Chapter I: Man a Moral Agent

IS man a moral or a merely physical agent? Are all man's thoughts, words, and actions determined by merely physical and necessary laws like those of electricity or steam? If man is a merely physical agent, then morality is only a department of physics, and, without doubt, it will be an important department of physics. It is important for us to know the laws which govern the action of gravitation, or of electricity, or of steam, but it is still more important for us to know the laws which govern the action of men. If man is nothing but matter and force, by patient study we shall be able to predict his every thought, word, and action with as much certainty as we can predict the action of a steam-engine or of a motor-car. Such knowledge would be invaluable for governments, employers, and parents. It would not be less valuable for the private citizen, the employed, and for children still under parental sway.

But is man a merely physical agent, a mere natural machine? Is man's action determined solely by the antecedents and conditions of action, so that if we knew them all we could predict infallibly what that action would be? Or is there something in man which clearly distinguishes his action from that of merely physical causes?

Man certainly is not an ordinary machine. He has the wonderful gift of knowledge. He knows what will happen if he fastens down the safety-valve of a steam-engine, and what is likely to be the consequence if he directs his motor-car against a stone wall. He has a further wonderful power if the common sense of mankind is a safe witness to truth. Just as he has the power of knowing and planning different courses of action, so he has the complementary power of choosing among different courses of action. He can fasten down the safety-valve of the steam-engine, if he chooses to do so, and he can drive his motor-car against a stone wall if he likes. In the department of morals man can know the difference between good and evil, and he can choose the good and avoid the evil. That is what I mean by a moral agent. To be a moral agent man must know the difference between good and evil, and he must have the power of choosing freely between them. Both elements are necessary. A child who has not come to the age of reason lacks knowledge, and so, if he does wrong, we do not blame him, though we may correct him, for he can be improved by correction. If a monomaniac does wrong we do not blame him, because we know that he has lost the power of self-control. But if a grown up man of sound mind does wrong, we blame him, and sometimes punish him, and we say he deserves it.

The practical reason of the normal man himself not only tells him what is right or wrong, but when he has done right it approves his conduct; when he has done wrong it condemns him. In other words, the normal man has a conscience, and conscience is keenly sensible of right conduct, and of wrong conduct. If wrong was done through ignorance or mistake conscience is not disturbed, it says: I am not responsible, I could not help it. But if a man, knowingly and willfully, does wrong, then his conscience condemns him, even when nobody else knows of his wrong-doing. He knows that he is responsible for the wrong, that he is the cause of it, and that he need not have done it, and should not have done it.

All this shows that man is something quite different from an ordinary and necessary physical agent, and so we give him a special name and call him a moral agent. As a moral agent man is endowed with knowledge of what is morally right and wrong, and he is endowed with freedom to choose between them.

The chief Protestant reformers vehemently denied that after Adam's fall man had the power of free choice between good and evil.

In his treatise, "The Bondage of the Will," Luther asserted that "in his actings toward God, in things pertaining to salvation or damnation, man has no free will, but is the captive, the subject, and the servant, either of the will of God, or of the will of Satan." Again, "if we believe that God foreknows and predestinates everything... it follows that there can be no such thing as free will in man or angel, or any creature."¹

¹ Quoted by E. H. Browne, The Thirty-nine Articles. Art. 10.

If this be so, Erasmus had asked in his book against Luther, who will strive to correct his life? "Nobody," answered Luther, in the same work, "The Bondage of the Will." "Nor can anybody do so. However, the elect and good are corrected by the Holy Spirit. The rest will perish uncorrected. If you say that the door is opened to wickedness by this teaching, I answer: So be it. Nevertheless, by this same teaching the door is opened to justice and the entrance to heaven is gained."

Calvin is, at least, equally emphatic. "The mind of man," he says, "is so wholly alienated from God, that it can conceive, desire, and effect nothing but what is impious, perverted, foul, impure, and flagitious; the heart is so steeped in the venom of sin that it can breathe forth nothing but fetid corruption."¹ The Anglican reformers were above all anxious to keep as many as possible within the limits of the national Church and they were studiously moderate in their teaching on this important point of doctrine. Article 10, On Free Will, is worded thus:

¹ Institut. Lib. ii., c. v. 19.

"The condition of man after the fall of Adam is such that he cannot turn and prepare himself by his own natural strength and good works to faith and calling upon God; wherefore, we have no power to do good works, pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will and working with us when we have that good will."

Of course, there is no room for free will in the modern theories of the mechanical evolution of the universe. Man is and must be simply what the forces of nature and of society have made him. "It is almost beyond dispute," says Mr. Bertrand Russell, in his "Philosophical Essays," "that man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms. In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to a tyranny of outside forces." Church by Satan, let him be anathema."¹ Thomas H. Huxley opposed the doctrine of the freedom of the human will on the ground that it was contrary to the principle of causality. He says:

The Catholic Church has ever been the consistent and outspoken defender of human liberty. For freedom of the will lies at the root of all other human liberties and is the necessary condition of them. In the early ages of the Faith she defended the freedom of the human will against the Manicheans and Priscillianists, and she was not remiss in defending the same truth against the errors of Luther and Calvin. The Fathers of the Council of Trent pronounced the following anathema against them:

“If any one says that the free will of man is lost or extinguished after Adam's sin, or that the substance is about a title only, and, indeed, a title without substance, and, in fine, a figment introduced into the "Whoever accepts the universality of the law of causation as a dogma of philosophy denies the existence of uncaused phenomena. And the essence of that which is improperly called the free-will doctrine is that occasionally, at any rate, human volition is self-caused, that is to say, not caused at all; for to cause oneself one must have anteceded oneself — which is, to say the least of it, difficult to imagine."² called the will, which is free. Just as when we see an external object the power of vision has to be stimulated into action by a ray of light coming from the object to the retina of the eye, so before an act of volition our will-power has to be stimulated into action by a thought. The will cannot act without the antecedent thought, but the doctrine of free will asserts that ordinarily, at least, the will is not determined to any definite action by the thought. The will can accept the thought or reject it or simply remain passive, and in that wonderful power the essence of free will resides.

Of course, the doctrine of free will does not imply that volition is ever self-caused, and it is not contrary to the law of causality. An act of volition is called free because it is the effect of a power of the human soul

¹ Sess. vi. c. 5.

² "Essay on Science and Morals." The Catholic doctrine of free will is not opposed to the principle of causality nor is it opposed to the true doctrine on divine grace.

Luther maintained that after man's fall the grace of God is absolutely necessary to enable man to think or do anything that is good. For man's nature was thoroughly corrupted by the fall. Henceforth, sin was of his very nature, he cannot help committing it, he commits it with every breath that he draws. The involuntary movements of appetite and concupiscence are sins: does not the Apostle say so?

Natural benevolence is mere hypocrisy; for by nature man hates and must hate his neighbor. “By nature I cannot utter a friendly word or make a friendly sign, and if I do it is only hypocrisy; the heart, at least, remains full of venom."

So deep rooted is this natural corruption of man that it remains even in the just. When God gives His grace to man, and thereby makes him just, He only turns His eyes away from man's natural foulness and gives him His favor on account of the merits of Christ which He imputes to him.¹

Man's will takes no part in the process of justification. "It is like a beast of burden; if God mounts it, it goes where God drives it; if the devil, it goes where the devil drives it. It cannot choose its rider, but the riders quarrel among themselves as to which shall get into the saddle."¹ Some recent writers have seen in such doctrines as these the cause of that amazing moral insensibility of the German mind which displayed itself during the great war.

¹ J. Verres, "Luther: An Historical Portrait," pp. 127, 128.

Very different from this is the teaching of the Catholic Church. She teaches that by the fall man was, indeed, deprived of sanctifying grace and of certain preternatural gifts by which man's lower appetite was restrained and kept within the bounds of reason so that he was not troubled even by its involuntary rebellion. Still man's nature was not entirely corrupted by original sin. It was still capable of good. We can, indeed, do nothing without God's help — in Him we live, move, and have our being. But the Catholic Church distinguishes two sorts of divine help. There is the divine help of the natural order, by which God preserves, sustains, and cooperates with His creature in all his actions. This divine concursus is necessary for man, it is required by his nature, which is essentially and always dependent on its Creator. But besides this natural help and cooperation of God, which is never wanting as long as God sustains His creature, there is the supernatural help of God's grace. This supernatural help is given freely and gratuitously to man to enable him to attain the supernatural end of the intuitive vision of God to which God has freely and gratuitously called him. Without God's supernatural grace man can do no good action of the supernatural order. He cannot take a single step toward his supernatural end. The Catholic Church further concedes that the grace of God is necessary to enable man to persevere and to keep God's commandments for any long period of time. Man's weakness in the face of continual temptation is too great to permit of his avoiding sin for very long without the special help of God's grace. But still by his natural resources and with the natural help which God gives him, even fallen man can do ethically good actions and avoid sin for a time.

¹ J. Verres, "Luther: An Historical Portrait," p. 190.

This doctrine is truer, more consoling, and more helpful than that of the reformers. Historically, the doctrine of man's absolute and utter corruption has not tended to maintain a high standard of moral conduct.