Pagan Virtues and Christian Graces

I

NOT long ago a friend of mine, discussing the ethics of Christ, observed that if we took them too seriously we should become despicable. ‘A man,’ he said, ‘who did not defend himself when attacked, who allowed himself to be insulted and injured without making an effort to vindicate himself, would be despicable; and we all know it.’ We do all know that point of view and we all realize that there is a great deal in it. And yet, as my friend drew his picture of the insulted, injured, abject victim of ill-usage, I could not help reflecting that the description might, so far as the actual words went, have applied with exactness to Christ before Pilate. Its contrast could be found in Peter, who, desperate and helpless though he was, still drew his sword and struck his blow for the right, and won our everlasting gratitude for doing it.

Which was the greater, Peter or Christ? Lovable, loyal, warm-hearted Peter, who drew his pathetic little sword to defend his Master against a legion of Roman soldiers, or Christ, who took the sword from his hand and, without protest or effort to defend Himself, went to an ignominious trial and a hideous death? We love Saint Peter. No one who has any imagination can fail to love him for his desperate and forlorn attempt to strike one blow in his Master’s behalf. We love Saint Peter — but we worship Christ. We do not call ourselves followers of Saint Peter, with his sword. We call ourselves Christians, and, if we cannot follow the example of our Lord, it must at least be with much heart-searching, and with the confession that, if we cannot follow Him, it is because we are not sufficiently like Him.

How is it that Christ was able to behave in a manner which, in an ordinary way, would seem to us despicable, and yet by that very conduct to command the worship of a world of warring men? What is it that He had which we have not — we who call ourselves Christians? What is it that we have not, which makes it in some instances literally impossible for us to do what our Lord did, because we find that in doing so we achieve the exact opposite of what He wished us to achieve? What qualities are lacking in us that we cannot act as He did? Why is it, in what respect is it, that we are not like Him? What is it that He had which we have not?

It is only part of the answer that I want to suggest here. There are certain virtues which are practised by pagans; our Lord took for granted that every Christian would practise those virtues. ‘Except,’ He said, ‘your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness ‘ of other people. We Christians have been very much inclined to emphasize what we may call the Christian virtues; to seek to practise those virtues which made Christ different from other men. We have forgotten that He took for granted the pagan virtues, and built the soaring edifice of Christian holiness upon that splendidly laid foundation.

What are the virtues that pagans admire and seek to practise? I use the word ‘pagans’ to mean non-Christian people; I do not use it in a derogatory sense at all. I mean people who do not call themselves Christians: people perhaps of other faiths, or people of no faith at all. What are the virtues, what are the qualities that they set store by? I suppose courage and honesty and loyalty, and a high spirit; wisdom and justice; what Aristotle called ‘magnanimity’ — a certain greatness of mind, a magnificence of spirit, that takes wide views and is not irked by little things. That is, roughly, the kind of character that the secular man, the non-Christian man or woman, admires: courage, perhaps, first of all, but also a high sense of honor, and loyalty to one’s friends, and independence, and wisdom, and so on. These are great virtues. Without them there is no real virtue at all.

If you examine the teaching of Christ you will find that He took these virtues for granted. There is nowhere in His teaching the dreadful doctrine that has been developed by a certain type of Christian, called ‘the total depravity of man.’ Christ never suggested that human beings were altogether evil and must be entirely changed if they are to be Christians, but rather assumes that most people are decent people. When He wanted to tell us what God is like, He said that God is like a human father, only greater and better. There are plenty of human fathers who are bad fathers, cruel, unjust, or merely indifferent, but our Lord assumed that most fathers are decent and kind, and said, if they knew how to give good gifts to their children, ‘how much more shall your Father which is in heaven?’ He did not denounce them. He did not speak as though we were all wicked and hopeless creatures. He said, in effect, ‘You have got a certain distance; you are all, or nearly all, kind to your children. Very well; start with that. Then you will see what God is like to His children.’ Or again, in the Sermon on the Mount, — which is, after all, the high-water mark of Christian teaching, the noblest expression of its ethic, — how persistently He assumed that people were, on the whole, decent people. ‘ Ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths.’ Christ did not go on to say, ‘I know that you never keep your vows, and therefore I tell you not to swear at all.’ He said: ‘You must give up your oaths. Don’t you realize that all this casuistry about what constitutes a binding oath and what does not means that your bare word is not enough? In future do not swear at all, by anything, but let your communication be. Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.’ We Christians ought to be so honest that no one will require us to swear any oaths at all

‘Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ That was a very high ideal, and the Jews were by no means always capable of acting on it. As you know, if you have read the Old Testament, they very frequently met an injury by wiping out a whole tribe, putting to the sword all their enemies with their wives and their little ones and their cattle. But the law was that they must not do so; they must not be vindictive; they must be just. If an eye is taken, an eye may be taken; if a tooth is taken, a tooth may be taken — not more. Now our Lord did not speak of the Jews as though they were continually vindictive and unjust. He took them at their highest level. He said: ‘This is your tradition — that you are not to be revengeful. You are only to be just. Now, I say to you, pass beyond human justice to divine Jove.

’Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.’ Our Lord did not say, ‘Hateful creatures! You are incapable of loving anybody! You must be completely changed! ‘ He assumed that His hearers really had lived up to that standard, but He said that it was not high enough. They must now learn to love their enemies.

At every step in this great argument, Christ begins with a pagan virtue, and goes on from that to Christianity. Is not some of the disgust that our religious professions and even our religious life have awakened among non-Christian people due to the fact that we seek to practise these amazing virtues, these soaring Christian graces of holiness and sanctity, without having acquired the rudimentary virtues of honesty, courage, loyalty, self-respect?

II

The other day I was among a number of religious people, of whom one spoke rather bitterly of the way in which he had been treated by his fellow theologians. Before I had time to think, I said impulsively, ‘ I hate religious people.’ Immediately he put his hand across the table and said, ‘Shake hands! So do I!’ Of course I do not really dislike religious people; I love them. A person who is really religious, a person who is truly Christlike, is a person more gracious, more lovely, more adorable, than any pagan character that has ever existed. There is a grace and a loveliness about Saint Francis of Assisi which even a Marcus Aurelius does not share. But what I meant, and what he meant, was that we disliked the kind of person — so terribly common — who seeks to practise the Christian virtues of humility and self-sacrifice and love and peace before he has got courage or honesty or honor.

Our Lord tells us that unless we take up our cross and follow Him we cannot be His disciples. We interpret that — rightly, I think — to mean that we must be ready to sacrifice ourselves even to the death; yet there are people who do this, who sacrifice themselves up to the last limit of sacrifice, and who only succeed in making the people around them intolerably selfish. Why is it? Is it not perhaps because selfsacrifice cannot rightly be practised by people who have not moral courage? I have sacrificed myself sometimes and have thought I was doing well. When I grew a little older and could look back at what I did from a different experience, I saw plainly enough that, in fact, I had not had the courage to do anything else! To assert myself required, perhaps, courage to face the imputation of selfishness. Perhaps it required that I should seem cruel or self-assertive, and I really ‘sacrificed myself’ not in the least because I was in love with self-sacrifice, but because I had not the courage to do otherwise. How often one sees that kind of selfsacrifice! It becomes merely abject, unless it is made by a person who could assert himself if he chose. It meets with the response of selfishness instead of the response of unselfishness, because, by an invariable spiritual law, we get from the world what we put into it — not immediately, perhaps, but in the end. If the final result of our unselfishness is to make other people selfish, we should surely examine ourselves very closely. Are we sure that we are not indulging in a luxury of unselfishness? Or is it that we have not the courage to be selfish? Do we desire the world’s applause and to have it said, ‘What an unselfish wife!’ ‘What an unselfish daughter!' (The vice of unselfishness is rather more common among women than among men.) If so, only a bad response can be expected, because, at the heart of it, the appeal is bad. Self-sacrifice cannot be rightly practised except by a person who is perfectly able to assert herself if she chooses.

Christians lay great emphasis, nowadays especially, on such virtues as toleration and courtesy. Is not our toleration also sometimes due to lack of moral courage? When our Lord found a person who illtreated a child, He did not say, ‘Let us reflect that this person is probably a badly brought-up person.’ He said, ‘It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.’ When He found real spiritual vileness He denounced it in language that terrifies the modern Christian, although it was generally people of power and position who excited that indignation.

Sometimes — for it is safest, perhaps, to speak of one’s own experience — I know that I have practised this ‘virtue’ of Christian courtesy merely because I had not the moral courage to say what I thought. I remember one occasion, when a committee of ‘religious’ people, of which I was a member, was considering how to turn the world upside down. We were considering who should write the literature for this great crusade. Among others, the name was suggested of a man whom no one could deny to be a Christian, but whose political views made him at the time very unpopular. Our chairman said, ‘I don’t think it would be wise to ask him to write for us, because our printing is all going to be done by a certain firm which does religious work, and it naturally would not like to risk offending its subscribers.’ I remember my feeling of indignation, and also of despair. How on earth were we going to have any effect on the world at all if we began by considering the subscribers to a certain firm? But I looked at our chairman and thought, ‘After all, he is a very good old man, doubtless a great deal better than I am, and it would be very rude and rough of me to say what I think.’ So I did not say it; but I did not say it because I was afraid to say it, not at all because I had any real consideration for his feelings. It is easy for us to persuade ourselves that we have to practise the Christian virtues of gentleness and grace, when our real trouble is that we have not the pagan virtue of courage to begin with!

Over and over again, in a genuine effort to achieve something good, something worth doing, as a member perhaps of some great society whose ends we approve and to which we are proud to belong, something is proposed that we feel to be wrong, and we decide that ‘it would not be Christian to judge.’ ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’ We refrain from ‘judging’; we refrain from protesting. It would be so awkward if we did protest! Everybody would be set by the ears, and the work which is at stake would be imperiled. Have we not all laid that flattering unction to our souls many times? But Christ did not care about any of these things, and we try in vain to imitate Him before we have laid the foundations of character. One of the most dishonest things in public life is the dreadful plea that to say or to do the audacious thing — which at a given moment may be the right thing — will do harm to the work or to the society that we belong to.

A little while ago I heard of a woman who had done most valuable work for her society, and who broke down — largely, of course, from overwork. She was dismissed, and those who were responsible for the dismissal told her that she should in future, for her maintenance and her support, ‘ put her trust in God.’ To disregard the claims of common loyalty to people who have worked for you and served you, and then tell them to put their trust in God, is unctuous, repulsive. If you cannot afford to look after your servants when they break down, at least face the fact as to what you are doing, and do not pretend that it is because you have such trust in God that you can sack anybody and everybody and put them on the street, and if they starve it is their fault, because they had not sufficient trust in God! I have found honesty, common honesty, to be the rarest of the virtues practised by religious people. We want the common, decent, pagan virtue of loyalty to other human beings before we begin to talk about trust in God.

Take the question of pacifism. A conscientious objector to war who is afraid of fighting has no right to his objection. He must be braver than the soldier before he has the right to be a pacifist. ‘Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees!' Even in the height of war, even in the poisoned atmosphere of hate which war engenders, there were, I think, few people who in their hearts despised men like Stephen Hobhouse and Clifford Allen. They might think them mad, but they could not think them despicable, for it was obvious that their position required a courage at least as great as, perhaps greater — indeed, in my heart I think certainly greater — than that required of the soldier. To suppose that their objection to war was based on cowardice would be a senseless denial of the facts. But as our righteousness must exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, so must the courage of those of us who call ourselves pacifists exceed the courage of the soldier. When I heard of conscientious objectors who, in the hour of danger, desired to be rescued, it seemed to me that there was something wrong with that kind of pacifism. Why, there were many soldiers who had none of the Christian graces, whose lives as private citizens had been marred by many faults, who yet would have scorned to ask to be brought back out of the trenches or sent home to what was called a ‘cushy job.’ The pacifism of the future must exceed the courage of Saint Peter. Without this courage we cannot really win the world for Christ.

There is something that disgusts in Christian grace on a shoddy foundation. It is like a poor and cheap building which we cover with elaborate ornament. It is like a mean melody supported with interesting harmonies. It is like an ill-cut dress overloaded with embroidery and lace. It is like anything that is false. And the average decent pagan is revolted by its dishonesty.

I often think that the farcical exaggeration which Dickens has given us in Uriah Heep is — like all Dickens’s conceptions — true at heart. Humility is loathsome if it is not founded on self-respect: it disgusts. We must have the pagan virtue of self-respect before we dare to have the Christian virtue of humility.

III

Had not Christ just those pagan virtues that so many of us Christians lack? With all His love and gentleness and mercy, how utterly courageous was His denunciation of all that was false and cowardly and bad! The tenderness with which He speaks of the outcast and the sinner is matched by His fierce denunciation of spiritual pride in high places, in places of power and dignity and influence. Those to whom He spoke with such pitiful compassion could not doubt His power to judge sternly if He chose. That was why His tenderness counted for so much. Had He done as we are so fond of doing with people we love, — sometimes too with people whom we do not love, — pretending that all is right when it is not, shutting our eyes to things that we know are wrong because we love to praise, refusing to see what is blameworthy because it seems cruel to see it, His praise would have been worth as little as ours so often is; His love would have effected nothing. But because men knew that His mercy was justice, because they realized that He was able to see through and through them and love them all the same, because His love rose up on the great foundation of truth and justice and clear-sightedness, it moved the world as nothing else has moved it.

Christ had strength of character, courage of mind and body, great physical courage as well as great moral courage. He had high-mindedness, magnanimity, or ‘magnificence,’ as our English poet Spenser calls it. If He trusted His disciples, it was not because He did not see how they might fail Him. If He kept Judas with Him, it was not because He did not know that Judas was quite ready to betray Him. His very self-sacrifice was accompanied by a self-assertion which sometimes horrifies those by whom it is not understood. His gift of Himself to us is accompanied by a demand upon us in return which is relentless. In Him every Christian grace was founded upon the rock of honor and loyalty, courage and justice, a piercing vision, a great strength. It is only the strong who can really be gentle. The gentleness of the feeble has in it something that repels; but the gentleness of strength, whether strength of body or strength of spirit, or both together, as with Christ, is adorable.

When Christ stood before Pilate with no sword in His hand and no protest on His lips, Pilate was afraid of Him. One can see that at every step. Christ was the judge — not Pilate. And the world has been in love with Him and afraid of Him ever since. We Christians have to begin at the beginning, and must not expect any more that the world will be moved, or attracted, or anything but repelled, by grace and beauty sought without strength, by a Christian grace of character which has not common honesty and courage at the heart of it. We have to realize that we Christians often repel the world as much as our Lord attracted it, because at the heart of our mercy there is weakness, at the heart of our self-sacrifice, fear.