Chapter II: Legalism

CATHOLICS are sometimes puzzled when they read contemptuous allusions to "legalism" made by non-Catholic writers on ethics. They feel that an attack is being made on the moral teaching of the Catholic Church, but they are often unaware of what the attack implies. After all there is a moral law, a right and wrong in morality, as there is in arithmetic. As arithmetic has its laws so has morality. If it is important to keep the laws of arithmetic, much more important is it to keep the laws of morality. If there are moral laws there is a moral lawgiver, and why should the precepts and commands of the moral lawgiver be sneered at, and those who think that they should be obeyed treated with contempt?

To show more clearly the question at issue between Catholics and non-Catholics, I will quote a recent and very moderate writer on ethics. Mr. J. MacCunn, in 1903, published a little book entitled "The Making of Character," in the Cambridge series for schools and training colleges. In that book occurs the following passage:

"These difficulties bring us to a parting of the ways. Once the ineffectual generality of precepts has made itself felt, two courses lie open. One is to see in this fact a final proof that a morality of precept is unequal to the demands of life, and to turn from it to a morality that centers its hopes in the training of individual judgment. The second is to refuse to give up the morality of precept without a struggle, and to set resolutely to work to make it adequate to those facts of concrete moral experience by which the morality of code is tested and found wanting. It is the adoption of the second course that leads to the third phase of the morality of precept, that supreme effort to make moral dogmas adequate to life, which gives rise to casuistry."¹ serve days and months and times and years." But we are free "with the freedom wherewith Christ has made us free. Stand fast and be not held again under the yoke of bondage. Behold I, Paul, tell you that if you be circumcised Christ shall profit you nothing.... You are made void of Christ, you who are justified in the law, you are fallen from grace. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing nor uncircumcision, but faith that worketh by charity."¹ position between the law and the Gospel, an opposition which, as he proudly boasts, he was the first to discover. "The Gospel does not preach what we must do or omit, but bids us open our hands to receive gifts, and says: Behold, dear man, this is what God has done for thee, for thy sake He has made His Son assume human nature. This believe and accept, and thou shalt be saved. The Gospel only shows us the gifts of God, not what we have to give to God, or to do for Him, as is the wont of the law." "Law is what we have to do, the Gospel what God is willing to give. The former we cannot fulfill, the latter we receive and apprehend by faith." "The Gospel is good tidings, it is not a sermon on works of ours. He who says that the Gospel demands works, necessary for salvation, is a liar." "That the law should have been abolished, so that it can no longer condemn those that believe, was just as necessary, as that it should have been given." "The law and the Gospel are two quite contrary things, which cannot be in harmony with each other by the side of each other." "He who knows how to distinguish between the law and the Gospel may thank God and consider himself a theologian." "When the conscience is terror-stricken on account of the law, and struggles with the judgment of God, do not consult reason or the law, act exactly as if thou hadst never heard of the law of God. Answer: There is a time to live and a time to die; there is a time to hear the law and a time to despise the law. Let the law be off and let the Gospel come." "If you do not ignore the law, if you are not sure in your heart that there is no law, that there is no wrath of God, but only grace and mercy through Christ, you cannot be saved." "If you do not send away Moses with his law, and in those tremblings and terrors lay hold of Christ, who has suffered for your sins, it is all over with your salvation." "The decalogue has no right to accuse and to terrify the conscience, in which Christ reigns through grace, for through Christ those laws have become antiquated." thing." "Christ's work consists in this: to fulfill the law for us, not to give laws to us, and to redeem us. The devil makes of Christ a mere Moses."¹ Lord.¹ This is what Luther says about them. "For instance, the commandment — Thou shalt have no bad desires — proves that we are all sinners, and no man can be without bad desires, let him do whatever he likes. From this he learns to distrust himself and to look elsewhere for help to be freed from bad desires, and to fulfill through some one else the law which he himself is incapable of fulfilling. As soon as man begins to learn and to feel from the laws of God his own incapacity he becomes thoroughly humble and annihilated in his own eyes."² if he wishes he cannot lose his salvation on account of the greatest sins, unless he refuses to believe. Apart from unbelief, no sins can damn him. If faith returns to the promises made by God to the baptized Christian, or if it does not depart from them in an instant, all sins are blotted out by it or rather by the divine veracity; for if you confess God and abandon yourself to His promises with confidence He cannot deny Himself."¹ These extracts from Luther's works show quite plainly what was his attitude toward the moral law. A recent German writer, Loofs, says very truly that "in the opposition between the law and the Gospel lies the chief difference between the Lutheran and the Catholic conception of Christianity." The Lutheran doctrine tended to divorce morality from religion and make it a matter belonging exclusively to the conscience of the individual. The tendency was increased by the influence of the Kantian philosophy, which sneered at the heteronomy of Catholic morality and proclaimed the autonomy of the human reason in the sphere of morals. Good men see and lament the moral chaos of the modern world. Outside the Catholic Church there are few practical principles of conduct on which even Christians are agreed. As against the morality of commandments and codes, Mr. MacCunn insists on the cultivation of a sound moral judgment. A sound moral judgment, he says, has three elements. It involves character, deliberation, and knowledge. There must be knowledge of means and ends, good ends. But what are good ends, and what are we to do when there is a conflict between them, as not unfrequently happens? We may not have recourse to casuistry, but, says Mr. MacCunn, "there is little safety if there be not in the mind a well-compacted and habitually-cherished ideal with which each isolated end that claims adoption may be confronted."¹ But where are we to get such an ideal? Alas, as we advance from youth to age we learn to reject many ideals that we once entertained. There are many disillusionments in life. But cannot we start life with a good ideal, with the true ideal which every man should place before himself all through life? "They are found," says Mr. MacCunn, "in those conceptions of the supreme End of life, which philosophy has been giving to the world since the days of Socrates. They are diverse as the philosophies that have devised them: duty, perfection, greatest happiness, greatest blessedness, self-realization and the rest."¹ tained in the law of Moses. The ceremonial and judicial precepts of the Old Law have ceased to bind, as St. Paul taught the Romans and the Galatians; the moral precepts of the decalogue were expressly reaffirmed by Christ. Love is indeed the great commandment which sums up the law and the prophets, but love manifests itself in obedience — If you love Me keep My commandments—If thou wilt enter into life keep the commandments. And if any doubt were possible as to which commandments He meant, we know from His own divine lips that He meant those of the decalogue—“Thou shalt do no murder. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness. Honor thy father and thy mother. And: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."¹

There, certainly, is the parting of the ways. The one is the Protestant attitude toward all codes of morality, including the decalogue, the other is the Catholic attitude. Which is right?

To understand the Protestant attitude we must go back to Luther and his Commentaries on St. Paul. After St. Paul had converted the Galatians to the faith of Christ, some false teachers, who were Jews, came to them and tried to persuade them to join circumcision and the observance of the ceremonies of the Mosaic law with the faith of Christ. In his Epistle to the Galatians St. Paul tells them that such a course is wrong.

"But now after that you have known God, or rather are known by God, how turn you again to the weak and needy elements which you desire to serve again? You ob-

¹ Loc. cit., p. 152.

Luther professed a special predilection for the Epistle to the Galatians. He said he took it to him for his spouse, as he had done Catharine von Bora. There and in the Epistle to the Romans he saw the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and the uncompromising condemnation of the law and legalism. It will be well to quote him at some length on this latter point.

According to Luther there is a direct op-

¹ Gal. iv. v.

Luther had a positive hatred for Moses and for his law. "If you are prudent," he says, "send that stammering and stuttering Moses with his law far away from you, and be not influenced by his terrific threats. Look upon him with suspicion, as upon a heretic, excommunicated, damned, worse than the Pope and the devil."

"I will not have Moses and his law, for he is the enemy of the Lord Christ. We must put away the thoughts and disputes about the law, whenever the conscience becomes terrified and feels God's anger against sin. Instead of that it will be better to sing, to eat, to drink, to sleep, to be merry in spite of the devil." "No greater insult can be offered to Christ than to suppose that He has come to give commandments, to make a sort of Moses of Him." "Only the mad and blind Papists do such a By the law in these passages Luther did not mean merely the ceremonial and judicial precepts of the Old Dispensation; he meant especially the moral precepts of the natural law contained in the ten commandments. Those moral precepts were the only portion of the Mosaic law which the Catholic Church taught had been ratified and promulgated anew by Jesus Christ. The violation of them alone could cause the terrible stings of conscience for which Luther was so anxious to find a remedy. Moreover, he in express terms repudiated the decalogue, the ten commandments in their entirety. Bad desires, if willfully consented to, are certainly sins against the natural law, and against the express teaching of Christ, Our The impossibility of observing the moral law, and the consequent necessity of committing sin, gives its supreme importance to Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone. In his work on the "Babylonian Captivity," he writes:

¹ J. Verres, "Luther: An Historical. Portrait," p. 130 ff.

"You see how rich the Christian is, even

¹ Matt. v. 28.

² J. Verres, "Luther: An Historical Portrait," p. 136.

In a famous letter to Melancthon, Luther wrote: "Sin, and sin bravely, but believe and rejoice still more bravely in Christ, the Conqueror of sin, of death, and of the world. As long as we are here below there must be sin. It is sufficient for us to acknowledge the Lamb who bears the sins of the world; then sin will not be able to separate us from Him even if we were unchaste a thousand times a day or committed a thousand murders."²

¹ Pagnier, Luther et l'Allemagne, p. 75.

² Pagnier, loc. cit. p. 76.

¹ Op. cit. p. 188.

But will any of these ideals do, are they all equally good and equally true though diverse and different? Yes, for practical purposes, is apparently the answer of Mr. MacCunn. He says: "If we would know that an end is good, we must be able to satisfy ourselves that it is in harmony with a settled and coherent ideal of life."²

Modern skepticism has invaded the sphere not only of speculative truth but of morality also. The Catholic still clings to Jesus Christ and His teaching. He condemns Pharisaic legalism, the exaggerated worship of the law coupled with its merely external observance. But he maintains that Christ was a true lawgiver inasmuch as He enacted anew the natural precepts con-

¹ Op. cit. p. 194.

² Op. cit. p. 188.

¹ Matt. xix. 18, 19.