The Church and Western Morality
Not surprisingly, Western standards of morality have been decisively shaped by the Catholic Church. Many of the most important principles of the Western moral tradition derive from the distinctly Catholic idea of the sacredness of human life. The insistence on the uniqueness and value of each person, by virtue of the immortal soul, was nowhere to be found in the ancient world. Indeed, the poor, weak, or sickly were typically treated with contempt by non-Catholics and sometimes even abandoned altogether. That, as we have seen, is what made Catholic charity so significant, and something new in the Western world.
Catholics spoke out against, and eventually abolished, the practice of infanticide, which had been considered morally acceptable even in ancient Greece and Rome. Plato, for example, had said that a poor man whose sickness made him unable to work any longer should be left to die. Seneca wrote: “We drown children who at birth are weakly and abnormal.”1 Deformed male children and many healthy female children (inconvenient in patriarchal societies) were simply abandoned. As a result, the male population of the ancient Roman world outnumbered the female population by some 30 percent.2 The Church could never accept such behavior.
We see the Church’s commitment to the sacred nature of human life in the Western condemnation of suicide, a practice that had its defenders in the ancient world. Aristotle had criticized the practice of suicide, but others among the ancients, particularly the Stoics, favored suicide as an acceptable method of escaping physical pain or emotional frustration. A number of well-known Stoics themselves committed suicide. What better proof of one’s detachment from the world than control of the moment of departure?
In The City of God, Saint Augustine dismissed the elements of pagan antiquity that portrayed suicide as somehow noble:
[G]reatness of spirit is not the right term to apply to one who has killed himself because he has lacked strength to endure hardships, or another’s wrongdoing. In fact we detect weakness in a mind which cannot bear physical oppression, or the stupid opinion of the mob; we rightly ascribe greatness to a spirit that has the strength to endure a life of misery instead of running away from it, and to despise the judgment of men . . . in comparison with the pure light of a good conscience.3
The example of Christ, Augustine continued, likewise forbade such behavior. Christ could have urged suicide upon his followers in order to escape the punishments of their persecutors, but He did not. “If He did not advise this way of quitting this life,” Augustine reasoned, “although He promised to prepare eternal dwellings for them after their departure, it is clear that this course is not allowed to those who worship the one true God.”4
Saint Thomas Aquinas likewise took up the question of suicide in the treatise on justice in his Summa Theologiae. Two of his three principal arguments against suicide are based in reason, defensible apart from divine revelation, but he concludes with a rationale that finds suicide to be absolutely forbidden on specifically Catholic grounds:
[L]ife is a gift divinely given to man and subject to the power that gives life and takes it away. Therefore, one who takes his own life sins against God, much as one who kills another’s servant sins against the master whose servant it was, or as one sins who usurps judgment in a matter not in his jurisdiction. To God alone pertains the judgment of death and of life, according to Deuteronomy 32:39: “I will kill and I will make live.”5
Although perhaps not a simple thing to measure, one might well argue that the Church had particular success in instilling an aversion to suicide among the Catholic faithful. Early in the twentieth century, one scholar pointed to the sharp difference in suicide rates between the Catholic and Protestant cantons of Switzerland, as well as to the very low rate in heavily Catholic Ireland, a land of so much tragedy and misfortune.6
Likewise, it was the Church and the teachings of Christ that helped to abolish the gladiatorial contests, in which men fought each other to the death as a form of entertainment. Such trivialization of human life could not have been more at odds with the Catholic emphasis on the dignity and worth of each individual. In his Daily Life in Ancient Rome, Jerome Carcopino states flatly that “the butcheries of the arena were stopped at the command of Christian emperors.” Indeed, they had been suppressed in the western half of the empire by the late fourth century, and in the eastern half by the early fifth. W. E. H. Lecky put this development into perspective: “There is scarcely any single reform so important in the moral history of mankind as the suppression of the gladiatorial shows, a feat that must be almost exclusively ascribed to the Christian church.”7
The Church was equally critical of what eventually became the widespread practice of dueling. Those who sanctioned the practice alleged that it actually discouraged violence by institutionalizing it, developing codes of honor surrounding its proper use, and providing for witnesses. This was better than, say, ceaseless blood feuds carried out in the dead of night or with reckless disregard for human life. Since only utopians believed violence could ever be fully eradicated, it was thought better to channel it in the least socially disruptive ways. Such was the rationale for dueling.
Yet there was still something off-putting about men using swords and pistols to vindicate their honor. Not surprisingly, the Church applied sanctions against those who engaged in the practice. The Council of Trent (1545–1563), which dealt primarily with matters of Church reform and the clarification of Catholic doctrine in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, in effect expelled duelers from the Church, cutting them off from the sacraments and forbidding them Church burials. Pope Benedict XIV reaffirmed these penalties in the mid–eighteenth century, and Pope Pius IX made clear that not only the duelers themselves but also any witnesses and accomplices incurred the penalties.
Pope Leo XIII continued the Church’s opposition to the practice at a time when secular laws against dueling were being disregarded. He summed up the religious principles that had informed Catholic condemnation of dueling for centuries:
Clearly, divine law, both that which is known by the light of reason and that which is revealed in Sacred Scripture, strictly forbids anyone, outside of public cause, to kill or wound a man unless compelled to do so in self-defense. Those, moreover, who provoke a private combat or accept one when challenged, deliberately and unnecessarily intend to take a life or at least wound an adversary. Furthermore, divine law prohibits anyone from risking his life rashly, exposing himself to grave and evident danger when not constrained by duty or generous charity. In the very nature of the duel, there is plainly blind temerity and contempt for life. There can be, therefore, no obscurity or doubt in anyone’s mind that those who engage in battle privately and singly take upon themselves a double guilt, that of another’s destruction and the deliberate risk of their own lives.
The reasons given by duelers for their contests were, said the pope, ludicrously inadequate. At root they were based on a simple desire for vengeance. “It is, to be sure, the desire of revenge that impels passionate and arrogant men to seek satisfaction,” Leo wrote. “God commands all men to love each other in brotherly love and forbids them to ever violate anyone; he condemns revenge as a deadly sin and reserves to himself the right of expiation. If people could restrain their passion and submit to God, they would easily abandon the monstrous custom of dueling.”8
Another important way in which the Catholic Church has shaped Western conceptions of morality involves the tradition of just war. To be sure, the world of classical antiquity took up this issue to one degree or another, and Cicero discussed the rights and wrongs of war. But although the ancient philosophers did refer to particular wars as just or unjust, they did not erect a full-fledged theory of the just war. “Neither in Plato nor in Aristotle,” attests Ernest Fortin, “do we find anything that quite compares with, say, the famous question ‘On War’ in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae.” Thus the development of a distinct intellectual tradition in the West whereby the moral rectitude of wars is held up to scrutiny according to certain fixed principles has been the work of the Catholic Church. It is true that Cicero advanced something like a theory of the just war in his evaluation of the history of Rome’s own conflicts. Yet the Church fathers who inherited the idea from him expanded it into a tool of moral reckoning far more ambitious in scope. Fortin adds that “one has to admit that the problem of warfare has always been fraught with greater urgency for the Christian theologian than it was for any of the philosophers of classical antiquity,” particularly given “the force of the biblical teaching concerning the sacredness of life.”9
The most significant early Catholic treatment of the issue of war and the moral criteria necessary for a war to be considered just appears in the writings of Saint Augustine. In his view, a just war was “justified only by the injustice of an aggressor, and that injustice ought to be a source of grief to any good man, because it is human injustice.” Although Augustine did not expressly include the immunity of noncombatants in his conception of the just war, as did later contributors to the theory, he appears to have taken for granted that civilians should be spared the violence of a belligerent army. Thus when Augustine warned against being motivated by revenge and insisted that a just war could not be waged on the basis of mere human passion, he was insisting on a certain internal disposition in the soldier that would militate against the indiscriminate use of force.10
Saint Thomas Aquinas memorably addressed the issue as well, citing three conditions that had to be met in order for a war to claim the mantle of justice:
In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign by whose command the war is to be waged. For it is not the business of a private individual to declare war.
Secondly, a just cause is required, namely that those who are attacked, should be attacked because they deserve it on account of some fault. Wherefore Augustine says, “A just war is wont to be described as one that avenges wrongs, when a nation or state has to be punished, for refusing to make amends for the wrongs inflicted by its subjects, or to restore what it has seized unjustly.”
Thirdly, it is necessary that the belligerents should have a rightful intention, so that they intend the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil. . . . For it may happen that the war is declared by the legitimate authority, and for a just cause, and yet be rendered unlawful through a wicked intention. Hence Augustine says, “The passion for inflicting harm, the cruel thirst for vengeance, an unpacific and relentless spirit, the fever of revolt, the lust of power, and such like things, all these are rightly condemned in war.”11
This tradition continued to evolve into the later Middle Ages and into the modern period, particularly with the work of the sixteenth-century Spanish Scholastics. Father Francisco de Vitoria, who played a major role in establishing the rudiments of international law, also devoted himself to the question of the just war. In De Jure Belli, he identified three major rules of war, as explained by Catholic historians Thomas A. Massaro and Thomas A. Shannon:
First Canon: Assuming that a prince has authority to make war, he should first of all not go seeking occasions and causes of war, but should, if possible, live in peace with all men as St. Paul enjoins on us.
Second Canon: When war for a just cause has broken out it must not be waged so as to ruin the people to whom it is directed, but only so as to obtain one’s rights and the defense of one’s country and in order that from that war peace and security may in time result.
Third Canon: When victory has been won, victory should be utilized with moderation and Christian humility, and the victor ought to deem that he is sitting as judge between two states, the one which has been wronged and the one which has done the wrong, so that it will be as judge and not as accuser that he will deliver the judgment whereby the injured state can obtain satisfaction, and this, so far as possible, should involve the offending state in the least degree of calamity and misfortune, the offending individuals being chastised within lawful limits.12
Father Francisco Suárez likewise summarized the conditions for a just war:
In order that war may be justly waged, certain conditions are to be observed and these may be brought under three heads. First, it must be waged by a legitimate power. Second, its cause must be just and right. Third, just methods should be used, that is, equity in the beginning of the war and the prosecution of it and in victory. . . . The reason of the general conclusion is that although war, in itself, is not an evil, yet on account of the many ills which it brings in its train, it is to be numbered among those undertakings which are often wrongly done. And thus it needs many circumstances to make it honest.13
Nicolo Machiavelli’s book The Prince was a purely secular examination of politics.14 His view of the relationship between morality and the state, which still exerts influence over Western political thought, helps us to appreciate the significance and importance of just-war theory. In the Machiavellian scheme of things, the state could be judged by nothing and no one, and was accountable to no higher authority. No pope or moral code was permitted to stand in judgment of the state’s behavior. This was one reason that Machiavelli so disliked Catholicism; it believed that states, not just individuals, were subject to moral correction. Politics for Machiavelli became, as one writer put it, “a game, like chess, and the removal of a political pawn, though it comprised fifty thousand men, was no more disquieting than the removal from the board of an ivory piece.”15
It was precisely in order to counter that kind of thinking that the just-war tradition, and particularly the contributions of the sixteenth-century Scholastics, developed in the first place. According to the Catholic Church, no one, not even the state, was exempt from the demands of morality. In subsequent centuries just-war theory has proven an indispensable tool for proper moral reflection, and philosophers working in this tradition in our own day have drawn from these traditional principles to meet the specific challenges of the twenty-first century.
Our ancient sources inform us that sexual morality had reached a particularly degraded point at the time of the Church’s appearance in history. Widespread promiscuity, wrote the satirist Juvenal, had caused the Romans to lose the goddess Chastity. Ovid observed that sexual practices in his day had grown especially perverse, even sadistic. Similar testimonies to the state of marital fidelity and sexual immorality around the time of Christ can be found in Catullus, Martial, and Suetonius. Caesar Augustus attempted to curb this kind of immorality through the law, though law can rarely reform a people who have already succumbed to the allures of immediate gratification. By the early second century, Tacitus contended that a chaste wife was a rare phenomenon.16
The Church taught that intimate relations were to be confined to husband and wife. Even Edward Gibbon, who blamed Christianity for the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, was compelled to admit: “The dignity of marriage was restored by the Christians.” The second-century Greek physician Galen, so struck by the rectitude of Christian sexual behavior, described them as “so far advanced in self-discipline and . . . intense desire to attain moral excellence that they are in no way inferior to true philosophers.”17
Adultery, according to the Church, was not confined to a wife’s infidelity to her husband, as the ancient world so often had it, but also extended to a husband’s unfaithfulness to his wife. The Church’s influence in this area was of great historical significance, which is why Edward Westermarck, an accomplished historian of the institution of marriage, credited Christian influence with the equalization of the sin of adultery.18
These principles account in part for why women formed so much of the Christian population of the early centuries of the Church. So numerous were female Christians that the Romans used to dismiss Christianity as a religion for women. Part of the attraction that the faith held for women was that the Church sanctified marriage, elevating it to the level of a sacrament, and prohibited divorce (which really meant that men could not leave their wives with nothing to go marry another woman). Women also attained substantially more autonomy thanks to Catholicism. “Women found protection in the teachings of the Church,” writes philosopher Robert Phillips, “and were permitted to form communities of religious who would be self-governing—something unheard of in any culture of the ancient world. . . . Look at the catalogue of saints filled up with women. Where in the world were women able to run their own schools, convents, colleges, hospitals and orphanages, outside of Catholicism?”19
One aspect of ancient Greek philosophy that constituted a bridge to Catholic thought is the suggestion that there is a certain kind of life that befits a chimpanzee, and one that befits a human being. Possessed of reason, the human being is not condemned to act on mere instinct. He is capable of moral reflection, an ability that must always elude even the cleverest specimens of the animal kingdom. Should he fail to exercise this faculty, then he never lives up to his own nature. If he will not engage in intellectual activity or serious moral reckoning when it comes to his own behavior, then what is the point of his being human in the first place? If one’s guiding principle is to do whatever brings immediate pleasure, one is in a sense no different from a beast.
The Church teaches that a life truly befitting humanity requires the assistance of divine grace. Even pagan Romans perceived something of the degraded condition of man: “What a contemptible thing is man,” wrote Seneca, “if he fail to rise above the human condition!” The grace of God could help him do so. Here the Church has held out the examples of the saints, who demonstrate that lives of heroic virtue are possible when human beings let themselves decrease so that Christ may increase.
The Church teaches that a good life is not simply one in which our external actions are beyond reproach. Christ insists that it is not enough merely to refrain from murder or adultery; not only must the body not yield to such crimes, but the soul must also keep from leaning toward them. Not only should we not steal from our neighbor, but we should also not allow ourselves to indulge in envious thoughts about his possessions. Although we are certainly permitted to hate what is evil—sin, for example, or Satan himself—we are to divorce ourselves from the kind of anger and hatred that only corrode the soul. We are not only not to commit adultery, but we are also not to entertain impure thoughts, for to do so turns one of our fellow human beings into a thing, a mere object. Someone wishing to lead a good life should not want to make a fellow human being into a thing.
It has been said that to do anything well is difficult, and that living as a human being rather than as a beast is no exception. It requires moral seriousness and self-discipline. Socrates had famously said that knowledge was virtue, that to know the good was to do the good. Aristotle and St. Paul knew better, for we can all recall moments in our lives at which we knew perfectly well what the good was but did not do it, and likewise knew what was wrong but did do that. This is why Catholic spiritual directors instruct those under their charge to eat a carrot the next time we want a cupcake; not because cupcakes are evil, but because if we can get into the habit of disciplining our wills in cases in which no moral principle is at stake, then we shall be better prepared in the moment of temptation, when we are indeed faced with a choice between good and evil. And just as the more habituated we become to sin the easier further sin becomes, it is also true, as Aristotle observed, that virtuous living becomes ever easier the more we engage in it and the more it becomes a matter of habit.
These are some of the distinctive ideas that the Church has introduced into Western civilization. Today, all too many younger people have heard the Church’s teaching on human intimacy only in caricature, and given the culture within which they live, cannot begin to understand why the Church proposes it. Faithful to the mission she has fulfilled for two millennia, however, the Church still holds out a moral alternative to young people immersed in a culture that relentlessly teaches them to pursue immediate gratification. The Church recalls the great men of Christendom—like Charlemagne, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Francis of Assisi, and Saint Francis Xavier, to name a few—and holds them up as models for how true men live. Its message? Essentially this: You can aspire to be one of these men—a builder of civilization, a great genius, a servant of God and men, or a heroic missionary—or you can be a self-absorbed nobody fixated on gratifying your appetites. Our society does everything in its power to ensure that you wind up on the latter path. Be your own person. Rise above the herd, declare your independence from a culture that thinks so little of you, and proclaim that you intend to live not as a beast but as a man.