft-cover sales is not Erskine Caldwell (a more conventional and to-be-
expected pornographer), but the celebrated Dr. Spock on how to bring up babies.

436

The Problem of Moral Progress

merely the notion of "progress," but the whole notion of any specific moral
"better" depends on what it is now fashionable to call value judgments. If
you think suffering, mental and physical, is a moral good, a needed test of
virtue, then you may regard the change from beating demons out of the
insane to modern psychiatric treatment of mental illness as no moral prog-
ress, even as moral decay. (Do not sneer at the verbal change from "insane"
to "mental illness" — that, too, is a kind of moral progress within our tradi-
tion.) But the moral concepts of good and evil in their broader senses are a
relative constant in the West, and these concepts make suffering an evil
against which it is right to struggle.

The list of such modern triumphs or part-triumphs over human suffering
is long, and hardly needs recording here. It runs from the treatment of mental
illness to the care and feeding of the healthy, and to the comfort and culture
of all. Even the two centuries or so of such "progress" shows shifts, varia-
tions, tendencies toward taking on vaguely cyclical patterns. This process,
which may, nevertheless, also be Progress, is clear in the whole history of
education in its broadest sense, and in child development. There are swings
from discipline and control to permissiveness, and back again — well, part
way back, at any rate. There are swings from what we may loosely call
"intellectualism" to "anti-intellectualism," and perhaps, as of 1959, some of
the way back again. The brief history of modern education, the first attempt
to "educate" in the formal institutional sense of the word almost everybody,
is full of conflicting ideals and personalities, of evident failures and wrong
turnings; it must seem even to the moderately hard-boiled realist rather too
much dominated by the goal of ultimate human perfectibility. But the
history of education, as of the rest of modern humanitarian effort, does not
by any means suggest to the historian of morals who is bent a bit toward the
philosophy of history decadence, tiredness, rigidities, a Spenglerian old age
of a civilization; it suggests a lively, sometimes almost innocent, youth.

As to the familiar field of personal morality of the sort the Victorian
vulgar tended to identify with the sum total of morality, there is neither in
the last two nor in the last twenty centuries any very clear sign of the kind of
progress one may discern in the lessening of much human suffering in the
last few hundred years. Sex morality has, indeed, varied in time and place, as
I have abundantly noted. But it is difficult to show that we conduct our sex
lives on a higher plane than the Greeks or the men and women of the Middle
Ages. The Victorian Englishman thought he and his countrymen had
achieved in this respect the kind of progress he saw all about him. We today

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A History of Western Morals

can hardly do so. It is true that the old-fashioned brothel has tended to dis-
appear under the pressures of legislation and policing in most of the West;
but the automobile, though it can scarcely be as comfortable, seems to be an
adequate substitute for many. It would be hard to show that fornication, for
love or money or both, has decreased significantly in our day. Among the
educated — the rather highly educated — there is a tendency to regard the
various sexual perversions as a form of mental disease, to be treated as such
and not as crime or immorality. Among the many, to judge by recent events
in Britain, where there has been an attempt to remove from the list of crimes
homosexual activity among adults "constitutionally" inclined thereto, the old
strong sentiments of moral condemnation still prevail. The masses, the
people, in most of the West are far from being as emancipated from old-
fashioned firm morals as intellectuals, either the now few who are hopeful or
the many worried about it all, are inclined to assume. The concept of chronic
alcoholism as basically a mental illness, on the other hand, seems to be
somewhat more widespread. I shall come shortly to the problem of how far
the development and spread of such notions — essentially part of the growth
of the social or behavioral sciences — may be considered "progress."

As to the other vices of self-indulgence, there again seems to be little
sign of consistent improvement, though briefly in puritanical societies and
eras many of them are temporarily greatly lessened and driven underground.
Gambling, in particular, seems to resist the attacks of Enlightened, as well
as those of Puritan Christian, virtue. In old-fashioned language, gambling
may even be said to be natural, to be a need. At the height of American Vic-
torian public morality, which came in the early twentieth century, prohibi-
tory legislation in many states had made such usual forms of gambling as that
of the race track inconvenient indeed; it was much easier, and almost as
much fun, to gamble on the stock market; and there were, of course, in the
widespread network of respectable lawbreaking that grew up after the Eight-
eenth Amendment was passed many opportunities for gambling as well as
for buying liquor. There has been since 1929 much relaxation of such pro-
hibitions, and the pari-mutuel has been a great success in some most respect-
able states of the union.13 Gluttony, in orthodox tradition one of the seven
deadly or capital sins, is nowadays surely one of the least common, in spite

13 It is an arresting example of the inevitably subjective character of all we are now
discussing to realize that for those who really believe in the methods well-enough
summed up by the Eighteenth Amendment — and there are many who do so believe —
the last three decades have shown moral decline, retrogression.

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The Problem of Moral Progress

of (or because of) the relative abundance and security of the food supply
of the West. The lover of good cooking will suggest that throughout that
large part of the West dominated by the English-speaking peoples there is in
fact little to tempt to gluttony; but it seems more likely that fashion, espe-
cially for women, has made the consequences of gluttony seem intolerable.
And fashion works through the first and deadliest — and most ambivalent —
of these sins, pride.

The mere listing of these seven sins — pride, covetousness, lust, anger,
gluttony, envy, and sloth — should remind us that whatever it is in men that
inclines them fo such conduct has certainly not been overcome. We may say
in summary with folk wisdom that "human nature hasn't changed." We may
say more cautiously and more heavily that in terms of what we think we know
about human "personality" the likelihood of some such conduct seems pretty
well built into the ordinary adult; and in terms of what we think we know
about history and the social sciences we may say that though culture, or
"environment," clearly has worked to vary the incidence and intensity of
such conduct, to channel and control it in part, no large group has for long
eliminated any of this conduct. At this late point in our study, I need hardly
point out that, though the freethinker dislikes and usually refuses to em-
ploy the term "sin," he does, in fact, usually condemn all Christian sins as
morally bad conduct.

The mention of the social sciences does, however, suggest one final pos-
sibility of discerning clear "progress" in morals. Is it not possible that, in
some way comparable to that in which the natural sciences have opened
the way to the unquestionable progress the race has made in its ability to
make use of the powers of nature to secure some of the things men want,
the social sciences may open the way to progress in our ability to get what
we want out of ourselves? Now on this vast subject there is already a whole
library of books and articles. We cannot do it justice here. But we can at
least try to pose the problem in the frame of the historical record.

But first of all we may dispose of the pejorative statement: There is
no such thing as social or behavioral sciences, at least no such body of
cumulative knowledge as that which we all recognize as such in the natural
sciences. There is, on the contrary, a great and rapidly growing body of
cumulative knowledge about human conduct, individual and group, and
it deserves the nowadays eulogistic label "scientific." It is not, as a body
of cumulative knowledge, as well developed as the natural sciences, for
many reasons. It is as an organized effort to use the methods of science

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A History of Western Morals

much more recent. It has perhaps tried too hard to do exactly what the natu-
ral sciences have done, notably in its attempt at quantification. It is se-
verely limited, in its study of human beings, by strong, indeed, for the pres-
ent, ineradicable, human sentiments which strictly limit the possibilities
of deliberate experimentation. It has had to contend with many hostile cur-
rents of public opinion, not only among the many, but among the educated
few. It has not, probably, in our society been able to compete with the natu-
ral sciences in recruiting for its ranks the very best minds. But the list of
the handicaps under which the social sciences have labored could be long
indeed; and it would have to include the fact that the working out of viable
uniformities or generalizations from its data is intrinsically much more diffi-
cult than in the natural sciences, both from the complexities and from the
inadequacies of its data.

Yet with all these handicaps, the social sciences have progressed; we
know more, in the simple sense of the word "know," and we know more
systematically, about human personality and human relations than was known
in 1700. Our grave difficulty lies in the equivalent, for the social sciences, of
the relation between pure science and the technology or applied science or
engineering so familiar to us all in the natural sciences — though for the
historian and philosopher of science the dynamics of that relation is itself
by no means a simple and clear one. Note, by the way, that this problem of
the relation between "pure" natural science and technology is itself a prob-
lem of the social sciences, not of the natural sciences. On this subject, too,
there is already a great library. From my point of view, which I shall try to
make clear in the next chapter, the central difficulty lies in a philosophic
problem: Does the study of what we call "science," natural or social, give
us ends, purposes, even immediate ones, let alone final ones, teleologies,
eschatologies? Perhaps such horrendous philosophical problems can be got
around comfortably, as I have suggested in Chapter I. There remains for us
today at least a difficulty in applied social science harder to get around: such
applied science must in real life be "applied" by the few, the expert, the
"engineer," who, to judge, as we must, by historical precedent, must stand
in relation to those to whom the social-scientific know-how is applied in a
position profoundly incompatible with the strong and widespread current that
dominates Western, and, most emphatically, American, sentiments. A society
bettered — bettered as rapidly, at least, as the alarmists think ours must be —
by social engineering could not possibly be a democratic society. The relation
of the human planner to the human planned-for has, inevitably, elements of

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The Problem of Moral Progress

the relation between shepherd and sheep; and this relation is in our tradition
almost as offensive, as "immoral," as that of master and slave. At bottom, the
American distrust of high-minded planners (and most social scientists are
indeed high-minded) really is what the worried call "anti-intellectualism,"
but there it is, fierce and strong. The American today simply will not let
himself be improved by his betters — his machines, yes, even his health, but
not himself.

Yet there is a difficult line to be drawn here. The relation of physician
to patient, though it can sometimes be tyrannical and sometimes involves
the naive Machiavellianism of the placebo, can be, and in our culture often
is, quite consistent with the sentiments we call "democratic." The comment is
obvious: Both physician and patient have the same end in view, the good
health of the patient. And although there is plenty of room here for conflict
of will, and even for debate over the nature and definition of good health,
these difficulties are as nothing compared with the problem of what the eco-
nomic, social, political, and moral good health of a society is, and what the
ends that the skills of social scientists are intended to further should be. Now
the social sciences are not at all as advanced as the biochemical sciences on
which the expertness of the practicing physician so largely depend; nor is
there yet as good a working arrangement between the pure scientist and the
applied scientist in any of the social sciences as that shown by the relation
between the research biologist or pathologist and the physician, or between
the chemist and the chemical engineer. For all the ill-natured fun the carica-
turist and the politician love to poke at the economist, there is a clear begin-
ning of such a relation in the field of economics. There is a clear beginning
of such a relation in the field of psychology, though here the moral problem
of ends is most evident to the worried liberal: 1984 is now less than a genera-
tion away.

For all its limitations and, indeed, errors, for all the imperfections of
those who built it up, the body of our systematic knowledge of human be-
havior is greater and more reliable now than it was two hundred or two
thousand years ago. In that strong current of Western thought, Christian and
Enlightened alike, which accepts human reason as an essential good, the
growth of the social sciences must appear cumulative, progressive. The
problem of developing and using these sciences — a problem to which that of
the proper moral place of the expert in a democratic society is central — may
well be considered the major problem that faces us today.

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VI

In summary, we must say that the cliche is unavoidable: the record shows
no moral progress comparable to our material progress. From the beginnings
of Western society in the ancient Near East there have been states, societies,
which have seemed in no mere Spenglerian metaphor to have been born,
matured, and died, to have had a spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Yet
this process of rise and fall is still ill understood, and has no immediate
and clear relation to the private or public morality of the individuals who
make up the state. It would no doubt be comforting to many of us to hold
with Thomas Carlyle that "a false man cannot build a brick house," but the
record is against the preacher. "False" in this context is no doubt an ambigu-
ous word; but Carlyle meant that a bad man cannot do good work of any
kind, and this is simply not so.14 There are degrees of corruption that clearly
lame a society, especially if it is in competition with a disciplined and morally
strict society, but not even in warfare is it clear from the record that the
simple, old-fashioned virtues always pay off. And as for the record of private
morality, it is difficult to show that there is in the record a steady, consistent,
unilinear increase in the practice of the traditional virtues, and such a steady
decrease in the practice of the traditional vices. There seems to be only a
mixture, varying in place and time, and so far never quite lethal for the
species.

The idea of Progress in its fully theological form, that of an eschatology,
of mankind as a whole moving to some far-off divine perfection, is, of course,
not to be tested empirically. I have been seeking in this chapter to answer
from the historical record a more modest question: Measured against the
known standards for conduct set by the ethical principles of the Western
tradition, are we in fact conducting ourselves better, narrowing the gap
between conduct and ethics? And I have edged over into another and char-
acteristically nineteenth-century question, one, again, for which some answer
from the evidence should be possible: Is human conduct in the West at least
sufficiently good by standards that measure group achievement so that we
may say that the West is not, in a cultural evolutionary sense, clearly in a
retrogression, clearly not headed for the kind of extinction a Spengler pre-
dicted for it? Yet the answer has to be for both questions something in the
nature of the old Scots verdict "not proven," and the whole problem is,

14 Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship, London, Chapman and Hall, 1873, p. 41. I am
here working wholly within an empirical, indeed a common-sense, frame of reference.
In terms of a theodicy, evil never does produce good — but this is a very different set
of ideas and sentiments. There are no brick houses either in heaven or in hell.

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The Problem of Moral Progress

unfortunately, hardly to be lifted above the level of the bull session. It can
be debated, but there will not even be a sense of the meeting.

Yet most certainly, in this twentieth century our conduct has not been
nearly what a Condorcet — perhaps even a Jefferson, young Jefferson — hoped
and believed it would be. Raise up the horrid picture of men and beasts dy-
ing in the Roman arena, that of Clovis hacking and deceiving his way to a
most Christian throne, that of the Borgias intriguing, poisoning their way
upward, that of the mass murders of the great French Revolution, that of our
own successful genocide of the Eastern American Indians. You can raise up
quite equal, if not identical, horrors out of the twentieth-century West, bull-
fights, prize fights, dictatorships, purges, concentration camps, attempted and
nearly successful genocides, race riots, gangsterism, bloody wars between
mass armies. We can all, even the insensitive, even the hard-boiled, even —
if such there still be — the optimists, extrapolate in fear and trembling from
the facts of Hiroshima. We may indeed be no worse morally than our ances-
tors, and we may even be on the average a bit less cruel, less brutal, but
grouped in nation-states we can do a lot more evil more quickly and more
efficiently than they could. Our conspicuously, heroically, wicked are surely
no less wicked than the great evildoers of old; the many, again possibly a little
gentler at heart than the masses of old, and certainly as always no heroes,
seem no more able than of old to halt or contain the heroic few.

But again the record is spotty. It does show over the last two centuries in
the West at least a decrease in the violence and uncertainties of daily living
in time of peace; it does show over the centuries a widening of the social areas
within which a good life — a life not just of struggle to keep alive — is pos-
sible; it does show, in spite of the horrors we all know, a slowly and imper-
fectly extended concept of the dignity of man; it does show the abolition
of slavery and many another humanitarian reform in consonance with the
ethical tradition of the West; it does show — and this is most important — at
least no wide abandonment of the moral struggle and, for the West as a
whole, no indubitable signs of moral and civic degeneration. We seem in sum
not much better and not much worse, morally, than the Jewish and Greek
founders of our moral tradition. A dull, stupid, pussyfooting conclusion?
Perhaps, but suppose it happens to be a true one?

There does remain the undoubted fact that, notably in the United States
of America, most of us do somehow manage to "believe in" Progress. Here
is Adlai Stevenson, and in a campaign speech at that, where he should be
telling his audience what they want to hear: "Progress is what happens when
inevitability yields to necessity. And it is an article of the democratic faith

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that progress is a basic law of life."15 The naive semanticist — and actually
most semanticists are naive about other human beings— could, of course, make
great fun of that distinction between "inevitability" and "necessity." But Mr.
Stevenson surely knew what he was talking about. His "inevitability" was a
term of common sense, or even, if you like, "scientific," discourse; his "ne-
cessity" a term of moral discourse. Here, once again, I shall be unashamedly
in the middle — in a livable zone between two bleak poles. To hold that what
we believe in moral discourse must come wholly true in common-sense dis-
course, in "fact," just because we believe it, is called "fideism," and, though
not unknown among human beings, is rightly considered lunacy; to hold that
what we believe in moral discourse has no relation whatever to what goes on,
to what comes about in fact, in the world of common-sense discourse is in
the twentieth-century West far more common than fideism, and does not
therefore always seem the lunacy that it is.

It is true that our American belief in moral, or total, Progress cannot be
confirmed from the record by any process like that which the scientist uses
to confirm — or reject — his beliefs qua scientist. But the moment faith, or
belief in moral values, gets to work in our minds and hearts, it transforms
"confirmation" into something not quite what it is to the scientist testing by
orthodox scientific methods a hypothesis. Cynic, skeptic, and naive mate-
rialist are quite wrong; faith need not, does not commonly in our Western
tradition, deny, neglect, suppress the facts, the data, the realities of this
world. It does use them to try to get what it wants, what its world view makes
moral; it does try to change them. We must in a concluding chapter attempt
the more difficult task of estimating the moral value and probable or possible
moral consequences of some of our contemporary world views, and, in par-
ticular, of the doctrine of Progress and the whole configuration that has
grown out of the Enlightenment. The question at heart is, not whether the
doctrine of Progress is true, but whether it is wise, good.16

15 From a radio address, Oct. 24, 1952, quoted by Clarke A. Chambers, "Belief in
Progress in 20th-century America,'* Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. XIX, April
1958, p. 221. This article brings forward abundant evidence for the widespread and
firm American belief in "Progress."

16 1 am aware that what I say above has echoes of late nineteenth-century and early
twentieth-century notions such as the Sorelian "myth," the "as if of Vaihinger, and
many other contemporaneous philosophies that sought to rescue teleology from that
brute, fact But nowadays all these terms look a bit too apologetic, concede too much.
Even the elan vital, even the life force, hardly need disguise themselves nowadays, but
may come out openly as the faiths they are. I say quite simply that a faith, too, is a fact.

444

Conclusion: In Which Nothing Is Concluded

THE CENTRAL PROBLEM that confronts us in trying to draw some conclusions
from a history of morals in the West is this: What are the implications for
us all as citizens and as private persons of the very great revisions, amend-
ments, in some cases total alterations made in the world view, the religion, of
most Westerners since the beginning of modern times? Or, more briefly, what
are the moral aspects of the new religion of the Enlightenment? I shall not
attempt to rival my colleagues in the philosophy of history, shall not attempt
to be a prophet either of doom or of bliss. I shall by the very nature of what
I am attempting to do here be obliged to omit consideration of all sorts of
factors, economic, political, geographic, biological, and a lot more that would
have to go into a — moreover, as yet wholly impossible — chart of "Whither
Mankind?" But I shall poke about modestly into a perhaps not wholly un-
foreseeable near future.

Now whether in alliance with or in opposition to many organized forms
of the Christian religion, the Enlightenment, as I have tried to show, has at
its base certain beliefs, practices, attitudes that are, as such matters go in
this old world, new, and which I find it convenient to treat as new elements
in world beliefs, even in religions. I am careful to use the plural here, for, like
all great religions, that of the Enlightenment is by no means monolithic; it
has spawned numerous sects, and has infinite shades of compromise with
Christianity and the rest of the real world. Except in Russia, its system of
beliefs has never got incorporated in a single intolerant established church.
It has inherited, moreover, from its struggles against established and privi-

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A History of Western Morals

leged order, a strong initial positive belief in the values of tolerance and
diversity, and this belief keeps countervailing the tendency toward intoler-
ance and unification which the faith of the Enlightenment shares with all
dogmatic faiths. Indeed, as we have noted for early Christianity, under cer-
tain conditions proliferation of heresies and sects is probably a sign of
strength in a faith. At any rate, the fact of such proliferation is clear for the
faith of the Enlightenment today.

The element of novelty in the religion of the Enlightenment is not the
apocalyptic element in itself, not just the promise of a heaven. The novel
element is not even the promise of 'a heaven on earth. Christianity was born
of apocalyptic hopes; the first Christians felt the perfect promised life was
to be, as we should put it, a "natural" extension of this one. There is a touch
of this feeling that life right here on earth can and will be perfect for the
true believer in almost all of the long series of protesting, if not quite Protes-
tant, reforms that mark all Christian history. Yet the new element in the
Enlightenment is real indeed. It is, for one thing, in part a matter of scale,
of actual penetration of apocalyptic hopes to the many, all over the West.
The Enlightenment spread widely and deeply, as did early Christianity; it is
not a relatively limited clerical reformist movement, not even limited in the
sense that the Cluniac movement was limited. Again, at least among the many,
its apocalyptic hopes are more concrete, more "materialistic," more "nat-
uralistic," with no trace of the monastic, and, again among the many, with
little trace of the great disgust, the great revulsion against the world of
common sense that marks Christian apocalyptic feeling. There is a sense in
which the Enlightenment was from the start a vague faith. Finally, the
Enlightenment could and did lean on science and technology in a way early
Christianity never could; its most characteristic Utopias are full of quite
earthly gadgets.1 Yet the fact is important, and must be noted, that Chris-

1 Some of these contrasts come out well in a comparison between such representative
figures as the twelfth-century Joachim de Flore, whose Utopia is a firm, but most
monastic, one, and the Enlightened Condorcet, whose Utopia is certainly no Abbaye de
Theleme, but nonetheless contemplates the untroubled indulgence by all of their natur-
ally good appetites. On Joachim there is little in English, but Henry Bett, Joachim of
Flora (London, Methuen, 1931), will serve as an introduction The literature of and on
Utopias is vast indeed. J. O. Hertzler, The History of Utopian Thought (New York,
Macmillan, 1923), and Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (New York, Boni and
Liveright, 1922), will start a student off; but the subject has depths and a scope that
escape the sociology of the former and the aesthetic-moral Enlightenment of the latter.
Mr. Mumford follows his master Patrick Geddes in preferring to pun Eutopia (good
place) rather than putopia (no-place). My guess is that More himself meant Outopia.
I wish to call special attention to the recent R. Dubos, Mirage of Health: Utopias,
Progress, and Biological Change, New York, Harper, 1959.

446

Conclusion: In Which Nothing Is Concluded

tianity and Enlightenment were both, in their inception, attempts to do away
altogether with evil. Both were movements that we may call, without undue
semantic worry, "messianic," "millenarian," "chiliastic," "Utopian." Most
of us Westerners today have to live with the difficult heritage of two quite
different but, at their most emotionally exacting depths, equally messianic
religions, both of which, if we followed their most heroic demands, would
make us all saints. Perhaps the ordinary Christian still has over the ordinary
intellectual Enlightened the advantage that he knows he will not achieve
sanctity.

Still, with this warning against the oversimplification of the assumption
that the new faith is a monolithic one — or, even more dangerous, the as-
sumption that it is or ought to be a logically consistent whole — we may pro-
ceed to discuss cautiously the moral implications of the basic tenets of the
faith, which are perhaps as much held in common as are those of Christianity
since Luther. The most striking of the theological-metaphysical tenets of the
new faith is that the real world (or just plain Reality, capitalized) is revealed
to the human mind working on the data of sense experience, aided by such
instruments as microscope, telescope, and the like, in a way best exemplified
by what we call "natural science." Or, vulgarly, that Science, again with an
initial capital, can tell us all we can ever know truthfully about ourselves and
the universe. There is among the many, no doubt, much admixture of a
hearty and crude common-sense "realism" — Dr. Johnson kicking that stone
block on a London street to show that the block is there f not just in his mind,
nor even just in God's mind, or Bishop Berkeley's. The upshot, for the free-
thinker fully emancipated, is rejection of the Christian supernatural, of the
Christian eschatology of an afterlife, of miracles, and, in fact, most of the
traditional Christian world view; it is often also, but not necessarily, nega-
tively a rejection of those mental processes we may group together as im-
precise thinking, hunch-following, imagination, poetry, romance, the desire
of the moth for the star, positively an insistence that all proper, effective
thinking is clear, precise, "scientific." This real world is the world a conven-
tionally trained and not very bright freethinking "scientist" recognizes as
real, and there can be no other.

Now no religion so far has been able to take the world as it is; and
natural science, while it sticks to its last, is wholly unable to take the world
in any other way than as it is. There is, of course, for the faithful of the
Enlightenment a way out of this difficulty: the world revealed by human
reason working "scientifically" — let us frankly use for this world the old

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A History of Western Morals

term "Nature" — this sole real world which is Nature not only is, but has
been and will be; human reason working through the materials left by its
past learns that this Nature has a plan, is a plan, a significant part of which is
that what Western men have learned to call good is increasing, and what
they have learned to call evil is diminishing. Man makes himself indeed, but
according to plans laid down by Nature for the Cambrian trilobites, even for
the first earthly atom. Nature, in short, turns out to have moral intentions
for us, her favorite children, turns out to be "something not ourselves" (for
otherwise how could we resist her by acting unnaturally, evilly?) "that makes
for righteousness," turns out, in fact, to be what we all know her to be, a
God in spite of herself, and, like rex noster Maria Theresa, formally unsexed
by her office.

In the meantime, what has become of the nature the scientists have been
investigating so fruitfully? This nature has been in the course of the intel-
lectual and emotional process outlined in the previous paragraph quite
transcended, transmuted, humanized, and sanctified. I do not think that
natural science qua science can find in its researches into nature anything
like what we humans commonly call "meaning" — that is, morality, beauty,
purpose, in all their overtones for us. Science qua science does not provide us
with ends; it does not in itself, but only as one example of the working of
the human spirit, give us values. Or, put in metaphysical and epistemological
terms, science does not seek to establish Truth in the absolutist sense, nor
Reality; it does not even base itself on "facts" as common sense under-
stands facts, as something existing independent of "theories," or "hypoth-
eses" about them, and "conceptual schemes" into which they are fitted by
the mind of the scientist. Science has, obviously, its instrumental aspect,
but it is strictly the instrument of given human curiosities or conveniences, not,
as far as the scientist knows, the instrument of any universal design or
purpose.2

I am particularly desirous of not being wholly misunderstood in this
matter. First of all, my own position here is ultimately a metaphysical one,

2 On this enormous subject I know no better start than Max Weber's "Science as a Vo-
cation," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans, and ed. by H. H. Gerth and
C Wright Mills, New York, Oxford University Press, 1946. Most of it is printed, with
an admirably succinct introduction, by Philip Rieff in Daedalus for Winter, 1958
(issued as Vol. 87, No. 1, of the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences). On the philosophical side, see Henri Poincar6, The Foundations of Science,
Lancaster, Pa., The Science Press, 1946.

448

Conclusion: In Which Nothing Is Concluded

on which better metaphysicians than I have taken quite antithetical positions.3
Second, the bald statement that science gives us only means to ends, never
ends, is misleading. The pursuit of science itself is, of course, an end set
by human beings, though not an end set by any abstract and hypostatized
Science. More important and quite as obvious, the means-ends relation in
human life is an intertwining network, in which what is in one respect a
means to an end is itself an end for which we try to devise means. It is per-
fectly convenient to say that in trying to find a foolproof contraceptive — that
famous and as yet unfound pill, for instance — science sets up the end as well
as the means. But be careful: science itself will not tell you whether or not
you ought to try to find such a contraceptive, let alone whether you ought to
promote its widespread use. Social science will give some — not very complete
— guidance as to some of the possible consequences of the discovery and
spread of such a contraceptive. The social scientist, qua human being, will
probably tell you that on the whole these consequences will be good for the
race, and, if he is excited enough, will tell you that we must find such a
contraceptive or face fearful wars and famines. But this is because a Western
social scientist today is likely to be a good child of the Enlightenment, and to
share its beliefs and values. His Nature God and the Catholic Christian God
are neither of them the voice of Science.

The rigorous, exclusive attempt to use the human mind "scientifically"
and only scientifically is surely impossible; it is perhaps also an attempt
contrary to the real nature of man and the universe, and therefore immoral,
as the convinced Christian must believe. I will here settle for the impos-
sibility, and try to be concrete. Some — not many — years ago an infant was
brought to the Children's Hospital of a great American city suffering from
a disease no local doctor had been able to diagnose. The specialists, too, were
puzzled, until one bright — and unusual — young pediatrician with some
knowledge of the history of medicine got a hunch, quickly confirmed; the baby

3 Professor Charles Frankel of Columbia University seems to me the most typical de-
fender in our time of the orthodox position of the Enlightenment, that the pattern of
conscious mental activity set by natural science in our tradition does provide us with
"objective" moral values, that the good can be derived from naturalistic premises by
ratiocination. But it is likely that the foregoing formulation would not be acceptable to
Professor Frankel. Perhaps I had better simply list him as a very typical twentieth-
century follower and continuer of the Enlightenment. See his The Faith of Reason: The
Idea of Progress in the French Enlightenment, New York, King's Crown Press, 1948,
and The Case for Modern Man, New York, Harper, 1956. For a succinct defense of
science as a 'Value," see Harrington Moore, Political Power and Social Theory, Cam-
bridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1958, pp. 89-110.

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A History of Western Morals

was ill with scurvy, a disease American babies, full to the brim with vitamin
C, never have nowadays. It turned out that the mother, a European displaced
person trying very hard to be American, had learned that boiling kills the
wicked germs, and, therefore, secure in this scientific knowledge, boiled
everything, including the baby's orange juice!

Now in this matter, which we may put as one of multiple, not single, one-
way variables, science does but deepen what common sense knows well
enough. In her home country, the mother would perhaps not have had orange
juice, but she would, apart from the worst crises of war, have had its equiv-
alent in vitamin C, and she would never have boiled everything she fed the
infant. But there are always large realms of thought in which common sense
has not had sway, and which science hardly dares try to invade, for it will
not get very far. It is a simple fact that something deep in most of us resists
the essential position of science, that the variables always vary, that cir-
cumstances always alter cases, that even standards of measure are conven-
iences, not absolutes, that there really is not anything "out there" that stays
fixed — except in our minds. Something in us tells us, you sometimes do boil
even the orange juice. Or, to use in apparent reverse the classic phrase of
Galileo the moralist (not the scientist) : Something tells us it doesn't move.

Finally, in this matter of the relation between science and morals, it must
be noted that the pursuit of scientific truth is carried on by human beings
who find some part of their own morality in their activity as scientists. But
one may argue that, though no doubt we are dealing basically with one of
those mostly nonvicious circles, the scientist moralizes the pursuit of science
rather than' the pursuit of science making the" scientist moral. The scientist,
for instance, holds himself in his work to a most rigorous standard of honesty,
the practical honesty of distinguishing, without too much epistemological
worry, between what he registers as observer and what he would like to
register as a fully rounded human being. He has, therefore, to discipline
himself, to deny himself; he has to humble part of his desiring self, that is,
his moral self. Moreover, he must be patient and industrious. He is likely,
by training and social class, to favor the gentler virtues. Many atomic scien-
tists, conscience-stricken at some of the results of their labors, are now firmly
on the side of the angels.

ii

I shall, then, attempt a broad survey and critique of the religion of the
Enlightenment as it looks to be in the mid-twentieth century, roughly two

450

Conclusion: In Which Nothing Is Concluded

hundred years after its establishment. But a survey implies a point of view,
a critique implies critical standards. I shall quite frankly attempt to judge this
religion in its own terms, as to how far it has promoted the pursuit of hap-
piness, the good life of its inherited Christian ethics modified by humanitarian
and hedonistic strains, how far it has succeeded in balancing its principles of
liberty and equality, how far it has succeeded in making over human conduct
to conform to its concept of human nature. Though I have argued that its aims
and standards are not the immediate reflection — a passive and literal mir-
roring— of an existing "Nature," not even a direct product of the same human
effort that produced modern natural science, I have never argued that it has
no aims, no standards. Those aims and standards can, of course, be criticized
from a point of view wholly— or mostly — outside them, from the point of
view, for instance, of a religion that finds this world wholly evil, or wholly
illusory, or both, from the point of view of a Protestant fundamentalist, from
the point of view of a conservative Roman Catholic, and, in our modern
world, from many other points of view. Any such criticism would obviously
be quite different from my own. I am, indeed, attempting a task thoroughly
consonant with the paradoxical note in the religion of the Enlightenment itself,
attempting to stay inside and look on from the outside, attempting to be a
mirror that does not distort and yet does more than reflect.4

Now the religion of the Enlightenment makes man wholly a part of Nature,
at its "materialist" extreme, simply another organization of atoms, as organi-
zation perhaps the most complex yet existing, but surely in no sense
supranatural. But one of its more obvious inheritances from Christianity and
the whole Western tradition is in fact a deep conviction that man is unique,
that the gap between him and the highest of animals is enormous. An occa-
sional sociologist, or psychologist, or anthropologist, in some of his moods,
will remind us of how much like other animals we are, but the overwhelming
trend of the Enlightenment and its tradition is surely to emphasize the fact
that "Reason" or some equivalent trait separates us radically even from the
anthropoids. There is in the religion of the Enlightenment little touch of what
the generally educated Westerner is led to believe is the common Hindu
attitude toward animals as essentially linked to themselves, as themselves

4 1 write that last sentence carefully as a historian of ideas at work among the many, at
least the cultivated many. I think it clear that modern natural science, which is as a
world view at least as much the child of Descartes as of anyone else, has in the form
of the dualism of subjective-objective actually strengthened the old Christian dualism
of soul-body, thus adding an appreciable load for the conscience of most of us. Unlike
the old Christian, we have to worry about even our best sentiments, just because they
are sentiments.

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A History of Western Morals

in another guise. Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals have* in-
deed been a by-product of the humanitarianism of the Enlightenment; but the
Enlightened Westerner loves animals as a reflection of his own self-love,
because they amuse him, or flatter him, or seem even to love- him. One of the
many paradoxes — I use the term as I have generally hitherto, not in its
logical sense, but with its full load of emotional connotations — one of the
paradoxes of the new religion is that in putting man back into a hypostatized
Nature in one sense, it has by the many fillips it has given to his pride, notably
by his conquests over nature, made him very conscious oi; being quite dif-
ferent from the rest of nature's creatures. He is clearly on top of her heap,
has indeed — man makes himself — hoisted himself by his bootstraps to this
lofty position.

Yet Nature is there, for man clearly cannot bear being alone. And
toward Nature man is full of ambivalence. Two French poets set up the
poles neatly:

Mais la nature est la, qui t'invite et qui t'aime
O vraiment maratre Nature!5

Science has not diminished this ambivalence toward Nature, which like so
much else goes back to the Greeks and Romans. For Lucretius, surely,
Nature was not even a stepmother, just no relation; yet in the Theocritan
idyl Nature is kindly indeed. The relatively modest universe that early
modern astronomy opened up profoundly disturbed Pascal, who was more
sensitive to disturbance than are most scientists — "le silence de ces vastes
espaces m'effraie."6 Yet I know a modern astronomer, by temperament an
enjoying soul, who seems himself to expand with exuberant joy in contem-
plating the expanding universe, who delights in the thought that among the
billions of stars there must be many planets as suitable for life as ours.
Vulgdr-Darwinismus was at once a stimulus to man's self-satisfaction with
Nature, for it showed him how he had got his top place with no help from
God, and also, with its emphasis on "Nature red in tooth and claw," a
reminder that he had got there with no help from, perhaps in spite of, his

5 "There is nature, which invites thee and loves thee" (Lamartine, Meditations, "Le
Vallon"); "O really step-mother Nature" (Ronsard, "Mignonne, allous voir si la Rose").
I translate literally. "Maratre" is a very strong word indeed in French, with secondary
senses of "cruel," "harsh" — shall we say, **unnatural"? (I have seen it defined in a
modern French dictionary as mere denaturde; we work hard to make Nature a nice
humane concept.) Ronsard is no romantic; but De Vigny himself his written as harshly
of Nature.
« Pensees, § Hi, 206.

452

Conclusion: In Which Nothing Is Concluded

better "moral" self. The "struggle for life" could hardly have even the
consoling overtones of its Christian analogue, "many are called but few are
chosen," for the struggle was a purely natural, earthly one.

Intellectually, the view of Nature that emerged from the eighteenth-
century Enlightenment set a problem quite as important as the emotional
difficulty I have just noted. Since Western man always has sought to satisfy
his intellect in his world view, since so many of his emotions are intellectual
emotions, he has always had difficulty with the problem of the origins of
evil. The difficulty that faced the eighteenth century was at least as acute as
it has ever been for any theism that postulated a God all-good, all-knowing,
all-powerful. In the dogma of the natural goodness and reasonableness of
man, the Enlightenment had a postulate that made evil either illusory — and
this it emphatically was not to the philosophes and their followers — or else
unnaturally natural. No such satisfactory solution as Job's was possible, for
Western man simply cannot bring himself to regard Nature, no matter how
thoroughly hypostatized, as really inscrutable, as really possessed of a will
and a mind better than his own. I have pointed out in Chapter XI that the
Enlightened had to satisfy themselves with blaming evil on the institutional
and cultural enviroment — to a minor degree, as in the case, for example, of
the Eskimos, on the physical environment — a solution adequate for the very
pragmatic reformer, but not for the inquiring mind, since a mind had to ask
how an originally good environment happened to go wrong.

Two hundred years have indeed modified the bases of this problem for
the religion of the Enlightenment. It can be maintained that Freud, crowning
a long cultural development, has put both good and evil together, both
"natural" to the human psyche-and-soma, almost always intertwined, and
yet — for Freud was a good heir of the Judaeo-Christian-Enlightenment
tradition — nonetheless distinguishable as good and evil.7 As a good scientist,
Freud was content to leave the ultimate metaphysical and theological
problem of how good and evil got there unsolved, perhaps unasked. Cer-
tainly there is nowadays abroad in the West, as part of what may be called
Vulgar-Freudismus, a disposition to accept the naturalness, the thereness,
of both good and evil, without undue sentiments as to the uselessness of
trying to promote one and to resist the other. Yet two cautions need to be
made. First, there is still a strong minority of fundamentalist Enlightened

7 This has been put most effectively by Jerome Brunei in an essay, "The Freudian Con-
ception of Man," Daedalus, Winter 1958, pp. 77-84 (Vol. 87, No. 1 of the Proceedings
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences).

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A History of Western Morals

ho refuse to budge from the position that man is a kindly and rational
•eature by design of Nature, and would be so in practice if only . . . Well,
Le mad Marat during the French Revolution thought that five hundred
sads duly guillotined would do the trick; our modern mad rationalists, to
D them justice, seem to feel the guillotine is not quite up to the job. These
Warded children of the Enlightenment, who have been very powerful in
merican public education, cling firmly to the belief that only good is
atural, even in the little savages they fail to educate. But it looks as though
le power of this entrenched minority of educators is waning, and elsewhere
ley are not numerous even in the United States. Second, and more serious
)r the West, we cannot be at all sure that for the many a naturalistic
iterpretation of evil is desirable or possible. I shall have to return to this
oint.

Next, as the religion of the Enlightenment has developed historically,
has got tied up with, related to, two complexes of ideas, sentiments, and,
o doubt, "objective conditions" that are themselves closely interrelated —
ationalism and egalitarian democracy. Christianity, too, has in the last two
enturies got itself almost, if not quite, as fully involved with these two
Dmplexes. The critic who attempts to estimate how much of the good and how
inch of the evil to be found in nationalism and in democratic egalitarianism
; furthered or lessened by each of these religions, Christianity and Enlighten-
lent, has an impossibly tangled set of human relations to sort out. The ethics,
le world view, of both Christianity and the Enlightenment hold that all
len are brothers, and that warfare is an evil. Both religions accept, and even
herish, the cultural and emotional ties that bind men in national groups. On
ae record, neither has had much success in preventing warfare or in tran-
:ending in practice the limitations of the modern nation-state. The men of
ood will who are working throughout the world to achieve an international
rder that can prevent or at least control warfare are likely to run the gamut
rom conservative Christianity to all forms of freethinking. I do not think
aat a critic attempting to be neutral can find much difference here. Certainly
either of the fresher and more youthful forms of the religion of the En-
ghtenment, socialism and communism, has come anywhere near fulfilling
s promise of bringing men together in spite of differences of nationality, race,
olor, or creed. Their proponents will say, of course, that the mere existence
f capitalism, buttressed, they usually add, by Christianity, has prevented the
ilfillment of this promise. This kind of argument can hardly be controverted,
srtainly not among the faithful. But the fact remains that war among nations

454

Conclusion: In Which Nothing Is Concluded

is an unending threat in our world, and that neither Christianity nor En-
lightenment seems able to diminish that threat. Whether one or the other
faith seems more suited to enabling men to bear without surrender to despair
or to fatalistic numbness the tensions set up by that threat is a matter to
which I shall shortly come.

Both Christianity and the Enlightenment hold that in some sense all men
are equal; both sets of belief are congruous with much of what we all call,
loosely and firmly, "democracy." There is, historically, a very real difference
here, however, though not nearly as big a difference as the tradition of the
Enlightenment holds. Christianity in its many and long phases of inactivity
has indeed buttressed social and economic privileges; but it has by no means
always and everywhere put off to an afterlife the achievement of an equality
of fact between rich and poor, master and slave. There is always in Christian-
ity the possibility of a new drive inspired by the desire to get nearer equality
here on earth; the Christian tradition is strongly melioristic, and even in part
humanitarian. This is one of the reasons why so many Christians, both Catho-
lic and Protestant, have since 1700 been able to work together with the
Enlightened on concrete reforms basically egalitarian and democratic. And
on the other side, it is not true historically that the Enlightenment has always
worked in the direction of the egalitarian side of democracy. As I have taken
pains to point out, one powerful strain in the Enlightenment is by no means
egalitarian; all sorts of planners, from Enlightened despots to cultural en-
gineers have wanted to do away with poverty and suffering — so, too, do many
Christians — but not by any means to do away with all order of rank, esteem,
privilege, power. Democracy itself in the West has settled for some uneasy
compromises between the human desire to be different and the human desire
to be alike. A profession on the whole, if only because of its training in the
biochemical sciences, fundamentally not very Christian in its world view,
that of medicine, displays in the United States especially an acceptance by
the majority of its practitioners of some very big gaps between ideal and real
— in fact, of differences of class and privilege — as well as a determined ef-
fort by a conscientious and reforming minority to close that gap.8

Once more, as a naturalistic-historical critic of these two rival but by no
means wholly antithetical faiths, I am driven toward one of the key problems
of our discussion: How does each of these tend to affect individual human

8 See, for example, the admirably frank and realistic study of the situation in mental
health in A B. Hollingshead and F. C. Redlich, Social Class and Mental Illness, New
York, Wiley, 1958.

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A History of Western Morals

conduct? What does each achieve in the cure of souls? We may start, not by
quite dismissing or considering as solved a very old problem that still bothers
many sincere men, but by suggesting that it is not in fact now for us an acute
one. This is the old problem, a favorite with many Christians, as to whether
a superhuman, supranatural God-judge is finally necessary if men are to
conduct themselves at all tolerably well. The early Christians reproached the
pagans with having no sanctions against bad conduct, indeed, with encourag-
ing it by their immoral tales of gods and goddesses (see above, p. 62), and,
ever since the beginnings of Enlightened naturalism in modem religion, Chris-
tian critics have insisted that men who do not fear hell or hope for heaven
are likely to misbehave. So good an anti-Christian as Voltaire held the
opinion, common to all but the extreme Left Wing of the Enlightenment in
the eighteenth century, that sheer atheism among the many would ruin
society. This is the origin of one of his best known and least profound apho-
risms, "si Dieu n'existait pas il faudrait 1'inventer."9

To all sorts of alarmists, the history of the last two centuries is a record
of steady moral decline, of men who no longer fear punishment in an after-
life rushing into the deadly excesses of our animal sensate culture. I have
tried hard in this book to show that the record gives no support to such
alarmism, that, on the contrary, the last two centuries of Western history
are centuries of a relatively high moral level, certainly not one of general
moral decline. It would be difficult to show empirically that among West-
erners there is any correlation between the degree of acceptance of super-
natural sanctions in morals and conduct in conformity with high ethical
standards. Indeed, I have a suspicion that because of their recruitment for
the most part from serious, otherwise conventional middle-class persons and
earnest, ambitious, lower-class persons, the various freethinking sects would
perhaps show a slightly higher average of abstention from the lesser vices of
self-indulgence than would most Christian groups. As for the more serious
moral failings, I repeat that I doubt if there is much difference in level of con-
duct between Christians and non-Christians. We know enough about the
psychology of guilt and punishment to know that no such oddly rational
attitude as the classic Christian view of a sure divine judgment based on a
clearly known moral code exhausts the range and depth of the human con-
science, or even strikes effectively in the middle of that range.

9 "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him," from a letter in 1770 to
the Prince of Prussia, in S. G. Tallentyre, Voltaire in His Letters, New York, Putnam,
1919. Voltaire, proud of this aphorism, was fond of repeating it.

456

Conclusion: In Which Nothing Is Concluded

It will be more profitable to consider the effects of the two faiths on
the whole moral tone of the believers, on what, to be fashionable, we may call
the mental and moral health of the individual, on his disposition toward one
or another kind of conduct. Here, above all, we can but make stabs in the
dark, though we can be reasonably sure here, too, that the claims of the ex-
tremists of both sides are not justified; neither faith ends surely for the many
either in hopeless neurotic or psychotic despair or in a sure serenity and
soundness of mental and moral health. The differences between them in this
respect may be slight, but nonetheless important.

We may hazard the guess that emotionally and intellectually the new
religion in its extreme form does fulfill less successfully than traditional
Christianity the useful and indeed necessary role the Marxists call scornfully
that of "opium of the people"; or, at any rate, that the new religion is not
a satisfactory sedative for the intellectuals, who seem nowadays to need a
sedative badly. Since I have used an undignified but clear and, I think,
reasonably honest figure of speech, I may as well continue and note that
one's fundamental position as to human dispositions in this matter will as
usual be decisive. If one holds that men are generally more in need of seda-
tion than of stimulation — I continue to write figuratively, but with an eye
on the literal — then one is likely to esteem highly the quieting facets of a
religion; if one holds that men are more in need of stimulation than of seda-
tion, then naturally one esteems the troubling, pricking, "inspiring" facets.
Now I feel rather strongly — but, of course, quite personally — that men in
the West throughout their history, and especially their leaders both in thought
and in action, have tended to be overactive rather than underactive, have
stood in need rather of being quieted than of being pricked.

Such a judgment, such a diagnosis, is, of course, subjective, and, further-
more, applies only in general and not to special cases. To apply it to the
problem immediately at hand with purposes of deciding or curing is, how-
ever, no less difficult. I should like to suggest as a mere hypothesis that the
two centuries of experience we have had with the religion of the Enlighten-
ment show that this faith is weak in consoling power and, as a faith, intel-
lectually disturbing. Now the devout Enlightened, even the conventional
Enlightened, may quite rightly insist here that I have put the whole thing
in deliberately pejorative terms. The basic Christian position, he will insist,
is resignation, acceptance of much earthly evil, a position it is the glory of
the modern West to have got beyond. The basic position of the Enlighten-
ment— or, as he would prefer to put it, of modern progressive democracy —

457

A History of Western Morals

he must maintain, is that men can, by using fully and intelligently the faculties,
the "human nature," they are born with, mold this world to their good desires.
The moral force behind this position is, finally, for him, the one thing that
today can save us from disaster, indeed from extinction. Consolation, peace
of mind, resignation, and suchlike Christian satisfactions are, for him, in
this crisis absurd: a human race ruined by fusion-bomb warfare will be be-
yond consolation. At this point, all we can do is keep on debating. The
differences in attitudes, call them what you will, conservative and liberal,
pessimistic and optimistic, realist and idealist, are just there, existing, like
blond and brunet — with not even a good hair dye available, and few of in-
termediary coloring.

To continue with my analysis, however, I think it reasonably clear a
priori that the new religion can but produce as consoling elements in the
cure of souls substitutes that do their work less effectively than did the con-
soling elements of the old religion. I have already contrasted the Virgin Mary
and la patrie (we and the Germans are insensitive enough to make it "father-
land," and masculine, or even neuter; the Romance languages at least put
it in a grammatical feminine) as consolations in time of need, and found the
substitute almost certainly inferior to the original (see p. 334). Protestant-
ism itself, which is in some ways a step toward the new religion of the En-
lightenment, though it rebelled against the confessional, the priest, the wor-
ship of saints, indeed, against almost all Catholic art and ritual, has never
quite — not even among the Quakers — achieved a state of "every man his
own priest." The various Protestant sects have worked out their own form
of the cure of souls, their own rituals and worshiping, in short, their own
churches in the full meaning of that word. A convinced social Darwinist
might insist that they have worked out adaptations suitable to their func-
tions in society and satisfying to their members. But aesthetically and emo-
tionally the Protestant groups tend in one of three directions — toward Holy
Rollerism, thumping hymns, and general emotional dishevelment; toward
excessive austerity and emphasis on the sermon; toward an increasing imita-
tion of Catholic forms. The Protestant sermon nowadays is perhaps more
commonly a sedative than a stimulus, but it is rarely a good consolation.

What has been said of the Protestants in respect of the consoling elements
of belief and practice can be said even more strongly of the basically non-
Christian forms of the religions of the Enlightenment. Indeed, except in an
occasional patriotic ceremony or in moments of revolutionary excitement, as
with the Jacobins or the Bolsheviks, the ritual of the Enlightenment is dull

458

Conclusion: In Which Nothing Is Concluded

and perfunctory; moreover, its devisers, at bottom, are usually not quite sure
it is necessary. Good ritual is good art, and the Enlightened — and not only
in their Russian Communist sect — are often lacking in aesthetic sense. An
Enlightened funeral service is usually a dismal affair indeed, the ritual un-
certain, the music bad, the mourners uncomfortable and unconsoled as some
of the more sentimental outbursts of Enlightened evangelists — for instance,
William Ernest Henley's Invictus — are read with more than clerical unction.
But then, the Enlightened have all sorts of difficulties with death, as they do
with many other facts of life; Freud, a most Enlightened nineteenth-century
Jew, was led in the end to his concept of the death wish.10

As for the cure of souls, they all try; there is something like the pastoral
visit even among the ethical-cultural societies. But the real modern parallel,
at least in the United States, is no doubt the extraordinary network of
"counselors" of all sorts, from fortunetellers to Christian Science "readers"
and professional psychoanalysts. The very profusion and variety of these
surrogate priests points up what I am trying to bring out here: if you are
rugged enough, you may feel that this proliferation is in itself a sign of life
and strength in our society, part of our undignified, fecund, multanimous
American democracy; if you are delicate enough, this overwhelming variety
of counsel may seem to you madness, the threatening dissolution of all that
really holds us together in society. I incline at the moment to the modest,
perhaps Whiggish, opinion that with respect to the necessary cure of souls
our present American society is probably marginally deficient. We cer-
tainly have in this respect achieved liberty and variety rather than equality
and uniformity. I am prepared to grant that psychoanalysis when successful
is perhaps the most effective form of faith healing yet devised; but think of
what a tiny privileged minority can avail themselves of it! The pure Freudian
evangel must be the most aristocratic, the most snobbish, of good news.
And as for "nondirective" therapy, in which the counselor merely grunts
from time to time to prove to the counseled that he is still awake, one feels
that not even the philosophic anarchists of the Enlightenment were that
thoroughly convinced of the natural goodness of man.

The intellectual difficulties implicit in the new faith of the Enlightenment
are, however, under critical examination for their logical consequences, quite
as obvious, and, to me, quite as serious, as its emotional inadequacies. First,

!0 The other end for the Enlightened, I suppose, is the concept of full individual immor-
tality on this earth and in this body. See my mention of Dr. Gmman's thesis, p. 314n.
above.

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A History of Western Morals

the new faith puts upon the serious but ordinary, conventional, unheroic,
ungifted believer an even greater burden than the one that, as Eric Fromm
has pointed out in his Escape from Freedom, the Protestant obligation of
private judgment put upon such believers. Now I think it quite evident that
in this respect both Protestantism and the religion of the Enlightenment have
their own equivalents or surrogates for the intellectual assurance of being
right, of knowing where one stands in this universe, that Catholic traditional
Christianity afforded the many. Protestantism and Enlightenment would
not at all deserve the name of faiths if they did not give this assurance. The
good Baptist, the good Unitarian, the good Marxist, even the good member
of the Americans for Democratic Action is by no means obliged to go
through a difficult and soul-testing struggle of ratiocination and experimenta-
tion to get most of the answers he needs for most of the questions he has to
ask; indeed, if he is normal enough and good enough as a believer, he does
not need to ask questions at all. As so often, the problem is one of margins.
I think it likely that the ordinary devotee of the new faiths of the Enlighten-
ment does face many more occasions than does the devotee of older faiths,
when he has to go to the pains and stress of thinking about questions for
which he does not already feel he knows the answers. It is not very painful,
often, in fact, pleasant and relaxing, at most, involving some relieving dis-
charges from the adrenals, to think about questions for which you already
know the answers. That relaxing and morally useful satisfaction must come
less often to the Enlightened than to the Christian.

One example may suffice: let us take the problem of the sterilization of
the unfit. The traditional orthodox Christian has a clear and certain answer
to this problem, which, as a matter of fact, he himself would never have
raised as a problem: God through the ministers of His church on earth has
forbidden any such human tampering with the body which houses an im-
mortal soul. For the traditional orthodox believer in the faith of the En-
lightenment, especially if he is really conscientious about his duty to Sci-
ence (here, essentially, a surrogate for the Christian's grace), the problem
bristles with unsettled difficulties. How do we in practice define and recog-
nize the "unfit"? What do we know, qua scientists, about the genetic origin
for each type of unfitness as defined, for they are unlikely to present the
same genetics? What do we know about the effectiveness, in a given popula-
tion with a given culture, of a maximum achieved sterilization of each type
of unfit? What do we know about the effects of a program of sterilization on
public opinion? How shall we put such a program across? And, perhaps

460

Conclusion: In Which Nothing Is Concluded

worst question of all, who shall decide who is unfit, and how? Shall there be
appeal from a decision to sterilize, and to whom? The Enlightened may in-
deed appeal to a favorite stereotype and insist that the orthodox Christian
attitude is simply that of the traditional, if not ethologically accurately pic-
tured, ostrich hiding his head in the sand, refusing to face a problem that
we had all better face, or else. No good answer here is possible, for any sure
scientific answer is bound to be too late.

The answers the scientist gives, even in well-developed fields such as
the physical sciences, let alone in the still-groping social sciences, are al-
ways tentative, always subject to revision the moment a single fact fails to
fit in. For many specific problems, the scientist, perhaps even the social sci-
entist, can be a good deal more sure of himself and his answers than the
problem of sterilization of the unfit would indicate. This is so partly be-
cause there is a great deal of scientifically established knowledge we can
all afford to take as it stands; but it is so also because for some scientists and
for many laymen who accept the new faith, the uniformities of science, its
"laws," get readily transformed into dogmas, its uncertainties into certainties,
and thus, no doubt, its disturbing tensions get resolved into comforting as-
surance of oneness with the universal plan, of knowing that plan. The En-
lightened, fortunately, is not continually held to the highest rationalist ten-
sion any more than the Christian is held to the highest spiritual tension. The
Enlightened, too, can relax, can even be "natural" at moments.

For the honest intellectual, however, aware of what natural science
means in practice, there must remain some awareness of the dishonesty, or
at least the laziness, of this leap from uncertainty to certainty, and he is
aware of a residue of discomfort. Certainty has been smuggled in; and
smuggling, if often an interesting activity, is certainly an immoral one. The
good Christian, too, is troubled; he cannot be too much at ease in Zion.
But his troubles center in his relation with God, not in God's nature or
existence, which he knows but does not — or should not — pretend to under-
stand. The rationalist believer in the faith of the Enlightenment must have
moments when he is aware of how great the gap is between what on his own
premises he ought to understand and what he does understand.

These intellectual difficulties, which are, of course, also emotional and
moral difficulties, have been intensified for the Enlightened intellectual in
the course of the last two centuries by evidence, which he is still often un-
able to face, that the founders of his religion were wrong about human na-
ture, that men are not in fact roughly equal in respect to their capacity to

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A History of Western Morals

receive the grace of Reason or Science.11 The philosophes expected or hoped
all men would become philosophes, I think it not unfair to say, in the sense
that many of the first Christians must have expected or hoped all men would
become Christians. Now Christians have long been aware that all men are
not in fact good Christians, but they have never ceased to believe that they
have the capacity to be good Christians, have never begun to believe that
their not being good Christians is a fact of nature not to be overcome even
by conversion. You cannot say to a Christian, "That poor fellow over there
has an I.Q. of 85, therefore he cannot be saved." But, with no dogmatic
assurance as to the scientific value of the technique of the I.Q., indeed, using
it merely as a convenience, you can say, "That man over there, who has an
I.Q. of about 85, will never become a philosopher, nor even a philosophe,
cannot ever fully — perhaps not at all — receive your grace of Reason." The
overwhelming evidence accumulated since 1700 — though it was available
then, and known to many — that millions of men and women are incapable
of using their minds in the way the men and women we may once more call
"intellectuals" can and often do use theirs — in the way, reader, you are now
using yours — need not mean the end of the world, nor even the end of the
religion of the Enlightenment. But it does call for a kind of adjustment in the
attitudes of many men of good will, an adjustment in some senses perhaps
not altogether unlike that which the gradual awareness that Christ was not
going to come back to earth at once made necessary for early Christianity.
This adjustment is, I think, going on now among the intellectuals who had
enlisted on the side of the Enlightenment, but it is still incomplete, and the
process still brings unhappiness to many, still puts an undue strain on the
adrenals. The religion of the Enlightenment has a long and unpredictable way
to go before it can face the facts of life as effectively as does Christianity,
rich with two thousand years of experience of saints and sinners, good and
evil, in all their protean — and by no means equal — forms.

The greatest problem that confronts the moralist attempting to criticize
the religion of the Enlightenment on its own terms is that of the eternal
agon, which throughout this book I have insisted must be a central theme

11 1 am not inventing this parallel. In the famous Encyclopedic of Diderot and his col-
leagues, you will find the following in Volume XII, under the word philosophe: La
raison est a I'egard du philosophe, ce que la grace est a l'e*gard du Chretien. La grace
determine le chretien a agir; la raison determine le philosophe. The writer's recourse to
the verb determiner -, I suppose, was almost automatic. For a translation of most of the
article see my Portable Age of Reason Reader, pp. 255-257.

462

Conclusion: In Which Nothing Is Concluded

for any history of morals in the West.12 The problem may be put in various
ways. We are today likely to recognize it most readily as the problem of the
proper balance between individualism and collectivism in a society, or be-
tween rival individuals seeking each his own victories and co-operating in-
dividuals each seeking the common good. I have suggested, as a figurative
way of putting it, as good a balance as possible — admitting we cannot do
much about the balance — between the great cat, or possibly the wolf, in
man, and the ant or bee, or perhaps the sheep, in man.

In the Christian tradition, this antithesis sets the problem of the constant
need to combat in man the most dangerous form of original sin, the sin of
pride, which nonetheless is no wholly ignoble sin like that of gluttony, but
the "sin of the angels"; for in that tradition, as in common language, there
is an ambivalence in the concept of pride, which is not unnatural to man,
and can even in some sense be a "good," or "proper" pride (no "good"
gluttony, no "proper" avarice). For many of us today the problem is sharp-
ened by a feeling that in the pooled self-esteem of nationalism the spirit of
the agon is at its wildest and most dangerous, both in the leaders who face
each other in the public arena that is nowadays ironically called "diplomacy"
and in the great public that follows them. However one puts the problem,
it is hard in mid-twentieth century not to start with a feeling that the pre-
sumptions, the evidence, in fact, must lean to the side of controlling, taming,
lessening, if possible, the innumerable competitions of modern life, the
innumerable temptations we all face to indulge ourselves in the will to shine,
or the will to howl, if not in the will to power.

Certainly some such feeling is the burden of the worries which, from
Edmund Burke on, philosophic Western conservatives have felt about the
effect of the efforts of the Enlightenment to realize men's natural rights to
life, liberty, and the attainment of happiness. Burke's sense of outrage over
the French Revolution rested on no mere politician's feeling for an "issue."
Burke was, indeed, no sensible man, but a Christian, and he felt threatened
by the Enlightenment in that fundamental part of any man I have been
obliged to label here with the horrid phrase "world view." He saw more
clearly than any contemporary that the Enlightenment, too, was not a com-
mon-sense matter, but a religion.

12 1 confess to a suspicion that it must be a theme for any study of human beings, even
in the East. I do not doubt that "patterns of culture" vary, perhaps even as widely as
those of the late Ruth Benedict's Kwakiutls and Zunis. But I have been careful in this
book to confine myself to our Western civilization, where the pattern is certainly far
closer to that of the Kwakiutls than to that of the Zunis.

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A History of Western Morals

It has seemed to these Burkean conservatives ever since that the En-
lightenment, erroneously holding that men are by nature good, that evil lies
wholly in tradition, convention, institutions, environment, in short, has
worked to dissolve the ties, the disciplines, the restraining supports with
which this Christian-built environment worked to protect men from them-
selves. Left to themselves, left morally naked, their natural bent toward
satisfying their desires has in fact, so say these conservatives, driven them
to all sorts of irresponsible excesses, toward a series of mad competitions in
all walks of life. What we now need most, these conservatives argue, is
some acceptable restraints on human competitiveness, some means of get-
ting men to accept individual failure, insignificance, an order of rank, the
discipline of reality.

We are back at another phase of the restraining or deterrent effect of
different sets of ideas on human conduct in the large; or, as Pareto would
put it, the specific use of certain ideas, rationalizations (derivations) either
to activate or deactivate certain sentiments (residues). Just as in logic the
fear of the Christian hell should work to keep individuals from sinning, and
the removal of that fear by Enlightened abolition of the idea of hell should
leave the way toward sinning a bit more open, so the Christian dogma of
original sin should act to restrain human self-assertion as well as self -in-
dulgence, and the Enlightened dogma of the natural goodness of man should
work to remove such "unnatural" restraints.

I do not think the record of the last two centuries, however, quite con-
firms this expectation. There has been in private morality from about 1700
on, in such border areas between manners and morality as dress, an actual
increase of order, form, discipline, and restraint to a kind of Victorian peak,
and an increasing loosening of such restraints since then. But in this key
matter of the agon, and of stimulating or restraining what the Christian calls
"pride," I see very little difference among the believers of the two faiths.
The agon among nation-states seems to me no worse and no better morally
than the agon has been in earlier modern times, and in the days of the
dynastic Western state and in ancient Greece. Death and maiming and
raping in war have always been total; war has always been total. The major
difference between our wars and earlier ones is a difference of scale. There
is some difference in the degree of fanaticism with which wars are fought, as
I have noted, but in this respect over two thousand years there is no clear
pattern, but only a series of oscillations. As for the agon among individuals
in a given society, that, too, has in some of its manifestations, most notably

464

Conclusion: In Which Nothing Is Concluded

in economic life, been tamed and partly controlled. The Age of the Robber
Barons in the United States is well past, and nowadays some conservatives
in America — and even some liberals — are worried lest we have gone too
far to eliminate the adventurousness, the competitiveness of the great Ameri-
can tradition.

In fact, if you want to set up a master pattern for contemporary wor-
riers, conservative and liberal alike, it would be something like this: in in-
ternational relations, the competition among nation-states is absolutely
unbridled, unrestrained by law or morality; within each nation-state, how-
ever, the tendency is toward an opposite extreme of collectivism, conformity,
rough egalitarianism, legal and moral restraints on the individual. Among
states, the morality of the big cats; within each state, the morality of the social
insects. Toward some such conclusions writers as different as Ortega y Gas-
set, Koestler, Toynbee, Riesman, Orwell, the younger Schlesinger, and many
others, tend to arrive by somewhat varied routes.

Of these two horrors, the first is to the historian-naturalist by far the
most threatening. The existentialist disgust that has overcome our Western
priestly class, the intellectuals, is indeed in part the age-old and perhaps not
very cataclysmic revolt of the sensitive and the bright against the coarsely
successful few and the dull, ugly, conventional, joyless many. Over a cen-
tury ago, when the best explosion men could manage was a mere gunpowder
pop, the Davidsbundler were prodding away at the Philistine levelers. But
the unbelievable threat of a single bomb that has an explosive strength equal
to everything fired in the whole course of the last great war does quite
realistically justify some of the worries of our intellectuals. The record gives
no indication that war can be avoided; the most hopeful Christian, the most
positive Enlightened, cannot discern the kind of moral progress in inter-
national relations that would make recourse to war unlikely.

An ingenious Christian with a sense of history might bring himself to
face the catastrophic destruction — worse yet, the horrid laming — of hundreds
of millions of human beings as quite consonant with the apocalyptic strain in
his religion. The Book of Revelation has been firmly established in his canon
for a long time. But what possible consolation can the Enlightened heir of
Condorcet find in the dark prospect ahead? Indeed, much harder for him as
rationalist to bear, he must find himself, at bottom, unable to find any ex-
planation for what seems to lie ahead. No wonder that under all sorts of
disguises, as the unconscious, as the Freudian death wish, as the rather
neurotic Stoicism of the philosophic existentialists, as the Angst of the Chris-

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tian existentialists, the dogma of original sin — a belief in some fundamental
and on this earth ineradicable flaw in men, not just in environment, not just
in institutions — confronts uncomfortably the Enlightened. And perhaps, ir-
rationally, as is fitting, does give him strength to bear up, to face a world he
never made. With all its rationalist confusion of word and deed, the religion
of the Enlightenment has, perhaps merely as a derivative of Christianity,
preserved an illogical and practical moderation, disciplinary power, an ability
to cope undespairingly with an evil which should not be there, and, above all,
has preserved and, for many of its faithful, strengthened in daily life that
"minimal moral puritanism" which quite gainsays its original denial of the
"civil war in the breast."18

Once more, at the risk of wearying the reader, I must revert to the full
religious parallel. Reason does indeed for the Enlightened do the work grace
does for the Christian. Though Reason is in the determined world view of
the Enlightened the free but uncomfortably mysterious gift of Nature, as
grace for the Christian is the free and properly mysterious gift of God, so in
this moral world of free will the Enlightened individual must strive to deserve
(attain?) Reason as the Christian strives to deserve grace. We can all get
more Reason into this world of human relations if we will only go to work
properly, in the missionary spirit, bearing the good news of Reason, Science,
Technology. I am trying hard here to report, not to exhort, not even by that
rather ineffective form of exhortation which is irony. The basic moral faith
of the Enlightenment, that in the natural goodness and reasonableness of
man and infinite pliability, is still strong among us Americans. Here is a
quotation from a recent source:

Despite all this [our wars and fears of war] we have a kind of strength to which
we have given little heed: the fact that human nature is changing at an extraor-
dinary pace; that a new kind of humanity is coining into existence, rooted in
current historical trends, especially trends arising from science and the urge
toward discovery. Discovery of our own identity, belief in ourselves and in the
use of the intellectual weapons of a democratic society — a science-minded and
technology-minded society — can strengthen those moral, intellectual, and social
devices without which, in such a world as this, there is no strength at all.14

In short, one more push and we shall be safe in Condorcet's tenth epoch,
only one hundred and fifty years late, which is, in terms of a good philosophy
of history, no delay at all.

13 On that original denial, I refer the reader back to my paraphrase of Robert Owen,
p 299.

14 Gardner Murphy, Human Potentialities, New York, Basic Books, 1958, p. 5.

466

Conclusion: In Which Nothing Is Concluded

Yet the doubt persists: If, on the whole, the record has shown that the
Western intellectual, for all his bellyaching, can get along with a hope that
is never fulfilled, a Promised Land never attained, it is not at all clear that
the non- or unintellectual can make such an adjustment. The otherworldly
promises the religion of the Enlightenment makes for this world may be too
much of a goad for men less used than is the intellectual to taking the word
for the deed, less able than is he to transfer to the central nervous system in
"sublimation" very concrete appetites. The many are not quite as likely to
be taken in by nice words, not even by the activities of those wicked per-
suaders, propagandists, motivational researchers that the intellectuals love to
read about, as are, at their own rather more subtle verbal level, the intellect-
uals themselves. The many really want what they want. Was not Hitler's
thousand years surely the worst of chiliasms?

Ill

At any rate, we are going to have to put up with this coexistence of Christian-
ity and the religion of the Enlightenment for some time; or, rather, there are
no good signs that the present multiplicity of sects, Christian and Enlight-
ened, the present multanimity of Western men in manners, tastes, morals,
world views, is going to end — not even with that end of our world the
prophets of doom expect. Toynbee, most firmly of all such prophets, has
announced a hope that out of these horrors will come a new religion of
gentleness and love, Christianity-cwm-Buddhism, achieved transcendence of
the flesh and of the spirit spurred by the flesh, and, one need hardly say, the
end of the agon. The Marxists are sure that they, too, will either end, or,
better, wholly ennoble, the agon in the classless society. The mere historian
should be modest in such matters. He should confess that he does not by any
means understand the origin and spread of great religions, certainly not well
enough to make predictions. The historian-sociologist of religion, almost
inevitably influenced in the West today by the ideas of the Enlightenment, has
to say that there does seem to be a relation, a congruity, between the whole
culture from which a religion emerges and the religion itself, and that there-
fore it would be most surprising if a religion of gentleness, love, and
"etherialization" of appetites and ambitions — a fully otherworldly religion —
were to spring out of the West of nationalist democracy, nationalist Commu-
nism, satellites political and astronomical, existentialism, and general inter-
est in a varied, exciting, unavoidable material world. The great disgust, the

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A History of Western Morals

gut-deep horror of such a world, can indeed spring up anywhere, and in the
group may produce a sect, an order, a crusade, and, in individuals, a poet,
a revivalist, a saint, or simply a columnist; but I should be surprised if in our
time such feelings were to spread to the many and get transmuted into a
great religion; for to hate this world enough — or to love it enough — to give
it up seems well beyond the powers of the many in our West. It is perhaps
already too late for a prophet.

The reader will be aware that I do not regard as a possibility in any
foreseeable future a society without any religion at all. Indeed, I consider the
concept of a society without a religion as much nonsense as the concept of a
human society without human beings. Now and then under the influence of
the Enlightenment someone — especially the Marxists — uses as a form of
words the statement that a given group or a given individual has "no reli-
gion." Now and then in our own time an even more incautious statement is
made: Science will take the place of what we call "religion."

Now at the risk of some repetition, I must again go over this ground
hastily. Natural science is a method of using the human mind to answer
certain kinds of questions. These questions are ultimately always questions
about means to ends; which ends are not themselves set, merely, and in
^ isolation within the mind, by that activity of the human mind we call "nat-
ural science." The answers natural science provides are always tentative, and,
though tested for their truth at the moment in various complex ways, are
never so tested by their effects on the tester's personal desires, not even
when those desires are of the kind we call "moral." Though for convenience
— and out of long habit that goes back at least to the ancient Greeks —
natural scientists often talk about the answers they thus get as "true," as
descriptions or even reflections of the "real world," the more sophisticated
among them will admit that they do not mean by "real world" the world of
common sense or the world of morals, theology, metaphysics. The scientist
is bred to feel and act toward the task of reaching the kind of truth he
works to achieve in ways we have to recognize as "moral." He seeks truth
and shuns falsehood. But his truths are not necessarily what we call "morally
good," nor his falsehoods "morally bad."15 Science, in short, has no teleo-
logical element, unless you find it pleasing to say that science is its own
teleology. Its practice tends among its best practitioners to promote an atti-

15 Just overheard, from an impeccably trained scientist who knows what it is all about:
"I didn't say they [your words] were correct; I said they were wise."

468

Conclusion: In Which Nothing Is Concluded

tude of tentativeness, of skepticism, of relativism, toward other than scientific
questions, but that tendency, no doubt fortunately, is uncommon in the rank
and file of scientists, and inevitably incomplete in all of them.

The scientist cannot qua scientist be certain, not morally certain, and as
a full human being he is at least inclined to be morally certain at times.
Moreover, even in the West, so aware of science, and to a degree so trained
in it, the great majority of human beings are probably quite incapable of
serious scientific thinking, quite incapable of understanding what science is.
I come back again to that imperfect tool the concept of the I.Q., which,
nonetheless, is itself a product of the Enlightenment: the many are quite
simply not bright enough to be good scientists. Again, even very good sci-
entists often state, and confirm by their conduct, that they need to think
and feel about matters of theology or metaphysics, to know something about
what Spencer, here true to his training as a scientist, wryly called the "Un-
knowable."

All this should be obvious. But I think the difficulty goes deeper, or at
any rate can be put somewhat differently. Thinking and feeling teleologically,
morally, metaphysically is quite simply part of the human lot; if you yourself
have a firm "materialistic" metaphysics, of the kind historically associated
with the growth of natural science, you may choose to say that this thinking
and feeling are environmentally conditioned activities of the central nervous
system — though you will probably be driven to include the endocrines, and
thence go on to the total personality. But the point is clear: thinking and
feeling teleologically are there, quite as much as thinking and feeling scien-
tifically. It would, even on the materialist's premises, take more than a local
operation to remove them — you would have to destroy the personality.

It is certainly conceivable — there have even, no doubt, been examples —
that there should be a world view, much influenced by the spirit of natural
science and the Enlightenment, which should put off fully and honestly into an
Unknowable (as poor Spencer with his religion of Progress most certainly did
not) any and all sets of ideas about the origins and long-run destiny of man
on earth, or indeed any big systematic set of ideas about good and bad, or
long-run purpose, perhaps accept as good or at least as tolerable that there
should be variety, multanimity, more or less of a free-for-all here on earth,
and concentrate on doing what seemed possible in limited ways toward
getting what one simply wants here on earth. The holder of such a world view
might call himself a skeptic, and appeal to the memory of Montaigne. But if

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A History of Western Morals

he bothered to read Montaigne he would realize that what the essayist wanted
was what any good Christian humanist of his troubled age wanted, that he
was — as he is usually labeled in histories of literature — a moralist. Even if
our skeptic tried to put his position as an abdication of any private judgment
before the great fact that Nature will take its course anyway, he would still
have taken thereby a clear — and to some persons most consoling — moral
and metaphysical position, one Lucretius tried to take so long ago.

In this world of human nature true "naturalism" is no anarchy, no
meaninglessness, not even quite an acceptance of things as they are, but a love
of things as they are. It is, perhaps fortunately, a rare kind of love; among
our intellectuals, naturalism is rather more often a hatred for things as they
are. And more — even the skeptic's moral stance will not be "determined" in
any way any of us can understand and predict more than very roughly; it
will be chosen out of many possibilities left us all by the past, and at just
this level of world views and similar inescapable generalities, left us by the
whole Greco-Romano- Judaeo-Christian-Enlightenment tradition we have
been following in this book.

Statistical sorting out of Christian and Enlightened is, just because each
has so much influenced the other, a difficult and not very profitable task. In
the free West today, at least outside the Iberian Peninsula, neither tries nor,
at heart, thinks it possible or desirable to proscribe the other; some degree
of practical toleration is the price of our multanimity. The more ardent of
each group are given to polemics against the other. The Spanish Civil War
of the 1930's showed that both Christian and Enlightened could kill in the-
name of their religion. But for the most part, even in France and Italy, where
the struggle between "clericals" and "anticlericals" has long been endemic,
the conflict does not get beyond the bounds within which Western society
seems normally to be able to hold itself together. On the continent of Europe
outside the Iron Curtain, non-Christians and anti-Christians are relatively
numerous, and in France must number something between half and a third
of the population. In English-speaking countries, though actual church mem-
bership never seems to climb much over sixty per cent of the total popula-
tion, the number of those who frankly deny they are Christians — they incline
to say they have "no religion," which I have insisted above is not likely to be
true — is relatively small. But English-speaking anti-Christian Enlightened are
nonetheless in total many millions, and are firm, articulate, and often intol-
erant indeed. Their own faith does teach them that toleration is no negative,
but a positive, virtue, and the gentler among them live up to their principles;

470

Conclusion: In Which Nothing Is Concluded

but many of them are bitter, determined, convinced infighters, no more
tolerant than were the philosopher^ Even the run of the mill of these
Enlightened apparently often hold the naive view that the Christian con-
vinced that he has a revealed, absolute truth incorporated here on earth in a
church ought, nonetheless, to behave as if he believed that all religious groups
are equal, and that his church is simply another public building, a slightly
more dignified cafeteria. But the religion of humanity has long been weak in
its understanding of human nature.

We may then for the not too remote future anticipate a continuing inter-
action between the Christian way and the way of the Enlightenment. Neither
world view, to judge from the past, will in such a future wholly annihilate
the other — not even in Spain, not even in Russia. Christianity cannot, with-
out ceasing to be Christianity and becoming, as have so many of the modern-
istic or "liberal" sects nominally still within Christianity, in no way distin-
guishable from freethinking Enlightenment, wholly give up its other world,
its supranatural godhead, in short, its theology.17 And yet such has been the
very great success of natural science and its associated attitudes toward
"reality" — that is, such has been and is the Enlightenment — that a great num-
ber of Westerners will almost certainly in the future, as they have in the
past, be unable to accept this essential supernatural element in the Christian

16 1 am aware that the above statement will give offense to many Enlightened, and that
"toleration" is a word that invites semantics — and hence, ultimately, metaphysics. I
revert to my controversial statement (see above, p. 1 1 ) about moral evil and '"weeds."
No flower gardener can "tolerate" dandelions. To the Enlightened, belief in, for ex-
ample, the doctrine of the Trinity, has to be a weed, an evil, and surely it is as
easy for him as for the Christian to equate believer and belief? I grant that in prin-
ciple the Enlightened could not solve in an emergency a problem of toleration in quite
the way the Abbot of Citeaux solved his at Beziers (see above, p. 210); but tempera-
mentally are there not surely Enlightened equivalents of the Abbot? I think Lenin, for
instance, might have given a similar response.

17 This statement, too, will not be acceptable to many Enlightened. But I feel the diffi-
culty is at least more than a conventional one of definition. The Enlightened certainly
often try hard to maintain a theology without a theos, without miracles, without a super-
natural, a naturalistic-historical theology. I can only repeat that this "theology" seems to
me no longer Christian in its basic feeling about men and the universe— or, for that
matter, Jewish. The effort to build a satisfying "liberal" or "modernistic" theology can
be profitably studied, for non-Jews perhaps from a relatively objective point of view, in
contemporary Jewish thought. See notably two recent books: M. M. Kaplan, Judaism
without Supet naturalism, New York, The Reconstructionist Press, 1958, and J. J. Cohen,
The Case for Religious Naturalism, New York, The Reconstructionist Press, 1958. Mr.
Cohen writes, "God is that quality of the universe, expressed in its order and its open-
ness to purpose, which man is constantly discovering and upon which he relies to give
meaning to his life." Certainly this God is no longer even an heir of Jehovah? Quoted
in the New York Times Book Review, September 21, 1958, p. 22.

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A History of Western Morals

faith. There remains, then, that gap, no more than a gap in ideas, in the
"superstructure," but not to be readily filled even by high-minded and subtle
symbolisms, by psychological interpretations of miracles, by theologies that
make God almost as abstract and unnecessary as Whitehead's — and Des-
cartes's — or that prove that the doctrine of original sin is more consonant
with human nature than any other interpretation, a gap not to be wholly
filled even by a Earth, a Reinhold Niebuhr, a Tillich. It will, indeed, be so
filled for some, and especially for sensitive intellectuals, for there certainly
is in our time among the cultivated, as there was in Chateaubriand's time, an
appreciable swing back to some form of wished-for Christian participation in
what seems to be orthodox communion. But there will remain millions of
Westerners, from humanists through the many forms of freethinking to ardent
religious atheists, who will refuse to call themselves Christians, and who will
not in fact be Christians, though most of them will conduct themselves in the
main business of life as do most Christians.

On the other hand, the record shows no more firm signs that the Enlight-
enment will shortly annihilate Christianity. Through almost all the West, and
in all social classes, among intellectuals as among nonintellectuals, there are
millions of men who call themselves Christians, and who are, in all but the
pathetically diseased Kierkegaardian sense, good Christians. There may even
be some good Christians in the Kierkegaardian sense; there are, there must
be, by Christian standards and hopes, a few saints, a very few, as saints have
always been few. In Russia there has been a concerted attempt to root out
Christianity and substitute an extremely intolerant and militant form of the
religion of the Enlightenment. We cannot be sure that the attempt will suc-
ceed; sound sociological analysis is hardly possible for us in the West as yet.
Most travelers — and, frankly, that is all any of us can be in Russia nowadays
— seem agreed that Christianity is now practiced almost wholly among the
old, that men and women under forty have for the most part been in fact so
indoctrinated with the new religion of Dialectical Materialism that they have
ceased to have any feeling for, any memory of, Christianity, that, in short,
the government has already succeeded in its attempt to destroy Christianity
in the U.S.S.R. Yet by no means all travelers agree that the young of the
Soviet Union are wholly converted to the official form of the religion of the
Enlightenment. We have even less reliable information that the Soviet govern-
ment is succeeding in stamping out Islam in those parts of the union that had
a Moslem faith. Yet it would appear that, during the last general war at least,
the government let up designedly on its campaign against Christianity, with

472

Conclusion: In Which Nothing Is Concluded

the result that the churches in a city like Moscow — true, many fewer churches
for more people than in the old days — were filled. I think that, though we
cannot yet be sure as to just what has happened in Russia, it is already clear
that the Bolsheviks did succeed much more than did the Jacobins in a similar
revolutionary attempt to root out Christianity. All the Jacobins achieved in
their brief two years of power was to set up in France their own freethinking
church, known rather inaccurately as anticlericalism or secularism, in a form
so acutely hostile to the Catholic church that France has suffered ever since
the tragic rift between les deux France. In Russia, it would seem at least that
the new religion of the Enlightenment, in one of its more sectarian forms, has
really got a state for its church, a Leninist tradition that may work out as an
Enlightened variant of the Catholic Petrine tradition.

But let there be no mistake. The church that the Communists are trying
to set up as the sole church of Russia is only one sect of the religion of the
Enlightenment. I do not think it is destined to be more than a sect, nor, in
the long run, to be quite uninfluenced by what goes on in the West, and
indeed in the whole world. And in that West men live on and struggle on, if
they are intellectuals of a certain sort living best and struggling most fiercely
in the deep conviction that life is doomed and the struggle vain. The West— ^
and not only among its intellectuals — is deeply committed to living its parav
doxes, its contradictions, its conflicts, postponing to an afterlife or to some
other Utopia or to a classless society their resolution, yet deep down not
really admitting the legitimacy or necessity for such postponement, always
actively at work spinning verbal resolution of its conflicts, always likely to
burst forth somewhere on earth in a furious struggle to end struggle, an in-
human effort to transcend humanity. Yet this last effort has its own ambiv-
alence, for Western man can never quite decide whether to try to transcend
his humanity by subduing — by killing — the "natural" man of common sense
and desire, or by so indulging that man that neither common sense nor
desire remain. On the whole, surely, the self-annihilation of the mystic has
not been the Western way, and the climate of the last two centuries has been
most unfavorable to the private mystic. The public mystic, of course, is
Western indeed, but hardly a mystic, merely another leader, another prize
winner.

The variety of these contradictions is great. The intensity with which they
are felt obviously varies greatly in individuals and varies in societies with
time and place, as does the kind of working solution or acceptable nonsolu-
tion of any given contradiction. (Your temperament will tell you which of

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A History of Western Morals

these semantically identical phrases — working solution or acceptable nonsolu-
tion — suits you better emotionally; if neither suits you, you are potentially a
saint or a revolutionary, at any rate a troublemaker.) I do not think that a
history of men's attitudes toward these contradictions in the last few mil-
lennia would show what the Victorians called "Progress" in their resolution.
I should like to believe that the humanitarian currents of the last few cen-
turies which have done so much to reduce violence and physical suffering in
the West have at least worked to reduce the willingness, the delight with
which men murder to resolve their contradictions; and in spite of the prophets
of doom, in spite of the great wars of our time, it may be that really moral
wars — crusades — are getting harder to arrange. The mere fact of warfare is
at least for us a moral problem, as it hardly was for the ancient Greeks of the
Great Age, or for the men of the Middle Ages.

The very doctrine of Progress, however, is one of the acute modern forms
of the eternal and unresolved contradictions that are the life of the West.
I do not mean merely the obvious contrast between material or technological
progress and moral progress. I mean, rather, the horrendous metaphysical
problem set by the naturalism and historicism of the classical eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century conception of Progress, to which I have already alluded
(Chapter XIV) and which is really, at bottom, the old problem of determin-
ism, but this time with no saving God to help out with a solution. Man cannot
be at once both inside and outside a process of Evolution which makes him
what he is, and makes him want to be what he wants to be, and even ties
him up in the metaphysical knot he is struggling with. Nature cannot be un-
natural, history cannot be unhistorical, human beings cannot make history or
nature or themselves. Yet they most vigorously want to and manage to con-
vince themselves that they can succeed, and have succeeded. Their latest
attempt, through belief in a natural evolutionary process of which they are
at once the product and the producer, the design and the designer, worked
for a while to heighten their efforts as moralists to close the gap between what
they say and what they do, between their ethics and their conduct, to make
the lower into the higher — an effort not quite identical with what they as
Darwinian evolutionists found to be the achieved intention of Nature to make
the higher slowly out of the lower. It is, I think, still too early to decide
whether they will make a happy nonsolution out of the doctrine of Progress.
But we are already being urged to go beyond history.

Perhaps the crudest, and one would suppose therefore the most intoler-
able, of the contradictions that fill the modern West is at its clearest in

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Conclusion: In Which Nothing Is Concluded

Russia: the promise, the moral ideal, of the classless society, a society in
which men must be equals in such a way as to give the lie to the Gilbertian

When everybody's somebody
Then no one's anybody.

The reality in Russia of great economic inequalities of income, a social hier-
archy of prestige, a political hierarchy of power, a society that gives and
takes the wounds of the agon, is clear even through the Iron Curtain. Yet
orthodox Western democracy itself has never quite succeeded in filling by
means of asserted, and partly realized, equalities of opportunity and of hu-
man dignity, the gap between the full egalitarian ideal and the most inegali-
tarian reality. The conscientious democrat could hardly help feeling that Mr.
Elvis Presley's forced giving up for a relatively brief spell as a private soldier
his four Cadillacs and one Lincoln and all the rest of his aristocratic privi-
leges was a rather less than satisfactory tribute from vice to virtue — much as
the idealistic Christian, the true Christian, in the Middle Ages must have
felt about some formal penance imposed on a very rich and very sinful noble.
Perhaps the whole West, the whole world, will find, as some of our philo-
sophical conservatives fear, that the contradiction between the ideal of
equality and the ideal of individual liberty which really is "built into" the
religion of the Enlightenment is in fact a contradiction beyond even the great
capacities Westerners have developed for living such contradictions. But for
the present, it would seem as though we in the free West had so far managed
to get on with this one; it is not yet certain that the Russians, without the
help of Christianity, will do as well.

There is not much use repeating the litany of contradictions we have
encountered in the course of this book, nor even in trying to pick out a
master contradiction of our time. But as a last note of emphasis, I should
like to return to the contrast I have set metaphorically as between the great
cat in man and the social insect in him. To get the contrast less fancifully
put, any good social Darwinian — say, William Graham Sumner — will state
the thesis that man is essentially a rugged individualist, competitive with
other men, and that in the series of competitions which is life, the good, the
fit, win and survive, and the bad, the unfit, lose and die, by the will of Evolu-
tion; and Peter Kropotkin, in his Mutual Aid, will state the thesis that, on
the contrary, man is essentially a gregarious person, who lives by helping
others and letting others help him, who is inclined rather to co-operation than
to competition — and would be even more co-operative if he could follow his

475

A History of Western Morals

real nature, and not listen to mistaken guides like the social Darwinists.
Actually, Sumner does not quite deny that men co-operate as well as com-
pete, and Kropotkin does not deny that some competitiveness among indi-
viduals is natural and even good. But each does, especially in the heat of
exposition, assert very emphatically that the "nature" of man inclines him
unmistakably and markedly in one direction or the other, and each implies
that as far as is humanly possible we should all encourage society and Nature
to keep men going in the right direction in the future; it is almost as though
each feared that the diagnosis of the other was correct. The contrast has been
extrapolated into about as distant a future as any of our modern prophets
have dared indulge themselves by Sir Charles Galton Darwin in his The Next
Million Years and by Roderick Seidenberg in his Post-historic Man. Darwin
holds that man, Homo sapiens, as an animal — which is all he is — has already
in something less than 100,000 years shown all he can be and do, has shown
that he is basically a "wild animal," not a social one, and that therefore, until
another species is evolved in the course of evolution, which we know takes
about a million years, men will go on making and destroying states, cultures,
churches, in a series so long as to make the historian blanch at the prospect.
Mr. Seidenberg, on the contrary, thinks that the future — distant, it is true —
will see mankind work out their current heart-rending problems, their con-
flicts of ideals and ideas, which make for change and therefore for history —
and settle down into a state of automatic if high-level, almost spiritual, not at
all Pavlovian (no drooling), responses, intellectual and emotional equiva-
lents of, or parallels to, the present responses made by the social insects, an
achievement which will mean the end of change, the end of problems, the
end of morals, and the end of history, thus closing out nicely another human
contradiction, that between "end" as a finish, a death, and "end" as a goal,
a life.

We may in mid-twentieth century, with our eyes fixed on no more distant
future than the next few generations, be sure that the old contradictions in
man's ideas about his own nature and that of his society will by no means be
solved. Most intellectuals in the West tend nowadays to believe, either with
delight or with resignation, that the burden of evidence shows us moving
toward a pole of collectivism, conformity, uniformity, at least within a given
state or society. Perhaps, but we shall have to move a long way to get very
near the condition of the social insects. Even in the United States, where we
have been told from de Tocqueville through Sinclair Lewis right on to this
moment that the leveling process is inexorable, a good alarmist about our

476

Conclusion: In Which Nothing Is Concluded

diversities can point to dozens: the incredible variety of, the complete lack
of standardization among, what we call institutions of higher education; the
hundreds of organized sects, Christian, Jewish, Enlightened, theosophic, fad-
dist; the continuing concrete variety of our American scene — a physical
variety of regions which physiography and climate guarantee against archi-
tects, Main Streeters, and essayists who never use their eyes, a spiritual variety
which history and geography, and perhaps even the nature of man combine
to guarantee for a long time; the sometimes appalling course of fashion, the
uniformity of the desire to be different, which in the real world of the man
watcher, of time lags, of space not quite annihilated, does indeed make for
variation and for differential changes; the continuing American lust for ex-
periment, including socio-economic experiment, which has meant that even in
mid-twentieth century, though the great wild decades of Brook Farm, New
Harmony, and all the other "consociate families" are past, there still crop up
little groups that try to live without machines, or bring up children without
a single "No!," or make a university out of one hundred Great Books, or
control the flesh by going nude, or go back to the womb of Vermont, or pre-
serve in federally protected "wilderness areas" our innocent Mother Earth
and her brood of virtuous animals and plants from her one wicked child,
Man. But the list could be long indeed, and I forbear, knowing I can never
persuade the many intellectuals not really interested in the world of the man
watcher; for them, the United States will still be the land of identical Main
Streets tied together by the same interstate highway of mind and body.

There are many real worlds, not the least of which is the real world of
morals we have been so cursorily surveying. There is even a sense in which
the solipsist and the poet are right: each of us is a world, and surely quite
real. Of the worlds we share, Western man in particular has long been quite
sure that the most real is the world his senses and his instruments — above all,
perhaps his eyes and his cameras, for he loves to say "seeing is believing"
— present him with; and he has quite recently come to believe that what he
calls science is in fact this same world, even more accurately presented —
though his good scientists know better, know merely that theirs is the most
inhuman of the real worlds. One may guess that anthropologists and pre-
historians are right, and that men in the condition we think of as primitive
culture did not habitually and certainly not systematically separate their sense
worlds and their moral worlds, did not think a sensation organized in percep-
tion any more real than — perhaps not as real as — a desire (or urge or drive
or specifically channeled moment of the life force) organized in sentiment.

477

A History oj Western Morals

But certanly from the Jews and the Greeks on, all those with whom we have
dealt in this book have been aware that the world of morals (values) is not
identical with the world of sense perception (facts, data) , that "ought" is not
the same as "is." The great theisms of the West, and in particular Christian-
ity, have taught men that ought eventually becomes is, triumphs over is,
"determines" is. Toward that lesson Westerners have long had ambivalent
sentiments, but very few have asserted that the ought means nothing at all,
that the world of morals does not exist, is not real. Many of the Enlightened
thought they had reversed, and corrected, the Christian lesson, and taught
that the world of sense perception in its fullness as revealed to science
(Reason) is the only real world, and is identical with the world of morals.
I have urged that the Enlightened did not by any means make the two worlds
identical, that their world of morals was still a set of oughts, and of oughts
not very different from the Christian oughts.

But the Christian had long since reconciled himself to the continued
existence of the gap between ought and is; the Enlightened have, even though
they are no longer quite in the hopeful state of mind of 1789, continued to
insist that it is in accord with the nature of the universe that the is should
slowly but inevitably — this is the doctrine of Progress — catch up with the
ought, determine the ought, be the ought. Time will then, in the logic of the
doctrine of Progress, ultimately cease to be the master contradiction it is for
men, and past, present, and future will be one; we shall know what we want
and want what we know.

But there are signs that even the more ardently faithful of the Enlighten-
ment are learning the lessons the Greeks themselves finally learned, though
at an unhappy cost: "man is the measure of all things" does not mean "man
is the master of all things," not even potentially, not even if sufficiently
Enlightened. Our morals are the best and truest measure of ourselves, but
they are not a measure of the universe; not even our science is quite that, as
yet. Mastery of the universe would seem, so far, somewhat beyond us all, sci-
entists, moralists, soldiers, statesmen, priests. Yet I should not care to close
this book with anything like a whimper, or even a complaint. Mr. Archibald
MacLeish has just rewritten in a modern setting the Book of Job, man help-
less but invincible, chastened but never abject. We all are still that man, and
still also, perhaps even more, the man of the famous chorus of the Antigone,
strong, confident, cunning, marvelous to ourselves, but always vulnerable in
pride, always less than something not ourselves, TroXXa ra Sen/a K<w8ev

478

Conclusion: In Which Nothing Is Concluded

What a thing is man! Among all wonders
The wonder of the world is man himself.
He scuds the angry pallor of the seas
Upon the blast and chariot of the storm,
Cutting a pathway through the drowned waste.
He stirs and wears the unweariable Earth —
The eldest of his gods — with shuttling ploughs
And teams that toil and turn from year to year.

Man the Contriver! Man the master-mind
That with his casting-nets
Of woven cunning snares the light-wit birds;
And savage brutes; and sea-swarms of the deep;
Yea, every wary beast that roams the hills
Hath he subdued through excellence of wit.
Beneath his eye the horse accepts the yoke
And the mad mountain bullock seeks his stall.

Man the Householder, the Resourceful,
Safe from the drench of the arrowy rain
And the chill of the frozen sky; —
The Inventor of speech and soaring thought,
A match for all things, competent, victorious —
Against Death only shall he call for aid,
And call in vain.

Yea, wondrous is man's Sagacity:
Through this he climbeth on high,
Through this also he f alleth.
In the confidence of his power he stumbleth;
In the stubbornness of his will he goeth down.

While he honoreth the laws of the land

And that Justice which he hath sworn to maintain,

Proudly stands his city.

But when rash counsels have mastered him, he dwells
with perversity:

Such a man hath no city.18

is Sophocles, Antigone, lines 332-375, trans, by John Jay Chapman, Boston, Houghton
Mifflm, 1930, pp. 18-19. Even as late as the time of Sophocles, the word that has to be
translated "wonder" had some overtones of its earlier meaning — fear.

479

Suggested Readings

A BOOK of this sort does not need a systematic bibliography. I have tried to give in
footnotes such indication of my sources as will enable the interested reader to
pursue further specific topics or problems as they strike his interest. I realize, how-
ever, in spite of my good anti-intellectualist conviction that most of my readers
will have the necessary unshakable convictions as to right and wrong
before they open this book, that in our day there are many, many persons sin-
cerely on the side of the angels who would like to know a little more about how
both angels and demons got to be what they are — shall 1 say, how they have pro-
gressed? The following is, therefore, a brief set of suggestions for the seeker for
a way, insofar as the historical record can perhaps light that way. It should be
noted that the categories below are by no means mutually exclusive; many books
and authors cited under one head might well also be cited under another.

I • HISTORY

One can hardly hope to get light from a history of morals without some knowledge
of history in the conventional and all-inclusive sense of the word. For those — not
few in the United States — who have little or no history beyond the amorphous
"social studies'" of our school cuniculums, I suggest the following, chosen to
give a Christian as well as an Enlightened view: H. G. Wells, An Outline of His-
tory, many editions, brief, readable, in all its later editions, thanks to corrections
from many readers, accurate enough as to simple facts, and very, very Enlight-
ened; Christopher H. Dawson, The Making of Europe (New York, Sheed and
Ward, 1934), a study of the essential medieval background by a gifted Catholic
writer; Will Durant, The Story of Civilization (New York, Simon and Schuster,
1935-1957), which has in the sixth volume reached the Reformation, and will be
completed with a volume on the Age of Reason, a longer, detailed history, world-
wide in scope, Enlightened indeed, but carefully done from good secondary
sources; Edward Eyre, ed., European Civilization: Its Origin and Development
(New York, Oxford University Press, 1934-1939), a seven-volume collaborative
work, most uneven, erratic, but the most detailed work I know written from a
conservative Christian point of view. Of orthodox professional academic histori-
cal works, which are supposedly without a point of view, or at least without bias,
but which in the modern West lean mostly to Enlightenment, the many-volumed
Cambridge series — Cambridge Ancient History, Cambridge Medieval History,
New Cambridge Modern History (in progress), Cambridge History of the British
Empire (in progress) , Cambridge Economic History of Europe from the Decline
of the Roman Empire (in progress), Cambridge History of British Foreign
Policy, 1783-2919, Cambridge History of India (in progress), Cambridge His-
tory of Poland — comprises an enormous and generally reliable encyclopedia of
history. Most American college textbooks in European, Western, or world his-
tory are at least competent, and accurate as to facts, but they are rarely designed
to hold the attention of the general reader; they are nowadays usually well illus-
trated. For a reader with access to a great library, I recommend the original

481

A History of Western Morals

Propylden Weltgeschichte, Walter Goetz, ed., 10 vols. (Berlin: Propylaen-Verlag,
1929-1933), even if he has no German, for the admirably reproduced illustrations
are hi themselves a fine course in history. D. C. SomervelTs two-volume abridg-
ment of Arnold Toynbee's Study of History (New York, Oxford University Press,
1947-1957) and J. J. Mulloy's collection of Christopher Dawson's work on
general history entitled The Dynamics of World History (New York, Sheed and
Ward, 1957) will give the reader a start on the modern attempt to construct, or
buttress, with the help of history a world view or philosophy. Isaiah Berlin's brief
but difficult Historical Inevitability (New York, Oxford Press, 1955) will take him
into the midst of the great debate over "historicism."

II • ETHICS

This is one of the classical subdivisions of formal philosophy, and there are many
introductory manuals, such as W. K. Wright, General Introduction to Ethics
(New York, Macmillan, 1929); Woodbridge Riley, Men and Morals (New York,
Doubleday, 1929); R. A. Tsanoff, The Moral Ideals of Our Civilization (New
York, Button, 1942); P. A. Kropotkin, Ethics, Origin and Development, trans,
by Friedland and Piroshnikoff (New York, Dial Press, 1924) ; H. L. Mencken,
Treatise on Right and Wrong (New York, Knopf, 1934), both these latter quite
idiosyncratic, Kropotkin at the end of his life a slightly disillusioned Enlightened
philosophical anarchist, Mencken a never disillusioned, or always illusioned, sar-
donic observer of the foolishness of men. Political philosophy is so close to ethical
philosophy that it cannot be neglected. Here there is a splendid introduction,
George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, rev. ed. (New York, Holt,
1955).

But the essential is to read the philosophers themselves. There are a number
of "selections" designed primarily for use hi American college courses hi ethics,
but usually giving good long excerpts, and useful for the general reader, such as
Benjamin Rand, The Classical Moralists — from Socrates to Martmeau (Boston,
Houghton Mifflin, 1909), and G. H, Clark and T. V. Smith, Readings in Ethics
(New York, Crofts, 1931). Any selection is, of course, in part arbitrary, but the
following seems to me a good minimum sampling of the range of ethical philos-
ophy hi the West in space and time: Plato, The Republic, The Apology; Aristotle,
Nichomachean Ethics; Lucretius, De Rerum Natura — if you have any Latin, try
the Loeb Classical Library edition, which has Latin on one page and a good
English prose translation by W. H. D. Rouse on the opposite page; if not, there is
William Ellery Leonard's labor of love, a "metrical translation" (New York,
Dutton, 1916); Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations; St. Augustine, City of
God, especially Book XII; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae — here all but
the most assiduous reader will probably have recourse to anthologies and selec-
tions, such as those of Rand and Clark and Smith noted above; probably the key
sections, especially for those interested in the present revival of Thomism, are
the passages on natural law, first part of the second part, Question XC ff.; Machi-
avelli, The Prince, (perhaps a satire — see Garrett Mattingly in the American
Scholar, XXVII, Autumn 1958, pp. 482-490); Discourses on Livy (by no means,
a satire) ; Spinoza, Ethics Mathematically Demonstrated; Shaftesbury, An Enquiry
Concerning Virtue or Merit; Mandeville, Fable of the Bees; Hume, An Enquiry
Concerning the Principles of Morals; Helvetius, De I Esprit, or Essays on the

482

Suggested Readings

Mind; Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Im-
manuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morality, What Is
Enlightenment?; Robert Owen, New View of Morality; Herbert Spencer, Princi-
ples of Ethics; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Genealogy of Morals,
Antichrist; Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics; T. H. Green, Prolegomena
to Ethics; G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica; John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty;
and for an up-to-date rationalist, Kurt Baier, The Moral Point of View (Ithaca,
Cornell University Press, 1958). Many of these books can be read browsingly, as
interest dictates. Most of them can be got in inexpensive editions, often in paper-
backs.

Ill • HISTORIES OF MORALS

The classic is, of course, W. E. H. Lecky, History of European Morals from Au-
gustus to Charlemagne (1869), now available in a modern reprint (New York,
Braziller, 1955). This is a remarkable work, erudite, readable, inspired by deep
moral fervor, distrustful of ordinary human nature, convinced of the inadequacy
of "theological systems," but not quite serene about Enlightenment. Lecky's His-
tory of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe is also a
history of morals, and covers a later period not dealt with in the above. It also is
available in a new edition (New York, Braziller, 1955). J. M. Robertson, A Short
History of Morals (London, Watts, 1920), is rather a history of Western ideas
about ethics than a history of morals; it is strongly anti-Christian. There are two
well-known studies written from the combined point of view of nineteenth-century
sociology and anthropology, both much influenced by nineteenth-century evolu-
tionary concepts: L. T. Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (London, Chapman and
Hall, 1906; new ed. rev., New York, Holt, 1915), and Edward Westermarck, The
Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (New York, Macmillan, 1906-1917).
The Westermarck study in particular is a mine of concrete detail. Harold Nicol-
son, Good Behavior; being a study of certain types of civility (New York, Double-
day, 1955), comes close to being a history of morals, admirably brief but cover-
ing a good range of Western history.

IV • MORALISTES

I must emphasize that this is a French word, by no means exactly equivalent to
our "moralists," who are always exhorters rather than reporters. The line between
those I call ethical philosophers above and those I call here moralistes is by no
means rigid. But I make this category for writers who seem to me to be con-
cerned at least as much with observing human behavior as in trying to correct it.
Many of the following writers are deliberately hard-boiled; but I do not wish to
be understood as claiming that all under the category "ethics" (II above) are
simple-minded, soft-boiled idealists, and all under this category are tough-minded,
even cynical, realists. After all, I have listed Machiavelli, Mandeville, and Nie-
tzsche under "ethics" above, and not simply because they might be tagged as "in-
verted idealists." The wise reader will sample both categories. Here is a small and
rather arbitrary sample, but one that will lead the reader on into wider circles: the
books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament; Aristophanes, The
Clouds and Lysistrata especially, but any of the plays have touches of the man

483

A History of Western Morals

watcher; Thucydides, the whole Peloponnesian War, but especially the Funeral
Oration, the Corcyrean Terror, the Melian Dialogue (in the Modem Library,
John H. Finley, Jr., ed., pp. 102-109, 184-192, 330-337); Theophrastus, The
Characters, a most influential little book, first of a genre of great interest to the
moralist, the literary vignette not of a specific person, but of a generalized person-
ality— the coward, the surly man, et cetera; Theocritus, if only for Idyll XV, the
women at the festival of Adonis, another ''first" — the first New Yorker sketch;
Polybius, History, especially Book VI, on the reasons — political and moral — for
Roman success; Petronius, The Satyricon, a prose satirical novel, a fine source for
the historian of morals, as is also Apuleius, The Golden Ass (all the above works
in Greek or Latin are easily available in English translations) ; Chaucer, Canter-
bury Tales, all of them, in a modern English version if you like, since you are
reading as a moraliste, not as a student of the arts; Bacon, Novum Organum, es-
pecially Book I, and the Essays; La Rochefoucauld, the Maximes, in French if
possible, but there are several adequate translations; La Bruyere, Caracteres, ou les
moeurs de ce siecle; Vauvenargues, Reflections and Maxims, trans, by F. G.
Stevens (London, H. Milford, 1940) — there are several "oeuvres choisis" in
French; Chamfort, Maximes et Pensees, preferably hi the edition of Pierre Gros-
claude, Bibliotheque des editions Richelieu (Paris, 1953); Franklin, Poor Rich-
ard's Almanac and the Autobiography; Burke, Reflections on the French Revolu-
tion, and J. de Maistre, Soirees de St. Petersbourg, neither quite in line with most
of this category, but the best way to get at the conservative Christian response to
the Enlightenment; Newman, Apologia pro vita suat a realistic appraisal of a
Christian idealism; Nietzsche, the earlier aphoristic writings, such as The Joyful
Wisdom and Human, All too Human; Bagehot, Physics and Politics, and almost
anything he wrote — he is one of the few observers among English nineteenth-
century liberals — if he -was a liberal; W. Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (New
York, Macmillan, 1929), which should perhaps be listed above under ethical
writings, but is a necessary book to the understanding of his generation in the
United States; Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (New York, Harper, 1951), a
remarkable book, aphoristic in form, but actually a closely knit study of several
kinds of fanatics; Aldous Huxley, a complainer and an exhorter, but a magnificent
observer of intellectuals. He has written a great deal. There is a selection of his
writings, The World of Aldous Huxley (New York, Harper, 1947). His essays
are more useful for us than his novels; see especially "Variations on a Philoso-
pher," in Themes and Variations (New York, Harper, 1950) and "Ozymandias"
and appendix in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (New York, Harper,
1956).

V • LITERATURE

Aldous Huxley brings us inevitably to "literature" hi the broad and vulgar sense
of the word. Literature is surely still our best way of experiencing the past; and
it is by no means the worst way of experiencing the present. It gives a range in
social and geographic variations of the eternal human that no amount of time
and money could permit hi the way of direct personal experience, formally social-
scientific or inf ormally observing, mixing, hand-shaking, counseling. I should not
be heretical enough to suggest that reading is as good as living, or that the library
is an adequate substitute for that noble range, field work. But if you know what
you are looking for, the library is a fine place to find it.

484

Suggested Readings

I should not dare make a sampling of world literature for the historian of
morals. Almost anything that has survived can be grist to this mill. But the searcher
should do his best to sort out in what he reads the work of the observer, the man
watcher, the reporter, from the work of the moralist, the poet, the improver, the
complainer. The two kinds of thinking and feeling are always present in the work
of those who made our literary heritage, and no doubt one can even conceive a
measure of their mixture, a scale from near zero to near one hundred. Very near
zero for moralizing, poetizing, improving, or complaining, or near one hundred
for observing, recording, would be the best of the case histories recorded under
the name of Hippocrates, say the fourteen cases in Epidemics, in Volume I of the
Loeb Classical Library edition, pp. 187-211. At the opposite end of the scale,
choice would be freer, more difficult, more disputable. I suggest Kant's Meta-
physics of Morality, but I am, of course, prejudiced. It is at least an interesting if
impious exercise to rate a work of a Shakespeare, a Carlyle, a Balzac, a Tolstoy
on one's private scale of such sort.

This is fanciful and a bit pretentious. You can learn a lot about human nature
from literature, any literature, great or obscure. But watch your endocrine bal-
ance; neither euphoria nor dysphoria really helps us get nearer what we may
resignedly call "reality."

485

Index

Abelard, 190, 213, 381

Abortion, Russia, 405

Abraham, 52

Achilles, 24, 25, 60, 64, 68,
76,107, 118,273,274

Acton, Lord, 298n.

Acts, The, quoted, 162

Adams, Henry, 20, 186

Adams, John, 99«.

Adeimantus, 8w.

Admiration, 25-26

Aelian, 127

Aeneid (Vergil), quoted, 107-
08

Aeschylus, 76, 99, 100, 247

Aesthetics, 383, 459

"Afro-Asians," 346n.

Afterlife: Christian concepts,
245, 304-06; pre-Christian
concepts, 42-43, 59, 67,
107, 146

Agamemnon, 63-64

agape, 393

Agon, 273-74, 275; and
Darwinism, 348; defined,
27-28; Greek, 64-65, 76-84,
157, 161, 172; medieval,
181, 184, 188, 221-22, 236;
modern, 331, 360, 388-89,
398-401, 433, 436, 462-66;
nation-states, 331, 433,
436; personal, 429; Roman,
112, 114-15, 134«.; saintly,
189

Albigensian(s), 168, 186w,
194, 210, 213

Alcibiades, 76, 78w., 90

Alcoholism, 384

Aldington, R., 261 n.

Alexander the Great, 70, 71,
374

Alexander VI, 260

Alexandria, 135, 152, 155w.,
245

Alger, Horatio, 361

Allen, Ethan, 50/z.

Allen, F. L , 380*.

Also Sprach Zarathustra
(Nietzsche), 348

Amana, 367

Amateur ideal, 81

American Indians, 443

American Revolution, 313

Americans for Democratic
Action, 460

Amish, 367

Ammfanus Marcellinus, 69,

140, 153
Amusement world, disrepute,

133, see also Art, Drama
Anabasis (Xenophon), 76
Anarchists, philosophical,

300-02, 344
Anchorites, 158
Androcles, 134
Angell, Norman, 364/z.
Anglican Church, 223, 241,

285, 353

Anglo-Saxons, 176
Animal Farm (Orwell), 411
Animate, 16, 451-52

Anthony, St., 7, 155
Anticlericalism, 148/1., 205,

470
Antigone, 271, 273, 409-10,

Antigone (Sophocles), 103,
291, 409, quoted, 478-79

Anti-intellectualism, 11-12,
63-64, 193, 234, 239, 246,
298, 310, 373, 383, 397,
early Christian, 161-62,
165; see also Intellectualism

Antioch, 135, 152

Anti-Semitism, 51

Antonines, 118, 135

Aphrodite, 63, 98, 186

Apollonian, 64, 80/z., 98,
100, 103, 257, 263, 311

Apraxia, 122

Apuleius, 135-36, 153

Aquinas, Thomas, 6, 190,
193, 194-95; quoted, 194

Arabs, 378, 428

Archimedes, 275

arete, 64, 65, 81?z.

Aretino, 256

Arianism, 161, 178

Anstides, 82

Aristocracy: and birth rate,
85; Christian standards,
83; Greek, 64-65, 78, 82-83;
Middle Ages, 180-89, 422,
424, 427; natural, 281#.;
old r6gime, 280#.; prob-
able disappearance, 291-
92; Reformation, 242-43;
Renaissance, dual, 242ff.;

487

Rome, 112, 114-15, 134n.,

287; of talent, 281
Aristophanes, 78, 81, 85, 92,

95, 98, 243
Aristotle, 6, 72, 79, 81, 82,

88, 98w., 100, 117, 118,

123, 153, 156, 174, 243,

245, 271

Arminianism, 217
Arminius, 69
Arnold of Brescia, 253
Arnold, Matthew, 49, 211,

357, 414

Aron, Raymond, 29
Art, 16, 392; cave paintings,

38; contemporary, 384-85;

disrepute, 133, 227;

Egyptian, 45; Greek, 77;

humanitarian, 310-11; and

morale, 434, pornography,

385; Puritan distrust, 225,

226-27; Renaissance, 244,

245, 247

Arthurian cycle, 68, 186
Aryans, 52
Asceticism, 155, 156, 157-59,

161

Ashley, Maurice, 185/z.
Ashton, T. S., 324«.
Assezat, J., 314
Assur-Nasir-Pal, 48
Assyrians, 47
Ataraxia, 118-19, 121
Athena, 62, 63
Athens, 60, 70tf., 74/i.f 118,

245, 291, 292, 357, 392,

421,422,430-31
Atlee, Clement, 289
Aton, 41, 42, 45
Atreus, 100
Auden, W. H., 127w.
Augustine, St., 135, 165, 169,

190, 422

Augustinians, 213
Augustus, 110, 113, 118, 132,

136, 327

Aulard, F. V. A., 333
Aulus, Gellius, 134
Auschwitz, 77
Ausonius, 111, 112w., 153
Authoritarian elitists, 301^03
Authority-liberty antithesis,

302-03, 410, 411
Automobiles, 391

Index

Babbitt, Irving, 333n.
Babylonia(n), 46, 48, 50,

59, 142, 146

Bacchae (Euripides), 96-97
Bacchic rites, 110
Bacon, Sir Francis, 274, 276,

340, 434; quoted, 2
Bacon, Roger, 193
Bage, Robert, 312/z.
Bagehot, Walter, 36, 347
Ball, John, quoted, 255-56
Balzac, Honor6 de, 361
banausia, 81, 122, 222, 276
Baptists, 233, 460
Barbarians, 17, 68-69, 177-78
Bark, W. C, 181n.
Barnes, Harry Elmer, 205
Barraclough, June, 314/z.
Barth, Karl, 472
Basso, Hamilton, 432
Bastardy, 166, 204-05, 362
"Battle of the Books," 73
Baumann, CX, 10/z.
Beatitudes, 163-64, 411
BeautiM-and-good, Greek

ideal, 26, 72, 74-75, 78-80,

83, 86, 93, 96
Beccaria, Marchese de, 315,

324-25

Becker, Carl, 296n.
Beggar's Opera (Gay), 323
"Behavior/* 4-5; see also

Conduct

Behaviorism, 4-5, 306
Belgium, 221, 222
Bellona, 62
Belsen, 206, 377
Benedict of Nursia, 212
Benedict, Ruth, 463/z.
Benedictine, 199, 200
Bentham, Jeremy, 10, 213,

297, 309, 315-18, 326,

355, 419

Berkeley, Bishop, 447
Bernard of Clairvaux, 157,

190, 193, 212, 232
Bernstein, Eduard, 60
Berthold of Ratisbon,

quoted, 199-200
Belt, Henry, 446n.
Beza, Theodore, 223
Bible, 224, 238, 297, 408
Birth control, 405
Bismarck, Otto von, 287
Blazon of Gentry, The

(Feme), 282
Bliss, 295
Blue laws: defined, 229«.;

Puritan, 225, 230; Roman,

Boccaccio, Giovanni, 25,

256; quoted, 260-61
Boers, 288, 421
Bohemianism, 247, 358, 369
Bolingbroke, Lord, 319
Bolsheviks, 405, 424, 429
Bonaparte, Pauline, 113
Bonaventura, St , 190, 193
Boniface, St., 176, 190
Boniface VIII, 208

Born, Bertram de, quoted,

202
Borgia family, 240, 250,

252, 260

Bosquet, Marshal, 84
Boucher, Francois, 312, 359
Bourbon, Etienne de, quoted,

210
Bourgeoisie, 282; see also

Middle class
Bouvard et Pecuchet

(Flaubert), 394
Bowdler, Thomas, 350
Bracton, Henry de, 103
Brathwait, Richard, quoted,

225
Brave New World

(Huxley), 232
Breasted, J H,30, 38;

quoted, 40-41, 43-45
Brenan, Gerald, quoted,

25471.

Bretonne, Restif de la, 312
Breughel, Pieter, 204
Britain: national character,

337, 339; nationalism,

332-33, see also England
Broad, C. D., In.
Brook Farm, 309, 367, 477
Bruner, Jerome, 453w.
Buckle, Henry Thomas,

37/z.
Buddhism, 118-19, 175,

352, 3S2n., 396, 467
Bullen, K. E , 278n.
Bunyan, Paul, 24, 263, 323?z.
Burckhardt, Jacob C., 244,

250
Burke, Edmund, 312, 319,

359, 463-64

Burlingame, Roger, 397/z.
Burns, Robert, 225; quoted,

305

Bury, J. B., 295n
Business: attitudes to, 79,

160, 221, 273-74, 285,

360; morality, 339
Butler, Samuel, 73, 326/z.,

415?2.; quoted, 227
Byron, Lord, 321, 351, 358
Byzantium, 263

Cafe* society, 386
CaldweU, Erskine, 436/z.
Calvin, John, 157, 212-16,

219, 221, 223, 230-31,

252, 256, 303
Calvinism, 28, 159, 162-63,

170, 215-33, 236, 253-54,

263, 285, 306, 361, 404,

406; see also Protestantism,

Puritanism
Cambridge University, 178,

202, 244, 287, 352
Camus, Albert, quoted,

Candide (Voltaire), 278
Canterbury Tales (Chaucer),
20

488

Capitalism, 218tf., 235-36,

454
Carlyle, Thomas, 23, 165,

204, 223, 256, 287, 414,

442

Carter, Elizabeth, 137 n.
Carthage, 52, 109, 139,

143

Caspari, Fritz, 202?2.
Casugkone, Count

Baldassare, 247-50, 251,

252, 282

Cathan, 168, 186w
Catharine of Aragon, 277
"Catharsis," 100
Catholic (ism) See Chris-

tianity, Roman

Catholic Church
Catholic Reformation,

191, 212, 240-41, 256
Cato, 109, 158; quoted, 110
Cato the Stoic, quoted, 147
Catullus, 114
Celadus, 398
Celibacy, clerical, 167-68,

200-01, 214
Cellini, Benvenuto, 244,

247, 248, 252, 260
Celts, 34, 68, 69, 357
Cervantes, Miguel de, 285n,
Chaldeans, 47
Chambers, Clarke A., 377/z.,

4447Z.
Chanson de Roland, 65,

180, 183, 283
Chapman, George, quoted,

Charity, 162-63, 309
Charlemagne, 180, 183,

27071., 287

Charles the Bold, 257
Charles II, 2787Z., 289-90
Charles V, 251
Chartists, 309, 322
Chase, Stuart, 9
Chateaubriand, Vicomte de,

472
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 20, 25,

183, 204, 256, 356/z., 425
Cheever, John, 395?z.
Childe, V. Gordon, 264-65,

Children, morals in, 16-17,
32-33

Chivalry: Greek, 64-65;
medieval, 189 {see also
Kjiighthood)

Christ. See Jesus

Christian Scientists. 352,
459

Christianity: Caesar and
Christ, 165, 173, 273,
332, 410; "Christian
existentialism," 368n.,
Christian socialism, 368;
and Communism, 162,
357#., 375, 457-58 (see
also Marxism) ; as con-
soling faith, 150, 334-35,

Index

Christianity (Cont.)
457-58; and democracy,
375, 379, 454-55; and
the Enlightenment, 148tf.,
275#., 293#., 308#., 374-77
passim (see also En-
lightenment), ethical
standards, 25, 35, 64, 77,
147-97 passim, 290, 308#.,
339; as evangelical move-
ment, 150, 320, 324;
Greco-Roman elements,
142#.; heresies and
schisms, 150, 161, 168,
170-71, 177#, 208-10,
213#, 240, 241, 275, 374,
440; Jewish roots, 52,

142#.; minimal purf-

tanism, 170-71, 368, 374,
379, 404; moral conduct,
149#., 157-208 passim,
309, 424-25, 431-39, 456;
and nationalism, 272-73,
332, 418, 454-55, 463; and
pre-Christian world, 52,
68, 73, 142tf., 148-51,
154/z., 155tf., 436; as
revolutionary faith, 14,
150#., 197; sectarianism,
366, 367; theology and
metaphysics, 41, 59, 154-
55, 165, 168-70, 207-08,
278-79, 295, 298, 299,
304-06, 438-39, 463-66;
see also Jesus, Protes-
tantism, Roman Catholic
Church, and under speci-
fic topics

Christopher, John B., 18 In.

Cicero, 130, 136, 153, 158,
165, 388; quoted, 109, 120

Citeaux, 210, 471n.

Cities, 253; city-country
differences, 86, 131, 245,
426-27; city-states, Greek,
see Polis

Civic morality, 101-02, 172-
73, 179, 339, 428; see also
Public morality

Civil War, 434

Class struggle. See Marxism

Classical-Romantic dualism,
80-81

Classical world: modern
comparison, 138-39, see
also Greco-Roman world

Claudius, 113

Cleanliness, 425

Cleisthenes, 102

Cleon, 82, 430

Clergy: celibacy, 167-68,
200-01; medieval, 180,
198-202, 205, 214; see also
Priesthood

Clodius, 119

Cloth of Gold, 251

Clouds (Aristophanes), 98

Clough, Arthur Hugh, 352,
356

Clovis, 176, 177, 179, 250,
260, 443

Clumac reforms, 167, 194,
200-01, 446

Glutton-Brook, Arthur, 331

Cobbett, William, 235, 238

Cobden, Richard, 73

Cohen, J. J., 471rc.

Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 274

Cole,G D. H, 302?2.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor,
431*.

Colet, John, 252

Collective psychopathology,
390

Collective unconscious, 33

Colonialism, 409, 435

Columbia University, 449/z.

Committee for the Study
of Mankind, 340w.

Common man conflict over,
312-13; gap between intel-
lectuals and, 381; as
ideal of Enlightenment,
319-22 _

Communism: Christian, 162;
Marxist, see Marxism;
Spartan, 85

Competitiveness, 27, 273,
389; Homeric hero ideal,
64-65, 76-78, 81-84, and
co-operativeness, dualism,
76-77, 429-30, knightly,
181-82; laissez-faire, 343;
love replaces, under
Christianity, 163-64; and
Protestant Reformation,
235-36; in Renaissance,
247, 250; Roman, 112;
"survival of the fittest,"
342; see also Agon

Comte, Auguste, 37/z., 349,
370ii.f 421

Condillac, Etienne Bonnot
de, 306

Condorcet, Marquis de, 11,
314,322,365,373,376-77,
382, 383, 402, 421, 443,
446n., 465, 466

Conduct: ancestral or bio-
logical factors, 34-37, 68-
69; class differences, 91;
constants, 31, 91, 420;
contemporary, 384-87, 456;
cyclical theories, 91, 235-
36, 421-22; defined, 4-6;
environmental theories,
299-301; gap between
conduct and ethics, 5, 25,
338-39, 408-09, 442; in-
fluence of ethical precepts,
17, 418-19, 456; influence
of world views, 418,456;
norms, 8, 21-22; primitive,
36-37; "pure" conduct, 6;
unilinear evolution theo-
ries, 421

Confession, 43

Conflict: and co-operation,
27, 429-30, Marxist view,

489

404; see also Competitive-
Conformity, 45, 190-92, 194,

380, 382, 388-89, 396, 422
Conscience, 30-32, 38, 299,

379; defined, 6; national,

338
Conservatism: and change

polanty, 422-23; new,

280-81, 334n., 359, 422
Consociate families, 366#.
Constantino, 374
Constantinople, 245
Contractual religion, 39, 63,

106-07

Cooper, Gary, 24
Copernicus, 306
Corcyra, 77, 336
Corinth, 152, 156
Corinthians, Epistles to the,

155/z., 161-63, 190
Corneille, Pierre, 291
Coeur, Jacques, 221
Coulton, G. G., 25; quoted

199, 200, 205, 206, 209,

210

Council of Trent, 240-41
Counter Reformation, 235;

see also Catholic Reforma-
tion

Courage, Greek ideal of, 79
Court nobility, 289-90; see

also Aristocracy
Courtier (Castiglione), 247;

quoted, 248-49
Courtly love, 184-89, 248;

see also Knighthood
Cranmer, Thomas, 212
Cowley, Malcolm, 350n.
Cowper, William, quoted,

341?z.

Creation myths, 30, 47
Creative minority, 393, 430
Credit Mobilier, 365
Creon, 103, 410, 411
Crescens, 398
Crete, 87

Criminal codes, 22
Criminals, improved treat-
ment, 324-25, 326
Croesus, 79
Cromwell, Oliver, 173, 223,

274, 287, 337

Cromwell, Sir Richard, 185
Cromwell, Thomas, 185
Cruelty, 436, vicarious

436/z., see also Violence
Crusades, 161, 183, 209-10,

412, 425, 429
Cultural engineering, 38,

366, 375, 383, 404
Cultural evolution, 37
Cultural flowering, 434
Cultural generation, 350
Cultural inheritance, 17, 36
Cultural lag, 87
Cultural narcissism, 17
Cultural patterns, 263/z., 268
Culture heroes, 54, 57, 332
Cumont, Franz, 154?i.

index

Cunliffe, Marcus, 332
Cyclical theories, 138-39, 416,

421-22, 437
Cynic school, 380/z.
Cyrus, 76

da Certaldo, Paolo, 243

Dante, 107, 188, 228, 305,
326, 332

Danton, George Jacques, 332

Darwin, Charles, 149, 171,
212, 273, 275, 336, 341,
344, 345, 347-48, 352,
382ra., 4-74; see also Social
Darwinism

Darwin, Sir Charles Gallon,
347/z., 476

Datim (Florentine mer-
chant), 221

David, King, 146

da Vinci, Leonardo, 205,
247, 253

Dawn of Conscience, The
(Breasted), 30

Dawson, Christopher, 37/z ,
52n.

Day, Thomas, 320

Dead Sea scrolls, 146

Death of a Salesman
(Miller), 399

Debunking, 72-74, 235, 363,
426

Decameron (Boccaccio),
quoted, 260-61

Decatur, Stephen, 335«.

Declaration of Independence,
305, 399

Defoe, Daniel, 323/z

Deists, 148/z., 168, 297,
307/z.

Demaratus, 78/2., 102

Demeter, 95-97, cults, 73

Democracy, 303, 375 $.; and
Communism, 378; demo-
cratization, 380, 399-400,
455; English Tory, 430;
ethical ideal, 379; ethical
relativism, 380; Germany,
287; Greek, 82-83, 101-02;
and nationalism, 322, 467;
as new faith, 375, 378,
379; recent criticisms,
380$ , 454-55; relation to
Christianity and Enlighten-
ment, 454-55, and social
engineering, 440-41

Demosthenes, 99, 94

Dependent religions, 39

Descartes, Rene, 451, 472

Desegregation, school, 1, 13,
387

Determinism, 125-26, 170-71,
217, 223

Deuteronomy, 50, 54/z ;
quoted, 53

Development of Christian
Doctrine (Newman), 171

De Voto, Bernard, 361

Diagoras, 127

Dialectical materialism, 61,

67, 161,402,405,411,

429,472
Dictatorship, 302; of the

proletariat, 302, 403
Dtctionnaire Philosophique

(Voltaire), 93
Diderot, Dems, 126, 297,

300, 311, 312, 314, 462/2.
"Dignity of man," 14, 379
Dill, Samuel, 112/1., 119/2.,

135/2., 140, 159w
Dionysus, 95, 97, 103; cult,

73
Diplomacy, 433, 463; see also

International relations
Discipline, 428, 429, 437;

German, 69; Greek, 84;

imperialism, 54, parental,

387; Roman, 106, 108, 109
Divorce, 287, 386, Russia,

405

Dodds, E R., 74/i.
Dominic, St., 190
Don Juan, 90, 155
Dorians, 60, 83, 84
Douglas, Norman, 263
Drama, 289, 392; Greek, 77,

92, 409; Puritan distrust,

227-28; Roman, 133; see

also Art, Literature
Dress, and sex morality, 257
Druids, 68
Dryden, John, 19/2.
Dubos, R., 446/2.
Duff, J. D., 147/2.
Durant, Will, 181n., 257/2.;

quoted, 230-31
Duty: Christian, 160, 161,

290, Roman, 106-07, 119-

20

Ecclesiasticus, 57
Eckhart, Meister, quoted, 191
Economic gradations, 432
Economic morality, 235-36,

339

Economic progress, 415
Economics, as science, 441
Eddy, Mary Baker, 25/2., 402
Edison, Thomas A., 81/2.
Edmonds, J. M., 86«.
Education, 387, 396, 397,
399, 437, 454; Christian
view of classical, 165;
desegregation, 1, 13, 387;
European aristocrats, 287;
Middle Ages, 202, and
morals, 61/2.; progressive,
387; Renaissance, 244, 252;
Rome, 110, 137
Edwards, Jonathan, 157;

quoted, 217
Efficiency, 279
Egalitarianism, 14, 82-83,
303-06; see also Democ-
racy

Eggheads, 392$.
Ego, cult of the, 419
' is, 30,40-46
180

490

El Greco, 253

Elan, spiritual, 412

Elizabeth of Hungary, St.,
191

Ellsperman, C. L., 162/2.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 24

Engels, Fnedrich, 403

England: church affiliations
470; classes, 324/2., 393,
430-32; Enlightenment,
321; humanitarianism, 23
309, 324; Middle Ages, 1
176, 184, political morah
23, 289; in Renaissance,
235, 244, 258, 260-62, 26
392; Roman times, 121;
17th century, 230-32,
269$., 282-91, 327; Vic-
torian era, 238, 349$.; se^
also Britain

Enlightenment, 11-12, 15, 7
150$., 235, 266, 329$;
and Christianity, differ-
ences and interactions, I*
174, 175, 266, 293$.,
306$., 308$., 334, 367-68
374-75, 445; compromise,
and contradictions, 302-0
351-52, 365, 431, 433,
459-63, 472-76; conduct,
326-28, 456-57; defined,
148/2., 275; and democrat
302-04, 375, 454-55; ethic
163, 166, 171, 174-75,
293-95, 319-22, 374, 377£
383-87, 388, 396, 453;
freethmking religions,
306$.; humanitarianism,
163, 167, 308-12, 324-25,
374-75, 377$., 391; idea
of Progress, 295-96, 375,
414; intellectuals, 393-96'
and nationalism, 322, 431
454-55, 463 (see also
Nationalism) ; and Reaso
298, 375, 451$., 461-62;
as new religion, 297$ ,
306$., 379/2., 374$., 450$
and Russian church, 394,
470, 472, 473; and scienc
275, 375, 446-50, 461-62;
and Social Darwinism,
344-45, 347; survey and
critique, 450-67; view of
Nature, 375, 414, 447-49,
451-52, 454

Environmentahsm, 171, 295
301, 310-11, 347, 453

Ennius, 125

Epictetus, 118, 147; quoted
136-37

Epicureanism, 118, 122-25,
155,161,315,411

Epicurus, 22, 118, 122-23,
127,402

Equality, 14, 82-83, 380,

Erasmus, 205, 212, 244-45,

253
Erastianism, 241

Index

Eros, 94, 186

Escape from Freedom
(Fromm), 460

Eskimos, 453

Essenes, 146, 366

Esther, Book of, 49-50

Ethical culturalists, 148/z.

Ethics: approaches and
definitions, 5-12; ethical
relativism, 8, 10-11, 380,
417-18, 419; non-Western,
17; norms and constants,
416-17, 420, see also Con-
duct, Morals

Ethics Mathematically Dem-
onstrated (Spinoza), 5

"Ethology," 33

Etiquette, 282-83

Etruscans, 106

Eugenics, 346, 460-61

Eugenie, Empress, 355/z.

Euhemensm, 161

Euhemerus, 124, 127, 298

Eumaeus, 63

Euripides, 74, 88, 90, 92,
96-97, 99, 100

Evangelical movement, 320,
324

Evil, 11; environmental
theory, 171, 299-300; good
vs. evil, dualism, 168-69;
origin of, 453; reality of,
25/z.; see also Good

Evolution, moral, 91, 349,
421, 474, 475; see also
Social Darwinism

Existentialism, 123, 143, 173,
298, 368n., 383

Exodus, 50, 55w., 56

fabliaux. 25, 204, 425
"Facts," 4, 298
Faith vs. works, 41
Falke, 257/2.
Falsehood, 298-99
Family, 35-36, 89, 109, 387
Family Shakespeare, The

(Bowdler), 350-51
Farel, Guillaume, 252
Fascism, 378; see also Nazis
Fatalism, 10
Faulkner, William, 395
Faure, Elie, 46n.
Faustian(s), 80>z., 94, 98,

179, 263, 311, 414
Ferguson, C. W., 278?z.
Feme, Sir John, 282
Ferrieres, Marquis de, 286n.
Fertility cult, 38
Feudal-manorial society,

183-84, 198, 202-03
Ficino, Marsilio, 252, 253
Fideism, 44
Fisk, James, 361
Flaminius, 136
Flaubert, Gustave, 359, 394
Flood myths, 50
Flore, Joachim de, 446/z.

Florence, 83, 245, 252-53,

Folk art and tales, 5, 22,

204, 417

Ford, Henry, 24, 274
Fourier, Charles, 280, 367
Fowler, H. W. and F. G.,

Fox, Charles James, 424

France and the French-
anticlencalism, 470, 473;
aristocracy, 283-86, 289-
92, 327; Enlightenment,
309, 321, 324; ideal of
classicism, 290; intellectual
classes, 393, 395, in Middle
Ages, 176; national char-
acter, 337-38, 339; nation-
alism, 332-33; as new
state, 269-70, 271-72; and
Reformation, 240; Reign
of Terror, 132, 280#., 302,
327-28, in Renaissance,
260-63; Revolution, 23,
270, 281, 293, 302, 313,
326-28, 348, 368, 374, 393,
412,414,415,427,443,
454, 463, rise of capitalism,
221-22; social discontent,
432; Thenmdorean reac-
tion, 289, 327; World War
II, 19, 428; see also Jaco-
bins

Francis I, 251

Francis of Assisi, St., 78-79,
83, 150, 192, 193, 212,
213, 253, 358, 408

Franciscans, 192, 199

Francke, Kuno, 191 n

Frankel, Charles, 449/z.

Franklin, Benjamin, 22, 45,
213,311, 319

Franks, 176, 178, 182

Fredegonde, 177

Frederick the Great, 319

Free speech, 400

Free thought. See Freethinker

Free will, 8-10, 101, 125-26,
169-70, 299, 302

Freedman, Morris, 395n.

Freese, J. H., 124n.

Freethinker, 306#.; defined,
148«., 306; see also En-
lightenment

French, Daniel, 223

Freud, Sigmund, 6, 12, 33,
158, 453, 459; Freudianism,
318, 379, 385; pseudo-
Freudianism, 386w.

Friedlander, Ludwig, 21,
124w., 127H., 133/z., 134/z.,
137n., 147«., 257w.

Frigidity, 356/z

Froissart, Jean, 182, 291

Fromm, Ench, 228, 229, 235,
237, 265, 295, 460

Fronde, 290

Frontier tradition, 361-62,
387, 426

497

Fronto, quoted, 134
Frost, Robert, 30
Froude, J. A , 353, quoted,

236, 238

Fuchs, Eduard, 385/z.
Fugger family, 221

Gabriel, Ralph, 332n.

Galbraith,J.K,3707z.

Galileo, 274, 275, 348, 450

Gandhi, Mahatma, 378, 429*

Gay, John, 323

Geddes, Patrick, 446n.

Genesis, 50, 296, 305, 306

Geneva, 22, 223, 230, 231,
232

Geographical theories, his-
tory, 54/z.

George III, 287

German (y): ancient Ger-
manic peoples, 34, 68, 69,
177-78, 357; aristocracy,
221, 285-92 (see also Junk
ers) ; national character,
69, 337; national con-
science, 338; nationalism,
332-33; philosophy and
ethics, 5, 191-92, 418, 419;
problem of unity, 270; see
also Nazis

Gibbon, Edward, 116, 141,
149, 172, 173, 351

Gilbert, W. S., 318, 475

Gildas, St., 176

Gin Alley (Hogarth), 323

Gladiatorial games, 148, 165,
436

Gladstone, William, 178

Glaucon, 8rc.

Glover, T.R,154?z.

Gluttony, 438-39

Gnosticism, 127, 153

Gods: Greco-Roman, 61-67,
95-96, 106-07, 127; see disc
Religion

Godwin, William, 300

Goerlitz, W., 288?z.

Goethe, 312, 322, 358

Golden Ass (Apuleius),
135-36, 153

Golden Mean, 74, 79-81, 83,
117, 155, 243

Goldsmith, Oliver, 31 Iw.

Good, 295, 315-17; defined,
7; and evil, 11, 12,16,25,
42, 168-69, 380, 453

Greek ideal, see Beautiful-
and-good; natural, see
Natural goodness

Goodspeed, Edgar J., 157

Goodwin, A., 286n.

Gorce, Pierre de la, 240n.

Gothic revival, 265

Gould, Jay, 361

Gow, Alexander M., 351

Gracchi, 327

Grace, 461-62, 466

Graft, 383

Graham, Billy, 278/z.

Grant, Madison, 346/z.

Index

Gratian, 112n.

Graves, Robert, 263

Greco-Roman elements, in
Judaeo-Christian tradition,
142

Greco-Roman world: cults,
152, 1547Z.; debt to Greek
city-state, 71; insecurity
and poverty, 152-53; need
for Christianity, 151-54;
rationalism, 124-25; Roman
borrowings from Greece,
106; Romans as transmit-
ters of Greek heritage,
105; spiritual deprivation,
152-53; Stoic ideal, 117-24,
127-29; see also Greece,
Rome

Greece and the Greeks: agon,
64-65, 76-84, 157, 161, 172;
arts, 61, 77, 92, 95-101,
109, 409, and barbarians,
17, 68-69; civic morality,

82, 101-02; classes, 65, 70,
78, 86, 88-89, 99, 431;
colonies, 70-71, contrast
between Athens and
Sparta, 83#.; democracy,
63, 65, 67, 82-83, 101-02;
education, 76, 93; evalua-
tions of culture, 74, 243#.,
290; family, 88, 89, 93-94;
Great Age, 70#.; Homeric
Age, 60-67, 71; ideals, 26,
72, 74-75, 78-81, 84, 86,

93, 96, 172-73 (see also
Hubris) ; and Jews, 53-54,
567Z., 60; and law, 103;
masculinity, 61-65, mime-
sis, 95; moral code, 67,
95-104; moral level, 18, 19,
67, 78, 86-87, 95-104, mys-
tery cults, 96-97; myths,
95; and Nature, 64, polis,
70-71, 73, 83, 86-89; pov-
erty and suffering, 87-89;
religion, 61#., 73, 95-97,
301; Roman borrowings,
105-06; sex relations, 89-

94, 185; slavery, 88-89;
status of women, 89-90,
93-94; warfare, 77-78, 82,

83, 84, 87, 427; see also
Greco-Roman

Greek Way, The (Hamilton),

Green, T. H., 352
Gregory the Great, 190, 232
Gregory VII, 201
Gregory of Tours, 176-77,

178, 179, 189, 198, 199,

250, 289

Grenier, Albert, 125/2.
Greuze, Jean Baptiste, 312
Grosseteste, Robert, 193
Gruman, Gerald J., 31472.,

Guarani Indians, 366
Guerard, Albert L., 36/z., 268

Guest, Edgar A., 395
Guillaume de Lorris, 187
Guillotin, Dr , 326
Guilt, 299, 380; psychology

of, 456

Gummere, Richard M., 116/z.
Gwynn, Nell, 289n.

H-bomb, 377, 413

Hadas, Moses, 148w.

Haines, C. R., 13472.

Hal6vy, Eke, 233, 316^., 317

Hamilton, Edith, 74

Hammond, J, L. and Bar-
bara, 32472.

Hammurabi, Code of, 47

Hansa, 221, 270

Happiness, pursuit of, 294#.,
304, 312-14, 377, 378, 398,
402

Hapsburgs, 286

Hardy, Thomas, 39372.

Hare, Richard M., In.

Haraack, Adolf, 173n.

Harvard, John, 223

Harvard University, 31472.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 230

Hayek, F. A , 16672., 356n.

Hearst, William Randolph,
268

Heaven See Afterlife

Hebrews. See Jews

Hector, 64, 123

Hedonism, 123, 315, 418;
ethical standards, 386, 391,
401

Hegel, G. W. F., 10, 164,
192, 226, 352, 403, 404,
422, 423; quoted, 336n.

Heine, Heinnch, 60

Heinsius, 274

Heliopolis, 45

Hell.Se* Afterlife

Hellenism See Greece

Helots, 85, 88, 288

Helvetius, 314, 315, 316w.

Hemingway, Ernest, 395

Henderson, L J., 4w., 27572.

Henley, William Ernest, 459

Henry VIII, 185, 215, 235,
251, 277, 278?z.

Heraclitus, 22, 101

Heresies, 168, 170-71, 213#.;
Communism as, 302; mod-
ern natural science, 215ff.;
19th century, 365 ff.

Hermes, 63

Herod, 146

Herodotus, 20, 21, 46, 99;
quoted, 102-03

Hertzler, J. O., 4467Z.

Herzl, Theodor, 49

Hesiod, 52, 58, 65-66; quoted,
92-93

hetaircd, 94

Heywood, Oliver, 231;
quoted, 230

Hidalgo class, 280, 28572.,
291

Highet, Gilbert, 13072.

492

Hildebrand, 201, 212

Hindus, 17, 48, 146, 452

Hippocrates, 6, 275, 32072.

Hiroshima, 77, 206, 338, 37'
443

Hirschfeld, Gerhard, 34072.

Historical-naturalistic work
view, 298

Historical periods: dating,
70, 293, 330; lack of para
lels, 374; revolutionary, 2(

Historical process, 273-74

Histoncism, 138, 2707i., 383

History: contemporary
awareness, 383; cyclical
movements, 416; generali
zations in, 42671.; histories
sociological approach, 41
(see also Sociology),
philosophy of, 421, 422,
426, problems of interpre
tation, 264-67; slow
change, 341 n.; source ma
terials, 20, 329; "unit" of,
70; "uses of the past," 35

Hitler, Adolf, lln., 288, 33S
467

Hobbes, Thomas, 347

Hoffer, Eric, 14472.

Hofstadter, Richard, 346n.

Hogarth, William, 31272., 32

Hohenzollern(s), 69, 288

Holcroft, Thomas, 312w.

Holderlin, Friedrich, 328

Holland. See Netherlands

Hollingshead, A. B , 45572.

HoUoway, Mark, 367

Hollywood, 386, 395

Holy Rollerism, 458

Homer, 57, 60#., 158, 163,
251, 283, 399, 400, agon,
172; authorship, 60; con-
cern exclusively with ans
tocracy, 63-64, ideal of
hero, 26, 64-65; Homeric
Age, 33, 60-67, 71

Homosexuality, 93-94, 203,
372, 438

Hood, Robin, 25

Horace, 19, 12372.

Howard, Henry, Earl of Sui
rey, 13072.

Howard, Leslie, 25972.

Hoyle, Fred, 3 In.

Hubris, 62, 67, 95-96, 100-0
103, 279, 410

Hudibras (Butler), quoted,
227

Hugo, Victor, 358

Huguenots, 235

Huizinga, Johan, 112, 131,
179, 237, 254, 390, 400n ;
quoted, 201-02, 242

Human nature, 31, 128; as
constant, 420; inequalities
128-29, 461-62; normal ar
abnormal, 177; and vio-
lence, 258

Human planning, 440-41;
see also Social engineerini

"Humanists," 148«.
Humanitarianism, 308-12,

324-25, 344-45, 356, 437;

see also Social Darwinism
Humphries, Rolfe, 108n., 112
Hundred Years' War, 184,

428

Hus, Jan, 213, 256
Hutterites, 367
Huxley, Aldous, 355, 415/z.;

quoted, 323
Huxley, T. H., 232, 341,

342/z., 353, 354
Hypocrisy, 24

Ibn Khaldun, 422

Ibsen, Hennk, 100

Icarian, 367

Ideal, 23-24, 26; and real, 5,
25, 82, 151, 197, 238, 338,
395, 408-09, 442

Idealists, 42

Ideas: in conduct, 13-15;
and ideology, 353; and
material conditions, 12-13

Ikhnaton, 40-42

Iliad (Homer), 60#.

Illegitimacy. See Bastardy

Imitation of Christ (Thomas
aKempis),191

Immanentist position, 56/z.,
129-30, 301

Immortality. See Afterlife

Imperialism, 54, 412/z.

Impositionist position, 56n.,
129-30

Incest, 426

India, 48, 429/z. See also
Hindus

Individual vs. authority, Prot-
estantism, 218-19, 220

Industrial Revolution, 324

Infanticide, 18, 166

Innocent III, 157

Inquisition, 150, 210

Insanity. See Mental illness

"Instinct," 31-32

Intellectual assurances, 460-
62

Intellectualism, 11-12, 33, 63-
64, 234, 239, 246, 298; see
also Intellectuals

Intellectuals, 3, 73; alienation,
381, 392-94, 432; American
view, 75; contemporary
moral anguish, 391-96; crit-
ical attitude in all times,
392-95; defined, 392; dy-
namics of evolution, 381/z.;
morphology, 381/z.; op-
timism and pessimism, 393-
96; as priestly class, 75-76,
465; problem of moral
progress, 414-15; prophets
as first revolutionary,
144/1.; among Roman
citizenry, 137; saints as,
193; Victorian, 353, 358-
60, 369; see also Intellec-
tualism

Index

Interest, identification of,
317-18

International relations, 272,
335, 337, 433, 463; see also
Reason of state

Internationalism, 378

Invention, 422

"Invictus" (Henley), 459

Ionia, 60, 66

Ireland and the Irish, 69, 378,
417; see also Celts

Isaiah, 49, 142, 144, 145,
Book of, quoted, 144, 145

Isis, 142, 186

Islam, 150, 352, 407, 428,
472; origins, 52; jihads,
412; see also Moslems

Isocrates, 82

Isolde (the Fair), 185, 188

Isolde of the White Hands,
186

Israel, 52, 143; modern, 340;
see also Jews

Italy: aristocracy, 285/z.; re-
ligion, 470; rise of capital-
ism, 221, 222; unification
problems, 270, see also
Middle Ages, Renaissance,
Rome, etc.

Jacobins, 314, 324, 332, 393,
405, 424, 429, 458, 473

James, William, 98, 419, 436

Jansenism, 285, 323/z., 327

Japanese, 17

Jaspers, Karl, 395

Jefferson, Thomas, 14, 24,
99«., 213, 294, 303, 332,
375, 408, 443

Jehovah, 50-51, 52, 59, 143#.;
Freud's theories of origin,
33-34; see also Old Testa-
ment

Jeremiah, 142, 143, 144/z.

Jerome, St., 158, 165

Jervis, Alice De Rosen, 262/z.

Jesuits, 287, 366

Jesus, 49, 142, 355, 382w.,
408; and Paul, 149; and
Pharisees, 147, role, 172

Jews, ancient- afterlife con-
cepts, 59, 146; and Baby-
lonians, 47-48, as "Chosen
People," 51-54, 143; early,
49#., 54-58; Egyptian in-
fluences, 30; Essenes, 146;
Greek and Roman influ-
ences, 146; Greeks, con-
trast with, 53-54, 129-30;
"Jewish Iliad," 50; Judaeo-
Christian tradition, 11,
142#., 305; the Law, 143-
44; Messiah, 154; migra-
tions and assimilations,
146; moral ideal, 57-59;
moral puritanism, 53-54;
morals prior to prophets,
49-59, mystery of survival,
51-54, 142-43; nationalist
defeat and shift to mono-

493

theism, 142-45; prophets,

142, 143-44, 154; religious

and moral discipline, 11,

53-54, 56n., 60; sex rela-

tions, 54, 55, 56, sin, 43,

146; Ten Commandments,

55-56; Western cultural

roots, 54-58, 305; see also

Old Testament
Jews, modern, 60, 288, 328,

340, 471/z.; Zionism, 340
Joachim de Flore, 446n.
Job, 24, 50, 57, 67, 100, 142,

216, 218, 453, 478; quoted,

168
John, St., 154; Gospel, 154,

218
John of the Cross, St., 129,

191, 232, 253, 254
John of Leyden, 218
Johnson, Samuel, 312, 321/z.,

447
Joinvflle, Jean de, 183, 189,

291
Jones, Howard Mumford,

280?7., 294w., 350/z., 401n.
Joseph, 51

Joshua, 296, Book of, 50
Journalism, 19-20
Jove, 277; see also Jupiter,

Zeus
Jowett, Benjamin, 72/z., 89/z.,

92/z., 96n, 147/z.
Judaeo-Christian tradition,

11, 142ff., 3Q5-, see also

Christianity, Jews
Judah, 143
Judges, Book of, 50
Judith, 51
Julius II, 260
Jung, Carl G., 33
Junkers, 47, 263, 285, 287-88,

291, 292, 424
Jupiter, 52, 62, 197; see also

Jove, Zeus
"Just price," 195-96
Juvenal, 17, 19, 106/z., 121,

133, 136, 139, 289, 381
Juvenile delinquency, 386-87

kalokagathm, 26/z.

Kant, Immanuel, 6, 192, 297,

312,355,419
Kantorowicz, H., 308/z.
Kaplan, M. M., 471/z.
Katyn, 77
Kelso, Ruth, 255/z., 256/z.,

Keroualle, Louise de, Duchess
of Portsmouth, 289/z.

Keynes, John Maynard, 370

Kidd, Benjamin, 370

Kierkegaard, Soren, 173, 241,
256, 472

Kindrick, T D., 278/r.

Kings, Books of, 50, 58/z.

Kingsley, Charles, 178

Kinsey, Alfred C , 18,21,
363, 385

maex

Kipling, Rudyard, 76

Kitchener, Earl, 421

Knighthood, 180-89, 202,
284; agonistic ideal, 181,
184, 188, Christian ideal,
180; code, 181-83,203,
284; courtly love, 184-89,
248; tourneys, 184-85, 189,
244

Knowledge, as virtue, 98-99

Knox, John, 216, 219, 223

Koestler, Arthur, 10/2., 19,
153, 388, 465

Korean war, 412/z.

Kotzebue, August von, 312«.

Kropotkin, Peter, 76, 346,
475

Kroeber, A. L., 37/z., 426/2.,
434/2.

Kruger, Oom Paul, 288

Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Eric von,
380/z.

Kwakiutls, 463/2.

la Bretorme, Restif de, 312
Laconia, 84-85
Laclos, Choderlos de, 312
Lactantius, 62n.
Lafayette, Marquis de, 327
Lahontan, Baron de, 311
Laissez-faire, radical, 343,

344/2., 356
Laraartine, Alphonse de,

452/2.
La Mettrie, Julien Offray de,

306

Landes, David, 222/2.
Landor, Walter Savage,

quoted, 72

Landucci, L., quoted, 261-62
Langer, W. L., 390/2.
Language, and morals, 7, 416
Laodicaeanism, 160, 388
Laplace, Pierre Simon, Mar-
quis de, 277

Laputa, Academy of, 280
La Rochefoucauld, Francois,

5, 20-21, 26, 45, 290
LateriUe, Andre", 240/z.
Lattimore, R , 65n.
Laws (Plato), 89, 99
Lazarsfeld, Paul, 395/t.
Lazarus, 298
Lecky, W.E.H, 23/2., 137,

158, 161/2., 177, 233, 323;

quoted, 136
Legends, role in nationalism,

68
Lenin, Nikolai, 151, 332, 405,

411, 471/z.; Leninism, 302,

306, 307, 404
Leonardo da Vinci, 205, 247,

253

Lettenhove, Kervyn de, 182/z.
Lerner, Max, 380/2., 397/z.
Leveling, 380; see also Egal-

itarianism
Leviticus, 50, 56
Lewis, C. S., 57, 330/z.

Lewis, N., 110/2., 136/2.

Lewis, Sinclair, 46, 476

Liberals, 394

Libertarian democrats, 302;
see also Philosophical an-
archists

Liberty vs. authority, antith-
esis, 302-03, 410-11

Liberty and equality, ambiv-
alence, 380

Liddell, Henry G., 157

Lincoln, Abraham, lln., 24,
25, 57, 332, 334

Lindsay, A. D., 92n., 178/2.

Lipset, S M., 75/2.

Lisbon, earthquake, 278

literature: contemporary,
384-85, 395-96, contem-
porary paperbound, 43 6/2.;
Egyptian, 45; Greek, 61,
95 ff.; humanitarian, 311-12;
medieval epics, 183; por-
nography, 114, 312, 384-85;
as source for our knowl-
edge of morals, 19-20, 58,
22; see also Art, Drama

Little Rock, Arkansas, 1

Livy, 105, 108, 111/z.; quoted,
109

Locke, John, 6, 213, 275, 306

"Logical positivism," 9

London, 245, 259

Lorenz, Konrad, 33

Lorraine, 331

Louis, St., 183, 190

Louis XIV, 26, 69, 289, 290-
91, 292, 327/2., 349, 392

Louis XV, 289

Louis XVI, 287, 289, 293

Love: courtly, 184-89, 244;
Greek, 92-95; platonic,
187; replaces competitive-
ness, under Christianity,
63-64; Roman, 114, see
also Family, Marriage, Sex
morality

Low Countries, 184, 221,
231, 235, 262

Lowell, A. Lawrence, 42/2.,
219/2.

Loyola (St. Ignatius), 157,
214, 253

Lucan, quoted, 147

Luckenbffl, D. D., 48«.

Lucian (of Samosata), 125-
28, 137, 153, 246

Lucretius, 123, 125, 452, 470

Lucullus, 114, 119

Luke, St., 56/2.; quoted, 304

Luther, Martin, 48, 212, 213-
15, 228-41 passim, 252,
256, 327, 381, 432, 447

Lutheran (Church), 173, 215,
223, 229, 241, 254, 285,
288

Lycurgus, 86, 108

Lysistrata, 92, 429/2.

Lynchings, 387, 436

494

Macaulay, Thomas B., 22<

McCloy, S T., 309, 326/2.

Machiavelli, Niccolo, 53,
239«., 250, 256, 271, 28'
417, 421, 441

Machine, dilemma of man
and, 415

Mackail, J. W., 76/2., 84-8'

MacLeish, Archibald, 478

McPherson, James, 68

Macrobius, 140

Madame Bovary (Flauber
359

Magdalenians, 38

Magic, 39-41, 45, 62-63,
205-06

Mahayana, 119

Maimonides, 49

Maistre, Joseph de, 368

Man the Machine (La Me
trie), 306

Man Makes Himself
(Childe), 265

Man versus the State, The
(Spencer), 81, 344

Mamchaean heresy, 168, 2

Mannheim, Karl, 350/2.

Manning, Henry Edward,
Cardinal, 353, 354

Manuel, Frank E., 124/z.,
298/z.

Marat, Jean Paul, 310, 45'

Marcellinus. See Ammiani
Marcellinus

Marconi affair, 365

Marcus Aurelius, 111, 117
119, 122

Marguerite of Navarre, 25

Maria Theresa, 448

Marivaux, Pierre C de, 31

Markun, Leo, 350/2., 351/2
364/2.

Marquand, John P , 432

Mamage, 37, 300-01, Chn
tian, 165; contemporary
386; European aristocra
287; Russia, 405; Victoi
ian, 362

Marrou, H. L, 6ln., 93,
138/z., 162/z., 165«.

Mars, 62

Martial, 19, 133, 139, 289,
385; quoted, 130-31

Martin of Tours, St., 207

Martyrs, 42; see also Sainl

Marvin, F. S , 370/2.

Marx, Karl, 151, 275, 366

Marxism (Marxists), 148/i
175, 235, 237, 238, 282,
295, 302, 306, 307, 328,
366, 402-12; claims to d
mocracy, 375, 378; and
classless society, 403, 40
405-07, 411, 429-33, 467
compromises with natioi
state, 375; cultural en-
gineering, 404; and Dar-
winism, 348; determinisi

Index

Marxism (Marxists) (Cont.)
170, 171; dictatorship of
the proletariat, 403; future
possibilities, 407; as heirs
of Enlightenment, 394, 402-
04; idea of evil, 405, 407;
idea of Progress, 404;
ideals, 406-07; influence
on Weber thesis, 220;
moral practice, 404-06; and
nationalism, 467; pseudo-
Marxism, 12; puritanism,
405, 406; and religion, 29,
457, 468; as religion, 29,
322, 402, 407, 457, 468;
on slavery, 435; as state
religion, 322; see also
Russia

Mary, Virgin, 63, 186, 188,
201, 304, 458

Masculinity: as Greek ideal,
61, 65, Renaissance, 250

Material progress, vs. moral
progress, 374, 375, 377-78,
41 3#.; measurement, 414-
15

"Materialistic" vs. moral
factors, in history, 12-13,
54/2.

Materialism, 48, 148/7., 353,
355, 401; anti-Christian,
298; see also Dialectical
materialism

Mathematics, 46, 274

Mather, Cotton and Increase,
216, 222

Matthew (Gospel), 56«.,
59/z., 150/z., 154/t., 161/z.,
165n., 192/1., 408; quoted,
160, 164, 213, 215, 304,
408

Mattingly, Garrett, 417 n.

Maurois, Simone Andre,
356/z.

Mazzini, Guiseppe, 212

Means-end relation, 449, 468

Medea (Euripides), 90

Medici, Lorenzo de, 244, 252

Medicine, 46; see also Men-
tal illness

Melanchthon, Philip, 252

Melos, 77, 82, 421

Memoirs (Retz), 289

Menander, 133

Mencken, H. L., 53, 216,
297, 342/z., 363, 381, 420-
21; quoted, 51/t., 153-54

Menelaus, 63

Menno Simons, 233

Mennonites, 233, 238

Mental illness; alcoholism
as, 384; improved treat-
ment, 325-26, 437; inci-
dence, 211, 457

Merovingians, 176, 289

Mesopotamia, 46-48, 51

Messalina, 113, 155

Messenia, 85

Messiah, 145, 146, 154; see
also Christianity, Jesus

Metamorphoses (Ovid) , 66

Metaphysical Society (Lon-
don), 352, 355

Metaphysics, 36, 355, 447-49;
Marxism, 403; "material-
istic," 469; Platonic, 98

Metaphysics of Ethics
(Kant), 6

Methodism, 233-34, 319, 320

Meung, Jean de, 187-88

Mexican War, 336

Michelangelo, 247

Middle Ages: as "Age of
Faith," 196, 228; business
mentality, 221; clergy, 180-
81,194,198-202,241;
common moral level, 254-
55; courtly love, 184-89,
248; dating, 70; education,
202; ethical orthodoxy,
195-97; ethical relativism,
417; ethical synthesis, 197-
98, 229, 266; ethical tone,
194; feudal disintegration,
269; feudal-manorial so-
ciety, 183-84, 198, 202-03,
269; folk tales, 204; for-
mal ethics, 417; founda-
tions of capitalism, 221-
22, 236; gap between ideal
and real, 197#.; group
conflicts, 14, 431-32; im-
maturity, 177-79; insecu-
rity, 179, 206-07, 236, 237;
"just price," 195-96;
knighthood, 180-89; lim-
ited warfare, 427, 433;
masses, 14, 203-05, 236,
237, 259, 264; moral com-
parison with modern times,
266; prevalence of neu-
rosis, 211; pre-scientific
thought, 278-79; religious
unanimity, 208-10, ruling
classes, 177-88, 198, 202-
03, 208, 235, 422, 424,
427, saints, 180, 189-93,
199, sex conduct, 257;
slavery disappears, 203; as
transition era, 209, 221-22,
236, 264-66, 268-69, 432/z.;
troubadours, 183, 185; ur-
ban squalor, 258-59; vio-
lence, 14, 176#., 202, 206-
07, 258-59

Middle class: contemporary
leveling, 380/1.; in Refor-
mation, 220-21, 241; rising
standard, 18th century,
324; in U.S. South, 263

"Middle-class morality," 263,
316, 323; see also Victo-
rianism

Mignon complex, 248, 252,
263, 425

Mikado (Gilbert), 318

Military castes, 46, 47, 180#.,
427

495

Military virtues, 427-28
Mill, John Stuart, 123, 166,

168, 228, 256, 303, 308,

314, 316/z., 354, 356, 357,

409, 411, 414/z., 420
Miller, Arthur, 399
Mfller,F. J,119n.
Miller, Perry, 216/z.
Miller, Walter, 109/z.
Milton, John, 26, 223, 226,

287, 434

Mimesis, 95, 393, 430-31
Minoans, 55
Mirabeau, Octave, 424
Miracles, 298; see also

Saints, Christianity
Mitchell, J. M , 115n.
Mithraism, 142, 172
Moliere, 46
Moloch, 52
Monasticism, 158-59, 190,

199-201, 214, 424-25; early,

149; excesses, 157-78;

Greek foresights, 99; and

Puritanism, 253
Monboddo, James Burnett,

Lord, 348
Monogamy, 89-90, 386; see

also Marriage
Monotheism, 41-42, 52, 125,

142-45, 147, 168
Monroe, Marilyn, 24
Mont-Samt-Mtchel and

Chartres (Adams), 186
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem

de, 256, 469-70
Montesquieu, Charles de,

311/z., 319

Moore, Barrington, 449/i.
Moral animal, man as, 4, 16,

22
Moral awareness, 5-6, 379;

defined, 6; see also Con-

science
Moral code, contemporary,

Moral dynamics, 91
"Moral equivalent," 436
Moral evolution, 91, 264-66;

see also Moral progress
Moral factors vs. "material-

istic*1 factors, in history,

12-13, 54/z.
Moral history: constant ele-

ments, 416-17; evolution,

91, 264-66; source ma-

terials for, 18-22, 329;

see also Moral progress
Moral idealism, intransi-

gence, 408

Moral indignation, 1-3, 32
Moral laxity and strictness,

polarity, 423-24
Moral narcissism, 409
Moral pacifism, in primi-

tive man, 31
Moral and political law, con-

flict, 271

Index

Moral progress, 67, 189, 323,
413-44; and actual con-
duct, 421; city-country
polarity, 426-27; conserva-
tism and change polarity,
422-23, cyclical theories,
421-22, evolutionary
theories, 91, 264-66, 421;
improvements re: human
suffering, 436-37; lack of
quantitative measurement,
416; laxity-strictness polar-
ity, 423-25; vs. material
progress, 413, 442; per-
sonal morality, 437-38;
primitive-advanced polar-
ity, 426; public morality,
437-39, question of retro-
gression, 442, slavery, 435-
36; and social sciences,
439-41; see also Progress

Moral purposiveness, 129

Moral renewal, 143, 424-25

Moral responsibility, 379, 391

Moral style, 396-97

MoraHone, effect of Chris-
tianity and Enlightenment,
457

Moral tradition, U.S. and
Russia compared, 407-09,
411

Moral values, and science,
448-49, 450

morale, 126, 388, 390, 409,
412; and arts, 434; and
morals, 427-34, 442; see
also Public morality

moralistes, 20-21

Moralists: as complainers, 3,
20, 255-56, 380«.; and
"philosophers," 5; unreli-
ability as reporters, 20

Morality, defined, 5-7, 12

Morals- defined, 5-7, in chil-
dren, 16-17; and manners,
16; and morale, 427-34,
442; in primitives, 16-17;
private and public, 427-44;
and religion, 38-39, see also
Conduct, Ethics

More, St. Thomas, 252, 446n.

Mormons, 54n., 352, 367

Morris, William, 204, 415>z.

Moscow, 406

Moser, Justus, 68

Moses, 5, 50, 53-57, 59, 163,
253, Mosaic code, 5

Moses and Monotheism
(Freud), 33

Moslems, 39, 48, 183, 420;
see also Islam

Motivational research, 12, 14

Mountain-gods, 52

Mountain Interval (Frost),
30

Muller, Herbert J., 61n.

Mumford, Lewis, 44« , 259n.,
265

Muncie, Indiana, 401

Murphy, Gardner, 466rt.

Murray, A. T., 90rc.
Murray, Gilbert, 74, 97n.
Music, 392; see also Art,

Rituals

Mussolini, Benito, 339
Mutual Aid (Kropotkin),

475

Mycenaean Age, 60
Mystery cults, 95, 96-97
Mythology, 30, 47, 50, 68-

69, 95, 105
Mytilene, 82

Napoleon, 69, 113, 327, 433

Nation-states: agon, 464-65;
business development, 273,
as "churches," 330, 378,
379, moral differences,
337-39; possibilities for
evil, 443, rise of, 269-70,
374; technical develop-
ment, 274; ultimate moral
authority, 270-71; see also
Nationalism

National character, 319, 337-
39

National conscience, 338

Nationalism, modem West-
ern: agon, 331, 463-65;
and aristocracy, 291; at-
tacks on, 333, 335ff ; es-
sential conditions, 330-31;
immoralities, 409; morals
of, 330-39, as "natural"
to West, 340, parochialism,
409, 418; relationship to
Christianity and the En-
lightenment, 333, 418, 454-
55; religious analogies,
331#.;rise, 269, 330; role
of legends, 68, Russia, 411;
spread through world, 378;
as team spirit, 330-31; and
war, 335-36, 429, 454-55;
see also Nation-states

National Association for the
Advancement of Colored
People, 14

Natural causation, 278

Natural goodness, 277, 299-
301, 328, 375, 379

Natural law, 296; develop-
ment, 128-30; and private
property, 195; and reason,
195

"Natural religion," 307«.

Natural science, 439-40; effi-
ciency, 279; and the En-
lightenment, 275, 447; as
ideal, 360; influence on
social sciences, 347; and
morality, 274-75, 342w.;
and Progress, 279-80, and
Protestantism, 279-80; and
rationalism, 279; as a re-
ligion, 148/1 ; rise, 3, 269,
274, 275

Natural virtue vs civilized
vice, 310-12

496

Naturalism, 6, 470; vs. supe
natural, 66, 334, 447

Nature: cult of, 34; man as
part of, Enlightened view
447-54, man's ambivalenc
toward, 452-53, ripening
of concepts, Greco-Roma
world, 128-30; role of Gc
in, 276-78, "state of na-
ture," 31, see also NaturE
science, Naturalism, etc.

Nazis, 132, 328, 338, 416,
418

Necessity, 101, 119-20

Negroes, US, 387, 436; dis
crimination, 401 n , 409;
economic lag, 432; schoo
desegregation, 1, 13, 387;
slavery, 309 (see also
Slavery)

Neibuhr, Remhold, 472

"Neolithic revolution," 34

Neoplatomsm, 126, 142

Nero, 111, 119, 135

Netherlands, 192, 205, 231,
235, 263; see also Low
Countries

New Dealers, 303

New England, 230, 231, 232
426

New Harmony, 309, 477

"New Moral World"
(Owen), 293

New Testament, 146, 224;
Old Testament similarities
56n , 57, 58; social gospel
197; unworldly tone, 150;
see also Bible and under
names of individual Gos-
pels

New Yorker, 20

Newman, John Henry, Card
nal, 171

Newburyport, Mass , 401

Newton, Sir Isaac, 274, 275,
296, 306, 317, 319, 330,
341, 352, Newtonian me-
chanics, 349; Newtonian
world-machine, 330, 341

Next Million Years, The
(Darwin) , 476

Nibelungs, Song of the, 68,
276

Nicolson, Sir Harold, quote*
249-50

Nicomachean Ethics (Aris-
totle), 79, 153

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 61,
156, 157, 197, 256, 304,
316, 359, 398, 417; and
Darwinism, 348; on Greel
warrior ideal, 73; on hu-
mility, 147, 151, 163;
Mencken on, 51?z.; unreli-
ability as a reporter, 20

1984 (Orwell), 232

Nobility, 280#.; see also
Aristocracy

Norlin, George, 82

Index

Normans, 235

Norms, conduct, 21; ethics,
420

Northern virtue vs Southern
laxity (Europe), 149, 425

Notestein, W , 230/z.

Nouvelle Heloise (Rous-
seau), 188

Novels, 20, 432; see also Lit-
erature, Art

Nudity, 257; see also Sex
morality

Numbers, Book of, 50

Obrigkeit, 69

Odysseus, 63, 78, 103, 273

Odyssey (Homer), 60$., 73,
107

Oedipus, 101, 228

O'Flaherty, Terrence, 32/z.

Okinawa, 409

Old Testament, 41, 49-59,
224, 288, analysis of ele-
ments, 49-50; dating, 49-
50, ^Egyptian and Baby-
lonian influences, 30, 50;
debunking, 51, "laugh" vs.
law, 58; New Testament
similarities, 56n., 57, 58;
prophetic books, 142; tone,
57-58; see also Bible, Pen-
tateuch, an d under names
of individual books

Oldenbourg, Zoe", 182, 267

Olympian gods, 62ff., 95-96,
152; Roman borrowings,
106

Olympic games, 77-78

On Crimes and Punishments
(Beccaria), 315

On the Nature of Things
(Lucretius), 123

Oneida community, 367

Opdycke, Leonard Eckstein,
248/z.

Optimism, 383; see also Pes-
simism, Rationalism

"Organization men," 389

Origin of Species (Darwin) ,
336, 348

Original sin, 234, 463, 464,
466

Origo, Iris, 221/z., 236/z.

Ortega y Gasset, J., 350/2.,
388, 465

Orthodoxy: challenges, 19th
century, 365-66, ethical,
Middle Ages, 195-97; pa-
gan, 127; violence over,
Middle Ages, 177# , see
also Christianity

Orwell, George, 14, 19, 178,
232,295,388,407,411,
415n., 465

Osiris, 42

"Other-directed," 389

Ovid, 26, 66, 136

Owen, Robert, 280, 293, 299-
300, 367, 379, 466w.

Oxford University, 202, 234,
244, 287, 352, 415

Pacifism, Christian, 77, 160,

165, 173
Paganism, 62, 127-28, 157;

see also Gods
Pagulf, Abbot, 198
paideia, 76, 93/z.
Pain, and pleasure, 315-17
Paine, Tom, 310
Palatinate, 290
Palestine, 146; see also Israel
Panama Canal, 409; affair,

365

Pantheism, 191
Pap, Arthur, 12/z.
Paradise Lost (Milton), 26,

226

Paraguay, 366
Pareto, Vilfredo, 89, 239/z.,

287, 422, 464
Paris, 245, 253
Parkinson, C. Northcote,

9/z.; "Parkinson's Law,"

9n
Pascal, Blaise, 5, 290, 344,

452

Passive resistance, 429/z.
Pasternak, Boris, 395/z.
Pastor, Ludwig, 260
Pataria, 194
Patriotism, 82, 321, 418; see

also Nationalism
Patroclus, 64
Paton, W R., 107/z
Paul, St., 73, 142, 149, 154,

155, 156, 161, 165, 190,

226, 232; quoted, 160
Paul and Virginia (St

Pierre), 320
Paulmus, 159, 160
Pavlov, Ivan, 476
Pearson, Drew, 400
Peasantry, 203-04, 237, 286,

431, 432

Peck, Harry Thurston, 112/z
Pederasty, Greece, 93-94, 185
Pegler, Westbrook, 400
Peloponnesian War, 77, 82,

336, 430
Pen, and sword, dualism, 75-

76
Pentateuch, 3, 50, 56; see

also Bible and under names

of individual books
Pericles, 71-72, 77, 82, 99,

101, 157, 292

Permanence vs. change, 36
Persia, and Jews, 146
Persian Wars, 78/z.
Pessimism, 67, 123, 365, 373
Peter, St., 154, 473
Peter of Dreux, 208
Petrarch, 188
Petronius, 112, 115,153
Pharisaism, 146, 339, 351/z.
Philhellenism, 357
Philip Augustus, 182
Philip the Fair, 208

497

philosophes, 123, 278, 279,
315, 319-20, 323, 337, 393;
as intellectuals, 303; and
sophists, 97«., 98

Philosophical anarchists, 300-
02

Phoenicia (ns), 52, 54/z., 70

Physics and Politics (Bage-
hot), 347

Piaget, Jean, 32-33, 46, 170

Pick, Joseph, 32/z.

Pickrel, Paul, 395/z.

Pico della Mirandolo, 242

Piedmont-Lombardy, 221,
222

Pietism, 233, 234, 320, 323/1.

Pioneer, as ideal, 361-62; see
also Frontier tradition

Pity, 308

Plato, 8, 78, 83, 88-99 pas-
sim, 116, 118, 129, 142,
147, 158, 178, 208, 242-
46,253,271,281,366,381,
392, 410rc ; quoted, 92; on
Homer, 61; on war, 87,
Florentine Platomsts, 252

Plautus, 133

Pliny, 122, 134

Plotinus, 98, 127, 142

Plutarch, 84, 88, 108, 111,

Poggio Bracciolini, quoted,

246

PoincarS, Henri, 448/z.
Point of No Return (Mar-

quand), 432
Poland, 291, 378
Polemarchus, 8/z.
Polis, 70-71, 73, 86-89, 152,

271

Politian, 253
Political Justice (Godwin),

300
Political morality, 289; 18th-

century changes, 302;

19th century, 365; Refor-
mation, 235, U S., 409, see

also Nationalism, Reason

of state

Politics (Aristotle), 271
Polonius, 44, 243/z.
Polo family, 17
Polybius, 53, 105, 106, 107
Polygamy, 51
Polytheism, 40, 48, 52, 106;

see also Gods
Pompeii, 133
Pontius Pilate, 121
Poor Richard's Almanack

(Franklin), 22
Pope, Alexander, 381;

quoted, 175
Pornography, 114, 312, 384-

85

Poseidon, 63
Positivists, 148/2., 233
Post, Emily, 282
Postan, M. M , 197w.
Post-historic Man (Seiden-

berg), 476

Index

Prehistory, 17, 30-37

Presley, Elvis, 475

Priesthood: Christian, 167;
surrogate, 459, Greek war-
rior-priests, 84; intellec-
tuals, as priestly class, 465;
priestly ethics, 56; Old
Testament, 56; see also
Clergy

Primitive-advanced, polarity,
426

Primitive, cult of the, 310-11,

Primitive cultures, 16-17, 31,

57.
Primitivism, 34

Principles of Ethics (Spen-
cer), 344

Principles of Morals and
Legislation (Bentham),
316

Private morals, and public
morals, 427-34, 442

Private property, 272;
Aquinas on, 194-95, Rus-
sia, 405, Ten Command-
ments, 56

Progress, 279-80, 295tf., 375,
377; contradictions, 474;
and Darwinism, 341, 348-
49; doctrine, 295, 414, 478;
Enlightenment's substitu-
tion for supernatural fears,
414; Marxist view, 404,
415; see also Moral prog-
ress

Progressive education, 387

Prohibition (Eighteenth
Amendment), 384

Proletariat, 282, 393w., 403,
430, 431; dictatorship, 403

Prometheus, 24, 100

Propertius, 114

Prophets, Hebrew, 142, 143-
44, 154; see also Old Test-
ament

Prostitution, 94, 363-64, 438

Protagoras, 98

Protestant Ethic (Weber),

Protestantism: "active" and
"inactive," 222, 234; anti-
intellecrualism, 234, 239,
appeal to Bible, 238, and
business and capitalism,
21 8#., 236, 239; and con-
soling elements, 458, evan-
gelism, 215, 234; free will,
233; hard and soft, 232-34;
individual vs. authority,
218-19, 220; intellectual
assurances, 460-61; moral
renewal, 425; and natural
science, 239, original sin,
234; Protestant ethic, and
the working class, 220,
228-29; rationalism, 234;
Reformation, 212-41; sal-
vation, 233; see also Chris-

tianity, Puritanism, Refor-
mation, Calvinism, etc.

Provencal, 186

Proverbs, Book of, 50, 57,
58/2., 60/z.

Prudery, Victorian, 350#.

Prussia, 69, 284; see also
Junkers, Germany

Psalms, Book of, 41, 50, 57,
58

Pseudo-Freudianism, 386«.

Pseudo-Marxism, 12

Pseudomorphism, 357/z., 358

Psychoanalysis, 459

Psychology, 11-12, 17, 441;
in existentialism, 383; of
guilt and punishment, 456;
and rationalism, 371; as
science, 441; see also
Freud

Psychosomatic flls, 32

Psychotherapy, "nondirec-
tive," 459

Ptahhotep, 43-44, 46

Public morality, 388, 427-34,
438, 442; see also Civic
morality

"Pure" conduct and ethics, 6

Puritanism, 159, 202, 215#.,
263, 405; and arts, 225,
226-27, 434; blue laws,
225 ff.; Christian minimal,
170-71, 368, 374, 379, 404;
conscience, 224, 228; con-
trol of flesh, 215-16, 227-
28; Cromwell as hero, 223;
dependence on Bible, 224;
ethics and morals, 223 ff.;
freedom vs authority, con-
tradiction, 219, 231; ideal
and real, 238; "inner-
directed," 223-24, 227; in-
tellectualism, 234, 239;
Jewish moral, 51, 53-54;
monasticism, 253; moral
ideal, 223-32, 238; moral
polarities, 424; predestina-
tion, 217-18, 220, 224; and
Renaissance, 253; rise of
new, 269, role in capital-
ism, 218; Russia, 405-06;
saint vs. damned, 243; sal-
vation, 217-18, sex conduct,
226; in state churches, 223;
suppression, 229-32; theoc-
racies, 218-19, 223; theo-
logical determinism, 217-
23; theology and ethics,
contradictions, 217-19;
vices, 236; and Victorian-
ism, 216, 238, 356; in
wilder sects, 223

Pyrrhonism, 307/z.

Pythagoras, 128

Pythagoreans, 366

Quakers, 233, 238, 355, 367,

408, 458
"Quarrel of the Ancients

and Moderns," 73
Quietists, 233

498

Rabelais, Francois, 256, 405

Race experience, 56

Racine, Jean, 290, 291

Racism, 121, 346

Radicalism, 310; 18th cen-
tury, 317; 19th century,
365#.

Rank, 283-84

Raphael, 253

Ratchffe, Aegremont,
quoted, 255

Rational efficiency, 272

"Rational" thought, 32

Rationalism* attacks on
Christianity, 148; Chris-
tian miracles, 298, 18th-
century attitudes, 298 (see
also Enlightenment); and
evolution, 370; Greco-
Roman, 124-25; and nat-
ural science, 279; natural-
istic, 315 (see also Utili-
tarianism); 19th-century,
368-69; and Old Testameni
54; optimism, contem-
porary, 383; and Progress,
370, and Protestantism,
234, and psychology, 371;
rise of modern, 269, ten-
sion, 461

Rationalists: modern mad,
454; and Sophists, 97/z.,
98

Rationalizing, 11, 12

Rawlinson, George, 103/2.

Reader's Digest, 20

Real and ideal, 5, 25, 82, 151
197, 238, 338, 395, 408-09,
442

Realism, and ethical relativ-
ism, 417

Reality, 447; and science,
447-49; see also Real and
ideal

Realpolitik, 417-18

Reason, 72, 315ff.; achieve-
ments, 376-77; Age of,
293#.; contemporary
faith, 375-76; differences
in individual capacity to
receive grace of, 461-62, as
grace for Enlightened, 466
and natural law, 145; role
in conduct, 8; role in es-
tablishing ethical stand-
ards, 12; role in new En-
lightenment, 451, 466

Reason of state, 271-73, 289,
337, 418

Redlich, F. C., 455w.

Reform movements, 42;
Egypt, 42; through En-
lightenment, 318; Greek
disbelief in, 87; medieval
Christian, I99ff.; 19th-cen-
tury successes, 364; Rome,
11; see also Humanitarian-
ism, Reformation

Reformation, Catholic, 191,
212, 235, 240-41, 256

Index

Reformation, Protestant, 212-
41, Calvin, see Calvinism;
and capitalism, 218#., 235-
36; charity, 235, 236, 238;
and class struggle, 236-37;
contrast with Renaissance,
242; Counter Reformation,
235 {see also Reformation,
Catholic, above) ; distin-
guished from Renaissance,
212, economic morality,
235-36; evaluation by En-
lightenment, 235; high
church, 215; as last medi-
eval reform, 212-13;
Luther, see Lutheran
Church; medieval supports,
235; middle classes under,
220-21, 241; moral value,
23441; need for, 256-57;
political morality, 235;
psychological strain, 228-
30, Puritanism, 202 (see
also Puritanism) ; reform-
ers as aristocrats, 242-43;
revolt against Rome's
authority, 214-15; role of
reading in, 215; ruling
classes, 235-37; social
services, 238; transition to
modern times, 265, un-
planned results, 212, 219;
Weber thesis, 219-22, 236;
working classes under,
220-21, 228-29, 235-37,
241; works vs. faith, 215

Reinhold, M., 110/z., 136

Relativism, ethical, 8, 10-11,
417-18, 419; defined, 11

Religion: active, 428; agri-
cultural vs. pastoral
peoples, 52, 55-56; Chris-
tian adjustment to na-
tionalism, 332; co-existence
of Christianity and En-
lightenment, 467, 471-72;
Communism as heresy, 402
(see also Marxism, below);
continuing process of
change, 297-98, 471-72;
contractual, 39, 106-07;
democracy as a religion,
375; dependent, 39; En-
lightenment as religion,
297#., 306#., 375, 450-67;
formal religion, class dis-
tinctions in, 96; free-
thinking, 3Q6ff. (see also
Enlightenment); French
Reign of Terror, as reli-
gious persecution, 328;
future persistence, 468;
and magic, 34, 41; Marx-
ism as a religion, 61, 402;
Marxist view of, 430-31,
468; military successes,
428-29; and morals, 38-
39; nationalism as a reli-
gion, 68, 330tf.; origin and

spread, 467; relation to
total culture, 467; return
to, 382-83, and science,
341/z., 348, 468, 469; secu-
lar and surrogate, 118, see
also Christianity, Enlight-
enment, Gods, and under
names of peoples (Jews,
Greeks, Romans, etc.) and
topics (Monotheism,
Salvation, Sin, etc.)

Renaissance, 242-67; art,
244, 245, 247; anti-intellec-
tuahsm, 246, common
moral level, 254-56; cor-
ruption and immorality,
260#.; courtiers, 244,
248-50; dating, 70; dual
aristocracies, 242#.; edu-
cation, 244, 252; excesses
of luxury, 257-58; Greco-
Roman models, 83, 243$.;
humanist ethical ideals,
244-47, 251-52; insecurity,
255, 258, in Italy, 48, 150,
423, 434, knightly tourna-
ments, 244; masses in,
242-45, 251, 253, 264;
North-South differences,
253-55, 260-63; politics,
250-51; Puritanism, 253;
and Reformation, dis-
tinguished, 212, 242, re-
turn to classic ethical
ideals, 243, 245; and ro-
manticism, 258; sexual
conduct, 246, 257; social
unrest, 254-55, 262;
squalor, 259; transition to
modern times, 264-66; vio-
lence, 247, 258, 260-63;
virtu, ideal of, 244, 247-
52, 268, 276; warrior ideal,
250-51

Renan, Ernest, 256

Republic (Plato), 8, 27, 87,
99, 208, 366, 410n.;
quoted, 92

Retz, Cardinal de, 289

Revelation, Book of, 390,
465

Revivalism, medieval, 204

Rhineland, 221

Richard Coeur de Lion, 182

Richelieu, Cardinal de, 271-
74

Rieff, Philip, 448n.

Riencourt, Amaury de, 139

Riesman, David, 223, 228,
265, 380n., 465

Rituals: democracy, 379; En-
lightenment, 458-59; moral
implications, 54; national,
331-32; Protestant, 458

Robber Barons, 388, 465

Robbins, Lionel, 357/z.

Robertson, J. M., 88/2., 148,
149/i., 174; quoted, 79

Robespierre, 321, 327, 337

499

Robinson, Edwin Arlington,
268

Rockefeller, John D., 78-79,
274

Roeder, Ralph, 255«.

Rolfe, J. C, 134/z.

Roman de la Rose (Lorris
and Meung), 187

Roman Catholic Church: at-
tacks by Enlightenment,
300; banausic virtues, 276;
and capitalistic spirit, 221,
222; Catholic Reformation,
191, 212, 240-42, 256; cel-
ibacy, 167-68, 200-01 (see
also Clergy); conservative
resistance to change, 222;
and intellectual assurances,
460-61; see also Christian-
ity and under specific
topics (Monasticism, Orig-
inal sin, Saints, etc.)

Roman Empire. See Rome
and the Romans

Roman Life and Manners
under the Early Empire
(Friedlander),21, 124n.,
127?z., 133/z., 134?z., 137/z.,
147?z., 257/2.

Romans, Book of, quoted
160

Rome and the Romans: af-
terlife concepts, 107; aris-
tocratic agon, 112, 114-17,
134/z.; and barbarians, 68-
69, 178; borrowings from
Greece, 105-06; character-
istics, 105-06, 121, class
relations, 431; culture, 73,
105tf., 133, 137, 243ff. (see
also Greco-Roman world);
discipline and obedience,
53, 106, 108, 109; drama,
133; education, 110, 137;
effect of Christianity on
Empire, 148-49; Empire
as One World at top, 121-
22; ethical ideal, 107; fall,
moral factors, 73, 140-41;
family, 109, gladiatorial
games, 115, 131-35; intel-
lectuals, 137; models for
Renaissance, 243#.; moral
code, 106#.; moral levels,
109tf., 113-17, 130, 133,
140-41, 423-24; morale,
428; myths, 105; religion,
105-07, 110, 124-28; sex
conduct, 113-14, 140; slav-
ery, 120-21, 135-37, 435;
Stoic ideal, 117-24, 130;
upper-class conduct, 19,
lllff., 113, 132-33, 150;
urban masses, 131-35, 152;
violence, 115-17, 131-35;
warfare, 427, 428, 433

Romanticism: and anti-
Rationalism, 369; classical-
romantic dualism, 80-81;

Index

Romanticism (Cont.)
German, 369, in Great
Age of Greece, 74; and
humanitanamsm, 312;
rebel as ideal, 359-60; and
Renaissance, 83, 243 ff

Ronsard, Pierre de, 452w.

Roosevelt, Franklin D , 303,
332, 362

Roosevelt, Theodore, 332

Rougemont, Denis de, 10w ,
94n., 1697Z., 186/z., 188;
quoted, 373

Rousseau, Jean- Jacques, 59n ,
165, 188, 213, 297, 302,
310, 312/z., 313, 319, 378,
410

Roussy de Sales, Raoul de,
294n.

Russia, 282, 295, 306, 307,
322, 402-12; abortion,
405; Asian influences, 402,
and Christianity, 375, 402,
471, 472, 473; Commu-
nism, 402#., crusading zeal,
411-12; and the Enlighten-
ment, 445; gap between
word and deed, 408-09;
inner contradictions, 406;
intellectuals, 395; materi-
alism, 401 (see also
Dialectical materialism) ;
national character, 337-39;
nationality problems, 331,
406; puritanism, 337-38;
satellites, 307; as "West-
ern" society, 402; Yezhov
period, 132; see also
Marxism

Ruth, Babe, 24

Ruth, Book of, 50

Sabbatarianism, 56, 225
Sacraments: Christian, 165;

Greek mystery cults, 197
Sade, Marquis de, 8, 183,

312, 327/z., 362, 436n., 424;

sadism, 436
Sage, Evan T., 110/z.
Saint-Gaudens, Augustus,

Saint Joan (Shaw), quoted
291-92

St. Pierre, Bernardin de, 320

St Simon, Due de, 283, 284

Saint- Just, Louis de, 294

Saints, 40; action vs
contemplation, 189-93; as
Christian hero, 189-93; as
ideal, 25, 180; ideal and
reality, 189$.; intellectual-
ism, 193; life as agon,
189; national, 332; prob-
lem of conformity, 190-92;
rule of, 231

Salamanca, University of,
307/z.

Salem, Mass., 219

Salvation, 145, 233, 304-05,
459

Salvianus, 140

Samuel, Books of, 50

Sandford and Merton
(Day), 320

Sappho, 434

Sarton, George, 274

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 395

Satellites, Russian, 307

Saturnalia (Macrqbius), 140

Satyricon (Petronius), 153

Saul of Tarsus, 146

Saviour, 146; see also
Messiah, Jesus

Savonarola, Girolamo, 204,
236, 252-53, 337; quoted,
255

Scarlet Letter, The (Haw-
thorne), 230

Schmidt, L., S9n.

Schiaffini, Alfredo, 243n.

Schlesinger, A. M , Jr., 432

Science, 375, applied, 440-41
(see also Technology);
conflict with religion,
341n., 348, and culture,
274-75; and the En-
lightenment, 275, 277,
446-50, generalizations,
426?i.; as grace in En-
lightenment, 461-62; leap
to materialist cosmology,
277; and moral values,
275-79, 448-50, 468-69;
pursuit as moral activity,
450; and Reality, 447-49;
scientific thinking, 32, 447,
449-50; scientist as ideal,
360, and Truth, 448, un-
certainties, 461, see also
Natural Science, Social
Sciences

Scorpus, 398

Scott, Robert, 157

Scott, Sir Walter, 357

Schoolmen, 244, 245, 280,
392

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 61

Sectarianism, 366-67

Secular religion, 118

Security-consciousness, 476

Seidenberg, Roderick, 476

Self-control, 417

Self-esteem, pooled, 33 If .,
340, 463

Self-indulgence, 383-84,
402, 438

Self-made man, as ideal,
361

Semantic problems, 4-9,
12, 16

Semites, 51, 52; see also
Jews

Seneca, 119, 121, 130,
135, 136, 138/z.,243;
quoted, 116

Sermon on the Mount, 151,
153, 157, 160, 175, 192,
209, 224, 247, 316, 344,
345

500

S6vign6, Madame de, 291

"Sex appeal," 338

Sex morality: abnormalities
and deviations, 35, 114,
185,362,372,438;
Christian code, 149, 155,
156, 165-67; contemporary,
384-86, 437-38, double
standard, 286-87, 290, 355;
dress, 257; Enlighten-
ment, prudery, 166;
Greece, 90-94, 166; Jewish
code, 54, 55, 56, 166;
lack of norms or ac-
curate measures, 18, 185,
437-38, Middle Ages,
185, 200-05, 257, national
differences, 337-38; "nat-
uralism," 166, old aris-
tocracy, 286-87,290-91;
primitive attitudes, 31,
35, pseudo-Freudiamsm,
386/z , Puritanism, 167,
226; Renaissance, 246,
257; Rome, 113-14, 149;
Russia, 405-06, survivals,
35, Victorian era, 350#.,
362

Shafer, Boyd C , 330w.

Shaftesbury, Lord, 312/z.

Shakers, 367

Shakespeare, William, 147,
227, 332

Shaw, George Bernard, 76,
238, 316, 350/z.; quoted,
291-92

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 358;
quoted, 95

Shepherd, M.W, 246w.

Sheridan, Richard, 312

Sidgwick, A. and E. M ,
352/z.

Sidgwick, Henry, 352-53

Sidomus, 140, 153

Siegfried, 68

Simon, St., 280

Simeon Stylites, St., 78-79,
157

Simonides, 102; quoted,
84-85

Simony, 201

Sin, 43, 145, 438-39; as
"error," 318; freethinker's
attitude, 439; Greek
concepts, 67, 72; Jewish
concepts, 45, 59, 145-46;
original, 234, 463, 464,
466; venal and cardinal,
116-17

Skepticism, 307w.

Skinner, B. F., 38«., 299n.

Sky-gods, 52

Slavery, 421; abolition, 202,
435-36; and Christianity,
148-49; Greece, 88-89;
Middle Ages, 202; Negro,
309, 324, 421; Rome,
120-21, 135-37, 435

Slavs, 288, 358; myths, 68;
"Slavic soul," 69

Index

Smiles, Samuel, 361
Smith, Adam, 196, 357
Smith, Red, 400
Social Contract (Rousseau),

302

Social and Cultural Dy-
namics (Sorokin), 416,

433
Social Darwinism, 316, 341-

48, 356-57, 404, 458,

475-76
Social engineering, 366,

440-41
Social Evolution (Kidd),

370

Social gospel, 88, 197
Social gradations, 432
Social sciences, 18-21, 24,

36, 280, 439-41, 449;

achievements, 377, 440;

democratic uses, 441; in-
fluence of natural sciences,

347, and Progress, 440;

and Utopianism, 347/2.
Social services, 207, 238,

364
Social status, contemporary,

400-01

Socialism, 365#., 454
Society of Friends. See

Quakers
Society, moral decadence

and survival, 428
Society for the Preyention

of Cruelty to Animals, 178,

309, 452
Society for the Prevention

of Cruelty to Children,

309, 416
Socinus, 253
Sociological measurement,

416
Sociology, 33-34; of religion,

39,52
Socrates, 8, 73, 76, 81,

94-99, 125, 147, 158, 273,

392

Sodomas, 253
Solomon, 54, 146; Song

of, 55

Solon, 102, 431
Somervell, D. C, 330n.
Sophists, 97-99, 124
Sophocles, 92-93, 101, 103,

228, 271, 409, 434;

quoted, 478-79
Sorelian myth, 328, 444«.
Sorokin, Pitirim A , 35/2.,

37/2., 91, 139, 262, 265,

338, 380/z., 385/2,416,

426/2., 428, 433, 434/z.
Sources, of knowledge, re

conduct, 18-22, 329
Soul, 169-70, 306, 451?z.,

459

South Africa, 421
Soviet Union. See Russia
SpiUane, Mickey, 436/z.
Spock, Dr. Benjamin, 436/z.

Sports, 77-78, 115, 244,
400, 436

Spain, 471, Civil War, 470;
early modern, 269, 270;
hidalgo class, 280, 285/7.,
291, mystics, 191; Renais-
sance, 253-54

Sparta(n),71, 74/2, 78/z.,
83#., 99, 102, 108, 238,
411, 422

Spartacus, 14

Spartiates, 288

Spectorsky, A. C , 395/z.

Speenhamland system, poor
relief, 324

Spencer, Herbert, 37, 81,
275, 341, 344-45, 349,
364, 404/z., 415, 421,
434, 469; quoted, 73, 345

Spengler, Oswald, 52, 61,
75, 80«., 130, 138, 268,
357/z., 421, 426/2., 437,
442

Spinoza, Baruch, 5, 7, 11

Stace, W. T., 56/2., 129, 301

Stalin, Joseph, 406; Stalinism,
306

"Stasis," 431

"State of nature," 31

Stein, Baron Karl vom und
zu, 424

Stephen, Leslie, 307 n.

Sterilization, of the unfit,
460-61

Stephenson, George, 274

Stevenson, Adlai, 443-44

Stevenson, C. L., 7/7., 12/z.,
13/i.

Stoddard, Lothrop, 346/z.

Stoicism, 14, 81, 100, 115-29,
134, 141, 142, 147, 152,
155, 161, 172, 224, 273,
357, 358, 417, 465; re-
vival, 383

Strabo, quoted, 124

Strachey, Lytton, 90

Structuring, 400

Stuart kings, 289

Subjective-objective dualism,
451/7.

Sublimation, 467

Suetonius, 111, 113, 135,
289

Suicide, 120, 325

Sumner, William Graham,
341, 475-76

Supernatural: rejection by
Enlightenment, 447;
sanctions, and high ethical
standards, 456; see also
Supranaturalism

Superstition, 124, 206, 235,
296, 377

Supranaturalism, 66, 334,
368, 447

Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl
of, 130/z.

Surrogate religion, 118

Swift, Jonathan, 125, 280

Symbolic thinking, 16, 33

501

Symmachus, 134
Symonds, John Addington,

244

Syracuse, 82
Syria, 19, 121

Tacitus, 20, 69, 111, 113,
116, 140,176,276,289,

Tame, H. A., 283, 319, 363/z.

Tallentyre, S. G., 456/z.

Talleyrand, Charles Maurice
de, 267, 272

Tarn, W. W., 18

Taste, and morals, 16

Tawney, R. H., 219, 220,
222, 223, 235, 241, 265

Taylor, Harriet, 356/z.

Technology: and culture,
275; collaboration with
science, 276, 280, 440;
Enlightened dependence
on, 441; and war, 434

Television, 32

Ten Commandments, 55-56,

163, 175, 209, 224, 316
Tennyson, Lord, quoted, 84
Terence, 133
Tertulhan, 151, 159, 160,

164, 165, 172, 187
Teutonic knights, 173, 288
Thales, 66

Theaetetus (Plato), 88
Themistocles, 78/z.
Theocritan, 452
Theogony (Hesiod), 66
Theology: development of

Christian, 165; Greek,

95ff.; Marxist, 403
theoria, 98/2., 118
Theresa, St., 129, 191
Thermopylae, 84-85, 102
Thielens, Wagner, Jr., 395/2.
Thomas, D. B., 225/2.
Thomas a Becket, St , 190
Thomas a Kempis, 191
Thor, 277
Thoreau, Henry, 6n.t 58,

355
Thrasymachus, 8, 271, 380/2.,

398, 410n., 417
Thucydides, 20, 72/2., 77,

78, 82, 83, 99, 108, 260,

336, 431, 433
Tillich, Paul, 472
Timon, 126
Tinbergen, N., 33
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 414,

476

Toleration, 398, 470-71
TotaHtananism, 229, 410
Totem and Taboo (Freud),

33
Tournaments, knightly,

184-85, 189, 244
Toynbee, Arnold, 17, 37/z.,

70, 87, 138-39, 141, 265,

268, 330/z., 333, 335, 374,

375, 382, 393, 396, 409,

421, 422, 426/z., 428,

430-31, 432/z., 465, 467

Index

Tragedy, Greek, 99-101

Trajan, 145

Transcendence, 98

Trevelyan, George M., 323

Tristan, 186, 188

Tristan und Isolde (Wag-
ner), 228, 359

Trojan War, 63-64

Troubadours, 183, 185

Tyranny of Words (Chase),
9

Tyrtaeus, quoted, 86

Uniformity and variety,

ambivalence, 380
Unilinear evolution, 421
Unitarianism, 148/z., 234,

307, 353, 376, 435, 460
Urta, 48/z.
Utilitarianism, 123, 308,

314-18, 324-25, 352
Utopian communities,

366#.
Utopianism, 208, 242,

326n., 347, 446-47

Vaihinger, Hans, 444

Valentinus, 153

Vanbrugh, Sir John, quoted,
323w.

Variety and uniformity, am-
bivalence, 380

Varro, 122, 136

Vauvenargues, Marquis de,

Veblen, Thorstein, 405

Vedius Pollio, 136

Venice, 221, 327/z

Vercengetorix, 61

Vergil, 90/2 , 105; quoted,
107-08, 112

Verrall, A. W., 97n.

Verres, 388

Victoria, Queen, 356/z.

Victorian era, 349-61; con-
demnations, 350; conduct
of masses, 362, and
Darwinism, 356-57; East-
ern influences, 352, effort
to reconcile Enlighten-
ment and Christianity,
351-54; humamtananism,
356; mimesis, 431; moral
code, 355-56, 362; moral
ideals, 357-61; prudery,
350#; Puritanism, 356;
toleration, 354; working
classes, 351/2., 362

Victonanism, 35, 73, 350#.

View from Pompey's Head,
The (Basso), 432

Vigny, Alfred de, 358, 452w.

Villemain, Abel Francois,
202n.

Villon, Frangois, 247, 256

Violence, 422; contemporary,
387; Middle Ages, 14,

176#., 202, 206-07, 258-59;
and political change, 302;
in prehistory, 31; public
delight in, 131-33, re-
duction of, as moral prog-
ress, 377, 436; Renais-
sance, 247, 258, 260-63;
Rome, 115 ff.; see also
War

virtu, 242, 245, 247-52, 268,
276

Virtue, 64, 65, 81, 321,
427-28

Voltaire, Francois Marie
Arouet de, 93, 125, 126,
213, 278, 297, 303, 310,
312, 319, 335, 348, 400,
456

Vulgarization, 133, 385

Vyverberg, Henry, 297/z.

Wagner, Richard, 68, 187/z.,
228, 359

W olden (Thoreau), 58

Waldensians, 194

Walpole, Robert, 23, 365

Walsh, James Joseph, 265

Waning of the Middle Ages
(Hmzinga), 201-02, 237

War, 258, 376, 464-65;
amateur vs. professional,
41271., 427, 434, attitude
of new Enlightenment,

432, 433; contemporary
fears, 340, 413, 433;
Greece, 82, 83, 84, 87;
lack of moral equivalent,
436; as moral evil,
335-36; and nationalism,

433, 454-55; need for
military virtues, 427-28;
private, 436, and social
Darwinism, 346; and spirit-
ual elan, 412/z ; variations
in character, 77-78, 433-34;
see also Violence

Warmington, E H., 109/7.
Warrior-priest dualism, 75-76,

84

Wars of the Roses, 202
Washington, George, 24, 311,

332
Waverly Novels (Scott),

357
Weber, Max, 28, 218, 219-22,

235-36, 238, 265, 269, 356,

361, 448/z.

Webster, Daniel, 332
Weizmann, Chaim, 49
Wells, H.G, 12, 381/2.
Werther (Goethe), 312
Wesley, Charles, 234
Westermarck, Edward, 10/i.,

89/z., 120/z., 121/1., 136/1.,

161/z., 166, 356/z.
Westerns, 387

What Is Enlightenment?
(Kant), 6

Whitehead, A. N., 472

Whitman, Walt, quoted, 31:

Whitney, Thomas P., 408

Wilhelm I, 288

WiUard, Frances E , quoted
351

Will to Power, The
(Nietzsche), 5

Wilson, Colin, 395

Witchcraft, 278

Wilhson, George F., 216/i.

Wolff, Robert Lee, 181w.

Woman, cult of the, 356/z.

Women, status of, 35; Chris
tianity, 167; Greece, 85,
89-90, 93-94, Rome, 110,
124

Wordsworth, William, 177;
quoted, 328

Work, attitudes toward, 60,
81, 122, 222, 276

Works and Days (Hesiod),
58,65

World government, 378

World Is Not Enough, The
(Oldenbourg),267

World view (Weltan-
schauung), 29; and actua
ethical precepts, 418,
changes, 445; Christian
and Enlightened, co-
existence and mutual in-
terpenetration, 41 4w ;
historical-naturalistic, 298
Greco-Roman, 419;
Marxist-Leninist, 402-03;
modern, 419 (see also
Enlightenment), varying
"styles," 418-19

World War I, 332-33, 364,
433; World War II, 433

Wotan, 68

Wycliffe, John, 213, 256

Xenophon, 76, 79, 83, 93, 9<
Xerxes, 102

"Yellow journals," 329n.
Yezhov period, Russia, 132

Zeno the Stoic, 22, 81, 118,

142
Zeus, 52, 62, 92, 96, 126,

128, 197

Zimmern, Sir Alfred, 88
Zinzendorf, Count von, 234
Zionism, 340
Zoroaster, 348
Zunis, 463/z.
Zwingli, Ulrich, 212, 214,

215, 252

502