Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/610

Rh 588 ETHICS one in which all definite thought is transcended, and all consciousness of self lost in the absorbing ecstacy. Porphyry tells us that his master Plotinus attained the highest state four times during the six years which he spent with him. Neo-Platonism is originally Alexandrine, and more than a century of its existence has elapsed before we find it flourishing on the old Athenian soil. Hence it is often re garded as Hellenistic rather than Hellenic, a product of the mingling of Greek with Oriental civilization. But how ever Oriental may have been the cast of mind that eagerly embraced the theosophic and ascstic views that have just been described, the forms of thought by which these views were philosophically reached are essentially Greek ; and it is by a thoroughly intelligible process of natural develop ment, in which the intensification of the moral conscious ness represented by Stoicism plays an important part, that the Hellenic pursuit of knowledge culminates in a prepara tion for ecstacy, and the Hellenic idealization of man s natural life ends in a settled antipathy to the body and its works. At the same time we ought not to overlook the affinities between the doctrine of Plotinus and that remark able combination of Greek and Hebrew thought which Philo Judneus had expounded two centuries before ; nor the fact that Neo-Platonism was developed in conscious antagonism to the new religion which had spread from Judea, and was already threatening the conquestof the Greece Roman world, and also to those fantastic hybrids of Christianity snd later paganism, the Gnostic systems; nor, finally, that it furnished the chief theoretical support in the last desperate struggle that was made under Julian to retain the old poly theistic worship. To the new world of thought, that after the failure of this struggle was definitely established upon the rums of the old, we have now to turn. Ill, CHRISTIANITY AND MEDIEVAL ETHICS. In the present article we are not concerned with the origin of the Christian religion, nor with its outward history; the causes of its resistless development during the first three centuries ; its final triumph over paganism ; its failure to check the decay of the Hellenistic civilization that centered in Con stantinople, or to withstand in the east and south the force of the new religious movement that burst from Arabia in the 7th century ; its success in dominating the social chaos to which the barbarian invasions reduced the Western empire ; the important part it took in educing from this chaos the new civilized order to which we belong; the complex and varying relations in which it has since stood to the political organizations, the social life, the progressive science, the literary and artistic culture of our modern world. Nor have we to consider the special doctrines that have formed the bond of union of the Christian communities ^n any other than their ethical aspect, their bearing on the ^ystematization of human aims and activities. This aspect, -however, must necessarily be prominent in discussing Christianity, which cannot be adequately treated if con sidered merely as a system of theological beliefs divinely revealed, and special observances divinely sanctioned ; as it essentially claims to rule the whole man, and leave no part of his life out of the range of its regulating and trans forming influences. It was not till the 4th century A.D. that the first attempt was made to offer anything like a systematic exposition of Christian morality ; and nine centuries more had passed away before a genuinely philosophic intellect, trained by a full study of the greatest Greek thinker, undertook to give complete scientific form to the ethical doctrine of the Catholic church. Before, however, we take a brief survey of the progress of systematic ethics from Ambrose to Thomas Aquinas, it may be well to examine the chief features of the new moral consciousness that had spread through Grseco-Iloman civilization, and was awaiting philosophic synthesis. In making this examination it will be con venient to consider first the new/orm or universal charac teristics of Christian morality, and afterwards to note the chief points in the matter or particulars of duty and virtue which received an important development or emphasis from the new religion. The first point to be noticed is the new conception of morality as the positive law of a theocratic community, possessing a written code imposed by divine revelation, and sanctioned by express divine promises and threatenings. It is true that we find in ancient thought, from Socrates downwards, the notion of a law of God, eternal and immutable, partly expressed and partly obscured by the various and shifting codes and customs of actual human societies. But the sanctions of this law were vaguely and, for the moat part, feebly imagined; its principles were essentially unwritten and unpromulgated, and thus not referred to the external will of an Almighty Being who claimed unquestioning submission, but rather to the reason that gods and men shared, by the exercise of which alone they could be adequately known and defined. Hence, even if the notion of law had been more prominent than it was in ancient ethical thought, it could never have led to a juridical, as distinct from a philosophical, treatment of morality. In Christianity, on the other hand, we early find that the method of moralists determining right conduct is to a great extent analogous to that of jurisconsults inter preting a code. It is assumed that divine commands have been implicitly given for all occasions of life, and that they are to be ascertained in particular cases by interpretation and application of the general rules obtained from texts of scripture, and by analogical inference from scriptural examples. This juridical method descended naturally from the Jewish theocracy, of which Christendom was a univer- salization. Moral insight, in the view of the most thought ful Jews, was essentially knowledge of the divine law, to which practical efficacy was given by trust in God s promises and fear of his judgments ; this law having been partly written and promulgated by Moses, partly revealed in the fervid utterances of the later prophets. partly handed down through oral tradition from immemorial antiquity, and having further, before Judaism gave birth to Christianity, received an extensive development through the commentaries and supplementary maxims of several generations of students. Christianity inherited the notion of a written divine code acknowledged as such by the &quot; true Israel&quot; now potentially including the whole of mankind, or at least the chosen of all nations, on the sincere acceptance of which the Christian s share of the divine promises to Israel depended. And though the ceremonial part of the old Hebrew code was altogether rejected, and with it all the supplementary jurisprudence resting on tradition and erudite commentary, still God s law was believed to be contained in the sacred books of the Jews, supplemented by the records of Christ s teaching and the writings of his apostles. By the recognition of this law the church was constituted as an ordered community, essentially distinct from the state ; the distinction between the two was sharpened and hardened by the withdrawal of the early Christians from civic life, to avoid the perform ance of idolatrous ceremonies imposed as official expressions of loyalty, and by the persecutions which they had to endure, when the spread of an association apparently so hostile to the framework of ancient society had at length caused the imperial government serious alarm. Nor was the antithesis obliterated by the recognition of Christianity as the state religion under Constantino. The law of God and its interpreters still remained quite distinct from the secular law and jurists of the Roman empire ; though the former r