Lecture
Christianity introduced substantial innovations into the interpretation of moral life:
1) in contrast to the ancient ideal of the sage, Christianity is addressed to ordinary people, the «poor in spirit»;
2) the world religion proclaimed the equality of people before God, and developed the concept of the «neighbour»:
3) the source of morality was considered to be the voice of God in the soul of the individual (what in contemporary morality is called conscience), which allows the individual to make moral decisions independently;
4) love was proclaimed the main motive of moral behaviour (rather than reason, as ancient ethics held);
5) a holistic moral ideal was put forward - Jesus Christ, rather than merely a set of virtues, as was the case in ancient Greek ethics;
6) the new moral ideal also presupposed new virtues: faith, hope, love, as well as humility, meekness, mercy, and all-forgiveness. Thus, for the first time, the idea of humanism was formulated — a humane, compassionate attitude toward the individual human being.
In the first written document of Christianity - the "Revelation of John the Theologian" - Jesus Christ appears as the bearer of punitive justice,
a merciless avenger. The motif of vengeance appears in later works as well. Thus, the Gospel Jesus says that he brought to the earth not
peace, but a sword. Among the evils subject to unconditional destruction was wealth ("Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy
and where thieves break in and steal". - Matt. 6:19), lawlessness, violence, the exploitation of man by man, social inequality ("...you know
that the rulers of the nations lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them; but it shall not be so among you...". - Matt. 20:25), national and tribal
discord ("Here there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord is Lord of all...". - Rom. 10:12). In a word, all those social relations that
make up the flesh and blood of class society, of the "satanic" Roman empire.
The positive program of the rejected but unyielding Christians was considerably less concrete in character than their anger. To external requirements -
legal casuistry, political norms, the prescriptions of traditional religion, mores and customs - they counterposed the simple law
of the human heart. Jesus teaches "not as the scribes and Pharisees" (Matt. 7:29), but as a man who knows some hidden, profound and unconditional
truth. The famous Sermon on the Mount, which contains the moral essence of Christianity, ends with the well-known moral rule: "Therefore, in everything,
whatever you wish that men would do to you, do also to them, for this is the law and the prophets" (Matt. 7:12) [Here again is formulated the so-
called golden rule of morality, which is sometimes mistakenly considered to be biblical.
In reality it arises outside the religious tradition (as indicated above, it is already found in Thales and Hesiod), and in its
content it bears a universal, humanistic character. For more detail on the golden rule of morality, including its
interpretations in the history of ethics, see 129.].
Christian courage is very similar to the Stoic kind; Christianity leads people away from the external world into the internal one, it simply flees from
harsh reality. This flight was, of course, an expression of powerlessness in the face of the monstrous pressure of exploitation, which we shall discuss further. But not only that. At the same time, it marked out new moral horizons for society. Morality lays claim to absoluteness, to the role of the one force capable of giving human relations a harmonious,
dignified character. This was the form in which the oppressed masses expressed their right to historical judgment, their attitude to the fundamental questions of social order. The logic here is simple and convincing: if the true laws of human existence are not those complex, obscure, convoluted
formulas imposed by the Pharisees and other scribes, but rather those simple truths proclaimed by Jesus Christ, which everyone can
"read out" in his own heart, then, consequently, every individual, however insignificant, however worthless he may be from the official point of view, can and
must take upon himself responsibility for "truth" and "falsehood". From this point of view, moral absolutism, the unconditional nature of the moral criteria for evaluating
social reality, what can be called a moral worldview, for all its historically conditioned and ideologically
reinforced exaggerations, is a definite and quite important stage of social freedom.
To the alienated forms of social bonds, the first Christians counterposed love, called not merely to supplement or enrich existing mores and habits, but to replace them. Love, which sets the original bond of individuals against all possible differences between them, which compels a person to give his neighbour his last piece of bread, became the life-giving foundation of communal organization. And it was precisely in this capacity that it was elevated to a universal moral bond. It subordinates to itself all other human values - material, intellectual, and the rest. "Though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing. Love suffers long and is kind, love does not
envy, love does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it does not insist on its own way, it is not irritable, it keeps no record of wrongs, it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth;
it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails, though prophecies will pass away, tongues will cease, and
knowledge will vanish away" (1 Cor. 13, 2-11). This panegyric to love by the Apostle Paul allows us to grasp the full contradictoriness of Christian morality.
Here two points should be distinguished. First, the proclamation of love as the key moral principle. Second, the idea of the primacy
of a morality founded on love in relation to being.
The identification of morality with love was a significant step forward compared with antiquity, where morality was reduced to a set of personal
virtues. It was a more adequate rendering of the essence of the matter, conveying more precisely the fact that morality is a social bond between people. Moreover,
the reduction of morality to the immediacy of feeling, its de-intellectualization, was a movement toward broadening its social base, its democratization. If morality is love, it follows that it is immanent in man, given independently of his social status, property standing, level of education, and other socially or naturally determined traits.
At the same time, the elevation of love to the level of the determining foundation of being directed the social activity of the masses in a false direction, shifting
the resolution of all human problems onto the inner plane, onto the plane of moral self-perfection.
The military-bureaucratic state machine of the Roman Empire "equalized" representatives of various social strata and ethnic groups in
their lack of rights, thereby objectively contributing to their cohesion. The preaching of the principle of love meant the recognition of people's equality in their claims to a
dignified and happy life, to moral equality. Christianity, in the words of V. V. Sokolov, became "the religion of abstract man" (205,
13), and its morality acquired a universal human form. The idea of the equality of people, of their worldwide citizenship, was also encountered in ancient ethics.
Let us recall the sophists or the Stoics. But there it was merely one element among theoretical arguments, a kind of point of reference. In any case
this idea never acquired, in ancient ethics, a normative meaning comparable in the slightest to the demands of moderation or friendship.
Within the Christian worldview, joined to the principle of love, this idea became a leading normative guideline and acquired a form accessible
to the broad masses of the population. It is true that the idea of moral equality takes, in Christianity, an extremely abstract form; it takes no account of concrete social and ethnic differences but, on the contrary, stands opposed to them as an absolute imperative, and in this sense is devoid of efficacy. Therefore
it would be fair to say that Christianity distorts the idea of people's moral equality to the same extent that it
promotes its penetration into mass public consciousness.
The communal practice of the first Christians, whose spiritual weapon was the ethics of love, was, if not a historical paradox, then at least
a historical accident. From the standpoint of the main tendency of social development it must be recognized as a side branch. It is true that, under some
extreme circumstances, with the utter collapse of the established economic and state-political mechanisms, communal
organization may prove the only possible, and hence inevitable, form of survival, just as only the clan system once allowed
humanity to hold out under conditions of minimal provision of the means of life, in the absence of any productive guarantees of existence. But this is a separate question of social history. The first Christians were people who had lost hope of securing their existence through officially sanctioned forms of activity, and who therefore banded together into a kind of anti-society. Their activity, like their worldview, bears the stamp of despair, of hopelessness. This is expressed above all in the fact that they link their ideal to a force beyond the human - Jesus Christ. It is he, the son of god, who is to bring about the miracle of the glorious kingdom, where there will be neither poor nor rich, neither wars nor death, nor any need to labour by the sweat of one's brow, where "there shall be no more sorrow, nor crying, nor pain" (Rev. 21, 4), but only contentment, joy, eternal bliss. Christ appears as the visible embodiment of the social illusions, the chiliastic expectations, of the oppressed, largely déclassé masses. Moral laws are revealed by god, and in this lies the proof of their truth, and likewise the undoubted guarantee of their realizability. Christian morality is a religious morality, in which moral hopes culminate in faith in god. The explanation must be sought in the fact that Christianity was engendered not so much by revolutionary struggle as by the inability of the oppressed classes of the Roman Empire to organize such a struggle. The omnipotence of Christ complements and continues the powerlessness of the toilers. The essential theocentrism of Christian morality had, however, other and more substantial causes as well. Here we approach the question of the second, and principal, line of the social determination of Christianity.
If the disinherited strata of Roman society saw in the monotheistic religion an ideology of communal life, chiefly the ethics of love,
then the exploiting classes needed it as a means of consolidating their domination, although, to be sure, they did not grasp all its advantages at once. It is not our purpose here
to examine how Christianity gradually loses its oppositional character, fairly soon becoming a legal, and then the official,
religion of the state. What matters for us is to stress that this occurs simultaneously with the disintegration of the Christian communities, in the course of which
their egalitarian-democratic essence is hollowed out. They begin to be built in the image and likeness of official society, and within them there emerges
a privileged stratum of ministers of the religious cult, who hold spiritual, and in part economic, sway over the mass of believers.
In keeping with the unequal character of these relations, and to guarantee them, the Christian community is transformed into an independent institution which, in
its degree of alienation from concrete individuals, is quite comparable to the machinery of the state, and considerably surpasses it
in the cunning of its methods of subjugation. Having arisen as an alternative to the class structure of society, the Christian church only aggravated relations of exploitation and itself became
a powerful instrument of class oppression. History works thoroughly: it subordinated the sincere social fantasy of Christian morality to its own
development, a development that passed through private-property-based, class-antagonistic formations, brilliantly demonstrating in the process how it is able
to turn any good into evil. The content of the Christian religion changes in such a way that it becomes an indispensable ideology of the exploiting
classes.
Above all and decisively, in the fact that it offers such an interpretation of human existence, personality and history as allows social protest to be translated
into a plane of moral indignation, while the real struggle for social liberation is replaced by promises of justice in
the world beyond. The Christian religion allows the "steam" of social indignation to be let off, while leaving the relations of exploitation themselves untouched.
This is achieved in large measure thanks to a moralizing attitude toward reality, an utterly illegitimate expansion of the role and scope of morality. The idea of the primacy of morality over being, which, as we have noted, was conditioned by the weakness of the oppressed masses, turned out at the same time to be a stance expressing the interests of the exploiting class. It was this idea, above all, that received consolidation and justification in the Bible.
1. God created the world and is its life-giving essence.
The whole world develops out of him, and he remains its immediate governor. God is the absolute creative principle. But not only that. God is
at the same time the highest goal of the world, its innermost meaning. Everything that god creates, he creates for himself: "For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things" (Rom. 11,
36), and he alone contains within himself the cause, the norm, and the end of his own activity. All other creatures lack such autonomy; they
exist thanks to god and for god's sake. Man is no exception. "...Whether we live, we live unto the Lord; whether we die, we die unto the Lord..."
(Rom. 14, 8).
The idea of god as a moral absolute not only expresses a moralizing attitude toward reality, denoting a perfection before which
all other goals and desires appear insignificant. It is also, at the same time, the ground for a complacent optimism in the assessment of reality:
since the world is created by god, governed by him and directed toward him, it is good, profoundly harmonious in its essence, and this ultimate good foundation of being
justifies particular manifestations of evil, or at least reconciles us to them. The conception of god as the moral synthesis of the world stimulates, to a far greater degree, a conciliatory-passive, complacent attitude toward social reality than a critical one. The history of religious ideology
proves this beyond doubt.
2. Man, being one of god's creations, is at the same time a privileged being.
He is like god. This is expressed in the fact that man is created free, and the highest goal - to serve god - presents itself to him
as an obligation. It is precisely to the extent that man himself can choose god that he becomes like god as an absolute person. But this capacity
for voluntary obedience to god's commandments is only a possibility; it exists only in principle. It characterizes the essence, the destination
of man, but not his actual condition.
Man is like god, but not identical with him, for he is a sensuous, earthly, mortal being. His empirical, natural-social
existence appears as sin. The whole life of a man seeking his own earthly happiness is a sinfulness liable to condemnation.
What is said of the first man, of Adam, is a characterization of man as such. Man, according to the logic of Christianity, is destined
to serve god, but he himself wished to become like god, and in this pride, this claim to moral sovereignty, lies the source of all his misfortunes, the root
of evil as such. Man, then, in his real, empirical existence, is not what he ought to be according to his destination.
The overcoming of this discrepancy, the return to his supposedly authentic essence, constitutes the content of man's moral efforts.
The morality of Christianity is derived from the discrepancy between existence and essence.
This explanation is more accurate if one bears in mind the separation of morality from the world (with the rise of Christian monotheism this separation
and, correspondingly, the bifurcation of moral life reached precisely its most extreme form). The ancient view, which considered morality in the context of the human striving for happiness, did not attach such essential significance to the fact of the rift between accepted moral values and actual mores. Religious anthropology, with its conception of the inner fracturedness of man, expressed more profoundly the distinctive character of the moral being of individuals in a class society.
3. Can man, by the force of his own activity, realize his essential destiny?
It turns out that he cannot. The reason is that man is sinful, and hopelessly sinful. As a socio-natural being he is separated from god by an abyss he is not given to cross. Man can be saved only through god. The appearance of Jesus Christ is regarded as the expression of just such a divine intervention. The image of Christ is a testimony to the union of man with god, and at the same time an acknowledgment that such a union is possible only through god. This is an important point, for it shows that religious morality goes beyond the bounds of human possibility, proving to be a sphere of principled obligation. Christ is the visible model of morality in the Christian understanding, an embodied ideal. To follow god is to follow Christ. Just as the Fall began with Adam, so with Jesus Christ begins the regeneration, for he points the way to salvation.
What, then, does Jesus Christ teach?
4. Jesus sees the highest and only meaning of his existence in God the Father. Properly speaking, that turning point, that "miraculous" transformation, which meant
the death of the old man and the birth of the new, consisted in the full realization that man lives not for himself, but for god. "Not as I will, but as
thou wilt" (Matt. 26, 39); "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness..." (Matt. 6, 33) - such is the essence, the inner nerve, of the ideal proclaimed and actually
practiced by the evangelical Jesus. This is, in essence, the first and only commandment of his ethics. Christ calls upon his disciples to forsake
mother and father, daughters and sons, for in the heart of one who has set out on the path of renewal, of salvation, there must be room for nothing and no one but god. To the
question of which is the greatest, the most important commandment, Jesus answers: "...thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and
with all thy mind: this is the first and greatest commandment; and the second is like unto it: thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself; on these two
commandments hang all the law and the prophets" (Matt. 22, 36 - 40). Love for one's neighbour is a reflection of love for god. It is in one's neighbour and through one's neighbour that man loves god. Hence the requirement to love everyone. If, on the other hand, a man loves selectively, repaying one person with good and another with evil, he arrogates to himself the prerogative of god, supposing that he himself can decide what is just and what is unjust. In the epistle of Paul to the Romans it is said: "...be at peace with all men. Avenge not yourselves, beloved, but give place unto wrath. For it is written: Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord" (Rom. 12, 18- 19). If a man prides himself on being a Jew and despises the Greeks, this means that ethnic differences have acquired too great a significance for him and have replaced god in his soul. If a slave or some other oppressed person is filled with hatred for his master, it means he is in the grip of the illusion that it is not with god, but here, on earth, that he may attain bliss. Whoever loves money too much and clings to it creates for himself a new idol. In a word, love for one's neighbour, in all its manifestations, is nothing other than love for god.
Love, which had seemed at first to be proclaimed as a counterweight to alienated forms of bonds between people, in fact
turned out to be their most refined apology, becoming a new argument in favor of the old, hateful order: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers, for
there is no power but of God"; "...one must obey not only for fear of punishment, but also for conscience's sake" (Rom. 13, 1; 5).
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