“The fear o’ hell’s the hangman’s whip
To haud the wretch in order;
But whaur you feel your honour grip,
Let that aye be your border.”
This is not a bad driving power by any means in the world, as things
go. True, it may not make a man a missionary, but it will keep him out
of the mire, and teach him sooner to die than to do a base action.
Certainly it will not confine him to the performance of virtues of
mere prudential calculation.
So far well. But there is another view which, if we honestly take, we
shall find it impossible to acquit the Aristotelian morals of a very
serious defect. This defect is the want of the religious element. In
saying this I do not mean to assert that God--or rather the gods--are
not mentioned from beginning to end of his famous book; they are
alluded to in several places, but merely in the form of a passing
remark, as a pedestrian with a long day’s journey before him may
pick up a primrose from a moist bank, or a fragrant orchis from a dry
brae, and fling it away. Now, there is nothing more nobly
characteristic of Christianity than this, that piety is identical
{186} with morality; that faith and works--not ritual, or ceremonial,
or externally imposed works at all, of course, but genuine works of
moral fervour and moral firmness--are one; stand to one another, at
least, as the root does to the flower, or the fruit of a wholesome
plant, of which not the root but the fruit is the valuable part. That
this is the only true and philosophical relation of the two great
moral potencies no thinker will deny. Or, to take another simile,
which will suit equally well: Every arch must have its keystone; and
the keystone of every solid doctrine of ethics, as of every close
compacted system of speculative philosophy, is God. That there is a
great defect here in the Aristotelian ethics is plain. A man might as
well write a treatise on the Affections without mention of reverence,
as set forth a system of morals without mention of God. As the
discipline of a well-ordered family implies the recognition of the
father as the great source from which the family flows--as the prime
power by which it is regulated--so a treatise on human ethics implies
a chapter on human piety, or rather a pervading soul of human piety,
without which all other chapters want their highest inspiration. And
in this view the Aristotelian author of the “_Magna Moralia_” is
wrong in blaming Plato for mingling up the doctrine of Virtue with
discussions on the Absolute Good--that is, God. It is important to
inquire what was the cause of this defect. That the subject was not
altogether ignored by our philosopher is plain from the single
sentence of allusion in Book viii. 12. 5; and, indeed, that a man of
such reach of intellect should by mere accident or carelessness have
omitted such an important factor in all moral calculations {187} seems
in the highest degree improbable; but so far is the idea of God from
giving any colour to his system of Moral Philosophy, that the very
occurrence of the phrase, θεραπεύειν τὸν θεόν, in the last section
of the Eudemian Ethics, has been justly adduced by Grant among the
many proofs of the inauthenticity of that treatise. That Aristotle
was a theist is certain, both from other places of his voluminous
writings, and specially from a famous passage in the _Metaphysics_
which has lately been brought forward with due prominence by the
noble-minded Bunsen in his great work, _God in History_; it seems
impossible, indeed, for such a profound thinker as Aristotle to be an
atheist, because, as Schleiermacher well remarks, “Philosophy cannot
inquire into the totality of things, without at the same time
inquiring into their unity, and as the totality of things is the
world, so the unity of things is God;” or, as Spinoza has it in one
of his propositions--“_Quicquid est in Deo est, et nihil sine Deo
neque esse neque concipi potest_.” But it is one thing to be a
theist as a matter of speculative belief, and another thing to be a
man of devout temper and pious practice. And herein, if I mistake not,
lies the real cause of the defect in the Ethics now under
consideration. For if Aristotle had been a man of any fervour of
religious sentiment, he had two courses before him with regard to the
Greek religion, neither of which he has followed--he might either,
like his great master Plato, or Xenophanes of Colophon among the
pre-Socratic thinkers, have attacked the Homeric theology, and shown
how its general tendency and some of its most distinctive features
were inconsistent with a pure and elevated morality, or, like
Socrates, {188} Xenophon, Pindar, Æschylus, Plutarch, and many other
far-sighted and large-hearted men, he might have taken Jove as the
impersonated Providence of Hellenic piety, and, allowing the immoral
deities quietly to drop, shown how all the highest qualities of the
moral nature of man are collected and concentrated in the supreme
sovereign of gods and men. In the one case, he would have shown his
zeal for true religion by his zealous iconoclasm of false gods; in the
other case, he might have shown a still nobler form of piety by his
kindly exhibition of the soul of good in things evil. But he did
neither of these things; and the conclusion plainly is that the
omission arose from a defect in his mental constitution, which
curtailed the reverential faculties of their fair proportions. From
all which we learn a most important lesson: that the analytic work of
the mere understanding, even when practised by a Titan like Aristotle,
is an inadequate method of reaching the highest form of vital reality,
or, to use the words of Grant, it forces even the greatest minds at
times to degenerate into a sort of smallness; and, generally, that
mere intellectual culture never can of itself produce a complete and
healthy manhood--never can elaborate for a human soul that rich blood
which then only appears when the watery element of the understanding
is thoroughly permeated by the red particles of the moral and
emotional nature. So true is it, to use St. Paul’s language, that
“_knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth;_” and of charity
there is no perfect form except that reverential recognition of the
common fatherhood of God, and the common brotherhood of man, which we
call religion. Let this want of the devout element, therefore, stand
{189} strongly pronounced as a defect in the ethical system of
Aristotle; he is less than Socrates and Plato as a moralist,
principally because he is less in this. Omitting from his calculation
one element of that Nature which is stronger than all philosophies and
wider than all churches, he has so far failed; and the failure of such
a man in such a field should teach our modern philosophers, physical,
mechanical, and utilitarian, to beware of following his example.