7.
Of course, our readiness to accept guidance rather depends on the tone in which it is offered. Among religions’ more unpalatable features is the tendency of their clergies to speak to people as if they, and they alone, were in possession of maturity and moral authority. And yet Christianity never sounds more beguiling than when it denies this child — adult dichotomy and acknowledges that we are all in the end rather infantile, incomplete, unfinished, easily tempted and sinful. We are readier to absorb lessons about virtues and vices if they are delivered by characters who already seem fully acquainted with both categories. Hence the ongoing charm and utility of the idea of Original Sin.
We had to invent ways to frighten ourselves into doing what, deep down, we already knew was right: The Torments of Hell, French illuminated manuscript, c. 1454. (illustration credit 3.3)
The Judaeo-Christian tradition has intermittently appreciated that what can stop us from reforming ourselves is a lonely, guilty sense of how unusually bad and beyond saving we already are. These religions have therefore proclaimed with considerable sangfroid that all of us, without exception, are appallingly flawed creations. ‘Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me,’ thunders the Old Testament (Psalm 51), a message echoed in the New: ‘As by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned’ (Romans 5:12).
However, the recognition of this darkness is not the end point which modern pessimism so often assumes it must be. That we are tempted to deceive, steal, insult, egotistically ignore others and be unfaithful is accepted without surprise. The question is not whether we experience shocking temptations but whether we are able once in a while to rise above them.
The doctrine of Original Sin encourages us to inch towards moral improvement by understanding that the faults we despise in ourselves are inevitable features of the species. We can therefore admit to them candidly and attempt to rectify them in the light of day. The doctrine knows that shame is not a helpful emotion for us to be weighed down with as we work towards having a little less to be ashamed about. Enlightenment thinkers believed that they were doing us a favour by declaring man to be originally and naturally good. However, being repeatedly informed of our native decency can cause us to become paralysed with remorse over our failure to measure up to impossible standards of integrity. Confessions of universal sinfulness turn out to be a better starting point from which to take our first modest steps towards virtue.
An emphasis on Original Sin further serves to answer any doubts as to who can have the right to dispense moral advice in a democratic age. To the incensed query, ‘And who are you to tell me how to live?’, a believer need only push back with the disarming response, ‘A fellow sinner’. We are all descended from a single ancestor, the fallen Adam, and are therefore beset by identical anxieties, temptations towards iniquity, cravings for love and occasional aspirations to purity.
8.
We will never discover cast-iron rules of good conduct which will answer every question that might arise about how human beings can live peacefully and well together. However, a lack of absolute agreement on the good life should not in itself be enough to disqualify us from investigating and promoting the theoretical notion of such a life.
The priority of moral instruction must be general, even if the list of virtues and vices to guide any one of us has to be specific, given that we all incline in astonishingly personal ways to idiocy and spite.
The one generalization we might venture to draw from the Judaeo-Christian approach to good behaviour is that we would be advised to focus our attention on relatively small-scale, undramatic kinds of misconduct. Pride, a superficially unobtrusive attitude of mind, was deemed worthy of notice by Christianity, just as Judaism saw nothing frivolous in making recommendations about how often married couples should have sex.
Consider, by contrast, how belatedly and how bluntly the modern state enters into our lives with its injunctions. It intervenes when it is already far too late, after we have picked up the gun, stolen the money, lied to the children or pushed our spouse out of the window. It does not study the debt that large crimes owe to subtle abuses. The achievement of Judaeo-Christian ethics was to encompass more than just the great and obvious vices of mankind. Its recommendations addressed a range of faint cruelties and ill-treatments of the sort which disfigure daily life and form the crucible for cataclysmic crimes. It knew that rudeness and emotional humiliation may be just as corrosive to a well-functioning society as robbery and murder.
The Ten Commandments were a first attempt at reining in man’s aggression towards his fellow man. In the edicts of the Talmud and medieval Christian rosters of virtues and vices, we witness an involvement with more modest yet equally treacherous and combustible kinds of mistreatment. It is easy enough to declare that killing and stealing are wrong; it arguably entails a greater feat of the moral imagination to warn against the consequences of making a belittling remark or being sexually aloof.
ii. A Moral Atmosphere
1.
Christianity never minded creating a moral atmosphere in which people could point out their flaws to one another and acknowledge that there was room for improvement in their behaviour.
And, because it saw no particular difference between adults and children, Christianity never balked at offering its followers a range of star-chart equivalents to point them in honourable directions. One of the most accomplished of these is to be found in Padua, under the vaulted brick ceiling of the Scrovegni Chapel.
At the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Florentine artist Giotto was commissioned to decorate the walls of the chapel with a series of frescoes: there were to be fourteen niches, each one containing a portrait allegorizing a different vice or virtue. On the right-hand side of the church, nearest the nave, Giotto painted the so-called cardinal virtues, Prudence, Fortitude, Temperance and Justice, followed by the Christian virtues of Faith, Charity and Hope. Directly opposite these were arrayed a matching configuration of vices: Folly, Inconstancy, Anger, Injustice, Infidelity, Envy and Despair. To each of these abstract titles, the painter appended vivid specimens to evoke viewers’ admiration and stir their guilt. Thus Anger is shown tearing apart her garments, screaming at the sky in indignant self-pity, while two niches along, Infidelity squints out with deceitful eyes. The members of the congregation were to sit in their pews and think about which of the virtues they had embraced and which of the vices they had fallen prey to, while God watched over them from the celestial sphere, stars in hand.
Giotto, The Vices and the Virtues, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, c. 1304. (illustration credit 3.4)
The religious tradition to which Giotto’s star chart belonged felt comfortable in making detailed proposals about how one should behave and in distinguishing what it plainly termed good from its opposite. Depictions of vices and virtues were ubiquitous — in the backs of Bibles, in prayer books, on the walls of churches and public buildings — and their purpose was straightforwardly didactic: they were meant to provide a compass by which the faithful could steer their lives in honourable directions.