How Christianity Polluted the Moral Atmosphere of the West

Secular thinkers don’t realize how their moral views are influenced—for the worse—by a deeply Christian religious historical revolution.

In a book that was one of the seminal texts of the “New Atheist” movement, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins devoted a chapter to the subject of morality. His audience, skeptical about the existence of God, is apt to wonder where they might find moral guidance if not from divine commandments they read in religious texts. On this pivotal issue, here is how he frames the question:

But what about the wrenching compassion we feel when we see an orphaned child weeping, an old widow in despair from loneliness, or an animal whimpering in pain? What gives us the powerful urge to send an anonymous gift of money or clothes to tsunami victims on the other side of the world whom we shall never meet, and who are highly unlikely to return the favour? Where does the Good Samaritan in us come from?¹

Dawkins goes on to answer the question by offering various evolutionary accounts that might explain an allegedly innate urge to be a selfless Good Samaritan. But Dawkins’s reflexive interpretation of what it means to be moral is remarkable. In a chapter about how we can be good without God, he uncritically glosses “good” as synonymous with the New Testament’s view of the good as selflessness.

If you know the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30–35), you know that not everyone shares this urge to help a complete stranger or sees it as synonymous with morality. It’s not just the thieves in the story who don’t feel it. Neither does the priest who passes by, neither does the Temple minister. Christ praises the Samaritan’s behavior because he thinks not enough people in his time have this urge.

If this message was underappreciated in Christ’s time, could Dawkins’s urge really be the product of some biologically innate drive? Or could whatever feeling Dawkins has more likely be the result of the influence of the Good Samaritan story itself — and of Christ’s preaching and Christianity more generally? Dawkins himself has spoken lately of how he sees himself as a “cultural Christian.”² But he’d never argue that his taste in Christian music and architecture is some innate urge: he’d ascribe it to what he’s absorbed from his cultural atmosphere. He should consider that his moral attitudes may be similarly influenced.

Christianity’s profound impact on our modern moral attitudes is highlighted by a recent book by Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. There is much to dispute about Holland’s claims about Christianity’s responsibility for many modern values (values that came not from Christianity but from the arguably incompatible value framework of the Enlightenment). But when even an atheist like Richard Dawkins relies on Christ to justify his moral urges, Holland’s observation about one aspect of post-18th-century Western culture rings true:

The retreat of Christian belief did not seem to imply any necessary retreat of Christian values. Even in Europe . . . the trace elements of Christianity continued to infuse people’s morals and presumptions so utterly that many failed even to detect their presence. Like dust particles so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye, they were breathed in equally by everyone: believers, atheists, and those who never paused so much as to think about religion.³

Holland’s claim about Christianity’s influence has been touted of late by Christian apologists. But his thesis cuts both ways. As Holland puts it, “There are those who will rejoice at this proposition; and there are those who will be appalled by it.”⁴ If, like Dawkins, we are skeptical about religious thinking and agree with Christopher Hitchens that “religion poisons everything,” we should be on the lookout for religion’s influence in non-obvious places. If an ethical doctrine taken for granted by secular thinkers actually has its origins in Christianity, we should recognize that such “dust particles” of Christian morality are not just influential, but poisonous.

And the poison is everywhere. Dawkins is far from the only secularist to complacently equate morality with the lesson of the Good Samaritan story. We see the same equation in skeptics about religious belief like Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, and Steven Pinker, who equate moral norms with the “impartial consideration of interests,” the idea that in deliberation our own interests should count as of no more importance than those of strangers around the globe. We see it in the writings of Peter Singer, the “effective altruist” philosopher from whom they all derive this principle. Singer argues that because our interests and those of our friends and family count for no more than suffering strangers, we should dispassionately and disinterestedly calculate how to give away our wealth to end the most suffering around the world.

In this essay, I’ll tell some of the key chapters in the early story of how Christianity originated the message of selfless renunciation for the sake of God. This is the message that later evolved into a message of selfless renunciation for the sake of other people: Christian humility is what laid the foundations for secular altruism. Contemporary thinkers like Dawkins and Singer who assume that the Good Samaritan urge is both innate and rational are caught up in complacent delusions that derive from breathing in the ubiquitous, Christianity-polluted air of our epoch.

Pre-Christian morality

Jesus celebrated the selfless behavior of the Good Samaritan because he thought not enough people of his day practiced it. So at least some of them did not feel the selfless urge that Dawkins thinks might be innate. And they were not alone. Indeed some of the most celebrated moral thinkers of an entire historical period, classical ancient Greece, did not feel the urge sufficiently to consider it worthy of conceptualization. It’s no surprise, given that they lived and worked in a period before the birth of Christianity. Athens’ classical thinkers offered the world the first systems of philosophical morality, but they were profoundly different from Christian ethics.

Consider the work of Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher. His Nicomachean Ethics codifies a series of virtues that express the distinctively human function, a life of reason. The Greek for “virtue” is arete, which is more directly translated as “excellence.” Whereas “virtue” in modern parlance is associated with chastity and meekness, for Aristotle (and the Greeks more generally) it was associated with strength. The virtue of courage, for instance, concerns developing the right amount of fear and confidence needed to act in the face of dangers in order to achieve fine ends.⁵ Temperance is about taking pleasure in the right kinds of things, not those that are unhealthy or otherwise incompatible with achieving fine things.⁶⁷

The most distinctive of Aristotle’s virtues is magnanimity or pride, the virtue of thinking oneself worthy of honor when one is in fact worthy through one’s virtues. Even though this pride is obviously self-regarding, Aristotle deemed it the crown of the virtues, not just an incidental sub-virtue. Christians, by contrast, regarded this kind of pride as the deadliest of sins. For Christians, humility was the highest virtue.

Even Aristotle’s more obviously other-regarding virtues are untinged by any influence of humility.

The virtue of “magnificence” or “liberality” concerns the proper use of wealth when spending large amounts of money. According to Aristotle, one practices this virtue only when “one spends the worthy amount on a large purpose, not on a trivial or an ordinary purpose like the one who ‘gave to many a wanderer.’”⁸ Aristotle argues that one place this virtue is practiced is with regard to expenditures on temples, competitions for honor, a splendid chorus, a warship, etc.⁹ There’s no reference to giving for the poor.

For Aristotle, magnificence is just a grander form of beneficence than generosity, and even his account of generosity is dramatically different from the typical Christian focus on destitution and need. Just as magnificence is concerned with spending on the right projects, generosity is concerned with giving to the right people, and Aristotle thinks we are not generous but viciously wasteful if we “enrich people who ought to be poor, and would give nothing to people with sound characters” (emphasis added).¹⁰^,¹¹^, ¹² The very idea of an ethical theory by which some deserve poverty because of their character flaws will strike many people in the modern West (especially its ethicists) as off the reservation, if not entirely alien.

What’s more, Aristotle contrasts generosity with the vice of wastefulness, which he rejects because the wasteful man is “ruining his own property; for someone who causes his own destruction is wasteful, and ruining one’s own property seems to be a sort of self-destruction, on the assumption that our living depends on our property.”¹³ And when Aristotle names the “most highly praised” form of generosity exercised by the rich, he mentions beneficence toward one’s friends.¹⁴ Friendship, for Aristotle, involves loving “what is good for oneself,” since the deepest friendships are chosen when the character of another closely mirrors one’s own.¹⁵ Even Aristotle’s take on generosity is seriously self-centered.

Aristotle saw virtue generally as the key component in achieving human eudaemonia (variously translated as well-being, flourishing, or happiness).¹⁶ The central focus of his account is about how practicing virtue leads to one’s own happiness.¹⁷ This is why he has no trouble saying that the virtuous man “must be a self-lover, since he will both help himself and benefit others by doing fine actions.”¹⁸ His remarks are so jarring to the modern reader that scholars debate about whether Aristotle’s theory is actually a form of ethical egoism — which some of them see as incompatible with its being a moral theory. This interpretation is encouraged by the fact that Aristotle’s term for “self-lover” (philautos) was used as a term of disparagement even in his day. Older translations reflect this when they put Aristotle as saying that the virtuous man is even “particularly selfish.”¹⁹

Aristotle is also not the only ancient Greek who centered his ethics on the requirements of individual happiness. Though most of the ancient Greek philosophers differed starkly over the nature of happiness or eudaemonia and its requirements, they generally agreed that it was the aim of ethics. Plato in The Republic famously argues that the virtue of justice is to one’s greatest advantage.²⁰ After Aristotle, the philosophers of the Hellenistic era split over the importance of virtue to eudaemonia, but eudaemonia of some kind or another remains the north star of their ethics. Epicurus thought that virtue is valuable as an instrumental means to pleasure (which he understood primarily as a form of tranquility or freedom from pain).²¹ The Stoics, by contrast, argued that virtue is sufficient in its own right for eudaemonia.²²

The point is not that an ethics of virtue aimed at happiness is the historical norm from which later Christian developments were a deviation. This was the faulty assumption of Nietzsche’s critique of Christian ethics, which holds that humanity had long been governed by an aristocratic “master” morality until the “slave rebellion” of Christian altruism. In fact, Plato’s and Aristotle’s more egoistically oriented approaches to ethics were controversial even in their own day as we can see from the critics they sought to answer.²³

The point is that prior to Christianity, at least for a brief and stunning historical period, ethics in its formative period as a branch of philosophy looked radically different from Christian ethics. Since Plato and Aristotle were the founders of philosophical ethics, it would be fudging our data to see the subject of ethics as exhausted by only those later schools that systematically reduced ethics to selfless renunciation for the need of strangers. This is Tom Holland’s mistake: in characterizing Christianity’s influence, he discounts prior Greek moral thinking and writes as if Christianity invented ethics. He does not appreciate how the Greeks had actually revolutionized ethics at its inception by approaching it rationally and philosophically in relation to a worldly goal.

If the Greeks revolutionized ethics, Christians launched a counter-revolution against the Greek innovation. At the beginning of every ancient civilization we find a history of primitive pantheism or polytheism and, to the extent that there is such a thing as ethics, it’s an ethics of slavish duty to the kings and gods, often to the point of demanding human sacrifice.²⁴ As we shall see, Christianity tweaked this primitive framework to make it about the sacrifice of self rather than of others. But it was still a kind of reversion to the norm.

To see the effects of the counter-revolution, we must turn to the streets — and circuses — of Rome, where its main battles were fought, leading to what one scholar called “the greatest revision of historical perspective ever known.”²⁵

Christianity’s renunciation revolution

We often think of innocent Christians being put to death in the Roman gladiatorial games. But they also martyred themselves. Notably in 405 C.E., St. Telemachus jumped into an arena to try to stop a fight between gladiators, helping to shock the public into a ban on the games.²⁶

The Christian critique of the games was not only about their spectacle of violence. As historian Peter Brown recounts, Christian bishops objected that wealth given to support the games “contained no element of compassion for the poor.”²⁷ The rich were not completely without exposure to and occasional compassion for the poor, but the forms of giving that did exist “never congealed into a single social action that summed up everyone’s ideal of a signal act that combined generosity and humanity in the way that almsgiving to the poor was consistently exalted in Jewish and Christian circles as the pious act par excellence.”²⁸ Brown argues that this controversy could not have happened in an earlier period. “The emergence of the poor as highly charged objects of concern involved an imaginative revolution.”²⁹

More recently, renowned Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman, in a forthcoming book on the Christian origins of “altruism” (the more modern term for an ethics of selfless, other-oriented obligation), comes to a similar conclusion:

[P]rior to the emergence of the Christian tradition, altruistic acts and the rhetoric connected with them focused almost exclusively on close genetic and social relations — principally family and friends, and less frequently, others “like us,” members of the same community and socio-economic class. By contrast, the importance of caring for strangers and outsiders, the “others” who were suffering, was not simply non-obligatory, it was “non-sense.”³⁰

Ehrman argues that it was the spread of Christianity through the ancient world that led to “a fundamental transformation in the moral conscience of the West.” It was, clearly, a transformation that attacked the idea that moral obligations extend at best to close friends and family — relations of more intimate value to ourselves (and so not truly “altruistic”). Indeed, it is thought that this was the target of the parable of the Good Samaritan: the Samaritan is willing to help a Jew, someone from a hated opposing tribe.

But part of why it’s anachronistic to call the Christian view “altruistic” is that it was much broader than selfless service to the poor. The celebration of monetary renunciation for the poor was part of a more general revolution in moral outlook that brought with it support for the sexual renunciation of monasticism and clerical celibacy.³¹ It even celebrated the Christian martyrs like Telemachus and many others who gave their very lives for allegedly pious ends.

The original Christian martyr, of course, was Jesus Christ himself.³² The life of the Christian saint was lived in imitation of Christ, not only in the willingness to die for others, but also to live a life of poverty and chastity. It was not only that Christ lived a meek life that encouraged this imitation. It was that Christ was thought to be God himself, an omnipotent being incarnated in human flesh, and subjected to the most humiliating torture of the common criminal of the day, crucifixion. Holland makes much of this symbolism as encouraging the moral code of humility:

That the Son of God, born of a woman, and sentenced to the death of a slave, had perished unrecognized by his judges, was a reflection fit to give pause to even the haughtiest monarch. This awareness . . . could not help but lodge in its consciousness a visceral and momentous suspicion: that God was closer to the weak than to the mighty, to the poor than to the rich. Any beggar, any criminal, might be Christ. ‘So the last will be first, and the first last.’³³

Holland rightly notes that this idea would have seemed “grotesque” to pagan aristocrats of this period. For those who took the idea seriously, it would have made the pagan pursuit of virtue and happiness on earth seem petty.³⁴

Paul sounds a theme that we must lose our individuality and join in mystical union with the “body of Christ.”

Christ drew all the famous conclusions himself. Renounce your wealth: “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven” (Matthew 19:21). Renounce sexual desire: “everyone looking upon a woman in order to lust after her already has committed adultery with her in his heart. And if your right eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out and cast it from you” (Matthew 5:28). Renounce your pride: “whoever shall strike you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also . . . . [L]ove your enemies and pray for those persecuting you” (Matthew 5:39–44). Renounce even your loved ones and your own happiness: “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters — yes, even his own life — he cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:26–33).

St. Paul of Tarsus took Christ’s message and molded it into a new religion (Christ saw himself as a Jew). Paul amplified and streamlined the radical renunciation of the Christian creed. “May [you] be of the same mind, having the same love, united in soul, minding the same thing, nothing according to self-interest or according to vain conceit, but in humility be esteeming one another surpassing themselves, each considering not the things of themselves, but each also the things of others” (Philippians 2:1–4). “Let no one seek the good of himself, but that of the other” (1 Corinthians: 10:23–24). “I exhort you, brothers, through the compassions of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice. . . . For just as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, the many, are one body in Christ; and individually members one of another” (Romans 12:1–5). In these and other passages Paul sounds a theme that will be amplified by later Christians: that we must lose our individuality and join in mystical union with the “body of Christ.” It hints at another form of renunciation: that of one’s very self.

In the final years of the Roman empire, imitators of Christ multiplied. We have already spoken of the martyrs. As Charles Freeman puts it, “For many fourth-century Christians, it was as if suffering had to be undergone as a mark of one’s faith, even to the extent of deliberately inflicting it on oneself.”³⁵ They found many ways to self-inflict it. Epicureanism and Stoicism had already popularized detached “tranquility” as a way of life. Christianity dramatically accelerated this trend in favor of a strict asceticism. St. Jerome and especially St. Anthony the Great were the pioneers, withdrawing from worldly affairs in the desolation of the Syrian and Egyptian deserts.³⁶ The trend reached a climax when wealthy Roman aristocrats began taking seriously Christ’s injunction to give everything to the poor. Paulinus of Nola, a Roman Senator, gave up his entire fortune, and came to an understanding with his wife, Therasia, that they would henceforth live a celibate life.³⁷ He consciously sought to imitate Christ’s humility.³⁸ Others followed in his example, most famously, Melania the Younger, whose story was popularized in a biography by Rufinus.³⁹

It’s worth noting that all of this renunciation of wealth was not intended for the alleviation of poverty. Christ asked his followers to become poor, and in at least one gospel, is portrayed as reproaching those who criticize a woman for anointing him with oil that could have been sold to help the poor. “The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me” (Mark 14:7). In much of early Christianity, the imperative to help the poor was interpreted as an injunction to help the holy poor, i.e., monks and nuns who took vows of poverty so they could venerate God full time.⁴⁰ And the real poor were themselves to renounce for the sake of God. That is the lesson of Jesus’ story of the poor widow’s offering. After rich men deposit large sums in the Temple treasury, this poor widow offers “all she had to live on” (Mark 12:41–43), for which Jesus lauds her. In this worldview, the involuntarily poor were more like sacred totems than they were objects of genuine compassion — Brown’s “highly charged objects of concern.”⁴¹

Still, the most serious of the “holy poor” saw it as their task to renounce themselves in the name of these totems who were seen to share in Christ’s bodily suffering.⁴² The fourth-century Egyptian monastic Pachomius expressed it as such: “Neither shall I eat while my fellow members [in Christ] go hungry and find no bread to eat.”⁴³ To St. Gregory of Nyssa, a fourth-century Bishop, the poor “bear the countenance of our Savior [in order to] cause the hard-hearted . . . to blush with shame.”⁴⁴ In the eyes of many of those who urged the imitation of Christ, feeding the poor was a ritual that had the power to mystically join the worlds of heaven and earth so as to allow spiritual transfer of wealth to heaven.⁴⁵

But for whose sake was this “treasure in heaven” to be stored up? Importantly, it was not treasure for the self.

The selflessness of regard for the afterlife

Some doubt that the Christian doctrine of renunciation of worldly things is really a form of selflessness. If believers are motivated by a desire for heavenly “treasure,” the motivation seems selfish, not selfless.⁴⁶ In fact, Christian doctrine about the afterlife is just another expression of the deeply irrational selflessness of Christian morality.

When Christians make clear the content of their moral code, the message is unambiguous: we should imitate Christ’s sacrifice. One early Christian writer who exemplifies this is Lactantius (c. 250–325 C.E.), advisor to the first Christian Roman emperor, Constantine (who first legalized Christianity in the empire and converted himself):

A deed done with justice, piety and humanity is a deed you do without expectation of return. . . .

It needs to be fully understood that hope of a return must be absolutely missing from the exercise of mercy: only God may look for reward from this particular work. If you looked for it in man, then it will not be humanity but the interest on a benefit; it is impossible for anyone who does what he does for himself and not for another to have earned any credit. And yet there is a return: what a man does for another expecting nothing back from it he does do for himself because he will have his reward from God.⁴⁷

Here Lactantius adds a paradoxical reference to the alleged reward in heaven, but explicitly states that expectation of such a reward is incompatible with receiving moral credit. Since the distinction between selfish and selfless is primarily a contrast with regard to the intended beneficiary of an action, it’s not clear how one could disavow the expectation of reward and still be selfish. So by Lactantius’s account, one cannot be selfishly motivated by the afterlife and earn the moral credit needed to be admitted.⁴⁸

Lactantius’s view is not just a slip of the pen. There are deep Christian reasons why motivation by heavenly rewards is incompatible with moral virtue. These reasons were fully explicated by St. Augustine in his reaction to a doctrine that eventually (through his condemnation) became heresy.

The British monk Pelagius preached the doctrine of extreme asceticism that inspired Paulinus and Melania to renounce their wealth with the expectation that it would deliver “treasure in heaven.”⁴⁹^,⁵⁰ He believed that Christian moral perfection was possible because each of us is made in the image of God with the power of free will and hence the ability to choose ascetic perfection or not. He stressed that one who sought this perfection would do so seeking “values as precious as the objects which [one] has spurned in this world,” and that through one’s choices one would deserve the rewards: “Spiritual riches no one can give you other than yourself.”⁵¹^,⁵²

From one perspective, Pelagian doctrine seems like the perfect embodiment of Christian self-sacrifice: a fully principled commitment to giving up everything for the glory of God. Augustine took a different view. The last sentence quoted was cause, from his perspective, to condemn Pelagius as a heretic.⁵³ That’s because it implies that one can save oneself and earn one’s way into heaven, without assistance from the grace of God. For Augustine only God’s will, not man’s, is responsible for electing the saved vs. the damned. To say otherwise and try to play God is the sin of pride, and an abdication of the humility that Christ preached.⁵⁴ In part to oppose the Pelagian view, Augustine formulated the doctrine of original sin: no act of renunciation could pay off our “debt” to God; we are bound to be sinners and can do nothing to escape the need for constant expiation for our sins.⁵⁵

Importantly, the doctrine that pride is a sin illustrates the depth of the selfless renunciation demanded by Christianity. Pride is a sin because humility is the ultimate virtue, and humility is the ultimate form of renunciation — the renunciation of one’s own best, rational judgment.⁵⁶ After all, in this doctrine, the source of original sin was Adam’s prideful choice to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Adam wanted to know the difference between right and wrong on his own, but God demanded unquestioning faith.⁵⁷ The idea that pride is a sin, that we can through our own knowledge of good and evil earn our virtue and rewards, is essentially a demand for blind faith and the renunciation of our minds.

The virtue of humility is the theme of Augustine’s magnum opus, City of God, which was published just after the sack of Rome in 410. Augustine argued that Rome’s collapse was essentially due to its pride. And the pride he condemned the most was not Roman emperors’ lust for conquest, but the intellectual pride of pagan philosophers, especially pagan ethicists, who thought, like Pelagius, that through their own knowledge and virtue they could achieve their own highest good.⁵⁸

The renunciation of one’s own independent judgment leaves no rational conception of a self that can be the beneficiary of any rewards.

But even if there are formal Christian reasons that oppose motivation by rewards in the afterlife, wouldn’t the promise of these rewards at least show that its adherents believe that they don’t in fact give up that much? The answer that few appreciate is still no. No, if to speak of receiving rewards presupposes a self capable of receiving them. Given the self-effacement demanded by the virtue of humility, it’s hard to see how any self would remain even as an (unintended) beneficiary.

Augustine makes this explicit when he explains how the ultimate sacrifice Christianity demands is fundamentally “a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart the Lord will not despise. [God] does not desire the sacrifice of a slaughtered beast; but He does desire the sacrifice of a contrite heart. . . a contrite heart, humble with the sorrow of penitence.”⁵⁹ He goes on to argue that we must sacrifice only for the sake of God, that we must sacrifice our bodies to become “instruments of righteousness unto God,” and sacrifice our very souls to lose their worldly desires and become “reformed immutably” by submission to God.⁶⁰ The practice of Christian ethics may well have been thought to store up treasure in heaven, but the treasure was for God, not for individual men. No human being who has lost all worldly desires has a self that can receive anything we recognize as rewards.

For Augustine, it’s not clear in what sense a soul in the afterlife is an individual self any longer. Drawing from the “spiritual communism” of the Neoplatonic mysticism of Plotinus, Augustine suggests that the immortal soul loses all previous individual identity as a self and is merged into indeterminate nothingness.⁶¹ Like Paul he stresses that through “the true sacrifice of ourselves,” our minds are “renewed” as we become joined together “one body in Christ.”⁶²

We can borrow a question from a character in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead for anyone who thinks one can be selfishly motivated by the afterlife: “when the gates [of heaven] fall open, who is it that's going to enter?”⁶³

Friedrich Nietzsche saw that it was Christian faith as such which demanded sacrifice: “[Faith] . . . resembles in a gruesome manner a continual suicide of reason. . . . From the start, the Christian faith is sacrifice: a sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit; at the same time, enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation.”⁶⁴ Ayn Rand made the same point even more precisely:

It is your mind that they want you to surrender — all those who preach the creed of sacrifice, whatever their tags or their motives, whether they demand it for the sake of your soul or of your body, whether they promise you another life in heaven or a full stomach on this earth. Those who start by saying: “It is selfish to pursue your own wishes, you must sacrifice them to the wishes of others” — end up by saying: “It is selfish to uphold your convictions, you must sacrifice them to the convictions of others.”⁶⁵

If we take this seriously, the very acceptance of the doctrine of the afterlife (or any other article of faith) is an act of selflessness — precisely because it is one that has always been and has to be embraced on blind, submission to an alleged authority.⁶⁶^,⁶⁷ Christian morality is a morality of selflessness because Christian religion is fundamentally a belief based on faith, the renunciation of one’s own independent judgment. It’s a faith that leaves no rational conception of a self that can be the beneficiary of any rewards.

As Rand’s comments indicate, the demand for faith would go on to become an essential part of all creeds of selflessness, whether religious or secular.

Transitions to and from Christianity

The influence of religion on a culture is not all or nothing; it comes in degrees. Indeed, a survey of the historical periods before and after the dominance of Christianity shows that as more systematically religious thinking gradually strengthened its grip on the West and paved the way to Christianity, the morality of selflessness became increasingly prominent. As religion loosened its grip, so too did that morality.

In the years leading up to the Christian era, the philosophy of the period became increasingly and overtly mystical in a way that helped mold Christianity itself. Even as these philosophers embraced eudemonia as the ostensible end of their ethics, their views of what constituted eudaemonia came to resemble the life of the ascetic saint.

The Stoics, for instance, maintained that the entire universe was governed by an animate force, the logos (sometimes referred to as Zeus). Theirs was also the most ascetic conception of eudaemonia in the pagan world. It amounted to the freedom from deep concern for the worldly values other than virtue (which they saw as “indifferent” to the good).⁶⁸ The parallels between the Stoics on this issue and the ethics of St. Paul are striking.

By the same token, the Neoplatonist Plotinus embraced and emphasized all of the most mystical elements of Plato’s philosophy (e.g., that the universe was a product of the ineffable One and could be known only intuitively). In ethics he argued that virtue required not only freedom from the desires of the body, but also mystical union with the One — the idea eventually picked up by Augustine in his anti-individualistic metaphysics of the afterlife.⁶⁹^,⁷⁰

There is even more to say about how as religion retreated in the West after the Middle Ages, so too did the morality of selflessness.

Whereas Augustine stressed the most mystical elements of Plato in his foundational formulation of Christianity, St. Thomas Aquinas reintroduced the worldly elements of Aristotle’s philosophy in an attempt to graft them on to Christianity. This included both the centrality of observation-based rationality and an ethics at least nominally targeting eudaemonia.⁷¹ Aquinas is careful to avoid charges of heresy, so he always attempts (untenably) to balance Aristotle’s wisdom with Catholic dogma. But the Aristotelian elements were pronounced and important. For instance in ethics, Aquinas paradoxically held both humility and magnanimity as virtues.⁷² His embrace of eudaemonism would incur the wrath of Duns Scotus and Martin Luther, who resurrected Augustinian objections to self-love and pride.⁷³^,⁷⁴

After the Renaissance and the scientific revolution, Enlightenment philosophers began exploring the connection between morality and self-interest. Many of their positions are complicated (arguably, to their detriment) by an embrace of “psychological egoism,” the idea that one’s actions are necessarily aimed at self-interest such that no guidance could point in another direction. But they still dared to consider the possibility of self-interested motivation for the pursuit of virtuous action, and questioned doctrines traditionally associated with the doctrine of selflessness.

Notably, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), whose materialism put him at odds with conventional religion, offered a host of self-interested reasons for keeping one’s promises.⁷⁵ The Enlightenment Augustinian, Bernard Mandeville, observed with horror that the actions his contemporary British countrymen regarded as virtuous, especially industry that helped spur prosperity, were motivated by selfish motives. Even acts of humility seemed to be motivated by a desire for honor, suggesting that morally pure motivation by his Augustinian standards was actually impossible.⁷⁶ These psychological egoists together shook up the moral philosophy of the period, prompting further philosophers to explain the possibility of moral motivation.

Baruch Spinoza’s (1632–1677) radical Enlightenment philosophy embraced the pantheistic doctrine that equated God with nature, emptying theism of much of its mystical content. While he was a psychological egoist, Spinoza argued in his Ethics that guiding one’s life by reason meant rejecting the guidance of pity and humility and embracing a kind of “self-contentment” as “the highest good we can hope for.”⁷⁷

Several philosophers challenged the assumption that moral action could not be selfishly motivated. Lord Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper) (1671–1713), John Locke’s most famous student was one: he pushed for a return to a Stoic–Aristotelian eudaemonist account of virtue, and even spoke of the possibility of being “rightly selfish.”⁷⁸ Bishop Joseph Butler (1692–1752) rejected the psychological egoist claim that we are bound to pursue our self-interest, and argued that actions consciously pursued out of self-love can be virtuous. He even claimed that there are rarely any conflicts between moral duty and self-love.⁷⁹

David Hume’s (1711–1776) position was similar to Butler’s, in that he allows for the possibility of virtue in the presence of selfish motivation. As a notorious religious skeptic, he even challenged various arguments for religious ethics and openly repudiated “celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude and the whole train of monkish virtues” for not serving any worldly purpose.⁸⁰

None of these Enlightenment thinkers fully rejected every element of Christian ethics. What’s important about the period is how the retreat of religious belief moved in pace with the retreat of the ethics of selflessness. The history of Christianity, both its origins and its partial retreat from Western culture, bears the marks we would expect if its religious outlook directly influenced the adoption of the morality of selfless humility and renunciation.

Why secular selflessness still lingers

As Holland appreciates, even as traditional Christian religion retreated from Western culture, its ethics still maintained a solid grip.

For instance, even though David Hume rejected religion and to a significant extent as well the morality of humility, in another respect his moral views remained tethered to the religious culture in which he was raised. In this respect, he is representative of a great many secular thinkers, like Pinker, Singer, and Dawkins, who would follow. All of them thinking of themselves as secular and scientific and as having abandoned the relics of primitive faith. They simply do not realize or (in some cases) are unwilling to find out just how many such relics they still hold.

In arguing against psychological egoism, for example, Hume stresses that not all motivated actions are motivated by self-interest. He was explicit that actions motivated by benevolence are judged as moral because of a cooler feeling of sympathy, cooler because impartial with respect to one’s own interests. It is from this viewpoint he thinks we identify actions as moral or not.⁸¹ So even as he objected to the monkish virtues, the “data” Hume took for granted in interpreting the concept of morality were the moral attitudes of his day.⁸² Even in the late 18th century, these attitudes were still predominantly Christian.

The point of the present argument, of course, isn’t that there’s something uniquely special about Christianity as a religion vs. other religions. The broader hypothesis is that it’s religion as such that accounts for the influence of the morality of selflessness in any culture. Christianity just happens to be the most culturally influential religion in the West. A survey of Eastern philosophy, especially Buddhism, is likely to turn up results similar to the present investigation.

And there are also religious attitudes embraced by those who explicitly disavow religion. These include a belief in transcendent realities and a willingness to base ethical beliefs on “intuitive” feelings. These secular stand-ins for God and faith can just as easily lead to the adoption of modern altruism, and modern secular versions of altruism often embrace both, as I have argued previously.⁸³

Any religious doctrine or religiously inspired philosophy that holds there to be a higher power to which we must submit, both in action and in thought, logically pushes its adopters towards a morality of selflessness. This is clearest in the case of Christianity’s influence on Western moral thinking. But it also continues to apply to Christianity’s many secular Western descendants.

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Secularists like Richard Dawkins and his followers who tout their unscrutinized Good Samaritan’s “urge” should become acutely aware that this urge is ultimately the product of a long cultural tradition, not some innate instinct. The secular moral outlook that celebrates selfless sacrifice for others originates in the same blind faith that Augustine and Paul had in a voice demanding that they submit their wealth, their happiness, their pride, and ultimately their minds to the demands of God. Modern philosophers have succeeded in secularizing this ethical outlook only modestly, by substituting the voice of God for the voice of our feelings about the poor or society’s other alleged needs.

But truly secular and scientific thinkers need to subject every powerful urge they feel to the scrutiny of reason. The voice they hear may simply be a distorted version of the voice of the Christian preachers of their childhood. It’s a voice that’s sustained and amplified by a cultural atmosphere that has never been fully purged of the noxious pollution of Christian selflessness.

1. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), p. 215.

2. “Richard Dawkins: I’m a Cultural Christian,” LBC YouTube channel, April 1, 2024.

3. Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books, 2019), p. 533. Others have claimed Christianity was the ultimate source for modern Western moral attitudes. Friedrich Nietzsche made the claim, linking Christianity’s morality of renunciation with more modern ethical theories that celebrate selflessness like Kantian deontology and utilitarianism. (For references to Kant see: Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 99–102 (V: §187–188) and The Antichrist, H. L. Mencken (transl.); and The Portable Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann (transl.), (New York: Penguin, 1976), 576–578 (§10-11). For references to utilitarianism see Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 153–54 (VII: §225), 207 (IX: §260). Also: “The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Walter Kaufmann (transl.), (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 90 (II: §20). See also On the Genealogy of Morals, 34–35 (I, §9).) Likewise 20th-century British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe alleged that modern notion that moral obligation requires motivation that is independent of one’s inclinations and interests derives ultimately from the Judeo-Christian notion of morality as the dictate of a divine law-giver. (See G.E.M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy (vol. 33 (124)), 5–6.) Neither figure presents systematic evidence this historical causal claim. (But for at least some linguistic evidence for Nietzsche’s thesis, see Mark Migotti, “Slave Morality, Socrates, and the Bushmen: A Reading of the First Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (vol. 58 (4), Dec. 1998), pp. 745–79.)

4. Holland, Dominion, p. 13.

5. Aristotle, Ibid., p. 73 (1115b10–15).

6. Aristotle, Ibid., p. 97; 99 (1123b3–5; 1123b30–35).

7. Aristotle, Ibid., p. 83–84 (1119a11-16).

8. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Terence Irwin (transl.), (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1985), p. 93 (112a25–30).

9. Aristotle, Ibid., p. 95 (1122b20–25).

10. Aristotle, Ibid., p. 91 (1121b5–10).

11. And there is reason to think Aristotle was describing a practice in classical Athens that eventually became the basis for euergetism in the later Hellenistic–Roman world. See Marc Domingo Gygax, “Classical Athens and the Invention of Civic Euergetism,” in Marc Gygax (ed.), Benefactors and the Polis: The Public Gift in the Greek Cities from the Homeric World to Late Antiquity (Cambridge, UK/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 69–95. See also Stephan J. Joubert, “One Form of Social Exchange or Two? ‘Euergetism,’ Patronage, and Testament Studies.” Biblical Theology Bulletin (vol. 31 (1), February 2001), pp. 17–25.

12. The focus of Aristotle’s other-regarding virtues (whether magnificence or generosity) is not even always about giving. “It is also proper to the magnificent person to build a house befitting his riches, since this is also a suitable adornment; and to spend more readily on long-lasting achievements, since these are the finest.” See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 96 (1123a5–9).

13. Aristotle, Ibid., p. 86 (1120a1–5).

14. Aristotle, Ibid., p. 207 (1155a7–10).

15. “In loving their friend they love what is good for themselves; for when a good person becomes a friend he becomes a good for his friend. Each of them loves what is good for himself, and repays in equal measure the wish and the pleasantness of his friend.”Aristotle, Ibid., p. 217 (1158a34–38).

16. Aristotle, Ibid., p. 29; 42 (1102a5–6; 1106a23–24).

17. He’s not always clearly univocal about this. He also discusses how politicians aim to achieve the happiness of their fellow citizens, though they do this by encouraging the virtue of their citizens. Aristotle, Ibid., p. 29 (1102a9–10).

18. Aristotle, Ibid., p. 256 (1169a10–14).

19. Aristotle, A New Translation of the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle (anonymous transl.), 2nd ed. (Oxford: Baxter for J. and C. Vincent, 1826), 1168b23–31. Aristotle might not be an ethical egoist. He is unclear about whether the self-interest of an act is what makes it moral vs. simply that what is moral happens to be in one’s self-interest. See Gregory Salmieri, “Aristotle on Selfishness? Understanding the Iconoclasm of Nicomachean Ethics ix 8,” Ancient Philosophy (34(1), Spring 2014):101-120.

20. Plato, G.M.A. Grube (transl.), The Republic (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1992). In Book I of The Republic, Plato has Socrates argue that because justice is the soul’s main virtue, anyone who acts with virtue thereby is “blessed and happy” (p. 31 (353e10-354a9)). Elsewhere in The Republic, Plato stresses the that the just man is happier than the unjust man, especially because the different parts of his soul are performing their proper functions, with reason playing an authoritative role that harmonizes all the others (p. 119 (443d-e)). In this way justice in the soul is analogous to the health of the body (pp. 260-1 (589a-b). His remarks on this topic are scattered and there is some question of whether he takes virtue to be merely necessary, or both necessary and sufficient. But his attempt to connect moral virtue with self-interest is provocative enough that it conflicts with the common (among others, modern) views of ethics. See Terence Irwin, The Development of Ethics: A Historical and Critical Study, Volume I: From Socrates to Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 89–90; 98–100.

21. See Irwin, The Development of Ethics, pp. 273–74 citing Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Volume II: Books 6–10. R. D. Hicks (transl.), Loeb Classical Library 185 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), p. 653–55 (128). See also Irwin, p. 275n54, citing Plutarch, Moralia, Volume XIV: That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible. Reply to Colotes in Defence of the Other Philosophers. Is "Live Unknown" a Wise Precept? On Music, Benedict Einarson, Phillip H. De Lacy (transl.), Loeb Classical Library 428 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 47 (1091b).

22. See Irwin, p. 286; 318, citing Cicero, On Ends. H. Rackham (transl), Loeb Classical Library 40, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), p. 243 (iii 24). See also Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Volume II: Books 6–10. R. D. Hicks (transl.), Loeb Classical Library 185 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), p. 197; 205–206; 231 (89; 98; 127); and Stobaeus, excerpts from Anthology in The Stoics Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia (Brad Inwood, transl.), (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co, 2008), pp. 126–27; 129; 143 (5b4–5; 5d; 6d; 11h).

23. Plato presented his ideas in dialogue form and his mouthpiece Socrates’ claims about the necessary advantage of justice are received with skepticism by his interlocutors. See Irwin, The Development of Ethics, p. 113.

24. See Laerke Recht, Human Sacrifice: Archaeological Perspectives from Around the World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 1–3; 22; 58–59; 97–98; 110–111. Plato and Aristotle themselves retained remnants of the primitive approach (Plato’s advocacy of a totalitarian state in The Republic bears the mark of a tribalistic past; Aristotle’s advocacy of slavery shows a similar unwillingness to reject all tradition).

25. Charles Oman, On the Writing of History (London: Metheun & Co. Ltd, 1939), pp. 107–8.

26. Charles Oman, On the Writing of History, pp. 107–108.

27. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 62. “Classical society did not invest acts of generosity to the poor with the same, high ideological charge as did the Jews and Christians” (p. 59).

28. As Brown explains it, it’s not that wealthy Romans had no concern for giving. They would often loan money to friends and family, especially in a world without major banking institutions (Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, p. 60). If any single social action did sum up the pagan ideal with regard to giving in this period, it was when citizens, as though practicing Aristotle’s virtue of magnificence, would show their love for the city by giving to support great civic projects like building statues or temples or running spectacular games for the citizens. (See Brown, Ibid., p. 62.) They would sometimes practice acts of generosity for the poor, not because they were poor, but because they were Roman (Brown, Ibid., p. 68). What’s salient here is the singular lack of focus among the targets of their criticism, the wealthy Romans, on the need of the downtrodden as the focus of moral virtue. What many wealthy people of the late Roman Empire saw as virtuous was working to achieve what they saw as great things for the city in which they lived, not for scattering their wealth to be devoured by those they saw as diminutive.

29. Brown, Ibid., p. 75.

30. Bart Ehrman, “How I Begin My Book on Jesus, Ethics, and Altruism,” EhrmanBlog.com (November 13, 2024).

31. Brown, Ibid., p. 76.

32. It is hard to know for sure which stories from which gospels reflect the views of the historical Jesus. But whether real or imagined, the Jesus who came to be embraced was one who articulated revolutionary moral views. We can be reasonably certain that Jesus saw himself primarily as a Jewish prophet who was convinced that an apocalypse was imminent, and that we must repent of our sins before God institutes a kingdom on earth and punishes the wicked. See Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them (New York: Harper One, 2010), pp. 156–162.

33. Holland, Dominion, p. 9.

34. Interestingly, from what we can tell, there was little if anything in the view of the historical Jesus that promised rewards for piety in the afterlife — but we will return to this later. See Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (London: Oneworld Publications, 2020), pp. 147–67.

35. Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), p. 235.

36. Freeman, Ibid., pp. 237–39.

37. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, p. 185; 209; 216.

38. Brown, Ibid., pp. 222.

39. Brown, Ibid., pp. 292–93.

40. See Peter Brown, Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2016).

41. St. Paul’s celebrated passage about how “love is patient, love is kind,” makes clear why love of other people for their sake is not even the focus of the Christian ethic. The love he has in mind is not even aimed at strangers who are objects of charity. According to Paul, I can “give away all my goods to feed others” and “give up my body that I may be burned” and still not have the kind of love he has in mind (1 Corinthians 13:3). The only love that counts, love that we cannot understand through “childish” reasoning, is love that we can have only in the afterlife as we see God “face to face” (1 Corinthians 13:11–13).

42. See also: “For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another . . . . By this we have known love, because He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. Now whoever might have the world’s goods, and might see his brother having need, and might close up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?” (1 John 3:11–16).

43. Peter Brown, Treasure in Heaven, p. 107–8.

44. Gregory of Nyssa, “On the Love of the Poor” (1) (from De Beneficentia), Susan R. Holman (transl.), in The Hungry Are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 194.

45. Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, p. 233.

46. See William S. Green, “Epilogue,” in Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton (eds.), Altruism in World Religions (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2005), pp. 191–94.

47. Lactantius, Anthony Bowen and Peter Garnsey (transl.), Divine Institutes (Liverpool University Press, 2004), pp. 353–55 (Book VI, 11.1–12.1).

48. It would be senseless to define selfish action without reference to motives. A great many selfish acts that aim at one’s own advantage but which misfire, through accident or ignorance, would be disqualified. Especially if the reward they believe in simply does not exist.

49. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, pp. 287–88.

50. Brown, Ibid., pp. 231–33.

51. Pelagius, Letter to Demetrias, in Brinley Roderick Rees (transl.), Pelagius: Life and Letters (Boydell Press, 1998), p. 36 (2).

52. Pelagius, Ibid., 48 (4).

53. Augustine, Letter to Juliana (Letter 188), Ch. 1 (§4–5), (J. G. Cunningham, transl.). From Philip Schaff (ed.), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 1. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight.

54. “Whosoever, therefore, is worthy, to him it is due; and if it is thus due to him, it ceases to be grace; for grace is given, but a debt is paid. Grace, therefore, is given to those who are unworthy, that a debt may be paid to them when they become worthy. He, however, who has bestowed on the unworthy the gifts which they possessed not before, does Himself take care that they shall have whatever things He means to recompense to them when they become worthy.” Augustine, “On the Proceedings of Pelagius,” Ch. 33, Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis (transl.), and revised by Benjamin B. Warfield. From Philip Schaff (ed.), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 5. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight.

55. Brown, The Ransom of the Soul, p. 99.

56. Augustine, Ibid., p. 469 (Book XI, Ch. 14); p. 494 (Book XI, Ch. 33); p. 604 (Book XIV, Ch. 11); p. 610 (Book XIV, Ch. 13).

57. Augustine, Ibid., pp. 604–611 (Book XIV, Ch. 11-4).

58. Augustine, R. W. Dyson (transl.), The City of God against the Pagans (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 58 (Book II, Ch. 7); pp. 376–77 (Book IX, Ch. 14); p. 582 (Book XIV, Ch. 2); p. 922 (Book XIX, Chapter 4); p. 961 (Book XIX, Ch. 25).

59. Augustine, Ibid., p. 397 (Book X, Ch. 5).

60. Augustine, Ibid., p. 399 (Book X, Ch. 6).

61. Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, pp. 180–83. Augustine’s encounter with Plotinus would influence him profoundly and help push him toward his final conversion, Christianity, which he thought the neo-Platonists had anticipated. For more on Plotinus’s influence on Augustine, see Robin Lane Fox, Augustine: Conversions to Confessions (New York: Basic Books, 2015), pp. 225–40.

62. Augustine, Ibid., pp. 400 (Book X, Ch. 6).

63. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, (New York: Bobbs-Merril, 1943), p. 375.

64. Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Kaufman (transl.), Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), p. 60 (III: §46).

65. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957), p. 1030.

66. The arbitrary, faith-based modifications of this doctrine through the ages are too evident. (The idea of the afterlife for an immortal soul (ironically, borrowing from the Greeks whom the Christians had previously repudiated) seems to have been grafted onto the idea of the resurrection of the body in order to explain away the failed prediction of a looming apocalypse. It should be obvious that there is no evidence to support the doctrine. What’s less well-appreciated is how the history of the doctrine bears all of the tell-tale signs of having been invented by men and adopted by blind conformity. Of course this is true of much of the content of Christian religion as well, but with the doctrine of the afterlife it’s especially clear. There was no mention of an afterlife in the Old Testament and at most ambiguous reference to it in the New. Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife, pp. 81–101; 147–211. Jewish thinkers did come to believe in earthly resurrection of the bodies of the elect at the end of days, perhaps under influence of Persian Zoroastrianism, but without much reference to an eternity of bliss thereafter (Ehrman, Ibid., p. 104). The idea of an immortal soul subject to reward or punishment instead seems to have come from none other than the Greeks, in a tradition from Homer to Plato (Ehrman, Ibid., pp. 35–65). In fact early Christians criticized the idea of an immortal soul, as it seemed to put each of us on par with the divine vs. being subordinate creatures of the divine (Peter Brown, Ransom of the Soul, pp. 10–11). Early Christians had no view of an afterlife, and only made room for an immediate union with God for the martyrs — not for the rest of us. (Brown, Ibid., pp. 5–12.

67. See Ehrman, Heaven and Hell., pp. 191–93; Peter Brown, Ransom of the Soul, p. 45. It was the idea of the resurrection of the body on earth that became part of the Jewish apocalypticism that Jesus seemed to embrace (Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell., pp. 143–46; pp. 154–57). It was this idea, not eternal reward or punishment for every immortal soul, that Christians continued to embrace through the time of Paul, who thought the apocalypse was still imminent. When that apocalypse did not come, Christians had to solve the problem of why all of their scriptures said it should have happened. In the signature move of groundless belief seeking to insulate itself from refutation, their doctrine was arbitrarily modified. With the grafting of the immortality of the soul onto the resurrection of the body came the extra problem of how to make sense of an immortal body, which would have had to be separated for a time from the immortal soul. The absurdity of this idea spurred the adoption of further absurdities (like the idea of purgatory) to rationalize the previous absurdities. To hold these required only more blind faith. Christians today who believe in an afterlife not only believe it on faith, but believe on further baseless faith that they are adopting the previously baseless faith of their ancestors. No one who believes on grounds of double faith honestly believes that he is making rational calculations for how best to achieve some far-off happiness for himself. Instead, he’s passively accepted a belief that is the product of centuries of rationalizations for previously defeated faiths. He’s allowing himself to be manipulated by others who themselves were manipulated. That is the essence of a selfless approach to ethics, adopting beliefs about right and wrong through selfless duty. It is the humility of Augustine’s “broken spirit,” the sacrifice of the mind.

68. See Brad Inwood, “Introduction” in The Stoics Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia, pp. xiii–xv, and Irwin, The Development of Ethics, pp. 291–92. Irwin quotes a fragment of Chrysippus via Plutarch to illustrate the connection between Stoic theology and ethics. See Plutarch. Moralia, Volume XIII: Part 2: Stoic Essays. Harold Cherniss (transl.). Loeb Classical Library 470 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 431–33 (1035c-d).

69. Plotinus, in Elmer O’Brien (transl.), The Essential Plotinus (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1964), p. 117 (Enneads I 2.7).

70. Just as we see pagan ethics fading away with the increasing religiosity of the culture, we see religious ethics gradually fading in by first promising worldly returns. This was most obviously true of pagan polytheism, in which believers sacrificed animals or food in return for tangible favors (like a favorable harvest) from the gods. Many Jews and the earliest Christians saw their God through the same lens. (See Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, pp. 12–13.) Indeed the first Christian emperor, Constantine, was thought to have converted because of his conviction that the Christian God had assisted in his victory in the pivotal battle of the Milvian bridge. (See Eusebius, The Life of Constantine, Ch. 27, in Ernest Cushing Richardson (transl.), Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (eds.), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 1 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890). Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight.)

71. For Aquinas’s reintroduction of Aristotle and its general effect on the culture, see Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind, pp. 323–33; and Arthur Herman, The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization (New York: Random House, 2013), pp. 223–40.

72. See Thomas Aquinas, Alfred J. Freddoso (transl.), Summa Theologica, 129.3; 161.1. “Magnanimity” is from magnanimitas, the most direct translation of Aristotle’s virtue of pride (in Greek, megalopsychia). But Aquinas also calls “pride” (superbia) a sin. See Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 162.1. For Aquinas, whereas magnanimity is understood roughly as Aristotle does, as about thinking oneself worthy of great honors when they are due (naturally, for Aquinas, this means being magnanimous about gifts from God (129.3). Humility is about thinking little of oneself to the extent that one is defective due to original sin (taking Augustine’s position). So Aquinas thinks one can hold both of these virtues consistently. Pride, by contrast, is the sin of wanting to be seen as more worthy of honor than one actually is, what Aristotle would have regarded as the vice of vanity.

73. See T. H. Irwin, “Scotus and the Possibility of Moral Motivation,” in Paul Bloomfield (ed.), Morality and Self-Interest (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 159–66.

74. See T. H. Irwin, “Scotus and the Possibility of Moral Motivation,” in Paul Bloomfield (ed.), Morality and Self-Interest (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 166.

75. See Thomas Hobbes, Richard Tuck (ed.), Leviathan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 100–103 (Ch. 15). Note, however, that it’s not clear what normative force Hobbes’s arguments here have, given that his entire approach to morality seems to be not normative but descriptive.

76. See Roger Crisp, Sacrifice Regained, pp. 60–73. See also T. H. Irwin, “Scotus and the Possibility of Moral Motivation,” pp. 170–76. See also T. H. Irwin, “Scotus and the Possibility of Moral Motivation,” pp. 167–68.

77. Baruch Spinoza, Samuel Shirley (transl.), Ethics (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1992), 181–83 (IV.50, 52, 53).

78. See Roger Crisp, Sacrifice Regained, pp. 74–91. On p. 79, Crisp cites Shaftesbury (3rd Earl of), L. Klein (ed.), Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 56.

79. See Roger Crisp, Sacrifice Regained. pp. 105–9, citing Joseph Butler, “Upon Human Nature” (Sermon III), David McNaughton (ed.), Joseph Butler: Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel and Other Writings on Ethics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017).

80. David Hume, P. H. Nidditch (ed.), Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 270 (IX.1).

81. David Hume, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, pp. 271–78 (IX.1).

82. See Roger Crisp, Sacrifice Regained, p. 148; citing Thomas Beauchamp, “Editors’ Introduction,” in David Hume, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 40.

83. Ben Bayer, “Religious Skeptics Should Question Their Moral Theology,” New Ideal, May 17, 2023, and “Debunking the Supernaturalism That Haunts Secular Ethics,” New Ideal, October 11, 2023.