The Dartmouth
Apologia
A Journal of Christian Thought
Spring 2010, Volume 4, Issue 2
MLH[\YPUN
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:VJPHS9LMVYT
Revivalism and Reform in
Early 19th-Century America
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Morality: Two Views
Christianity and Culture,
Lessons from China
Eugenics and Its Ethical
Implications Revisited
M
odern academia is a maze of compartmentalization. The corpus of human
knowledge is divvied up among more fields and specializations than any one of
us is capable of exploring. John Sommerville, author of The Decline of the Secular
University, points to this phenomenon as a symptom of a fundamental deficiency in the modern educational experience. Considering that there is widespread agreement on the value of
our academic pursuits, as evidenced by our willingness to expend vast quantities of time and
money on them, one would expect to find a similar consensus on the ultimate purpose of these
endeavors. But this consensus is conspicuously absent, and none is likely to be found without
a conscious redirection of our academic efforts
ff
toward the determination and acquisition of
absolute values.
Many academics reject the idea of absolute values altogether, like the ghostly bishop in C.S.
Lewis’ The Great Divorce. The bishop, having arrived at the edge of heaven, is met by an old
friend. The friend tells him, “I will bring you to the land not of questions but of answers, and
you shall see the face of God.” But the ghost replies, “For me there is no such thing as a final
answer. The free wind of inquiry must alwayss continue to blow through the mind… to travel
hopefully is better than to arrive.” The friend replies, “If that were true and known to be true,
how could anyone travel hopefully? There would be nothing to hope for.” By ignoring his destination, the bishop has deprived his intellectual journey of value. Likewise, if our values are not
rooted in ultimate fact, then all of our efforts
ff
toward intellectual integration and progress will
be mired in futility.
Unless we question the purpose of our academic pursuits, life and thought will be proff
itless, and if our questions about purpose cannot be answered with finality, we have no reason to
hope for fulfillment. Therefore, Sommerville concludes, “Anybody who has achieved a unifying
view of all of life and all of thought will have something like a religious view… [Everything they
do or think] will be integrated in some highest concern.” The only way to achieve a fulfilling,
integrated intellectual life is by tracing our individual goals to a fixed reality of purpose and
meaning, something like God.
At The Apologia, we believe that “Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.” This journal
seeks to present Christianity as the message of Eternal Fact and Supreme Value, as a foundation
for all of life and thought. We hold that our intellectual abilities are properly directed to experiencing and understanding the final, definite, and unchangeable reality of the human condition, which we are convinced was embodied in the person of Jesus Christ. Having recognized
that Christ’s claims are so expansive that one cannot consider them properly while they remain
confined to “organized religion,” we discover that all of our beliefs and actions are necessarily
informed by our religious commitments. Therefore, we strive to integrate faith and free inquiry
by applying academic rigor to our spiritual convictions and spiritual insight to our academic
pursuits.
Spring 2010, Volume 4, Issue 2
Charles Clark ‘11
Sarah White ‘11
Bethany Mills ‘10
Peter Blair ‘12
Brady Kelly ‘12
Elli Kim ‘13
Alex Mercado ‘11
Suiwen Liang ‘13
Daniel Choi ‘13
!
Kelsey Carter ‘12
Robert Cousins ‘09
Grace Nauman ‘11
Emily DeBaun ‘12
Lee Farnsworth ‘12
Suiwen Liang ‘13
Brendan Woods ‘13
Fr. John Corbett
! !
Gregg Fairbrothers, Tuck
Richard Denton, Physics
Eric Hansen, Thayer
Eric Johnson, Tuck
James Murphy, Government
Leo Zacharski, DMS
Council on Student Organizations
The Eleazar Wheelock Society
Andrew Schuman ‘10
Robert Philp
Charles Clark
Editor-in-Chief
We welcome the submission of any article, essay, or
artwork for publication in The Dartmouth Apologia.
Submissions should seek to promote respectful,
thoughtful discussion in the community. We will
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by Bethany Mills ‘10
The opinions expressed in The Dartmouth Apologia are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect
those of the journal, its editors, or Dartmouth College. Copyright © 2010 The Dartmouth Apologia.
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Brendan Woods ‘13
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Fr. John Corbett, Ph.D.
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Peter Blair ‘12
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Lee Farnsworth ‘12
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Sarah White ‘11
and Charles Clark ‘11
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Robert Cousins ‘09
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Grace Nauman‘11
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Emily DeBaun ‘12
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Suiwen Liang ‘13
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by Brendan Woods
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O
n September 2, 1979, Mu En Church in
Shanghai, China opened its doors for the
first time in three decades. Although no public Christian service had taken place in Shanghai since
the Communist Party took power in 1949, one thousand Chinese citizens from all walks of life crowded
into the church for worship.1
Since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) voted to
allow religious worship in 1979, Christianity in China
has experienced an unexpected boom. Membership in
both registered churches and illegal “house churches”
has swelled to over 80 million Chinese, according to
the most recent Associated Press reports2—a figure over
twenty times higher than the number of Christians in
China before the CCP took power. This phenomenon
has raised important questions for sociologists of religion, since the growth of Christianity in China has occurred simultaneously with its economic development.
This trend runs contrary to conventional wisdom and
development theory, which hold that as a society becomes more technologically and economically developed, its population tends to lose interest in religion.
Furthermore, many observers have been surprised that
Christianity should thrive in China because of China’s
cultural separation from traditional Western centers of
Christianity. The present state of Christianity in China
2 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
]
“Chairman Mao Has
Come to Our Factory,”
Chinese Communist
Party political poster
indicates that in both cases the accepted wisdom may
be in need of revision, and religion may be neither opposed to material progress nor based purely upon cultural biases.
The history of Christianity in China has been marked
by several false starts and subsequent declines. The first
Christian mission in China came in 635 with the arrival of Nestorian missionaries. Arriving at the height
of the Tang Dynasty’s cultural and economic achievement, the Nestorians were tolerated by China’s rulers
and were even able to establish bishoprics in Chang-an
and other cities. Around the year 900, civil unrest and
the collapse of the Tang Dynasty led to the abolishment of the missions, and the religion was virtually
extinct in China for a period of over 300 years. In the
13th century, Franciscans led the next wave of missionaries into China. The Franciscans were banished from
China when the Ming Dynasty took power in 1365,
and it was not until the arrival of the Jesuits in 1601 that
missionary activity truly took root in China. Over the
next three and a half centuries, China became the largest mission field in the world. The Western Christian
presence in China swelled to include eight thousand
missionaries from Protestant sects alone in 1926. This
success was not to last, however. With the beginning
of CCP rule in 1949, the results of three hundred and
forty-eight years of missionary efforts were all but extinguished. Historian G. Thompson Brown describes
the effects of the Cultural Revolution thus:
Four years from the time Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s
Republic on October 1, 1949, all missionaries
had either left China, were in jail, or under
house arrest. Within sixteen years not a single
Christian Church was open in that vast land.3
It is hard to understate the effect of the Cultural
Revolution on religious groups in China. While the
Constitution officially provided for the freedom of
religious belief, in reality the CCP’s policies virtually
wiped out public religious practice. Mao described
the Party’s views on religion in a report entitled On
Coalition Government. In the report, Mao said that although there may be times when it is advantageous to
partner with religious groups in order to pursue certain goals, “we can never approve of their idealism or
religious doctrines.”4 The CCP’s policies on religion
crippled many Christian groups, having a particularly
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
3
disastrous effect on the Roman Catholic Church in an independent Chinese Church that would be comChina. CCP officials shut down Catholic seminaries, patible with socialism. The Manifesto took an anticlosed churches, and incarcerated clergy. Church lead- Western position, proclaiming the necessity “to purge
ership was particularly hard hit in the CCP’s purge; the imperialistic influence from within Christianity itself.”6
Archbishop of Beijing during the Cultural Revolution Despite these concessions to the government, it was
spent twenty-two years in prison, the Archbishop of Shanghai >P[OP[ZNYV^PUNZWPYP[\HSP[`HUKYPZPUNU\TILY
thirty years, and the Archbishop
VM*OYPZ[PHUZ*OPUHHWWLHYZ[VILKPZWYV]PUN
of Shanghai’s successor twentyseven. In an effort to adapt to [OLT`[OVMZLJ\SHYPaH[PVU[OLVY`
Communist rule, Christian
churches went through a period known as “theological not until 1979 that the CCP announced that “normal”
reconstruction.”5 Christians launched what came to be religious activity would once again be permitted.7
ironically known as the Third Opium War, an effort to
Now, thirty-one years after the legalization of limited
convince the CCP that religion was not the opiate of religious observances, there are three unique aspects of
the masses as Marx had claimed. A group of Protestant the church in China that have made it a focus of study
leaders published a “Christian Manifesto” calling for from both religious and nonreligious perspectives. I
have already referred to the first
Mu En Church in Shanghai, China
of these, the staggering growth in
the number of Chinese Christians.
Even in the face of the persecution
of the Cultural Revolution, the
number of Christians in China has
grown by several orders of magnitude. It is estimated that there were
around three million Christians in
China in 1949 just before Mao and
the Communist Party took power.
Now official government estimates
admit the number to be at least 15
million,8 and China scholars and
news agencies put the figure closer
to 70-80 million. The second interesting characteristic is the cultural
independence of the Christian
Church in China from its Western
branches. CCP policies have guaranteed that Western influence in
Chinese churches is minimal.9 The
influence of the West on the unregistered underground churches
known as “house churches” is even
less.10 Indeed, Chinese Christianity
has taken on a distinctly indigenous
flavor—a University of Wales study
revealed that 56 percent of Chinese
Christians combined certain indigenous practices, such as enshrinement, with otherwise orthodox
Christian worship.11 The third
significant point is the types of
people Christianity has attracted in
China. According to the University
of Wales study, a surprising 14.3
4 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
]
percent of Chinese Christians are members of the CCP
or its youth affiliate, a number roughly in line with
the percentage of the general population.12 Christians
do not appear to be isolated to one particular area or
demographic. Christianity is growing in urban as well
as rural areas, and amongst both professional and bluecollar workers. As is the case everywhere, Christianity
has spread quickest to the most vulnerable members
of society; the poor make up a disproportionately
large share of Christians, as do minority groups such
as women and young people.13 Overall, however, the
data indicate that Christianity has been spreading to
all members of society, including groups that are not
typically associated with Christianity in the West.
As Christianity enters what many are calling its
golden age in China, the nation means more and more
for the field of apologetics. Because China is such a
unique case—a country that is experiencing rapid
Christianization even in the midst of strong attempts
to suppress it—it offers a new perspective on many of
the theories surrounding religious geography. Most
notably, it provides a significant counterargument to
secularization theory. First mentioned by Max Weber
in 1930, secularization theory holds that as countries
become more developed socially, culturally and economically, the importance of religion to that society
will diminish.14 Karl Marx anticipated this theory in
his work “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right.” Marx claims that religion
wrongly centers man’s focus on spiritual matters, and
that mankind will be better off when economic progress finally forces people to focus on themselves.15
Clearly, this is not the case in China. China is the
fastest growing major economy in the world,16 and
from 1985 to 2006 its citizens saw their average income grow almost seven-fold.17 Despite the growing
economy and the attendant materialism that is finding
its way into Chinese culture, regular Chinese appear
Chinese appear to be searching for a different philosophical foundation. With its growing spirituality and
rising numbers of Christians, China appears to be disproving the myth of secularization theory.
The Chinese Church also provides an interesting
perspective on another theory of religion, that of memetic inheritance. This theory, popularized by author
Richard Dawkins, holds that religious beliefs can be
considered packets of cultural information called
memes. Dawkins likens memes to genes and contends
that they are passed down through a process similar to
Darwinian selection. According to Dawkins, memes
can be passed vertically, through inheritance from
one’s parents, or horizontally, between individuals or
groups. In order to spread horizontally, he says, memes
often require an “infective agent,” a charismatic leader
like St. Paul or Jonathan Edwards.20 They also require
the presence of a “memeplex,” or a set of related cultural factors that enable the meme to assimilate into
the “host culture.” Dawkins’ point is to characterize religion, and Christianity in particular, as a cultural relic
that has survived due to tradition.21 Dawkins explains
his theory in this way:
It is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast
majority of children follow the religion of their
parents rather than any of the other available religions. Instructions to genuflect, to bow towards
Mecca, to nod one’s head rhythmically towards
the wall, to shake like a maniac, to ‘speak in
tongues’—the list of such arbitrary and pointless
motor patterns offered by religion alone is extensive—are obeyed, if not slavishly, at least with
some reasonably high statistical probability.22
Memetic inheritance theory misses many sociological trends occurring in the world today. Christianity
is the majority religion in places as diverse as subSaharan Africa, South Korea, Oceania and South
America.23 The vast differences between these areas
;OLWPJ[\YLVM*OYPZ[PHUP[`[OH[JVTLZV\[VM*OPUHPZ[OH[VMH
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to be opening up to Christian ideas. Although only
2.6 percent of the population is officially Christian, 11
percent say that they “should follow the way of the
Christian God.”18 Chinese appear to be warming up
to spirituality in general in even greater numbers.
78 percent believe that “goodness will be rewarded,”
and 41 percent responded positively to the statement
“We must do our best in life to glorify God/Lord of
Heaven/Buddha/ancestors.”19 Instead of embracing
the materialist ethos spawned by China’s growth, the
make it very difficult to apply memetics to the case of
Christianity. The cultural conditions in each of these
places and the diversity of Christian groups taking root
suggest that the memeplexes in each of these situations
are different and probably opposing. This presents a
serious obstacle to Dawkins’ theory that Christianity
spreads only to those areas with which it is most compatible. The example of China is further proof that the
accepted model of religious transmission by culture
is, at best, overstated. If religion really were the static
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
5
4
Adam Schall and Matteo Ricci, Jesuit
missionaries, with map of China, 1667
entity that Dawkins assumes it is, one would expect
it to only pass in two ways: vertically, from parents,
or horizontally, through some sort of infectious agent.
Christianity in China does neither—the birthrate is
not high enough to account for Christianity’s growth
by virtue of inheritance, and China’s laws against foreign missionaries, and even against evangelization by
its own citizens, mean that no religious leader has been
able to gain prominence in the country. Instead, the
picture of Christianity that comes out of China is that
of a dynamic faith, one that spreads more due to the
universality of its message than the workings of evangelists or memetic inheritance; a religion that is able to
adapt to the culture it finds itself in, and at the same
time to maintain the orthodoxy and universality of its
doctrines.
1
G. Thompson Brown, Christianity in the People’s
Republic of China (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1986)
7.
2
Christopher Bodeen, “Fast-growing Christian
Churches Crushed in China,” The Associated Press, 11
Dec. 2009.
3
Brown 10.
6 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
]
Daniel Bays, Christianity in China: From the
Eighteenth Century to the Present (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1996) 351.
5
Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang ed., Chinese Religiosities
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008) 165.
6
Bays 344.
7
Ibid. 161.
8
Daniel Bays, “Chinese Protestant Christianity
Today,” The China Quarterly 174 (2003).
9
Xinzhong Yao and Paul Badham, Religious
Experience in Contemporary China (Cardiff:
University of Wales Press, 2007) 72.
10
“Chinese Protestant Christianity Today.”
11
Yao and Bedham 79.
12
Ibid. 75.
13
“Chinese Protestant Christianity Today.”
14
William Swatos Jr. and Kevin Christiano,
“Secularization Theory: The Course of a Concept,”
Sociology of Religion 3 (1999).
15
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,
ed. Joseph O’Malley, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph
O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1970) 132. Marx says, “The criticism of religion
disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and
fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his
illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move
around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only
the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long
as he does not revolve around himself.”
16
The World Factbook, Central Intelligence
Agency, 4 Feb. 2010 <https://www.cia.gov/library/
publications/the-world-factbook/index.html>.
17
The World Bank, China Quick Facts, 2010,
The World Bank Group, 4 Feb. 2010 <http://web.
worldbank.org/cn>.
18
Yao and Badham 9.
19
Ibid. 40-41.
20
Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain (New York:
First Mariner Books, 2003) 143.
21
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006) 191-198.
22
A Devil’s Chaplain 136.
23
The World Factbook.
Brendan Woods ‘13 is a
Government major from
Glastonbury, Connecticut.
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I would say morality is about moving towards completion of happiness. Morality is a response to the question of happiness, rather than a response to the question of obligation. Obligation should be understood in
the context of happiness, rather than the reverse.
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Morality by itself doesn’t make us happy. I suppose
we should say that it is not acting justly, for example,
that makes you happy in itself, but possessing the good
that justice directs you toward. This is complicated,
but St. Thomas Aquinas asks the question of whether
happiness is a good of the soul, and he gives a nuanced
answer to that. On the one hand, happiness is not a
good of the soul. Why? Because the soul is directed to
something beyond the soul; the soul isn’t its own final
end. St. Thomas talks about the soul as a potentiality,
and a potentiality is something that could be, is by its
very definition on its way to being, and therefore by
its definition not yet complete. So insofar as the soul
is unrealized potentiality, happiness can’t be the good
of the soul. So happiness is about something that takes
you beyond the soul, into something which is good—
for Thomas at least—subsistently good and satisfying.
Now, happiness is the good of the soul because you
possess the good through the soul, through your own
mind, through your body. You become connaturalized
to the good, you become good yourself, and in that
sense happiness is the good of the soul.
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
7
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There are a couple of ways of approaching it. One
is by just pure reason, and the other is by experience.
By reason you can show that money, for example, or
power, can’t be the final good of a human life. Power is
always power to do. So power by itself is incomplete;
power is only itself when it engages in performing or
doing something. Besides, power can be wielded, St.
Thomas says, by good people or bad people. There are
some very monstrous people who have had quite a lot
of power and wouldn’t be, by any sane person’s definition of the term, happy. So is that reasonable? Sure.
Does that persuade somebody who is really interested
in acquiring power? No. As an argument it will fail.
Why? Because the arguments are defective? No, but
because if a good doesn’t find an echo or answer in
somebody’s desire, your arguments are going to fall
flat. You have to already be in love with a good before
arguments about that good will appeal to you. So the
only way, if you’ve got somebody who says that power
is the final good or somebody who says that making a
lot of money is the final good or somebody else who
says that being famous is the final good—there are a
lot of people who would try to find happiness in one
of those—all you have to do is say, “Go for it. Give
it your best shot,” and then, “Are you happy?” And
the answer will be, “No, there’s something missing.”
Happiness is always about the something more.
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I would concede the point in the short term; I would
contest the point in the long term. Charles Taylor has
written a book called A Secular Age; it’s worth reading.
It’s a description of the conditions of unbelief in our
society. In his account of the history of this, he says
that most societies will have a conception of what he
would call hyper-good, and that’s distinguished from
ordinary goods, goods of ordinary flourishing. For example, in our society that would be having friendships,
family life, a satisfying job—these would be ordinary
goods that most people would be happy to find. But
then there are hyper-goods, goods that are considered
to be incomparably more worthy than the other goods
and also costly. Now Christianity has such a hypergood in mind: the kingdom of heaven, friendship with
8 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
]
Jesus, eternal life. That requires that we treat each other
with justice and fidelity, and that requires restraint.
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There’s a difference between sensual pleasure and
joy, happiness. Pleasure stimulates the body, but that
can’t make a human person happy as such because we
are so much more than a body. If that weren’t the case,
then we could just be fed and petted to happiness.
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Eventually, immorality will make you unhappy.
Substantially even from the very beginning, but experientially over time. You can think you are happy
and not be, but persist in vice long enough and the
experience of unhappiness will become part of your
conscious experience, too. The same thing is true with
living a good life. You may not know that you are
good—“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” well, they don’t
look very blessed to themselves. Happiness is lost on
them for the moment, but the promises, the real objective safety and goodness of their position, will become
clear even to themselves as they know they are dependent upon God, trust him, love him, are saved by him,
and all of that. If you really know that, if that’s really in
your soul, then it eventually gets to your body as well.
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There’s a kind of hierarchy that he talks about in
question ninety four, article two, primus secundaa of the
Summa Theologicaa where he talks about natural law.
The basic orientation is just to be. It is good to be.
That’s something that exists on the inanimate level
as well. Things naturally resist their own destruction.
You translate that into human consciousness, and you
get moral intuitions like it’s wrong to kill, it’s wrong
to commit suicide. Then you have the whole area of
what we share with animals and not just boulders, and
that’s reproduction. For an animal, being prolongs itself through reproduction. For a human being, it does
that physically, but also psychologically and spiritually
when we have children. We tend to hand on what we
are to someone else, give ourselves to something else
who is both from us and yet different from us. So that’s
children and that’s part of the natural good. And it’s
not only having them—it’s not just sex, but having
children, and it’s not just having children, but raising
raising them as human beings—you know, reason, language, faith, whatnot. Then there’s reason,
goods of reason that involve sociability, being together. To be human is to learn how to be human
together. It’s learning to live together, with justice
and with charity, and you learn that by doing it,
just by living with other people. And finally there’s
mystery. We are of course technically curious, we
all have some degree of technical curiosity about
how things are put together and how they work,
but there’s also a thirst for a deeper wisdom, which
is why they work. How and why are two differ
ff ent questions. How is one level of intelligence;
why responds to another. And I think the deepest mystery of the human person is faced when
we ask the question why: “Why am I here? Why
is there a world? Why is there something rather
than nothing?” These are things that don’t admit
of technical solutions, but you are faced then with
the mystery that we call God. And to face that, to
think about that, to live in that, is purely a really
human thing to do. Those are all different
ff
goods
that we respond to in different
ff
ways in becoming
more fully a human being, which is another way
of describing what morality is: becoming more
fully a human being.
!
! !
It has to do with the relationship between freedom
and inclinations. A freedom of indifference
ff
would say
that you are free in spite of your inclinations. In other
words, the only cause of your action as a free person
is the will itself. On the other hand, for St. Thomas,
free choice is born of a conjunction between our natural inclination of our mind for what is true and the
natural inclination of our will for what is good. Free
choice is born from those natural inclinations; we
only have free choice because we are already, before
free choice, spontaneously ordered to what is good. So
for St. Thomas we are free because of our inclinations,
not in spite of them. That means that desire is not the
enemy of the good. But for Aquinas, there’s no other
reason to act at all other than the desire to be happy.
So we are free because of our inclinations, and we find
our deepest happiness when we are in a way not free to
choose anything else. That is when we see God. There
will be no question of a choice to turn away from God,
and yet we’ll be deeply free and happy, because our
most spontaneous inclination and desire has been fully
satisfied.
Saint Thomas Aquinas
!!
"
!!
#
!
Yes, that’s not what this is about. That’s why this
kind of thing—even though it’s about who you are
rather than what you do—is actually at the end of the
day more practical, because it comes from an experience of just being attuned to the good.
!!
!
Well, it depends upon whether he wants to or not.
He might not want to. But most people do want to
on some level or another. The thing is, most people
have bad taste in many areas of their lives. The point is
that you start with what you’ve got right and then you
build on it. I mean you might have very little sense of
generosity, but you might have a feel for what is fair.
Alright, then you be loyal to what you know about
being fair; sooner or later you’ll be led to generosity. I
think it goes that way. You work with what you’ve got,
and then it gets better.
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
9
The Christian
Integration
by Peter Blair
I
n his essayy “W
Whyy I am not a Christian,”
Bertrand Russell wrote, “There are a great many
ways in which at the present moment the church,
by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality,
inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnec1
essary suffering.”
ff
He goes on to explain that Christian
morality is harmful “because [the church] has chosen
to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness;
and when you say that this or that ought to be done
because it would make for human happiness, they
think that has nothing to do with the matter at all.”2
This is a common indictment of Christianity: that it
puts people in a moral straightjacket, enslaving them
to an outdated moral system, and thereby greatly diminishes their happiness and even inhibits the progress
of the human race. According to this view, Christians
are by nature priggish, puritanical moralists.
But the Bible, which Christians believe is divinely
inspired, is full of statements that present a very diff
ferent view of Christianity than the one Russell offers.
ff
In his Epistle to the Galatians, St. Paul writes that
“it is for freedom that Christ has set us free.”3 In the
Gospel of John, Jesus Christ is recorded as saying, “I
came that they may have life, and have it to the full.”4
Echoing this biblical message, Christians throughout
the ages have expressed a great joy that derives from
their faith. G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “Joy… is the
gigantic secret of the Christian.”5 C.S. Lewis titled the
spiritual autobiography that detailed his conversion to
Christianity Surprised by Joy. The message of the Bible
is one of freedom and liberation, and the experience
Saint Augustine
10 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
]
Left: Bertrand
Russell
Right: G.K.
Chesterton
of many Christians throughout history has been one
of irrepressible and uproarious joy. What, then, explains the enormous gap between the Christian idea of
liberation and the popular perception of Christianity,
as expressed by Russell? How can these two views of
Christianity be reconciled?
The popular view articulated by Russell does contain
a grain of truth. Christianity does have a moral code
that it enjoins upon all its adherents, and its code is in
some ways stricter than the codes offered
ff
by other philosophies and worldviews. Furthermore, Russell’s view
is not without some empirical basis. There have been,
and continue to be, self-identified Christians who approach their faith in a highly legalistic and moralistic
way, who conform joylessly to a moral code they don’t
fully understand or even agree with, who look and feel
enslaved, and who even take a perverse delight in destroying the happiness of others. However, the salient
question is not whether some self-identified Christians
have such an attitude, but whether Christianity as a
belief system logically implies and requires such an attitude. When the issue is examined, it seems that rather
than imposing such an attitude on believers, Christian
moral thought is characterized by a desire for happiness, freedom, and beauty.
The prejudice against Christianity’s moral claims is
due in part to a general human tendency to resent all
rules and restrictions—religious, political, or otherwise—as unfair and destructive of liberty. However, as
Tim Keller notes in his book The Reason for God,
d “In
many cases confinement and constraint is actually a
means to liberation… freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions. Those that fit with the reality of our
nature and the world produce greater power and scope
for our abilities, and a deeper joy and fulfillment.”6
The idea of “liberating restrictions” may seem paradoxical, but Keller uses several examples to make his
point. He discusses the condition of a pet fish taken
out of its fishbowl. The fish has thus been freed from
the limits of the fishbowl, from restrictions of place
and movement—but removed from its proper environment, the fish will die. Because the fish is free to
live and move only when it is limited to a bowl full
of water, the restrictions placed on it are essential to
ensuring its freedom, flourishing, and survival. This
example illustrates why it is that restrictions can simultaneously bind and free; it is only in being bound by
some rules that we can live at all or enjoy any kind of
meaningful freedom. Just like the fish, all things have
their proper environments, and if the barriers keeping
things in their environments are destroyed, so too is
the ability to thrive.
Keller uses a pianist as a further example of this principle. If somebody has natural musical aptitude and
wishes to develop that aptitude in order to become an
accomplished pianist, he or she must endure relatively
great restrictions on his or her time, because lots of
practice is necessary to develop musical skills. The aspiring pianist must give up absolute freedom over the
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
11
ral desire) will have to be controlled anyway,
use of his or her time in order to achieve, as Keller says,
7
unless you are going to ruin your whole life.8
“a richer kind of freedom to accomplish other things.”
In this example, we see that the development of a skill Lewis argues that all people have codes of behavior
or an art requires accepting some restrictions on one’s that limit them because everybody—in practice if not
time and one’s freedom. The end result of these regu- in theory—understands that some restraints are neceslations, however, is not a lesser freedom but a greater sary for happiness and freedom. And that is precisely
freedom: in this case, the ability to play piano pieces the claim that Christianity makes about its own moral
excellently whenever one wishes. One has acquired a code. Christianity does not seek rules for the sake of
new skill, and the ability to freely practice that skill rules, but for the sake of true happiness and freedom.
brings joy and contentment.
Example upon example could be
added to ways in which our everyday
life depends upon this idea of “liberating restrictions.” When we think politically, the vast majority of humans
recognize the need for limits and
rules. We recognize that anarchy—the
complete absence of governmental
authority—is not a desirable political
arrangement, and that the restrictions
on our freedom enforced by laws and
taxes actually allow for human prospering and flourishing in a way that
anarchy never could.
In all these cases, it is restrictions,
limits, and rules that actually free a
person; in these situations, limits liberate us and actually give us more to
do by restricting what we can do in
certain ways. This is the general idea
behind both government and piano
practice: by allowing everything, you
effectively destroy everything; but by
forbidding some things, you allow
everything else. True freedom is only
possible where freedom is limited.
Yet this idea of “liberating restrictions” implicit in so much of our life
is somehow forgotten when the object Jesus preaching the Sermon on the Mount, which contained the most complete summary of his
of discussion is the Christian moral moral teaching.
code. Christianity is thought to be
It seeks rules for the same reason that everybody seeks
oppressive and legalistic simply because it makes moral rules: in order to allow us to survive and flourish.
demands. But as C.S. Lewis points out in his book
Moralism or legalism, that is, rules for the sake of
Mere Christianity,
rules, is much more an intellectual attribute of secular
thought than of Christian thought. The 18th-century
secular philosopher Immanuel Kant is the clearest example of secular legalism. He espoused a duty ethics
which emphasized the necessity of obeying moral laws
and held that morality had to be opposed to happiness
because any action that gave happiness was a selfish
one, and thus immoral. This Kantian deontology is
emphatically not the Christian view. Christianity, because it believes that true freedom proceeds from our
natural longings for truth, goodness, perfection, and
For any happiness, even in this world, quite a
lot of restraint is going to be necessary... every
sane and civilized man must have some sort of
principles by which he chooses to reject some of
his desires and to permit others. One man does
this on Christian principles, another on hygienic
principles, another on sociological principles.
The real conflict is not between Christianity
and nature. For ‘nature’ (in the sense of natu-
12 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
]
Scene from Stories
of Moses, fresco
by Raphael in the
Loggia di Raffaello,
1516-1519
happiness, holds that the moral life is the way to happiness. Because the secular worldview deprives man
of any transcendental purpose or destiny, it can offer
very little guidance on what the purpose of rules is. As
Lewis writes,
I think all Christians would agree with me if
I said that though Christianity seems at first
to be all about morality, all about duties and
rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on
out of all that, into something beyond. One has
a glimpse of a country where they do not talk
of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every
one there is filled with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do
not call it goodness. They do not call it anything.
They are not thinking of it. They are too busy
looking at the source from which it comes.9
Secularism denies the existence of that “something
beyond,” and so the best it can do is offer a kind of
pragmatic justification for rules centered on the need
for social cooperation. That is fine as far as it goes, but
it can easily degenerate into an unhappy legalism. On
the other hand, because Christian morality is animated
by an understanding of mankind’s natural longing for
goodness, happiness, and perfection, the Christian
view sees rules as a means for achieving a more fulfilling existence.10
In the examples used above to illustrate the idea of
“liberating restrictions,” the implied idea was that one
restricts one’s freedom in order to achieve a greater good
and a fuller unfolding of freedom. It suggests an idea of
freedom which Servais Pinckaers, in his book Morality:
The Catholic View, calls freedom for excellence or the
freedom to act excellently. The problem that many
people have with Christianity is that they cannot see
what greater good the Christian moral code purports
to direct one to. What kind of excellence does it aim
to effect? If Christianity is not about laws for the sake
of laws, but instead about laws for the sake of a greater
good, what is that good? Christian thinkers tend to answer these questions by saying that Christianity’s moral
code is not an end in itself, that it has no intrinsic value. Its value is purely instrumental, meant to aid one
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
13
in attaining goodness and happiness and to succeed in
becoming a good and happy person.
There is much skepticism about this claim that morality, especially Christian morality, could ever be connected to happiness. The position one takes on this,
however, turns on one’s definition of happiness. Many
people today would define happiness as mere pleasure,
as the temporary and ephemeral experience of neurochemical stimulation. However, there is a quite different way of looking at happiness, one that defines it in
terms of joy. St. Augustine, the great Christian theologian, once defined happiness in this way: “Thus all
agree that they want to be happy, just as they would, if
questioned, all agree that they want to rejoice, and it is
joy itself that they call the happy life. The happy life is
joy born of the truth.”11 Father Pinckaers explains the
essential differences between joy and pleasure:
Pleasure is an agreeable sensation, a passion
caused by contact with some exterior good. Joy,
however, is something interior, like that act
that causes it. Joy is the direct effect of an excellent action, like the savor of a long task finally accomplished. It is also the effect in us of
truth understood and goodness loved. Thus we
associate joy with virtue, regarding it as a sign
of virtue’s authenticity…pleasure is brief, variable, and superficial, like the contact that causes
it. Joy is lasting, like the excellence, the virtues,
that engender it. Sense pleasure is individual,
like sensation itself, it decreases when the good
that causes it is divided up and shared more
widely; it ceases altogether when this good is
absent. Joy is communicable; it grows by being
shared and repays sacrifices freely embraced.12
a deeper joy in being able to live a virtuous life. There
are many reasons for this intrinsic connection between
the moral life and happiness, between goodness and
joy, but in terms of simple empiricism, it is also an
easily observed phenomenon. Numerous Christians
throughout the centuries, from St. Augustine to St.
Francis of Assisi to G.K. Chesterton, have testified to
the ability of the moral life to instill joy.
The joy of the Christian life, however, arises not
only from the satisfaction of a morally excellent life,
but also from the particular religious teachings of
Christianity and the practical effects of those teachings
in one’s life. Part of the confusion about Christian morality is a result of the fact that Christian moral teaching is so often presented in isolation from its spiritual
or religious teachings. Though there are many thinkers, such as Princeton professor Robert George, who
will argue for the rational superiority of Christian morality quite apart from religious revelations, the fact remains that the joy that Christians throughout the ages
have associated with the Christian life is very difficult
to understand apart from the messages and teachings
of Jesus. You cannot disconnect Christian morality
from Christianity in general. If somebody urged you
to brush your teeth twice a day but you had no prior
knowledge of the importance of dental care, you might
wonder at it and dismiss it as an irrational imposition
on your life. But certainly if you learned that brushing
your teeth twice a day will actually prevent your teeth
from decaying later in life, you would readily adopt
the practice.
The cause of Christian joy is precisely God Himself.
Christians believe that God came to earth as a man in
When happiness is under- *OYPZ[PHUP[`KVLZUV[ZLLRY\SLZMVY[OLZHRLVMY\SLZ
stood in terms of lasting
joy, instead of temporary I\[MVY[OLZHRLVM[Y\LOHWWPULZZHUKMYLLKVT
pleasure, the way in which
Christian morality can be said to be compatible with order to free mankind from its sins and reunite manhappiness becomes clear. Though a Christian must, kind with Himself. That is the principle message of
from time to time, forgo certain temporary pleasures, the Gospel, and it is called the Gospel (which means
the Christian moral life instills a deep and irrevocable “good news”) for a good reason. As Keller notes in his
book, for the idea of “liberating restrictions” to make
joy.
The attainment of a virtuous character, one that can any sense, the restriction must fit our nature and cirgive rise to morally excellent actions at all times, is a cumstances. He writes, “Discipline and constraints,
joy-giving accomplishment, in part because we natu- then, liberate us only when they fit with the reality
rally desire goodness (though we often forget what of our nature and capacities.”13 Christianity teaches
goodness actually is). Keller’s example of the piano that the one thing that fits with our true nature above
player, discussed above, is helpful in understanding everything else is love. Love is the most sublime huthis concept. Just as attaining the skill of piano-play- man emotional state, and it is something that everyone
ing requires surrendering some freedom to that task, yearns for. It is the proper environment for mankind,
so too does attaining the skill of living a virtuous life. just as the fishbowl is the proper environment for the
And just as one finds happiness and contentment in fish. Yet the seeming contradiction of a loss of freedom
being able to play the piano well, so too does one find that liberates is clearly demonstrated with regard to the
14 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
]
Saint Augustine
Altarpiece by Jan Van
Scourel, ca. 1520
experience of love. Love, Keller argues, is simultaneously the most liberating thing and the most restrictive
thing a human being can experience; it demands the
most, but it also gives the most. “To experience the joy
and freedom of love,” Keller writes, “you must give up
your personal autonomy.”14
Keller’s statement neatly summarizes the whole basis for Christian morality. Christians believe that we
were made for love—for love of each other and love of
God. Furthermore, they believe that God loved us first,
that He loved us when He created us and He loved us
when He underwent unspeakable suffering for us on
the cross. Because Christ loved us and sacrificed much
for us in order that we could be with Him again, we are
filled with joy and gratitude, and we respond to Him
in love for what He has done for us. By its very nature,
love means giving things up, sacrificing for the other,
the object of your love. Removed from the context of
love, those sacrifices might seem painful and absurd,
but within the context of a love that gives joy, freedom,
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
15
and meaning, they begin to make perfect sense. This is
why the central statement of Christianity is not “follow
rules” but, as Christ says in the Gospels, “Follow me.”15
It is not about a relationship with a set of rules, but
about a relationship with a person.
Therein lies the meaning of the biblical passages
which I referenced at the beginning of this article. God
came and suffered on earth to restore us to a loving
relationship with Him, our Maker, and it is in that
ultimate relationship of love that we are most free and
joyful, no matter what sacrifices it might call on us
to make. It is not about automatically and mindlessly
obeying rules that mean nothing to us and that only
trample on enjoyment. It is about the true joy and liberation that comes from living in love. The Christian
message is not oppressive. It is not animated by a hatred of pleasure or fun or by a desire to put people in
a straightjacket. It is animated by the spirit of love,
which is the spirit of God. We all seek to live in relationships of love and to live in a world characterized by
love. Christianity offers exactly this, but it also specifies
what is necessary for such a world to come about.
Christians desire above all to be near to God, to live
in a relationship with Him. In fulfilling that desire,
we must sometimes reject our secondary desires when
giving in to them would separate us from God. We
believe that He has freed us not only from the punishment due to our wrongdoings, but from the wrongdoings themselves, and that He will grow this freedom
from wrongdoing in us more and more each day. The
struggle, furthermore, is more than worth it, for the
freedom and joy that comes from a relationship with
God is truly the “pearl of great price.”16 Pope Benedict
XVI put it this way in his inaugural homily:
Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way? If we
let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open
ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that He
might take something away from us? Are we not
perhaps afraid to give up something significant,
something unique, something that makes life so
beautiful? Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom?… No! If we
let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing,
absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the
doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship
is the great potential of human existence truly
revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with
great strength and great conviction, on the basis
of long personal experience of life, I say to you,
dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ!
He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive
16 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide
the doors to Christ—and you will find true life.17
If one doubts this idea, the Christian may answer along
with Chesterton that for the doubter, “Christianity has
not been tried and found wanting; it has been found
difficult and not tried.”18 Those who have tried it down
through the ages, however, have overwhelmingly testified to a deep and profound joy. Morality for them has
not been an imposition, but rather a way of expressing
their love for and gratitude to Christ, for deepening
their union with Him, and for achieving a joyful life.
The most important “liberating restriction” of all is the
love of God, come to set us free.
1
Bertrand Russell, Why I am not a Christian and
Other Essays (New York: Simon and Shuster Inc.,
1957) 21-22.
2
Ibid.
3
Galatians 5:1.
4
John 10:10.
5
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1995) 167.
6
Tim Keller, Reason for God (New York: Penguin
Group, 2008) 45-6.
7
Ibid. 46.
8
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Granite
Publishers, 2006) 100-1.
9
Ibid. 149.
10
For a complete exposition of this idea, see
Morality: The Catholic View.
11
Augustine, qtd. in Pinckaers 77.
12
Servais Pinckaers, Morality: The Catholic View
(Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001) 78.
13
Keller 46.
14
Ibid. 48.
15
See Mathew 4:19, Matthew 9:9, Luke 9:23.
16
Matthew 13:46.
17
Pope Benedict XVI, “Homily of His Holiness
Benedict XVI,” Vatican: The Holy See, 24 April 2005,
Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 9 Feb. 2010 < http://
www.vatican.va/holy_father/ benedict_xvi/homilies/
documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20050424_iniziopontificato_en.html>.
18
G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994) 37.
Peter Blair ‘12 is from Newton
Square, Pennsylvania. He is
a Government and Classics
double major.
]
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alter Sinnott-Armstrong begins his
recent book, Morality Without God?
God?,
? with
an explanation of its title. He writes,
“There really is no question about morality without
God. There is just plain morality.”1 The book contains
Sinnott-Armstrong’s systematic explication of his secular conception of objective morality, which is based on
the premise that it is morally wrong to cause harm.
He writes, “Many theists claim that God is necessary
for objective morality, so atheism implies nihilism or,
at least, the denial of objective morality. The next two
chapters argue for the opposite conclusion: Morality
does not depend on God.”2 This article will evaluate
Sinnott-Armstrong’s conception of morality, which, I
will argue, falls short of providing a coherent secular
grounding for making moral judgments.
Sinnott-Armstrong’s first move towards defining objective morality apart from God is to establish a point
of near universal agreement on a moral question. He
writes, “Consider rape. Rape is immoral. I hope you
agree. Everyone I know—whether theist or atheist or
agnostic—agrees that rape is morally wrong.”3 Starting
from this common ground, Sinnott-Armstrong offers
an explanation of the immorality of rape. According
to Sinnott-Armstrong, a secularist can conclude that
rape is morally wrong because “it harms the victim for
no adequate reason.”4 Of course, this definition raises
a host of philosophical questions, which he then goes
about answering.
Sinnott-Armstrong begins by defining harm as
death, pain, or disability. He states, “Most people
agree that harms include death, pain, and disability.
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
17
Disability includes loss of freedom and maybe also
false beliefs insofar as false beliefs make people unable to achieve goals. Just imagine trying to buy a car
is subjective. Therefore, their immorality would be
subjective as well. However, Sinnott-Armstrong seems
to overlook this point. He writes, “What makes these
when you believe that cars are sold at grocery stores.”5
Sinnott-Armstrong is not explicit in his definition of
“adequate reason,” but suggests that harm is justified
by adequate reason if the benefits resulting from its
commission outweigh the harm itself or prevent greater harm in the future. He acknowledges,
Of course, these harms sometimes bring benefits in their wake. Death can end pain. Pain
and disability can build character. Nonetheless,
these harms are bad at least when they bring
no benefit… Doctors cause harm when they
amputate limbs. But those harms are caused
in order to prevent greater harm in the future. That is why these acts are not immoral. 6
This definition of “adequate reason” is the basis for my
first objection to Sinnott-Armstrong’s moral framework. How are we to evaluate the benefit and detriment of an action to determine whether it is justified
by adequate reason? For example, a selfish person might
hold that it is permissible to weigh benefit for oneself
more heavily than detriment to others. That person
could commit all sorts of
traditionally immoral acts
including theft, rape, or
murder without ever violating Sinnott-Armstrong’s
conception of morality.
People can disagree about
what constitutes “adequate
reason.” Therefore, one
must appeal to a higher
standard of morality in order to condemn someone
for wrongly judging the
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s
reason for which he or she
Morality Without God?? was
causes harm.
published in July 2009.
In the next step of
his argument, SinnottArmstrong’s claim that he is
explicating an objective morality quickly begins to unravel. In order to provide an objective grounding for
his system of morality, he needs to show that harms are
objectively bad. Only upon these grounds can he argue that they are objectively morally wrong, because if
harms are not intrinsically bad, then their harmfulness
18 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
]
harms bad? That is another tough question that I do
not need to answer here. It is enough for my argument
that these harms are bad, even if it is not clear what
makes them bad or what it means to call them bad.”7
This is a rather baffling claim, tantamount to a bare assertion. It is critical to Sinnott-Armstrong’s argument
that he demonstrate that harms are objectively bad if
he is to claim that their infliction is objectively wrong,
and yet he declines to justify this premise.
Anticipating this objection, Sinnott-Armstrong
cites the work of Professor Bernard Gert, who defines
consequences as bad if it would be irrational to seek
them or not avoid them. Of course, relying on this
definition requires that Sinnott-Armstrong address
the meaning of “irrational.” He claims that “one sign
that an act is irrational is that you would never advise anyone you care about to do it.”8 This structure
is highly suspect. Sinnott-Armstrong is attempting to
define harm. He argues that harms are bad because it
would be irrational to seek them and that irrational
actions are those which we would not advise people
we care about to do. However, why would we advise
people we care about not to do irrational actions, unless their irrational actions might harm them? SinnottArmstrong’s definition of harm begs the question by
using an impulse to prevent harm to define harm. This
undermines both the validity of his argument and its
claim to establish an objective morality.
It is also unclear from this argument why harmfulness implies wrongness, though this is the foundation
on which his whole case rests. Why must we accept
Sinnott-Armstrong’s idea that to cause unjustified
harm is immoral? Arthur Leff,
ff a professor of law at Yale
Law School, published an essay entitled “Unspeakable
Ethics, Unnatural Law” in which he argues for the
necessity of an objective moral evaluator to establish
normative moral claims:
A statement in the form ‘you ought to do X,’
‘it is right to do X,’ or ‘X is good’ will establish
oughtness, rightness, or goodness only if there is
a set of rules that gives the speaker the power
totally to determine the question. But it is precisely the question of who has the power to set
such rules for validating evaluations that is the
central problem of ethics… There is no one who
can be said a priori to have that power unless
the question being posed is also being begged.9
By making normative statements about what is bad
and therefore morally wrong, Sinnott-Armstrong is
presupposing a moral evaluator. Because he has ruled
out God, Sinnott-Armstrong’s moral evaluator must
be some person or group of people.
Thus, when Sinnott-Armstrong extends his discussion of harm from self to others, he relies on the force
of public opinion in settling certain actions as morally
wrong. Take, for example, an argument which SinnottArmstrong claims should convince everyone:
It is morally wrong for [some person] to hit you
for no reason. If that is morally wrong, then
it is also morally wrong for you to hit him for
no reason. Therefore, it is morally wrong for
you to hit him for no reason. The only way
around this conclusion is either: (a) to admit
that everyone in the world is allowed to hit you
on the nose whenever he or she feels like it or
(b) to claim that you are allowed to hit others
when they are not allowed to hit you. Response
(a) is abhorrent. Response (b) is arbitrary.10
But this line of argument can never satisfactorily answer what Leff calls “the grand sez who?”11 SinnottArmstrong assumes that everyone will agree that we
ought not to be victims of unjustified violence and
therefore concludes that we ought not to commit unjustified violence either. Unfortunately, that agreement
Objective morality requires an evaluator who is “the
unjudged judge, the unruled legislator, the premise
maker who rests on no premises, the uncreated creator
of values.”12 By definition, no human-created system
can be that “uncreated creator.” According to Leff,
himself an agnostic, this is why God is the necessary
grounding of any system of objective morality. If God
exists, then we and the moral order in which we find
ourselves are defined by Him. As Leff puts it, “Our relationship to God’s moral order is the triangle’s relationship to the order of Euclidean plane geometry, not the
mathematician’s.”13 It necessarily follows from God’s
nature that His statements are true and effectual.
Under what other circumstances can the unexamined will of anyone else withstand the cosmic “says
who” and come out similarly dispositive? There are
no such circumstances… No person, no combination of people, no document however hallowed by
time, no process, no premise, nothing is equivalent to an actual God in this central function as
the unexaminable examiner of good and evil.14
In this way, Christianity provides a coherent framework for objective morality that is impossible without
God.
1
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Morality Without
God? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) xi.
2
Ibid. 56.
3
Ibid. 57.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid. 58-59.
6
Ibid. 59, 71.
7
Ibid. 60.
8
Ibid. 61.
9
Arthur Leff, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural
Law,” Duke Law Journal 1979.6 (1979): 1232.
10
Sinnott-Armstrong 63-64.
11
Leff 1230.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid. 1231.
14
Ibid. 1232.
º6\Y YLSH[PVUZOPW [V .VK»Z TVYHS VYKLY
PZ[OL[YPHUNSL»ZYLSH[PVUZOPW[V[OLVYKLY
VM ,\JSPKLHU WSHUL NLVTL[Y` UV[ [OL
TH[OLTH[PJPHU»Z» ·(Y[O\Y3LMM
does not explain or justify any objective, normative
moral claim. The judgment of the moral evaluators
on which Sinnott-Armstrong relies can be challenged.
One cannot even define genocide as objectively wrong
without raising the question, “Sez who?”
In an effort to base normative moral judgments
on normal moral beliefs, Sinnott-Armstrong sidesteps
foundational elements of his theory. He attempts to
forge unimpeachable propositions from a cultural consensus, but in order for his basic propositions to be
unimpeachable, the source of those basic propositions
must also be unimpeachable. This is a standard that
no person or group of people, no matter how strong
the consensus, can possibly meet. Moral norms vary
from time to time and place to place. How should we
ever decide between them without appealing to some
higher moral order?
Lee Farnsworth ‘12 is from
Fort Wayne, Indiana. He is a
Government and Philosophy
double major.
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
19
by Sarah White and
Charles Clark
Revivalism and Reform in Early 19th-Century America
The Good Samaritan by Domenico Campagnola, ca. 1530
T
he civil rights movement and women’s
suffrage
ff
have radically changed the face of
American society and have succeeded in
changing the way most Americans think about the
issues that they addressed. But while these reform
movements of the twentieth century spring easily to
mind, we are apt to forget that the demand for social
reform has been an ever present force in the evolution
of society. Consequently, we often underestimate and
misunderstand the social reform movements of the
more distant past. The foundation for modern reform
movements was laid in the early nineteenth century.
According to historian Timothy Smith, “the crusade
for humanitarian reform” was sparked by leaders in the
Christian church.1 Inspired by the revivalist movement
that spread across the United States, unprecedented
numbers of Americans began to fight for change in
their society. Among these early reform movements
20 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
]
were the temperance movement and the movement for
equal education for women and African Americans.
The impetus for the revivals of the early nineteenth
century came largely from the disestablishment of off
ficial state churches in New England. Despite the Bill
of Rights’ prohibition of the regulation of religion by
the national Congress, several New England states
continued to have a state-supported church for many
years.2 Historian Daniel Walker Howe comments on
the unprecedented nature of this reform: “Ever since
Constantine the Great had made Christianity the established religion of the Roman Empire, the Western
world had typically connected church and state. Now,
the Americans undertook to experiment with their
separation: Religion would be purely voluntary.”3
Many Christians were dismayed by these changes, but
in fact, “The results astonished both friends and foes of
Christianity.”4 According to revivalist Lyman Beecher,
“They say ministers have lost their influence; the fact in 1784. In it he wrote, “Thus we see poverty and misis, they have gained… By voluntary efforts, societies, ery, crimes and infamy, diseases and death, are all the
missions, and revivals, they exert a deeper influence natural and usual consequences of the intemperate use
than ever they could” as a state institution.5 Once in- of ardent spirits.”13
dependent from state support and regulation, church
Another looming social problem was the unleaders “devised means of influencing public opinion equal education available to women and to African
outside of politics.”6 According to Howe, “The reli- Americans. Of course, slaves were forbidden to learn
gious institutions
they created some- 0U[OLLHYS`UPUL[LLU[OJLU[\Y`HSJVOVSPZT^HZ
times
displayed
ÄYZ[YLJVNUPaLKHZHZLYPV\ZZVJPHSWYVISLT
more democracy
than the nation’s
civic ones”7 because churches and religious institutions to read and write, and strict laws existed to punish
gave positions of authority to immigrants, women, and anyone who attempted to educate a slave. According
African Americans long before these groups were able to Fredrick Douglass, this was because “education and
to participate in politics.8 The separation of church slavery were incompatible with each other.”14 When
from state in the early nineteenth century in fact gave he was a boy, Douglass’ mistress began teaching him
the newly independent churches the freedom to reach to read but stopped when her husband told her that
out to all levels of society, facilitating revivals and the it would ruin him for slavery. Douglass took this observation to heart, and having realized that education
reform movements that followed them.
In the early nineteenth century, alcoholism was first was a form of liberation, he thereafter taught himself
recognized as a serious social problem. According to to read, saying that he “understood the pathway from
Thomas Pegram, “Drinking, long accepted as an es- slavery to freedom.”15 Once able, he read the literasential component of daily life and social interaction… ture of abolition, “a powerful vindication of human
began to be seen as a cause of disorder and a barrier to rights,”16 and became convinced of the truth that
progress.”9 In this period, binge drinking and a pref- slavery was not his proper destiny. David Walker, an
erence for hard liquor over beer became increasingly African American freeman, likewise condemned the
typical. During the forty years between 1790 and 1830, injustice of keeping blacks in a state of ignorance in his
Americans “consumed each year between 6.6 and 7.1 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.
d He observed
gallons of pure alcohol,” more than double the amount that unequal education made it easy for white society
consumed today.10 As Mark Edward Lender points to treat not only slaves but all blacks as second-class
out, the social fact of heavy drinking “made it relatively citizens.
easy for anyone prone to alcoholism to get into real
Women too found it almost impossible to receive
trouble.”11 Of course, the social consequences of alco- the same education as their male peers. It was popularholism have not changed significantly since the early ly held that women ought not to be educated because
nineteenth century, and “although socially tolerated, they were intellectually inferior or even because educadrunkenness frequently generated violence, especially tion would be physically harmful to them.17 Indeed,
domestic violence, and other illegal behavior.”12
Abigail Adams wrote that “it was fashionable to ridiMany contemporary observers recognized the cule female learning [in] the best families,” where girls
growing problem of alcoholism in American society. were taught only writing and basic arithmetic skills.18
Benjamin Franklin remarked on the economic con- Benjamin Franklin writes in his Autobiographyy of a
sequences of alcohol addiction in his Autobiography, Dutch widow who was able to save her family from
noting that heavy drinkers were less productive and ruin by running the family business after her husband’s
death. Franklin adds, “I mention this af(UV[OLYSVVTPUNZVJPHSWYVISLT^HZ fair chiefly for the sake of recommendeducation to our young women
[OL\ULX\HSLK\JH[PVUH]HPSHISL[V asing…
likely to be of more use to them and
^VTLUHUK[V(MYPJHU(TLYPJHUZ their children… than either music or
dancing.”19 However, society at large was
had difficulty financing their costly habit. Benjamin not inclined to take Franklin’s advice. For example, a
Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration of public high school education was not available for girls
Independence, published a pamphlet called An Inquiry in Boston until 1852 and in Philadelphia until 1893,20
into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors upon the Human and almost all colleges denied women admission.
Body, and Their Influence upon the Happiness of Society
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
21
With the disestablishment of official churches and were his parishioners. His first step was to prepare recthe advent of religious revival in early nineteenth- ommendations for the church on how to address the
century America, the prospect of broadly addressing problem of intemperance. Within a year of the publithe root causes of these societal ills became increas- cation of Beecher’s report, temperance societies began
ingly achievable. While spreading the Gospel, the to be founded. These societies provided support for rerevival movement was able to reach out to society in covering alcoholics and encouraged others to commit
other ways, encouraging the repentance of destructive to temperance. They provided speakers who were rehabits and the service of the underprivileged. Charles formed alcoholics and published and distributed tracts
Finney, a leading revivalist, recognized the reforma- on the subject.
Beecher and others in the revivalist movement did
tive power of a renewed love for God. He wrote that
“Revival breaks the power of the world and of sin over not try to punish people for their intemperate lifestyles,
Christians. It brings them to such
vantage ground that they get a fresh
impulse toward heaven.”21 Finney
thought that revival would lead not
only to the internal transformation
of the believer, but that the believer’s love for God would overflow
into love for others, making him
an agent of the external transformation of society. This view was shared
by Joshua Bradley, a contemporary
observer of the revival movement
who wrote, “Pure religion is of infinite importance to man. It not only
discloses the odiousness of sin, but
the benevolence of God in sending his Son into the world to save
all that believe.”22 His phrase, “pure
religion,” is taken from the book of
James in the New Testament. James
writes, “Religion that is pure and
undefiled before God, the Father, is
this: to visit orphans and widows in
their affliction, and to keep oneself View of Oberlin College, the first co-educational and racially integrated college in
unstained from the world.”23 This America, during the tenure of Charles Finney, with revival meeting in progress
ideal of religious life combines compassion and morality in a way exemplified in the person and unlike later movements, they did not seek the
of Jesus Christ, who “committed no sin”24 and “did not statutory prohibition of alcohol. Instead, they encourconsider equality with God something to be grasped, aged people to abstain from hard liquors and binge
but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a drinking because temperance offered a better way of
servant.”25 This spirit of revival was the catalyst for so- life. This approach came directly out of their undercial reform, and the first of these reforms to gain wide- standing of man’s spiritual condition and of sin. Paul
writes in the book of Romans, “Do you not know that
spread support was the temperance movement.
The first successful campaign to encourage the if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves,
responsible use of alcohol was founded by Lyman you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin,
Beecher, a New England minister and revivalist. which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to
Beecher took up the cause of temperance in 1812, and righteousness?”27 Revivalists saw addiction to alcohol
within ten years, “one million Americans enrolled in not as a personal failing but as a form of enslavement
more than six thousand voluntary associations had from which people needed to be freed by the liberating
pledged themselves to abstain totally from the use of power of the Gospel. The message that the revivalists
spirits.”26 Beecher’s involvement in the movement be- preached was essentially the same as that Paul wrote to
gan when he witnessed the damage that whiskey trad- the Ephesians: “You were taught, with regard to your
ers were doing among a Native American tribe who former way of life, to put off your old self, which is
22 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
]
being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made evening classes and establish schools for both freemen
new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the and escaped slaves in Cincinnati. Some citizens of the
new self, created to be like God in true righteousness city, however, became angry that the students were
“taking seriously the antislavery doctrine concerning
and holiness.”28
The temperance movement was revitalized in 1825, equality,”35 and Lane’s trustees enacted policies to diswhen Beecher gave his Six Sermons on Intemperance. In courage student involvement in the African American
these sermons, he described intemperance’s “woes and community against Beecher’s wishes. This led some
sorrows” and “the helplessness of its victims,”29 adding students to split from Lane.
Many of the abolitionist students who left Lane
that “The injurious influence of general intemperance
upon national intellect, is equally certain, and not less joined Oberlin College, an interracial and coeducato be deprecated.”30 The grassroots efforts of the re- tional college run by Beecher’s friend and fellow revivalists were consolidated in 1826 with the founda- vivalist, Charles Finney. Finney had been invited to
tion of the American Temperance Society. By the 1840s become the professor of theology at Oberlin before
the effects of the temperance movement were becom- he assumed the position of president, and he accepted
ing clear, and the consumption of hard liquor in the on the condition that “we be allowed to receive colUnited States had fallen by more than two-thirds from ored people on the same conditions that we did white
its rate in 1825. This wave of social reform was both people; that there should be no discrimination made
motivated and facilitated by the revivalist message of on account of color.”36 As one of Finney’s biographers
new life in Jesus Christ.
points out, Finney and the founders of Oberlin beSeveral prominent revivalists were also advocates for lieved that “all of life is under God,” and they were
t Beecher wrote, therefore compelled to offer an equal opportunity for
educational equity. In Plea for the West,
“But if this nation is, in the providence of God, des- education to the members of society who were typitined to lead the way in the moral and political emanci- cally denied.37
pation of the world, it is time she understood her high
Oberlin College was founded in 1833 by a group
calling, and were harnessed for the work.”31 He was of Presbyterian revivalists. From the beginning, it was
convinced that education was essential to this mission. “noted for its abolitionist stance, for its acceptance of
While clergy traditionally received
good educations, Beecher believed
;OLZLLHYS`YLMVYTTV]LTLU[Z^LYL
that “not only did ministers have to
WYVWLSSLKI`HZWPYP[VM*OYPZ[PHUYL]P]HS
be properly educated; alll of society
required schools and colleges, news- M\LSLKI`[OLYLKPZJV]LY`VM[OL.VZWLS
papers and books, to educate citizens
of a democracy and to prepare them to work on behalf black students, and as a pioneer in coeducation for
of righteousness and morality.”32 Additionally, his wife women.”38 In the first year of the college, one hunRoxana ran a girl’s academy for many years, which, dred and one students were accepted, of whom thirtyaccording to Howe, “demonstrated the Beechers’ eight were women; 1864 was the first year when the
commitment to developing the intellectual potential enrollment of women exceeded that of men.39 James
of women,”33 including their four daughters, one of Fairchild, who succeeded Finney as president of the
whom, Catharine Beecher, later founded the Western college, writes in his history of the school that the
Female Institute, a secondary school for women in founders’ original plan was for women to be enrolled
Cincinnati.
in a separate department of Oberlin’s preparatory
When Beecher became the president of Lane school. However, they ultimately decided that women
Theological Seminary, he insisted that both white should receive equal treatment and attend the same
and African American students be admitted to Lane, classes as men. A few years later, women were also addespite opposition from some students and commu- mitted into Oberlin’s Theological Seminary. Fairchild
nity members. Beecher wrote on the subject, “Our adds, “It is not necessary to say that in scholarship the
only qualifications for admission to the seminary are young women have held an honorable place… the best
qualificationss intellectual, moral, and religious, with- scholar, in any branch of study, is just as likely to be a
out reference to color, which I have no reason to think young woman as a young man.”40 Oberlin College’s exwould have any influence here, certainly never with ample of providing an education to anyone, regardless
my consent.”34 Beecher intended Lane to educate the of race or gender, demonstrates the sincerity of revivalinstruments of revival and reform, regardless of their ists’ dedication to creating opportunity for the underclass or race. During Beecher’s tenure at Lane, students privileged and underrepresented members of society.
formed an Anti-Slavery Society and began to hold
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
23
These early reform movements were propelled by
a spirit of Christian revival, fueled by the rediscovery
of the Gospel. As Charles Finney wrote in his essay
“What is Revivalism,” a revival consisted of Christians
who were newly inspired in their love for God and
their desire to live in obedience to his word.41 Christ’s
example of service to others and the Bible’s call to the
“pure religion” of caring for the least regarded members
of society led revivalists to work to change the lives of
those who were trapped in alcoholism or denied an
education. By addressing the underlying problems and
prejudices that led to social injustice and discontent,
revivalists helped people change their hearts, as well as
their lives. The success of their movements testifies to
the efficacy of their methods, has had a lasting impact
on American society, and offers a model for Christians
who would pursue reform today.
1
Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform
(Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1967) 36.
2
Daniel Walker Howe, What God Hath Wrought:
The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007) 164.
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
5
Lyman Beecher qtd. in Howe 165.
6
Howe 169.
7
Ibid. 166.
8
Ibid.
9
Thomas R. Pegram, Battling Demon Rum: The
Struggle for a Dry America, 1800-1933 (Chicago:
Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 1998) 3.
10
Ibid. 6-7.
11
Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin,
Drinking in America: A History (New York:
Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1982) 60.
12
Howe 167.
13
Benjamin Rush, An Inquiry into the Effects of
Ardent Spirits Upon the Human Mind and Body
(Boston: James Loring, 1823) 12-13.
14
Fredrick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of
Fredrick Douglass: A Slave (Mineola, NY: Dover
Publications, Inc., 1995) 22.
15
Ibid. 20.
16
Ibid. 24.
17
Marion Talbot, The Education of Women
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1910) 18.
18
Ibid. 16.
19
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography of Benjamin
Franklin, ed. Frank Woodworth Pine (New York:
Henry Holt and Company, 1916) 177.
20
Talbot 16.
21
Charles Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion,
6th ed. (New York: Leavitt, Lord, & Co., 1835) 1415.
24 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
22
Joshua Bradley, Accounts of Religious Revivals in
Many Parts of the United States from 1815 to 1818
(Wheaton, IL: Richard Owen Roberts, Publishers,
1980) v.
23
James 1:27.
24
1 Peter 2:22.
25
Philippians 2:6-7.
26
Pegram 16.
27
Romans 6:16.
28
Ephesians 4:22-24.
29
Lyman Beecher, Six Sermons on the Nature,
Occasions, Signs, Evils, and Remedy of Intemperance,
2nd ed. (Boston: T.R. Marvin, 1827) 2.
30
Ibid. 49.
31
Lyman Beecher, Plea for the West, 2nd ed.
(Cincinnati, OH: Truman & Smith, 1835) 11.
32
Jerald C. Brauer, “Editor’s Preface,” in Vincent
Harding, A Certain Magnificence: Lyman Beecher and
the Transformation of American Protestantism, 17751863 (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing Inc., 1991)
xvii.
33
Howe 168.
34
Lyman Beecher, qtd. in Harding 338.
35
Harding 353.
36
Charles Finney, Memoirs of Rev. Charles G.
Finney (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company,
1876) 333.
37
Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney
and the Spirit of American Evangelism (Grand Rapids,
MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1996)
178.
38
Ibid. xi.
39
James Harris Fairchild, Oberlin: The Colony and
College, 1833-1883 (Oberlin, OH: E.J. Goodrich,
1883) 176, 170.
40
Ibid. 184.
41
Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion 14-15.
Sarah White ’11 is from
Chapada dos Guimaraes,
Brazil. She is an English and
Russian Studies double major.
Charles Clark ‘11 is from
Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He
is a Classical Archaeology
major and an English minor.
]
Designed
Perfect
Love
by Robert Cousins
By Jen Freise ‘12
T
he human conception of love is con stantly changing. Cultural understanding
and representation of this most distinctly
human emotion is enduringly expressed through literature. Indeed, literature often functions as a mirror
held up to society, illuminating this or a bygone era.
Medieval literature, for instance, features numerous
examples of what is today called “love at first sight.”
Two characters are introduced to each other and instantly fall in love. Their marital happily-ever-after is a
foregone conclusion. There is no depth to the relationship, no apparent impetus save serendipity. One early
instance of this motif arises in the 11th century Welsh
folktales The Mabinogi.
The first branch of The Mabinogi, “Pwyll, Prince of
Dyfed,” sees the titular Welshman encounter the goddess Rhiannon while out in the country. She is “dressed
in brilliant gold silk brocade” and Pwyll’s first impression of her is that, “The faces of all the maidens he had
ever seen were unpleasant compared with her face.”1
After exchanging merely five lines of conversation,
including introductory pleasantries, Pwyll declares to
Rhiannon, “If I could choose from all the women and
maidens in the world, ‘tis you I would choose.”2 Soon
thereafter, the two marry and start a family.
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
25
Pwyll and Rhiannon, without any prior acquaintance, fall instantaneously in love with each other and
move quickly toward settling down together. This episode is representative of many of the courtships that
take place in medieval literature. Ubiquity suggests
cultural acceptability. If poems and folktales contain
consistent depictions of love, then this representation
must strike a familiar chord with the audience. If love
were portrayed in an unreasonable or foreign way,
there would surely be some kind of backlash against
the poets. The fact that there was no change in literary
convention speaks volumes.
Contemporary culture departs dramatically from
medieval times in its perception of romantic love. Love
is placed on a rarified pedestal, shrouded in mystique
and exalted to the point of becoming a societal fascination. This enthrallment has grown to such heights
that romantic fulfillment is now embodied in the “soul
mate,” the perfect person who is absolutely compatible on every possible level of desirability. Whereas
26 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
]
medieval lovers would fall in love and marry following
a chance encounter, the search for the perfect partner
has grown to nearly obsessive proportions in modern
times.
Prospective mates are now scrutinized and evaluated for suitability before any lasting emotional commitment is extended. A potential partner must possess
a preponderance of desirable qualities. Popular dating
website Eharmony.com, for example, boasts that it
matches its clients based on “29 Dimensions” of compatibility.3 This is the byproduct of a culture that proceeds warily, wading rather than falling into love and
marriage. Providential meetings between two strangers, leading to lasting love at first sight, are simply no
longer the romantic standard.
The stark difference between these approaches is
not the result of any dynamic quality intrinsic to romance. Rather, the shift from one end of the spectrum
to the other represents mankind’s collective dissatisfaction with the various versions of romantic love that
have developed. What we have had, quite simply, has
not worked. Over the centuries and across cultures,
humanity has mounted a quest for a new, better way
to understand love. But perhaps the answer is not a
new and better way to understand love, but rather a
new and better love to understand.
Sheldon Vanauken, author of the National Book
Award-winning autobiography A Severe Mercy, once
wrote to C.S. Lewis with the observation that happiness was found in timelessness. It was the pressure
of time—always passing, always weighing on you—
that stood in opposition to true Joy. Lewis’s reply to
Vanauken, who was not yet a Christian, also sheds
light on the question of mankind’s dissatisfaction with
the seemingly inconstant essence of love. He writes,
Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or
if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or
would not always be, purely aquatic creatures? Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time . . . why? Unless, indeed, there
is something in us which is not temporal.4
Lewis identifies Vanauken’s unease with time as evidence that he, and indeed all of humanity, had not always been and would not always be living within time.
Indeed, man was created for eternity. But in order for
this creation to take place, there must first have been
a Creator who Himself dwelt in eternity. Lewis’s mode
of analysis applies equally well to love. If his exchange
with Vanauken points to the existence of a Creator,
then examining love similarly can shed light on His
character. Consider the broad evolution of mankind’s
perception of romantic love. If human beings were intended to aspire only and always to earthly romantic
love, then why do we feel such gnawing discomfort
with it?
The answer is that humanity was not intended to
experience romance as the highest form of love. Just as
Vanauken’s resistance to time demonstrates that man
was originally designed for timelessness, our modern
resistance to past forms of romantic love shows that we
were created to experience love as something greater.
And when considering that for which we were created,
it is wise to start with the Creator Himself.
The apostle John writes, “Love comes from God…
because God is love.”5 Indeed, love is the driving force
of the entire Gospel narrative. “For God so loved the
world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever
believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”6
Love is an intrinsic part of God’s character. Whatever
earthly imitation we are able to muster will never perfectly reproduce its source, but we can still actively participate in God’s divine love all the same.
During the Upper Room Discourse after the Last
Supper, Jesus gave his disciples instruction in doing
precisely that. “Greater love has no one than this, that
he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends
if you do what I command.”7 Not only did Jesus emphasize the self-sacrificial nature of love, though, but
he lived out this teaching too. He demonstrated the
fullness of self-sacrificial love—and its union with divine love—by dying on the Cross to pay the penalty
for mankind’s sins.
Obedience to God and His commands is the primary duty of every human being. But this goes far beyond
simple subservience; obedience to God’s commands is
how we demonstrate our love for him. “He who has
my commands and obeys them,” Jesus tells the disciples, “he is the one who loves me… he who does not
love me will not obey my teaching.”8 We may not be
able to generate the holy, divine love that God bears us,
but we can fully participate in that love through study
and obedience to God’s Word.
This standard helps to put our collective dissatisfaction with erotic love into better perspective.
Undeniably, romance has an abundance of pleasant
and positive qualities. Chief among these, however,
is actually our awareness that romance is ultimately
inadequate to meet our thirst for being known and
loved. Through this realization, we are given poignant
evidence that humanity was created to enjoy a greater,
perfect, divine love, that of union with God Himself.
1
The Mabinogi, trans. Patrick K. Ford (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1977) 42, 45.
2
Ibid. 45.
3
eHarmony, 2010, eHarmony, Inc., 1 Dec. 2009
<http://www.eharmony.com/>.
4
Clive Staples Lewis, “Letter to Sheldon
Vanauken,” 23 Dec. 1950. Reprinted in Sheldon
Vanauken, A Severe Mercy (New York: Harper and
Row, 1980) 93.
5
1 John 4:7-8.
6
John 3:16.
7
John 15:13-14.
8
John 14: 21, 24.
Robert Cousins is from
Chappaqua, New York. The
former executive editor of
The Apologia, he graduated in
2009 with an English degree.
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
27
and its
Eugenics
g
Ethical Implications
p
Revisited
by Grace Nauman
A
lthough it seems unimaginable today, a
casual glance through academic texts, sociological treatises, and legislation from the early
20th century quickly reveals that the ideas of eugenics
and Social Darwinism were, in the words of Thomas
McCarthy, “omnipresent in scholarly and popular discourse by the end of the nineteenth century.”1 In the
1970s, G.R. Searle wrote, “Indeed, it requires something of an imaginative effort
ff to realize that earlier in
the century eugenics was… an important challenge to
politicians and academic theorists alike.”2 Nevertheless,
at the turn of the century, eugenics—the idea of using controlled breeding to improve the human race—
“quickly developed… into a political movement” of
surprising success and dominance.3 Its most notorious expression was Nazi Germany’s Final Solution, a
genocide designed to create an Aryan master race by
euthanizing 11 million “undesirables.”
28 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
]
But Nazi Germany was far from the only nation to
adopt eugenic policies—most nations had adopted or
at least considered eugenic legislation by the mid-20th
century. In the United States, for instance, thirty states
enacted laws that permitted authorities to forcibly sterilize those considered “feeble-minded” and “unfit to
propagate,” frequently the mentally ill or poor.4 More
than 64,000 Americans were sterilized under these
laws. These policies enjoyed great popular support.
California’s first sterilization law passed with just a
single nay vote in both the state’s Senate and its House
of Representatives.5 These policies purported to be
“the direct application of the laws of physical science,”6
incontrovertibly rooted in scientific fact,7 and so they
commanded uncontested intellectual hegemony.
Decades earlier, Charles Darwin had proposed that
life on earth developed by the selective inheritance
of beneficial traits through natural selection. Almost
immediately, philosophers and political activists
Logo for Second International
Eugenics Conference, held
in 1921 at the American
Museum of Natural History,
sponsored by the
U.S. Department of State
proposed that if people could learn to better understand this process, they could harness it to improve the
human condition. This prospect was understandably
appealing, and it met with little resistance. What little
resistance there was came primarily from the Roman
Catholic Church and a few other bastions of “mainstream Christianity,” who opposed eugenics on the
grounds that it conferred “dangerous powers upon the
state or other social agencies”8 and displayed an unacceptable “contempt for human rights.”9 At the time,
these factions were an embattled minority who seemed
to be rejecting science for outdated prejudices. And yet
in a matter of decades, the horrors of the Nazi eugenics program shocked the world into abandoning the
hope of breeding a better human race, and changing
science had all but removed Social Darwinism and eugenics from intellectual discourse, except as a historical
phenomenon.
The rise and fall of Social Darwinism provides an
opportunity to reexamine the appropriate relationship
between religion and science. In “The Flattening of
the Earth,” Charles Clark demonstrated that the thesis
that science and religion are naturally opposed was created by historians John Draper and Andrew Dickinson
White in order to promote a naturalistic worldview.10
This and other articles published in The Apologiaa have
argued that religion need not oppose the scientific pursuit of knowledge. However, the eugenics movement
offers an example of how the ethical influence of religion could have regulated the application of new scientific knowledge and perhaps have curbed the excesses
of Social Darwinism. Darwin’s theories promised a
powerful new way to alter the world, but they were by
nature “non-teleological and non-directive.”11 That is,
Darwinism could not define its own purpose, and its
application required an ethical framework external to
the theory itself. Christianity offered moral guidance,
but many Social Darwinists and eugenicists claimed
that encouraging the process of evolution should be an
end itself, “an object of first-class importance,”12 one
that should supplant former considerations of humanity’s innate dignity and divine purpose.
Social Darwinism is difficult to define. Historian
Linda Clark’s definition, “the application of Darwin’s
theory of natural selection and the struggle for existence to the evolution of human society,”13 is about
as precise as it is possible to be. Darwin’s theory does
not single out any one method for its application, so it
could be used by virtually any intellectual and political movement to claim legitimacy by proving that the
movement was part of Darwinian evolution and thus
the “natural order of things.” However, nearly all of
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
29
Left: Portrait of Charles
Darwin by John Collier
Top right: Portrait of
Sir Francis Galton by
Charles Wellington Furse
Bottom right: Portrait
of Herbert Spencer by
John McLure Hamilton
these discourses advocated taking steps to “improve”
the human race.
Though Darwin himself was not particularly interested in applying his own theories to human society,
he “was not free from ambivalence and hesitations on
these matters”14 and famously worried in his Descent of
Man about human behavior that would impede natural selection: “We civilized men… do our utmost to
check the progress of elimination… the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one
who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals
will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the
race of man.”15 Darwin felt that desire to aid the weak
and helpless was one of humankind’s finest characteristics, the “noblest part of our nature,”16 but at the same
time could not help but worry that this noble nature’s
tendency to indulge itself would have negative effects.
Other Darwinists, including his two most important
intellectual heirs, Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton,
would take this reasoning further and demand stronger measures to protect the human race from injury.
Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest,” began his philosophical career before Darwin
published The Origins of the Species, but he found that
Darwin’s work fit well into his belief that the entire
universe was advancing towards greater perfection.17
30 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
]
Spencer was happy to find a model of biological progress that fit his theory of the rest of the world and was
eager to understand how he and his society could help
promote this cosmic evolution. Subscribing to the
Lamarckian idea that evolutionary success came from
“direct adaptation and the inheritance of acquired
characters,” he believed that human society should be
hostile and competitive so that only the families and
races that could adapt and succeed would continue.18
Commerce and warfare were the two fields on which
this competition would take place, and charity, though
permissible, should be limited so as to “not encourage
the procreation of the unworthy.”19 He believed that
“This harsh discipline had enabled humanity to achieve
its present level of development”20 and maintaining it
would ensure “a constant progress towards a higher degree of skill, intelligence, and self-regulation… a more
complete life.”21
But soon developing theories of genetic inheritance
discredited Lamarckianism. Weismann’s germ plasm
theory and the resurrected theory of Mendelian genetics showed that organisms did not pass on traits
acquired in their lifetimes.22 Previous theories of
Social Darwinism had thought that social conditioning could advance evolution and improve the human race, but now it was revealed that an individual’s
social conditioning was not transferred to his children.
From this discovery, “eugenicists drew the moral that
true progress could only be achieved through racial progress; the level of intelligence, health, energy
or beauty could only be raised by breeding.”23 Social
Darwinists were forced to conclude that the only way
to improve the human species in an effective, lasting
way was through artificial selection. They hoped “to
‘breed out’ certain grave hereditary ailments… in the
way that Mendelian geneticists had learned to breed
‘rustiness’ out of wheat.”24 Any of the whole range of
human characteristics could be modified as the eugenicist saw fit, so long as he could supply an evolutionary
justification.
The founder of the eugenics movement was
Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton. Believing that “the
improvement of our stock seems one of the highest objects that can be reasonably attempted,”25 Galton became particularly interested in tracking the inheritance
of various traits and ultimately aiding nature in “supplanting inefficient human stock by better strains.”26
He developed a science of statistics, known as biometry, to track the heredity of such traits, which would
allow researchers to plan selective breeding programs.
Although Mendelian genetics would later overshadow
his work, he was correct to realize that researching inheritance patterns of specific traits was the necessary
first step to any eugenics project. Galton’s contributions to eugenics were political as well as scientific. He
worked to advance eugenics in the academic community, giving lectures, personally endowing a Eugenics
research fellowship, and providing an endowment
to establish a Eugenics chair at the University of
London.27 Galton foresaw a future where eugenic ideas
would replace former systems of values and become, as
Illustration of
the Lamarckian
conception of
inheritance
he wrote in Nature, “an orthodox religious tenant of
the future,” and he worked throughout his life to bring
this about.28
The prominence of the intellectual field of eugenics
was recognized by nearly every political movement.29
Just as Lamarckian ideas of social conditioning had
previously done, eugenics now offered to be a powerful social and political tool to create a new, custommade society. But being only a tool, it could not offer
a specific vision for its users to follow. Instead, social
activists across the political spectrum saw how these
methods could be used to alter the very fabric of society, its members, to suit their agendas. The number
and variety of these agendas that cited Darwinism for
support is staggering but not surprising. As Paul Crook
points out, “as a worldview, Darwinism is a powerful
rhetoricall instrument. Its persuasive and flexible rhetorical resources derive from the existence of indeterminaciess within the worldview itself.”30
The Social Darwinists and eugenicists failed to recognize that our scientific understanding of evolution
by natural selection cannot provide us with a deontological system of ethics by which to evaluate our application of that science. Darwin himself never fully
outlined what kind of worldview must come out of his
scientific discoveries,31 and so his ideas were vulnerable
to any ideology that could utilize his language. Indeed,
attempting to derive imperatives for human behavior
from Darwin’s worldview was doomed to fail, because
Darwin’s theory is merely a description of a biological
process. It is an account of how life is lived, not an
account of how life should be lived. It does not offer
moral advice in and of itself, so instead it served as a
“wellspring of a continual supply of metaphors”32 that
could be used to demonstrate that any and every political or social agenda “had
science on its side.”33 In
most cases, these agendas were nothing new—
Plato considered eugenics34—but by using the
Darwinian rhetoric they
gained fresh legitimacy.
This lack of ethical
foundation drew criticism from Christians. In
Eugenics and Other Evils,
written in the golden
age of Social Darwinism,
G.K. Chesterton rightly
pointed out that eugenicists could rarely offer a
clear vision of what their
efforts would accomplish.
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
31
Photograph of AuschwitzBirkenau concentration
camp in Poland by
Raymond Depardon
Galton himself admitted that even though men had a
“religious duty” to aid the course of evolution,35 “we
are ignorant of the ultimate destiny of humanity,” and
the actual direction of evolution “must first be worked
out sedulously.”36 Chesterton argued that such inexactitude would inevitably lead to unintended consequences, especially once it made its way into public
policy: “If you let loose a law, it will do as a dog does.
It will obey its own nature, not yours. Such sense as
you have put into the law (or the dog) will be fulfilled.
But you will not be able to fulfill a fragment of anything you have forgotten to put into it.”37 History has
proven him right—in full practice, eugenic policies led
to abuses that have appalled the world.
Chesterton also objected that eugenic policies allotted too much power to fallible humans, who did not
have any right to decide which human traits had more
right to exist than others. Ultimately, these decisions
were “a matter of taste,”38 and there were a “hundred
cases of… instant divergence of individual opinions
the moment we begin to discuss who is fit or unfit
to propagate.”39 Chesterton believed that it would be
impossible to decide upon adequate eugenic criteria,
for the simple reason that people prefer different traits.
Moreover, the Christian doctrine that all humans are
formed in the image of God made it impermissible for
any few humans to decide whether or not another person was worthy of reproducing. As Chesterton said,
In the matter of fundamental human rights,
nothing can be above Man, except God. An
32 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
]
institution claiming to come from God might
have such authority; but this is the last claim
the Eugenists are likely to make. One caste or
one profession seeking to rule men in such matters is like a man’s right eye claiming to rule
him, or his left leg to run away with him.40
Other Christian writers, like C. S. Lewis, objected
to the careless way eugenicists abandoned traditional
ideas of morality, “ready to do things hitherto regarded
as disgusting and impious”41 to shape humanity in
their own image.
These objections went unheeded, legislation spread,
and academic discourse became dominated with Social
Darwinist ideas. Anthropology devoted itself to deciphering the hereditary characteristics of the different
races, while “social Darwinism… contributed significantly to shaping the emerging human sciences, particularly sociology and psychology.”42 Mike Hawkins
writes, “Social Darwinism was an omnipresent reality for the practitioners of the social sciences during
this period. Even when not adopting it as such, theorists sometimes found it difficult to avoid (or resist)
the language of selection and survival of the fittest.”43
Sociological and political texts started describing rural
farmers,44 poor slum dwellers, and colonized peoples as
“degenerate races,”45 echoing the eugenics discourse.
Before long, though, the scientific foundation of
Social Darwinism had shifted once again. Although
ultimately it was the specter of Nazi atrocities that
“finally drove even the most recalcitrant scientists,
14
Crook 40.
Charles Darwin, Descent of Man (New York:
American Home Library Company, 1902) 180-81.
16
Ibid.
17
Hugh Elliot, Herbert Spencer (New York: Henry
Holt and Company, 1917) 233.
18
Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European
and American Thought, 1860-1945: Nature as Model
and Nature as Threat (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997) 85-87.
19
Ibid. 86.
20
Ibid. 85.
21
Herbert Spencer, qtd. in Hawkins 85.
22
Searle 2.
23
Ibid. 6.
24
G.R. Searle, qtd. in Crook 20.
25
Francis Galton, “Eugenics, its Definition, Scope,
and Aims,” Nature 70:1804 (1904): 82.
26
Galton, Nature 1.
27
Searle 2.
28
Galton, Nature 1.
29
Crook 26.
30
Ibid. 17.
31
McCarthy 75.
32
Ibid. 76.
33
Ibid. 77.
34
“And, in consequence, chucked the notion.”
Chesterton 10.
35
Galton, Inquiries 198.
36
Galton, Nature 1.
37
Chesterton 16.
38
Ibid. 57.
39
Ibid. 53.
40
Ibid. 60.
41
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: The
Macmillan Company, 1947) 48.
42
McCarthy 82.
43
Hawkins 13.
44
Adna Ferrin Weber, The Growth of Cities in the
Nineteenth Century: A Study in Statistics (New York:
The Macmillan Company, 1899) 422.
45
Searle 20.
46
McCarthy 82.
47
Ibid. 84.
scholars, and intellectuals away” from the ideas of eugenics,46 new discoveries in genetics appeared which
undermined many theories that had been central to
the practice.47 Scientific fact that had been considered
incontrovertible and had served as the basis for all sorts
of sociopolitical study was suddenly deemed morally
bankrupt and factually inaccurate. People impatient
to build social systems on a still-developing scientific
framework found that there was really no substance to
their Utopian visions. But the price of their hubris had
been high.
The history of Social Darwinism ought to remind
us that our scientific knowledge is incomplete and dynamic, and that we should be deeply cautious about
applying it to our humanity. It should also remind
us that science and religion each have their fields of
expertise. The Bible is not a biological treatise, and
laboratory results cannot translate into moral principles. If successful cooperation between science and
religion is to be achieved, each must look to the other
for guidance.
15
1
Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of
Human Development (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2009) 74.
2
G.R. Searle, Eugenics and Politics in Britain:
1900-1914 (Leyden, The Netherlands: Noordhoff
International Publishing, 1976) 181.
3
Ibid. 9.
4
Peter Irons, “Forced Sterilization: a Stain on
California,” Los Angeles Times, 16 Feb. 2003, Los
Angeles Times, 9 Feb. 2010 <http://articles.latimes.
com/2003/feb/16/opinion/oe-irons16?pg=2>.
5
Paul Popenoe, “The Progress of Eugenic
Sterilization,” The Journal of Heredity, Oxford
University Press, 9 Feb. 2010 <http://jhered.
oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/25/1/19.pdf>.
6
Searle 2.
7
McCarthy 77.
8
Paul Crook, Darwin’s Coat-Tails: Essays on Social
Darwinism (New York: Peter Lang, 2007) 22.
9
G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and its Evils (New
York: Cassell and Company, Limited, 1922) 51.
10
Charles Clark, “The Flattening of the Earth:
How Two Men Forged the Conflict between Science
and Religion from Bad History,” The Dartmouth
Apologia 4.1 (2009) 20-25.
11
Crook 40.
12
Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and
its Development (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1911)
211.
13
Linda Clark, “Introduction: Darwinism and
Social Darwinism,” Social Darwinism in France
(University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press,
1984) 1.
Grace Nauman ’11 is from
Lebanon, Oregon. She is a
Molecular Biology Major and
an English Minor.
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
33
Jonathan Swift’s
Satire of Hypocrisy in
A Tale of a Tub
n A TALE OF A TUB, Jonathan Swift confronts
hypocritical Christians for their abuses of religion
while affirming the purity of the Gospel itself.
Swift wrote this satire to address growing disillusionment with Christianity, which he saw as stemming
from doctrinal corruption and hypocritical behavior
within all major branches of the church. By exposing
its faults, he intended to hold the church accountable
for presenting an authentic, biblical account of the
Christian faith.
Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin in 1667. As a
young adult, he moved to England, worked as a secretary to a former diplomat, and began to write. His early
work primarily criticized the state of English prose and
examined the relationships between different cultures,1
but he soon realized that these intellectual exercises
I
34 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
]
by Emily DeBaun
were not enough to satisfy the calling of his faith. In
1694, Swift was ordained in the Anglican Church.2
He left his job as a secretary and went to minister in
Ireland.3 At the time, Europe was still feeling the effects of the Protestant Reformation, during which
religious dissenters who were frustrated with certain
practices in the Catholic Church formed new churches based on differing ideas about the interpretation of
scripture. Meanwhile, Britain was dealing with its own
English Reformation, a time when its official Anglican
Church was developed by a combination of elements
from both Catholicism and Protestantism.4 There was
a great deal of argument over what constituted “true”
Christianity and what was the best way to go about
following Christ.
Portrait of Jonathan Swift by Francis Bindon
of the Protestant Reformation. Swift
does not take sides in the religious
conflict, but criticizes each of the factions, exposing how each one abuses
religion.8 His strongest condemnation
is for Christian leaders who value selfpromotion over the core principles of
faith, an example which had led many
to see Christianity as irrelevant and
uninspired.
A Tale of a Tubb tells of three sons
named Peter, Jack, and Martin whose
father has recently died. Their sole inheritances are simple but well-made
coats, which their father has asked that
they enjoy and carefully preserve for all
of their days. Their father’s will is filled
with instructions on how to care for
the coats and rules about what his sons
may or may not do with their coats.
The brothers carefully maintain their
coats for seven years until they fall in
love with three royal women named
Money, Pride, and Ambition. They
then begin to resent the plainness of
their coats, certain that more ornate,
stylish apparel will help them gain the
ladies’ favor. They are aware that the
will strictly forbids any addition to the
coats, but they so badly want to conform to the styles of the period that
they twist and reinterpret the words
of the will in such a ridiculous way as
to allow exactly the practices against
which their father had warned them.
This first violation sets the stage for the brothers to
consistently disregard their father’s will whenever it
contradicts their own desires.9
This beginning to Swift’s Talee sets up a very thin
allegory for the history of the Christian church. The
father represents Christ, the will is the Bible, the
Though the Reformation occurred primarily during
the sixteenth century, the conflict between Catholics
and different
ff
groups of Protestant Dissenters was still
very much alive when Swift was ordained.5 The ten sion between authoritative, politicized religious organizations and the common public, who were inclined
to reject their faith because of
their religious leaders’ “dullness and pedantry,”6 was one of the
many problems that the English
church faced at this time. The church failed to present coats are Christian faith, and each son represents one
the foundational message of the Gospel to the middle major branch of the Christian church following the
class; instead, the general population saw the church Reformation. Peter represents the apostle Peter, and
as a place of power struggles and politics. As someone therefore the Catholic Church; Jack is named for
in a unique position to bridge the worlds of the “con- John Calvin and represents Puritanism; and Martin
temporary reading public” and the church, Jonathan represents Martin Luther and the Anglican Church,
Swift addressed these issues by writing an exceedingly as Swift considered Luther the “Father of the English
controversial work titled A Tale of a Tub, published in Reformation.”10
1704.7 In this piece, Swift gives an allegorical account
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
35
What is notable about the beginning of A Tale of a
Tubb is the way in which all three men fall into error together. There is not one particular brother who deviates
from the father’s will first. In fact, the brothers are not
even called by individual names during this first chapter of the satire. All three of the brothers are seduced
by society to a point where, “Resolved, therefore, at all
hazards to comply with the modes of the world, they
concerted matters together, and agreed unanimously
to lock up their father’s will in a strong-box… and
trouble themselves no farther to examine it.”11 Swift
argues here that the initial deviation from the teachings of the Bible was a unanimous and simultaneous
act by all three parties. The brothers’ human passions,
in which they abuse their coats. In other words, the
perceived problems of religion are the result of humans
prioritizing worldly things over the will of God, while
still claiming authority in the church. Since human
depravity is at fault, there is no reason to believe that
the will is an inadequate basis for faith. In the opening
chapter of his satire, Swift’s message to readers is that
the “self-interested stage-priests” who were the public
face of the early eighteenth-century religious scene in
England were not representative of the true message of
Christianity.12
As the Talee continues, Peter assumes power over
the kingdom, pushing his brothers out of public view.
He earns the respect of his constituents but quickly
Martin Luther at the Diet
of Worms in 1521, painting
by Anton von Werner
represented by their lust for the ladies Money, Pride,
and Ambition, as well as their desire to fit in with societal standards of dress, win out over their desire to
follow their father’s will. The problem is not with the
will itself, or with the wisdom of their deceased father’s
instructions, but rather with the brothers and the way
36 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
]
begins to abuse his power by deceiving his people.
This deception is most blatant when Peter feeds his
subjects bread crusts, all the while insisting that they
are actually sumptuous cuts of meat. When two of his
subjects protest this absurd disparity, he exclaims, “…
it is true, good, natural mutton as any in Leadenhall
Market; and God confound you both eternally if you
offer to believe otherwise!”13 Peter wants to maintain
control over his people without carrying out his real
duties. When his subjects protest that they have not
received what was promised, Peter’s absolute power is
brought into question, and he resorts to threats of divine judgment.
This portion of the tale is Swift’s allegory of what
he sees as corruption in the contemporary Catholic
Church. Peter’s rise to power over the kingdom is
meant to suggest that the Catholic Church had become allied with state power.14 Swift also intends for us
to link Peter’s threats to his insubordinate subjects with
the violent suppression of heresy during the Middle
Ages and early Renaissance, exemplified by the Spanish
Inquisition and the reign of Bloody Queen Mary of
England. Swift believes that by refusing to tolerate any
dissenting views, Peter, and the eighteenth-century
Catholic Church by analogy, pretends to excessive
authority.
Peter’s desire to keep power for himself fosters his
belief that he is capable of taking over responsibilities
that belong to God. As a result, his subjects are misinformed and mistreated. The Bible, represented by
the father’s will, is ignored. Though his father’s original message to Peter has not changed—
just as Christ’s initial instructions to the
church remain the same—people’s pride
and inadequacies lead them to corrupt
or ignore the instructions they have
been given. Swift thought it was important to convey to the English public that
the mistreatment of the people by the
church is by no means part of pure faith
or a true following of the scriptures.
A little later in the Tale, Jack also begins to depart further from the desires of
his father. When he and Martin discover
that Peter is acting self-interestedly, they
decide to seek their father’s wisdom, so
they find his will and begin to read it
again. As they read, they realize how
much the gaudiness of their coats has
deviated from their original instructions
on how to care for them. They commit
to removing the decorations and living
in alignment with their father’s will.
Martin gently removes each ornament
from his coat. Jack, however, exclaims,
“Ah! My good brother Martin… do as I
do, for the love of God; strip, tear, pull,
rend, flay off all that we may appear as
unlike that rogue Peter as possible.”15 He
furiously tears off the ornaments so that
the coat is torn to shreds in the process. In his attempt
to follow his father by disassociating himself from his
wayward brother, Jack destroys what his father has left
to him.16
In Swift’s story, Jack’s fall from obedience mirrors the development of Puritanism in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century England. In an effort to show his
dissatisfaction with the practices of the Catholic and
Anglican Churches, Jack attempts to pursue an ascetic
way of life in opposition to his brothers’ excesses. His
zeal for reform and obedience drives him toward legalism, where his dogged commitment to following the
instructions in his father’s will turns his focus to following rules rather than following God.17 In the process, he neglects Christ’s commandments to love his
brother and to correct him gently, rather than with furious passion. Like Peter, Jack allows his excessive zeal
to take precedence over the real message of the will.
The problems that result from his behavior are of his
own creation and a result of his human failures; they
do not come from any fault or failing of the will. At
the time A Tale of a Tubb was published, there were still
many Christians in England who chose to adhere to a
Puritanical lifestyle. By using Jack to show the legalism and lack of charity that often result from such a
Saint Peter
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
37
lifestyle, Swift wanted to counteract the alienation that on, Martin accrues considerable power and gains both
the common people felt toward zealots who claimed to constituents and land.18 According to Swift, Martin’s
have a true knowledge of God.
flaw is his moral flexibility – his willingness to comThough Swift presents the third brother, Martin, as promise. He is all too ready to bend the standards of
the most docile and levelheaded of the three broth- morality that call for monogamy in order to satisfy his
ers, he does not exempt him from an exposure of his potential followers.
Martin’s objection to Peter’s sale of remedies paralimperfections. When Martin and Jack leave Peter,
Martin gains popularity
for decrying Peter’s prac- :^PM[YPZRLKOPZWLYZVUHSZLJ\YP[`[VYLHJO
tice of selling his subjects
[OLWLVWSL^P[O[OLTLZZHNL[OH[O\THU
expensive—and
ineffective—remedies for various MHPS\YLKVLZUV[ULNH[L*OYPZ[»ZTLZZHNL
maladies. Martin soon becomes recognized as an advocate for Peter’s subjects; as lels Martin Luther’s sixteenth-century campaign against
part of this advocacy, Martin agrees to do what Peter the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences,19 which was a
would not: he performs second marriages for Peter’s major factor in the start of the Protestant Reformation.
Similarly, Swift uses Martin’s willingness to perform
polygamous marriages to represent the birth of the
Anglican Church in 1534 because its split from the
Catholic Church was prompted in large part by
King Henry VIII’s demand for a divorce that would
allow him to marry another woman.20 The newlyformed Anglican Church granted him the divorce
that the Catholic Church had refused to give him.
Swift saw this willingness to compromise the standards of the church in the face of political pressures
as a deviation from scripture’s instructions to “stand
firm”21 in the faith and to “not be conformed to this
world.”22 Martin’s desire to avoid conflict and his
fear of worldly institutions, along with his desire to
gain subjects and land of his own, take precedence
over the principles that he once upheld. This part of
the tale carried the most personal risk for Swift. In
attacking the Anglican Church’s political character,
he was taking on the flaws of his own institution.
After his satire was published, Swift faced major backlash from a number of powerful figures
within the church. He was accused of blasphemy
and prevented from ever holding higher stations
within the Anglican Church.23 Nevertheless, Swift
refused to retreat from his original purpose of exposing the abuses of religion to help his readers gain
an understanding of the true meaning of Christian
teachings. This is made clear in the “Apology” he
published with the fifth edition of A Tale of a Tub,
where he declares that, “The abuses of Religion, he
proposed to set forth” and states that, “It is manifest
Illustration from the 1710 edition of A Tale of a Tub. The brothers
by the reception the following discourse hath met
review their father’s will. Courtesy of the Dartmouth College Library.
with, that those who approve it, are a great majority among the men of taste.”24 In these lines, Swift
subjects who want to practice polygamy. Martin gains communicates both the firmness of his mission and
a large following of people who want to participate in his respect for his target audience, the common people
this practice, and many of Peter’s former subjects de- among whom A Tale of a Tubb was incredibly popular.
cide to submit to Martin’s rule instead. As time goes Though Swift’s career in the Anglican Church never
38 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
]
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954) 2-4.
3
“Swift, Jonathan, 1667-1745.”
4
“The Reformation,” The Oxford Dictionary
of the Christian Church, ed. F. L. Cross and E. A.
Livingstone, 2010, Oxford University Press, 30 Nov.
2009 <http://www.oxford-christianchurch.com/
entry?entry=t257.e5776>.
5
Ibid.
6
David Bywaters, “Anticlericalism in Swift’s Tale
of a Tub,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
36.3 (1996): 579.
7
Ibid.
8
“Swift, Jonathan, 1667-1745.”
9
Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (Adelaide: The
University of Adelaide Electronic Texts Collection,
2003), 16 Nov. 2009 <http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.
au/s/swift/jonathan/s97t/>.
10
Phillip Harth, Swift and Anglican Rationalism
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961)
14-16.
11
Swift, A Tale of a Tub.
12
Bywaters 579.
13
Swift, A Tale of a Tub.
14
Geoffrey Nathan, “Remapping the Landscape:
Early Christianity and the Graeco-Roman World.
A Review Article,” Journal of Religious History 32.3
(2008): 362.
15
Swift, A Tale of a Tub.
16
Ibid.
17
“Puritans,” The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian
Church, ed. F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, 2010,
Oxford University Press, 24 Nov. 2009 <http://
www.oxford-christianchurch.com/entry?entry=t257.
e5663>.
18
Swift, A Tale of a Tub.
19
“The Reformation.”
20
Ibid.
21
2 Corinthians 1:24.
22
Romans 12:2.
23
Judith Mueller, “Writing Under Constraint:
Swift’s “Apology” for a Tale of a Tub,” ELH 60.1
(1993): 101-102.
24
Jonathan Swift, “An Apology” (Lehigh
University, 1996), 25 Jan. 2010 <http://www.lehigh.
edu/ ~amsp/tubb0-2.html>.
Portrait of John Calvin,
16th century
recovered from the damage it received after the publication of his piece, A Tale of a Tubb was widely circulated and enjoyed.
Jonathan Swift was clearly a man burdened by the
threat that Christian hypocrisy posed to the spread
of the true Gospel. Seeing that the general public of
England was estranged from church leaders and clergy,
Swift risked his personal security to reach the people
with the message that human failure does not negate
Christ’s message. This concept remains significant today, as Christianity is commonly rejected because of
Christians’ natural inability to adequately represent
Jesus. Furthermore, the efforts of Swift and others like
him helped to eliminate many of the abuses that he
addressed in A Tale of a Tub. The churches as Swift
knew them have undergone significant change and
reform from within as Christians acknowledge their
failings and seek to follow the will of God. Ultimately,
true Christianity sweeps past the boundaries of human
error, honestly acknowledging that man is imperfect
and looking instead to the excellence of Christ for
deliverance.
1
“Swift, Jonathan, 1667-1745,” Literature Online
Biography, ed. Clark Lawlor, 2000, Jalic Inc., 25
Nov. 2009 <http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl/
openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&xri:pqil:res_ver=0.2
&res_id=xri:lion-us&rft_id=xri:lion:rec:ref:2045>.
2
Louis A. Landa, Swift and the Church of Ireland
Emily DeBaun ‘12 is from
Sandown, New Hampshire.
She is a Physics major.
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
39
Purpose,
Meaning,
and
t h e necessity
of
god
by Suiwen Liang
“The words of the Preacher, the
son of David, king in Jerusalem.
‘Vanity of vanities,’ says the Preacher,
‘Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.’”1
T
hese lines open the book of Ecclesiastes.
The “Preacher” is usually identified as
Solomon, the richest and most powerful king
in Israel’s history. Though he was famous throughout
the Middle East for his wisdom and wealth, Solomon
nevertheless found life empty and purposeless without
God. The questions he asks in Ecclesiastes are similar
to the doubts that the young nihilist Evgeny Bazarov
also encounters in Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and
Sons: “The tiny space I occupy is so small compared to
the rest of space… Yet in this atom, this mathematical
40 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
]
point, blood circulates, a brain functions and desires
something as well—How absurd! What nonsense!”2
Both Bazarov and the Preacher hunger for meaning and purpose, just as people throughout history
have also struggled with the question, “What is life’s
meaning, and where does it come from?” Traditional
Christianity asserts that the meaning of life is provided
by God, but secular materialism has rejected this explanation and attempts to provide another consistent
explanation for what, if anything, the purpose of life
really is. But without God, logic leads to only two possible conclusions: the secular humanist must either
deny that life has any purpose or create an illusory
meaning for himself. This logical impasse is why the
American atheist philosopher Will Durant wrote, “The
greatest question of our time is not communism vs.
individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the
Solomon’s Royal Court,
painting by Giovanni Demin
East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live
without God.”3
Materialism, which “not only holds that there are
no supernatural interventions in the course of nature,
but that there are no divine beings of any kind,”4 is the
philosophical underpinning of many forms of atheism.
Madalyn Murray O’Hair, founder of the American
Atheists, affirmed that her organization accepted “the
technical philosophy of materialism… that nothing exists but natural phenomena.”5 For the materialist, man
is the product of millions of years of mindless interactions of matter and nothing more. Stephen Jay Gould,
an eminent paleontologist, noted that “the world fared
perfectly well without us for all but the last moment of
earthly time—and this fact makes our appearance look
more like an accidental afterthought than the culmination of a prefigured plan.”6 If this really is the case, then
Richard Dawkins, author of The Blind Watchmaker, is
right to point out that the only difference between human beings and rocks is our degree of complexity.7 A
materialistic worldview offers man no intrinsic worth
or objective purpose. If matter is all there is, then the
fact of our existence is incidental.
But even if we have no intrinsic meaning, Gould
suggested that we could “construct these answers [to
the meaning of life] ourselves—from our own wisdom
and ethical sense.”8 The existentialist philosopher JeanPaul Sartre believed that “one may create meaning for
his life by freely choosing to follow a certain course of
action.”9 However, while the notion that we can create
our own subjective meaning may be appealing, it is undermined by the tenuousness of our existence. It is the
nature of our universe that there must be an end not
only of each human individually, but also of the world
itself. Physics foretells the final collapse of the universe
due to heat death, cementing our race’s extinction and
insignificance. As Bertrand Russell, the great materialist philosopher, observed, “All the noonday brightness
of human genius, [is] destined to extinction in the vast
death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of
Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath
the debris of a universe in ruins.”10 All of our collective
achievements, knowledge, and pleasures, even our sufferings will be obliterated by the passage of time. Not
even the memory of them will remain. Clearly, immaterial meaning cannot be shaped from the material
substance of a universe which is itself passing away.
Confronting this reality, the Russian novelist Leo
Tolstoy wrote, “‘What will come of what I am doing today or tomorrow? What will come of my whole
life? Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do
anything?’ It can also be expressed thus: Is there any
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
41
Where do we come from?
What are we? Where
are we going?,
? painting
by Paul Gauguin
meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”11 His dilemma is echoed in
Tom Stoppard’s existential comedy Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are Dead,
d in which the eponymous characters inadvertently wander into the plot of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet. Eventually, the confused pair is charged with
delivering Hamlet to England, but they are powerless
to stop his escape and must suffer
ff death as the consequence. Guildenstern laments, “We’ve travelled too far,
and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope
of explanation.”12 As the title suggests, the characters
are doomed, unable to alter their course. Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern represent the human dilemma of
drifting toward nonexistence. When God is excluded,
man is left with no explanation for why this should be.
Loren Eiseley noted that, “Man is the cosmic orphan.
He’s the only creature in the universe who asks, ‘Why?’
Other animals have instincts to guide them, but man
has learned to ask questions: ‘Who am I?’ ‘Why am
I here?’ ‘Where am I going?’”13 Gould answered this
inquiry with finality: “We may yearn for a ‘higher’
answer—but none exists.”14
The atheist Aldous Huxley found the logical conclusion that life is meaningless exhilarating:
We objected to the morality because it interfered
with our sexual freedom; we objected to the politt
ical and economic system because it was unjust.
The supporters of these systems claimed that in
42 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Spring 2010
]
some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian
meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was
one admirably simple method of confuting these
people at the same time justifying ourselves…we
could deny that the world had any meaning.15
Aware that purpose was either objective or nonexistent, Huxley and his contemporaries exchanged purpose for greater personal freedom. He confesses later in
Ends and Meanss that “those who, to be liberated from
political or sexual restraint, accept absolute meaninglessness tend in a short time to become… much dissatisfied with their philosophy.”16 As Huxley found, a
hedonistic approach to life’s purpose must ultimately
disappoint. The Preacher from Ecclesiastes also claims
to have tried hedonism and found it wanting: “I said
to myself, ‘Come now, I will test you with pleasure.
So enjoy yourself.’ And behold, it too was futility.”17
Having abandoned the pursuit of objective purpose
for the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure, the hedonist
arrives at a place of still greater emptiness. As G.K.
Chesterton said, “Meaninglessness does not come from
being weary of pain. Meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure.”18
In order to live consistently with a materialist worldview, it is necessary to accept the inevitable
meaninglessness of life. Christian theism, on the other
hand, addresses the question of our age in a way that
satisfies the mind and heart. The Bible claims that human existence is neither accidental nor finite. Created
the entire universe, molecules that would normally
make nothing more complicated than a chunk of
rock, gather themselves together into chunks of rocksized matter of such staggering complexity that they
are capable of running, jumping, swimming, flying,
seeing, hearing, capturing and
eating other such animated chunks
of complexity.”
Richard Dawkins, The God
Delusion (New York: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 2006) 366-367.
8
Gould, qtd. in The Meaning of
Life.
9
William Lane Craig, “The
Absurdity of Life without God,”
Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth
and Apologetics (Wheaton, IL:
Crossway Books, 2008) 78.
10
Bertrand Russell, “A Free
Man’s Worship,” Two Modern
Essays on Religion (Hanover, NH:
Westholm Publications, 1959) 25.
11
Leo Tolstoy, Spiritual Writings
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,
2006) 58.
12
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are Dead (New York:
Grove Press, 1967) 121.
13
Craig 71.
14
Gould, qtd. in The Meaning
of Life.
15
Aldous Huxley, Ends and
Means (New York and London:
Harper & Brothers Publishers,
1937) 316.
16
Ibid. 318-19.
17
Ecclesiastes 2:1.
18
G.K. Chesterton, qtd. in Ravi
Zacharias, The End of Reason: A
Response to the New Atheists (Grand
Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008) 39.
19
Zacharias, Can Man Live
without God xvi.
20
C.S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” God in the
Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids,
MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1994) 101.
21
Tolstoy 58.
in the very image of God, we are destined to exist into
eternity in companionship with Him. Eternity also
endows our earthly choices and relationships with unmistakable importance. Moral choices will be judged,
relationships will transcend time, and neither dies with
the material body. Pleasure also
finds its supreme expression in fellowship with God, and it is in that
communion that meaning and
consummate joy are experienced.
No one can remain indifferff
ent to the questions raised about
materialism’s logical ramifications
or the answers Christianity offers.
ff
As Ravi Zacharias puts it, whether
or not man can live without God
“must be answered not only by
those who are avowedly antitheistic, but also by the many who
functionally live as if there were no
God and that His existence does
not matter.”19 C.S. Lewis argued
that “Christianity is a statement
which, if false, is of no importance,
and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be
is moderately important.”20 As we
seek the answers for ourselves, we
ought to consider the testimony
of others who have faced the crisis
of existence already. Leo Tolstoy,
the same man who contemplated
suicide as an alternative to a meaningless life, wrote after his conversion to Christianity, “God is that
without which you cannot live. To
know God and to live is one and
the same thing!”21
1
Ecclesiastes 1:1-2.
Portrait of Leo Tolstoy
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and
Sons, trans. Michael R. Katz (New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, Inc., 1996) 97.
3
Will Durant, On the Meaning of Life (New York:
Ray Long & Richard R. Smith, Inc., 1932) 23.
4
Keith Campbell, “Materialism,” Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, vol. 6, 2nd ed., ed. Donald M. Borchert
(Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2006) 14.
5
Madalyn Murray O’Hare, qtd. in Ravi Zacharias,
Can Man Live without God (Nashville: W. Publishing
Group, 1994) 16-17.
6
Stephen Jay Gould, qtd. in The Meaning of Life,
ed. David Friend, et al. (New York: Little Brown &
Co., 1991) 33.
7
“On one planet, and possibly only one planet in
2
Suiwen Liang ‘13 is from
Memphis, Tennessee. He is a
Chemistry major.
[
Spring 2010 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót
43
(7YH`LYMVY+HY[TV\[O
This prayer by professor of religion Lucius Waterman appears on a plaque hanging outside Parkhurst Hall.
O Lord God Almighty, well-spring of wisdom, master of power, guide of all growth, giver of all gain. We make
our prayer to thee, this day, for Dartmouth College. Earnestly entreating thy favour for its people. For its work,
and for all its life. Let thy hand be upon its officers of administration to make them strong and wise, and let thy
word make known to them the hiding-place of power. Give to its teachers the gift of teaching, and make them
to be men right-minded and high-hearted. Give to its students the spirit of vision, and fill them with a just
ambition to be strong and well-furnished, and to have understanding of the times in which they live. Save the
men of Dartmouth from the allurements of self-indulgence, from the assaults of evil foes, from pride of success,
from false ambitions, from hardness, from shallowness, from laziness, from heedlessness, from carelessness of
opportunity, and from ingratitude for sacrifices out of which their opportunity has grown. Make, we beseech
thee, this society of scholars to be a fountain of true knowledge, a temple of sacred service, a fortress for the
defense of things just and right, and fill the Dartmouth spirit with thy spirit, to make it a name and a praise that
shall not fail, but stand before thee forever. We ask in the name in which alone is salvation, even through Jesus
Christ our Lord, amen.
The Reverend Lucius Waterman, D.D.
;OL5PJLUL*YLLK
We, the members of The Dartmouth Apologia, affirm
that the Bible is inspired by God, that faith in Jesus
Christ is necessary for salvation, and that God has
called us to live by the moral principles of the New
Testament. We also affirm the Nicene Creed, with the
understanding that views may differ on baptism and
the meaning of the word “catholic.”
We [I] believe in one God, the Father, the
Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that
is, seen and unseen.
We [I] believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only
Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light, true God from
true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with
the Father. Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation he came down
from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he
became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was
made man. For our sake he was crucified under
Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again in accordance
with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and
is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will
come again in glory to judge the living and the
dead, and his kingdom will have no end.
We [I] believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the
giver of life, who proceeds from the Father [and
the Son]. With the Father and the Son he is
worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through
the Prophets. We believe in one holy catholic
and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one
baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for
the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the
world to come. Amen.
44 t The Dartmouth "Ăāþāùûót Fall 2009
]
The Dartmouth
Apologia
A Journal of Christian Thought
The Dartmouth
Apologia
A Journal of Christian Thought