Foundation of Christian Moral Life 2

The Early Church

The Fathers took up the philosophical question directly, because they lived in a world where people argued about it in the street.

St Justin Martyr (second century) proposed that the Logos — the divine Word who became incarnate in Christ — had scattered seeds of truth throughout human reason, so that whatever the pagan philosophers had grasped truly, they had grasped by a light that was ultimately Christ's. This is the classic Christian explanation of why non-Christians know a great deal about morality.

St Clement of Alexandria, working in the great Egyptian city that gives this book its tradition, went further than most in engaging Greek philosophy. He regarded philosophy as a genuine preparation for the Gospel, a schoolmaster leading the Greek mind towards Christ, just as the Law had led the Hebrew mind. Clement's confidence that all truth is God's truth is a permanent feature of the Alexandrian mind, and it explains why this book will not be nervous about engaging modern science, medicine, and philosophy on their own terms.

St Athanasius grounded moral corruption in the loss of communion with God. In Against the Gentiles, the companion work to On the Incarnation, he traces how the soul, turning away from contemplation of God, became preoccupied with itself and with the body, and so began inventing evils that had no existence of their own. Evil, for Athanasius as for the tradition generally, is not a rival substance created by God. It is a privation, a lack, like a shadow or a wound, which is why it can corrupt goodness but never produce anything of its own.

St Basil the Great insisted that human beings possess a natural capacity for discerning good, given at creation, so that the commandments do not introduce something foreign but awaken what is already implanted.

St Augustine described the restlessness that follows from a moral order we did not invent — that we are made for God and cannot find rest until we rest in Him. His account of evil as privation, worked out after his years among the Manichaeans who believed evil was an independent power, remains the standard Christian answer to why a good God's world contains wickedness without that wickedness being a thing God made.

The Coptic Orthodox Understanding

The Coptic Orthodox Church holds, with the whole Christian tradition, that:

1. God is the source and standard of goodness; He is not its subject or inventor.
2. Moral truth is objective, universal, and knowable, though our knowledge of it is impaired by sin.
3. Conscience and reason genuinely perceive moral truth, and revelation corrects, completes, and clarifies what they perceive.
4. The purpose of the moral law is the healing and deification of the human person, not the appeasement of an offended deity.

These are not peculiar to Copts; they are the common inheritance of the Church. What is distinctively Coptic is the accent and the whining experience rather than the system.

The Egyptian tradition produced very few systematic treatises on ethics and an enormous literature of sayings. The Desert Fathers did not write moral philosophy. They wrote down what happened when a person actually tried to keep the commandments in a cell for forty years. Their authority comes from the fact that they had tested the claims empirically, at close range, on themselves. When St Antony the Great was asked what one thing a person must have to be saved, the answer that comes down to us is humility, because he had seen the enemy's traps spread over the whole world and could see no way past them except that.

This is why a Coptic answer to "Is morality objective?" will very often begin somewhere unexpected — not with an argument but with an invitation. Try it. Keep up the fast. Forgive the person you cannot forgive. Give away money you would rather keep. Then tell me whether you were operating on a preference or running into something real. The tradition trusts that moral reality, like a wall in a dark room, announces itself when you walk into it.

The liturgical dimension matters too. In the Coptic Liturgy the congregation confesses its unworthiness and receives Christ within a few minutes of each other. That juxtaposition teaches something about moral truth that no argument can: the standard remains high, and we are included despite sometimes failing to meet it. Both halves are held, week after week, until they sink in.

Pope Shenouda III, in his extensive writing and teaching for ordinary believers, consistently presented the commandments as expressions of God's love and as the means of the soul's health rather than as tests of compliance, and consistently linked knowledge of God's will to the practices of prayer, Scripture reading, and spiritual guidance rather than to private intuition alone. I give this passage as the sum of his teaching in works such as The Life of Repentance and Purity and his contemplations on the commandments, not as a quotation.

Other Christian Views

On the fundamentals of this chapter, the major Christian traditions agree far more than they differ. All confess that God is good, that morality is objective, and that conscience is real. The differences are of emphasis and of a technical account.

Roman Catholicism has developed the most elaborate natural-law theory, especially through St Thomas Aquinas, who held that the eternal law of God is participated in by rational creatures as the natural law and that its first principle is that good is to be done and pursued and evil avoided. Catholic moral theology is consequently confident about deriving detailed moral conclusions from human nature by reason alone. Orthodox writers have sometimes regarded this confidence as excessive, preferring to speak of the logoi — the divine intentions embedded in created things — and to keep moral reasoning more tightly tied to the transformation of the person. The difference is real but should not be exaggerated; both are talking about a moral order given in creation.

Classical Protestantism, especially in the Reformed tradition, has generally been more pessimistic about the reliability of fallen human reason and more insistent on Scripture as the decisive moral authority. Some Protestants hold a divine command theory, in which an action is right precisely because God commands it. Others, notably in the Lutheran tradition, have developed an account of law and gospel that assigns the moral law primarily the work of exposing sin and driving the sinner to grace.

Some modern liberal theology has moved towards locating moral authority in human experience and in evolving understanding, holding that moral norms develop as human societies mature. Orthodox Christians regard this as conceding the decisive point, since a standard that develops with the culture cannot then judge the culture. But the position deserves to be met with argument rather than with abuse, and its best advocates are motivated by genuine encounters with people whom the tradition has treated badly.

Where Christians differ on the foundations, as here, the differences are largely technical. Where Christians differ on applications — divorce, contraception, the use of force — the differences are sharper, and later chapters will address them individually.

Arguments and Counterarguments

The Euthyphro dilemma

Objection: Is an act good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good? Either God's commands are arbitrary, or goodness is independent of God.

Response: The dilemma assumes that God stands in relation to goodness as a person stands to a rule — either making it up or obeying it. Christian theism denies the assumption. God's own nature is the standard. His commands are neither arbitrary decrees nor reports about an external standard; they are expressions of what He unchangeably is. The parallel is imperfect but useful: asking whether God could command cruelty is like asking whether a circle could decide to have corners.

Counter-objection: This merely relocates the problem. Why call God's nature good, unless we have a prior concept of goodness by which to assess it?

Response: We do have moral concepts, and Christians hold that we have them precisely because we are made in the image of the God who is good. When we recognise God's character as good, we are not measuring Him against an external ruler; we are recognising the original of which our moral sense is the copy. This is admittedly not a knock-down proof, and honest Christian philosophers acknowledge as much. It is a coherent account, and its rivals have difficulties at least as severe.

Can there be morality without God?

Objection: Secular societies function morally. Atheists raise decent children. Therefore, God is unnecessary for morality.

Response: Everything in this objection is true, and none of it touches the Christian claim, which is about grounding rather than about behaviour. Compare: a person can use a language fluently without any theory of how language works. The Christian says that unbelievers know real moral truths because those truths are really there and human beings are built to perceive them.

The serious version of the question is this: on a purely naturalistic account, what makes a moral claim true? Several answers are on offer.

• Evolutionary explanations account for why we have moral feelings — cooperation and kin altruism confer survival advantage. But this explains the origin of the feeling, not the truth of the judgement. Evolution would equally explain moral feelings that were entirely mistaken. And it produces an awkward result: on a strict evolutionary account, our conviction that the strong should protect the weak is a useful illusion, which is a strange foundation on which to build a hospital.
• Social contract theories ground morality in agreement. But this makes it very hard to condemn a society that agreed to something monstrous, which was precisely Mina's seminar problem. Contracts also have little to say to those with no bargaining power, which is to say, the people ethics most needs to protect.
• Moral realism without God — the position that moral facts simply exist as brute features of reality, alongside mathematical truths — is a serious philosophical position held by serious people. Christians should engage it respectfully. The Christian objection is not that it is absurd but that it leaves unexplained something that theism explains: why the universe contains moral facts at all, and why they should have any authority over creatures who did not choose them.

Fair concession: none of this constitutes a proof of God from morality. It constitutes a claim that theism accounts for our moral experience more economically than the alternatives. Readers should be suspicious of any writer who tells them this argument is easy.