I am mainly in agreement with you on the Civil War. There a few inaccuracies in your account of the history of ethical inquiry, however. First, Socrates was generally acknowledged to be the first to concentrate on questions of ethics, and Plato laid the ground work of much of the subsequent tradition. Many of the schools that were contemporaneous with the Academy, and predated the Lyceum, claimed to have originated with Socrates, including the Cynics and the Stoics. That is one of the reasons why, in Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses various ethical theories already extent, because the subject was already very much worked over. Cicero was actually primarily a Platonist, not an Aristotelian, although eclectic.
It is not precisely true that there was no place for the gods and goddesses, by the way, except that the conception of divinity was refined. Aristotle's cosmology and metaphysics depends upon the idea of God as the most actualized being, "thought thinking itself", the Unmoved Mover, for love of which the sphere of the fixed stars moves, and so on down the line of the lesser divinities, namely the celestial bodies, like the sun and the planets. Ultimately, his ethical theories depend on the idea of a determinate cosmic order, especially when he places philosophical contemplation as the greatest human good. Similarly, the Stoics conceived of the divine Logos, an immanent principle which guided the universe, and into conformity with which we should strive. Now, it is true that these ideas of the divine do not involve caring about what people do, but they do mean that the moral order is rooted in the cosmic order, and that a sort of deistic conception of the divine shapes the cosmos. Also, not all Greeks and Romans were philosophers, and many people thought the gods did care.
What you do find in the Bible is the notion of righteousness, which is something that exists independently of the Mosaic Law. Thus, by tradition, Job was considered to be a righteous Gentile, and the patriarchs were considered righteous. There is no novelty in Paul speaking of a law written in the heart of the gentile.
Aquinas never tried to derive Catholicism from reason. He expressly says in the Summa Theologiae that there are many proposition of sacred theology that can only be derived from Scripture. He merely tried to harmonize philosophy and theology. In any event, the tendency to absorb philosophical ideas into theology long predates Aquinas. Justin Martyr, one of the first patristic writers, tried to prove that Christianity was not only the fulfillment of the Old Testament, but that it was the fulfillment of the queries of the philosophers. Augustine notorious imported philosophical concerns into theology. The idea of the natural law, which was primarily a Stoic doctrine, but was picked up by Roman jurists in theorizing about law, was embedded in Latinate culture long before Aquinas.
Sins could never be remitted by indulgences. Confession was the only way to access the sacrament of penance. Indulgences merely addressed the matter of time spent in Purgatory. The real abuse came when they were hawked to raise money in the most vulgar manner, rather than made solemn occasions to do good works as a matter of penance.
The primary goal of reformers was to not to affirm private judgement, but to affirm the doctrine of salvation by faith, and the sufficiency of Christ's vicarious atonement (rendering Purgatory superfluous), and, in some cases, the ineluctability of election. The Evangelical (Lutheran) churches remained moral instructors through the episcopacy, and the Reformed (Calvinistic) churches retained a strong presbytery, and often resorted to public punishments of wrong- doers, such as putting them in the stocks. Remember, the Puritans were of that breed. Do you think that they believed that the church should back off of moral instruction?
The Enlightenment brought a general questioning of custom, and a distaste for what often seemed, among many intellectuals, like superstitions in the churches, particularly the Catholic church. However, even those rejecting conventional beliefs were usually deists, and believed in a non- historically- intervening God, and a natural law rooted in his ordering of the universe. Many of them believed in an afterlife and judgment too. Kant did, and argued for rational religion, demystified of miraculous elements. In the end, he argues for intellectual agnosticism (we do not know that God exists) but rational belief (since we are compelled to acknowledge a moral order that is not fully vindicated in this life, we require God and the promise of ultimate judgment to reconcile the natural and moral spheres).
I will leave it at that....... |
