Moral Objections
By
D.M. Mackinnon

Christianity is regularly presented as a way of life and as such it is presented as demanding from those who profess it a certain pattern of moral behaviour. From this pattern Christians may depart; but with very important differences between divergent traditions of Christian faith and practice (e.g. over artificial contraception), there is a certain measure of agreement concerning what constitutes Christian moral behaviour. Now it is one of the features of the world in which we live that this venerable tradition is under fire from a great many directions, and subject to critical pressures at a number of different levels. It is with the characterization of some of these criticisms that I am concerned tonight.

Thus there has been a great deal of discussion recently in the press and elsewhere arising out of Professor Carstairs' series of Reith Lectures. I am not concerned with the accuracy with which Professor Carstairs' own mind has been reported; what I want simply to advertise is that in these discussions the Christian tradition has been attacked on the ground that it stresses the importance of pre-marital abstinence from sexual relations and fails either to reckon with psychological tensions such abstinence may set up in individuals, or to present any sort of adequate positive image of human life.

I want to concentrate on the latter more general criticism; it is a good example of the extent to which Christian morality is regarded as a morality of obligation, even of command. Christians may protest against this interpretation of what they say. They may argue roughly as follows:

'While some Christian denominations may identify the sanction or authority of this morality with the will of God, in fact the great tradition of Christian thought has found that authority to reside not in an arbitrary divine fiat or command but in the ways in which what we are morally bound to do provides the road to our own actualization as human beings; we rise to the full stature of our humanity, we become truly human by obedience to the dictates of the moral law. This is the broad high road to true health, individual and collective alike.'

If we apply this interpretation to help our understanding of the issues raised in Carstairs' broadcasts, we find that those issues are partly transformed. The claim is now one that those who condone pre-marital sexual intercourse are, wrong in fact. Such behaviour is perilously likely to prove destructive of the integrity, even of the stability and peace of mind, of those who practise it. They are failing to reckon with their total nature as human beings: they are isolating sexual activity from human life as a whole; although they claim to acknowledge its importance, they are failing to reckon with the extent to which its pressures invade and shape human life as a whole. What are conventionally called illicit relationships provide the sort of soil in which self-deceit and masquerade can flourish, and men and women are consequently easily estranged from the substance of their being.

Whatever we may think of this sort of argument (and I shall have more to say on this issue later) we must allow that this sort of emphasis considerably mitigates, if not altogether alters, the presentation of Christian morality as an ethic of sheer obligation. We are no longer forced to see ourselves as restrained by the arbitrary dictates of a God; we are rather encouraged to see ourselves as enticed by the way of obligation to tread the road of our proper humanity.

But two very serious questions arise here.

(a) How adequate is the image of the good life which is offered? It can hardly be denied that a widespread obsessional preoccupation with the alleged great evil of the remarriage of divorced persons creates the impression that the core and centre of Christian moral teaching is a particular interpretation of the indissolubility of marriage; on this view it is taken as putting an appalling stigma on these second unions, of which we have all met examples, and know to have been more abundantly justified by their fruits than the frequently tragic human distress they have replaced. It is impossible to escape the impression that, to certain sorts of clergy, the effective exclusion from sacramental communion of divorced persons who have remarried is the highest form of the Churches moral witness. The cynic might well be tempted to say that the heartless zeal frequently displayed in the bearing of this particular testimony is a way in which ecclesiastics compensate for their unwillingness to engage with other besetting moral issues of our age, for instance the moral permissibility of nuclear weapons.

I mention this issue, speaking in deliberately harsh terms (although no harsher perhaps than the callousness of our moral bigots merits) because it seems to pin-point the question immediately raised by the moral tradition which I have expounded. How adequate to human life as men and women live it is this image of the good life? Does it do justice to the heights and depths, to the pity and terror, of life as we know it? It is this question which is in fact one of those raised by the many who speak of Christianity as life-denying rather than life-affirming or life-enhancing; and it is with that criticism before all others that this lecture is concerned. But let there be no mistake at this point. If we seek to rebut the criticisms brought against our Christian image of the good life by saying that thus and thus runs the writ of the divine law, we are simply assuming the language of an ethic of obligation. You cannot have it both ways: either this way of living is commended because it is self-justifying or it is commanded because it is the will of God. To introduce appeal to the divine will is to find sanction for the manner of human life in the command of a transcendent lawgiver.

(b) Yet there is another question, related to the former but distinguishable from it. How far in the last analysis does the kind of ethic of which I am speaking escape the charge of legalism? The moral law is, it is argued, the law of our proper nature; it is the form of a truly human existence. It is presented to us as something which both commands and attracts us because we are the sort of beings that we are. The law of morality argues strongly against all that involves us in violation of what we suppose the form of our proper nature to be; as a matter of historical fact acknowledgement of its authority has made men ready to resist, faithful unto death, the dictates of tyrants, and of those who claim in the name of a so-called common good to override the most elementary human decencies. But still that way of life to which it is said we are drawn is presented as something over against us which commands us. It does not simply attract by seeming to enlarge the horizons of our existence; it is life-restricting rather than life-enhancing.

We have to reckon, if we are honest, with a strongly anti-nomian element in Christianity as a historical phenomenon. It shows itself in the New Testament in Paul's bitter arguments with himself concerning the Jewish. law; it is present also in the Gospel according to St Luke. Although traditional believers may find it scandalous, it has always been there in the background, as if at some level of their being Christians were deeply aware of the relativity of legal categories, even if they could not define the Christian way of behaviour without their aid. What is it, we may ask, in human life, to which the notion of law sometimes alone effectively does justice? What of positive import can be salvaged from so much that seems to lend itself to the distortion of a way of life into something that bears perilous resemblance to a life-denying legalism? I want to suggest to you, and this again is a central theme of my whole lecture, that in a very confused way the tradition of which I have spoken and which I have criticized is seeking to do justice to the element of restraint, of respect, in human life, complex as that life is.

What is the place of restraint in morality? There is a place for restraint. Human relationships can be irreparably damaged by absence of respect and by absence of attention to the total situation in which an agent is involved. We are familiar with such violations at the level of collective existence when individual rights and liberties are mercilessly sacrificed to the dynamism of the totalitarian state. But we encounter them also at the

more intimate levels of personal life. A man seeks to renew himself by accepting, in middle age, the advances of a woman much younger than himself; he plunges into the affair boldly, even enthusiastically; but soon, even very soon, the zest with which he gives himself to his adventure is overshadowed by the necessity of deviousness, of deceit, of make-believe intended no doubt to preserve the facade of his marriage, but itself a fearful violation of the respect he owes his wife and family. To speak in these terms is not to assume the tone of a censorious moralist; there is much in human life both healing and creative that would shock the compilers of manuals of moral theology. But respect, and the kind of restraint that is closely bound up with it, is part of the very stuff of human life, and we neglect its claims at our peril.

Although respect and restraint are not the whole of morality, human relations can be irreparably damaged by their absence. The problem raised so far in this lecture may well be that of finding a definition of the restraint element in morality and indicating its proper place. How indeed is restraint related to life? To these issues we shall return; but the time has now come to move to a rather different set of problems, admitting, you will be glad to be told, of less formidably abstract treatment than what has gone before.

So I come to the second group of questions which I wish to raise. So far nothing has been said explicitly concerning the theological foundations of Christian morality; I have not even mentioned the supposed primacy given to the so-called 'theological virtues' of faith, hope and charity. Later I shall have something to say on the subject of charity; for the time being I wish to restrict myself to faith and hope, and in particular to faith.

While the notion of faith is highly complex, it cannot be denied that faith, as the Christian understands it, includes as part of itself assent to certain propositions concerning matters of fact, and belief that what these propositions assert is supremely significant for human life, indeed for man's total posture under the sun. That this is so cannot be denied by those who emphasize in ways currently fashionable that Christian faith is primarily trust in a person; for the character of the trust given to that person is determined by belief concerning what he did and whom he is.

(a) Jesus of Nazareth belongs to history. He has a place, however obscure its details may be, in the story of the last years of the Jewish state between thirty and forty years before final catastrophe overtook it. He was a teacher, who spoke to men and women who lived in that situation, whose attitudes to the choices and emergencies that pressed upon them in their personal and collective existence were very various. His originality as a teacher lies partly in the permanent insight which continually he mediated in what he said, speaking relevantly and intelligibly to the men and women whom he addressed, but repeatedly transcending their immediate situation and, by any reckoning, enriching the moral understanding of those belonging to ages yet unknown.

But for Christian faith this teacher is also the one who, by what he did, affected decisively the ultimate destiny of every man and woman contemporary with him, born before him and born after him. Of the greatness of this claim I shall have something to say in a moment. What I want to emphasize immediately is that it stands or falls by the truth or falsity of certain statements relating to matters of historical fact. Thus we may agree that Jesus was brought to his death in consequence of the impact made by his teaching. What men decided to do to him had something to do with the things he said to them, for instance the radical challenge he issued to every sort of legalism, and entrenched ecclesiastical hypocrisy. But the claims which Christians make for that which he endured demand that he shall have approached his sufferings in a particular way, not simply as a luckless victim of uncontrolled circumstance, but as someone who, even if he found that circumstance uncontrollable, yet freely accepted the fact. No one who is in earnest concerning the foundations of Christian belief can pretend that his belief would not be radically affected, if he became convinced that as a matter of historical fact Jesus had never prayed in the garden of Gethsemane that the hour might pass from him and then after agony of prayer freely accepted his Father's will.

Whether or not he did so pray is a matter of historical fact to be settled by methods precisely akin to those which Roman historians use to determine whether or not Julius Caesar was aiming at Oriental despotism before his assassination, or English historians of the sixteenth century to determine the arcana of Elizabeth's relations to Mary Queen of Scots. Now Christians must realize that the crucial importance of this issue for their faith raises grave doubts in their critics' minds concerning the honesty with which they will approach it. So much is at stake that the Christian will accept, as proving that what he wants to believe happened actually happened, evidence which as a historian, passing judgement on the claims of other events to be classed as actual, he would never have accepted.

We have got to realize the seriousness with which men urge that faith encourages dishonesty. The importance that the Christian is encouraged by the very nature of his faith to attach to such events as those I have mentioned tends to obscure the honesty of the judgement he passes concerning them and affects adversely his intellectual honesty in general. Christians give weight, and must give weight, to belief that certain events have actually happened; how far does this make them prejudiced and narrow and unwilling to open their minds to uncertainties concerning particular strands of human history? This objection is a moral objection in that it urges that faith, as the Christian understands it, is incompatible with a proper intellectual objectivity.

(b) Further, suppose we do allow that the events to which I have referred actually happened, what are the consequences to the way in which a man or woman sees human life of bestowing upon them the sort of significance which Christians claim they have? We have to allow that the ways in which this significance is represented are relative to particular cultures, and more seriously to particular and restricted human interests and concerns. Think for a moment of the apparatus of images and concepts whereby the notion of atonement is conveyed. If we speak of Christ's death as a sacrifice which takes away the sin of the world, however much we may refine the concept of sacrifice that we employ, we are still putting ourselves in bondage to it; what of the man to whom the whole idea of sacrifice is not so much strange and repulsive as restricted and restricting? There is so much more in human life known and unknown than the kind of theological conceptions whereby we seek to capture the nature of atonement can hope to lay hold of. We live in an age that is at once one of unprecedented excitement and unprecedented fear; but the demand that we should try to catch its terror and its glory in this network of particular theological conceptions asks that we should mutilate our sense both of its promise and its terror.

Those of you who are unwise enough to read the church press will be familiar with a recent episode in which certain members of this University were made the targets of unbridled venom on the part of religious conservatives; the latter saw quite rightly that their own cozy acquiescence in conventional ways of thought was menaced by the facts to which the critics called attention. We are not concerned in this lecture with the Philistine anti-intellectualism of the Church Times; but we must be concerned with the underlying failure to measure up to the relativity of the Christian reality which it expresses. To return:

It would indeed be hard to underestimate the damage done to the Christian understanding of the moral life by the sort of impoverishment of our fundamental theological categories which I have illustrated. These categories have become dated and stereotyped; but their continued use has helped to fetter on Christian tradition some most dangerous falsehoods and half-truths concerning the way men and women should live. Moreover, they have done so precisely by the way in which they have imposed upon the central figure of Christian aspiration and devotion (the crucified Lord) the stamp of their own narrowly ecclesiastical pedigree.

It would be easy to point here to the attitude towards penal institutions and reform as encouraged, perhaps unconsciously, by acceptance of a penal substitutionary conception of the atonement. We need not deny a partial validity to the retributive analysis of punishment in order to be outraged by the supposition that the vindictive insatiability of the divine justice demands that the vials of wrath be poured out upon the innocent in ways that suggest that de Maistre spoke less than the truth when he said that the fundamental realities of the world were crime and punishment; he had better have said they were the fundamental constituents of being itself. But the idiom of sacrifice is scarcely less deadly in the ideas and attitudes which it encourages.

The cult of suffering is an extreme form of these; but even those who eschew this ultimately ambiguous attitude are encouraged by the doctrine of redemption through sacrifice to propagate such falsehoods as the thesis that pain ennobles, to which I suspect many of us give the lie each time we are overtaken by a dental abscess! Aristotle saw that men did best the things which they enjoyed doing, that zest for a task was an index of aptitude to its performance. Admittedly he underestimated the number of jobs any society demands which are both necessary and dull, requiring every sort of external incentive to make them bearable (after all he gave a metaphysical account of the status of slavery). Yet these issues gain nothing through being sicklied over with the pale cast of chatter concerning vocation, especially vocation to sacrifice. To sacrifice ourselves is, it is said, to realize the image of the crucified, whereas the self-sacrificing may simply be mutilating himself, purposively destroying the sweetness of existence in the name of illusion, in order to make himself a hero in his own eyes.

To take one other illustration. Those who are familiar with the problems of the care of old people will know very well what I call the phenomenon of the 'human sacrifice', the daughter in a large family who is described as 'devoted to her parents' (the language has a ritual quality), and who is therefore chosen to look after them in their decline. Not infrequently she is the victim of various sorts of spiritual blackmail. Her patience perhaps is exhausted by her mother's near senile cantankerousness and she is told 'you will be sorry one day dear, when I am dead and gone' (and a discreet sob accompanies the last words). She sees her life slipping from her and still she is held in the vice-like grip, I will not say of dedication, but of convention consecrated by the ecclesiastical image of sacrifice. The ethic of sacrifice indeed provides a symbolism under which all sorts of cruelties may be perpetrated, not so much upon the weak as upon those who have been deceived by a false image of goodness. We need fresh air blown upon these discussions by a sane ethic of utility, properly designing the most humanly prudent course (in this case rational and human policies for the care of the aged), seeking to liberate human energies not to confine them.

Theirs not to reason why
Theirs but to do or die.

The more fool they, a critical moralist might comment; and he would be right. It was Karl Earth, the greatest living theologian, who said to those Germans who in the immediate post-war years felt themselves cast for the role of the 'suffering servant' - ' it is not that you have been called to bear the suffering of the present time; it's simply that you have been political idiots'. The matter was as simple as that; the German people had been politically inept with consequences under which our world still labours.

Yet to argue in this way is not to deny the extreme importance of the place of restraint in human life to which I earlier referred. We have to reckon today with what I can only describe as the cult of moral toughness, the belief that in personal morality men and women who feel themselves strong enough to venture are entitled to try everything, to ignore the elementary claims of others, to disdain the weak, to experiment with every sort of relationship. To confuse such disdain for the claims of restraint, and indeed of gentleness, with a true human freedom is simply to confuse with freedom a kind of superior strength, and to claim that what alone remains of justice is the right of those endowed with that strength to go their own way. Yet this strength reveals its counterfeit quality by the extent to which it reins in its ruthless energies in deference to such trivial concerns as good reputation. The connoisseur of sexual experiment and perversion, the seducer for whom all is fair game, the woman of affairs who eggs on a tired middle-aged husband to rejuvenate himself by lively sexual adventure, these types for all their toughness are curiously unwilling to risk ultimate damage to their own public reputations. Their ways are devious and they take care to move only in the twilight.

It would be a mistake, however, to suggest that practice of the kind of restraint and of respect for persons of which I have been speaking is today the prerogative of Christians (although Christian faith provides the kind of soil in which it should flourish). May I mention one recent outrage? (I use the word advisedly)? I refer to the publication of two volumes of personal letters by the late Dame Rose Macaulay to her spiritual adviser Father Hamilton Johnson of the Society of St John the Evangelist. These letters were never intended for publication; indeed their preservation might be thought due to the mistaken enthusiasm of a near-senile religious, although in my judgement his religious order cannot be exempted from blame in letting them see the light.

The letters embody their author's reflections on religion, following a return to Anglican faith and practice after a long period during which she had had a prolonged affair with a married man who had eventually died. They are in no sense a record of her penitence for the outrage that quite conceivably she did to her lover's wife; in consequence by the triviality of much of their subject matter, they show a woman entering, after her lover was dead, into a cozy church world, where details of religious practice furnish endless topic for comment and conversation. Outrage is done not only by implication to the one whom it is hard to believe she did not injure, but to Miss Macaulay's own memory; for the writer of these letters seems able only ceaselessly to discuss such topics as the variations of ceremonial practice between such London churches as the Grosvenor Chapel, St Paul's, Knightsbridge, and the Annunciation, Bryanston Street. A reader, weary of these trivialities, may find himself, almost against his conscious will, echoing Anselm's words: nondum considerasti quantum pandas sit peccatum.

Whatever else we have here (and claim is made for the apologetic value of these letters, whatever that may mean) we have wanton disregard of the elementary duty of respect, of the kind of reverence that the sombre complexity of the human scene must always provoke. We have rather evidence of a sorry triviality of thought and feeling, indicating that what I have called restraint and respect are indeed necessary not simply to check the fierce indifference to the claims of others characteristic of the morally tough, but to prevent the currency of Christian conversation from being debased to the sorry level of most of these letters.

What however is disturbing pre-eminently in the manner in which Christian morality is presently commended is the way in which by its legalism, by its unselfcritical attachment to the shibboleths of another world, by the poverty of its theological foundations, it leaves unraised crucial questions concerning the relations in human life of the elements of restraint and respect to those which are positive, which are indeed open because concerned with possibilities yet unknown. The humanist ethic at its most profound insists that the elements of restraint shall serve affirmative ends, and these ends are usually conceived in terms of the diminution of misery, the increase of human happiness, the enlargement of the opportunities open to human kind. It is an ethic which exalts ends commending themselves to reason, over tradition; historically it has been the foe of cruelty, that most common fault of the servants of God in every age who by their fanatical devotion to the institution have so often betrayed themselves into the sort of mercilessness that, in the name of truth absolute, closes the gates of mercy on mankind.

One has only to think of the moral enormities of the crusades to recall a classical instance of the temper I have in mind. In the January 1963 number of The Twentieth Century Mr Philip Toynbee suggests that, to a modern, cruelty rather than pride is the fundamental sin. It is certainly a characteristically ecclesiastical manifestation of pride to forget the pervasive cruelty of the servants of God, whose imaginative devotion is more often kindled by concern for the organization and dignity of the community they serve than by any human concern for the delicate intricacies of personal existence. When one sees instances of the human misery caused by the hardness of prejudice in the Church one is reminded irresistibly that 'His Father's house was to be a house of prayer for all the nations'. We do not in these islands today have to reckon with active persecutors; but we do have to reckon with those whose zeal for the status, repute, the orderliness of the Church (as they misguidedly conceive it) eclipses their readiness to receive the Son of Man when his call is apparent in the needs of the least of his brethren. We may seem here to have moved a long way from the horrors of the Albigensian crusade; but it is perhaps worth while to point a similar misunderstanding of the nature of God, of the Christian God, of whom after all Paul wrote that one who was in his form made himself of no reputation, and in that condescension to the manner of a servant revealed and defined for every age the essential nature of the divine.

If we say that the heart and marrow of Christian behaviour is love towards the brethren, we are still of course faced with the question what in practice this love involves. We can see that it counsels a kind of sharp impatience with the counterfeits of legalism, and moral legalism is indeed counterfeit morality; it constricts the substance of the good life in obedience to the traditions of historically relative human society. (It encourages for instance obsessional preoccupation with the 'evils of divorce' to the exclusion of effective concern for the victims of broken marriages, and of support for those who often in great moral courage undertake to be husband or wife, let us say, to the innocent party in a broken marriage, and to serve her or him and the children of that first marriage, with heart-felt devotion.

To experience ecclesiastically encouraged vindictiveness towards such persons, as I have done, is to be outraged that men who claim to speak of Christ's compassion should by their fanatic attachment to what they call the Church's moral law obscure his care for those who, wounded by the attitude of his professed servants, understandably deny the reality of that compassion.) Yet it is not enough to repudiate the legalist perversion of the Christian way of behaviour; for the element of restraint is as we have seen a crucially important element in a truly human life and without it love may easily, will certainly, plunge into a kind of vague sentimentality cruelly indifferent to the facts of human injury and pain. Moreover, we have to reckon not with the troubled image of the morally perplexed and bewildered, whose fellows indeed we are, but with the self-confident thrust of the morally tough.

The strength of the one who believes himself or herself to be the stronger can masquerade as freedom; it is a paradox that such strength can also take to itself the name of love. But one can dispute that claim; for that which is without gentleness, without forbearance, can hardly claim to bear that title.

May I return finally to the theological issues which I raised? For Christians there is no escape from the issues raised by the involvement of the author and finisher of their faith in history. It is at once their glory and their insecurity that he is so involved. The very precarious-ness of our grasp of his ways reflects the depth at which he penetrated the stuff of human life. We cannot have that depth of identification on his part with our circumstances unless we pay the price of the kind of precarious-ness, belonging even to the substance of our faith, from which we may seek to run away to a spurious certainty even at the price of a kind of dishonesty which infects our whole outlook. We must be as sure as we can that we have rightly estimated the sort of certainty which we can hope to have about Jesus and do not make the mistake of trying to make that certainty other than it is.

Finally, however, if the Christian way of behaviour is to be liberated from the falsehoods and half-truths which beset it at so many levels it can so be set free only if the image of the crucified Lord, the author and finisher of our faith, is renewed. A false passivity, an invalid acquiescence in intolerable evils, a cultivation of obedience for obedience's sake, when revolt rather than acceptance is a plain human duty - these moral illusions have been fostered by misunderstanding of the work of Christ and dignified by the language of sacrifice, even of love. How are we to see that work in ways at once morally tolerable and morally revealing? The ways in which we are bidden see it, and indeed understand the divine plan to which it belongs, are in fact frequently morally intolerable; yet it is not enough to make of our understanding of the crucified something morally admissible; for here the Christian faces that which for faith is not of his own making. If he can reject all that diminishes its height and depth to dimensions less than the most profound he knows, it still concerns him that it should articulate for him questions from which he cannot turn aside.

We have in this lecture been largely concerned to criticize, angered perhaps by the crudities of so-called Christian moral teaching. Yet Christian morality re-mains a way of living which when it returns to contemplate its fontal inspiration is, in spite of all, uniquely able to hold together the claims of truth, of seeing things as they are or at least trying so to see them, and of mercy. The heart of the matter is here, and it is here because the cross supremely actualized that contradiction in human life, that splitting apart of the claim on the one side to call things, including evil things, by their name, and of mercy on the other. If Christ in his passion revealed to men the truth of what they are, we have to recall that he shrank from the work of that revelation.

Some of you will know the hieratic representation of Christ the King, triumphantly arrayed in vestments at once ecclesiastic and temporal, recently fashionable in churches of a certain sort; but I hope a declining fashion. For such representations hardly do justice to the mockery and harrowing simplicity of the one of whom Pilate said Ecce Homo; yet this latter is the one who expresses in concrete human life, I will not say the reconciliation but rather, the endurance to the end of this contradiction. But it is to him that we must look, if our moral understanding is to be renewed, and it is in him that we must hope to find resources not confined in their power to illuminate the enclosed pathways of a cozy ecclesiastical tradition, but able to throw abundant light on the new ways that open before us, ensuring that we walk those ways in some conformity with the true pattern of our humanity.