On Morality: Did Christianity Introduce Anything New?

I’ve been reading through Alasdair MacIntyre’s A History of Ethics. It’s an older text (1966) and not as well-known as After Virtue, but I’ve found it to be an enjoyable and illuminating guidebook through the various formulations of moral philosophy, from the “Homeric age to the twentieth century” (as the subtitle says).

In the chapter on Christianity, he suggests that, when Christianity came onto the scene, it did not so much as add anything new to the moral/ethical theories, concepts, and practices that were already in play; however, it did intensify and help solidify (in some good ways) intuitions that were already “in the water” so to speak.

After discussing the concept of the “power of God” as a motivator for moral behavior (we should obey God’s law–and/or be virtuous–because God has the power to either punish us for disobeying or reward us and make us happy for obeying), he then raises the point about how Christianity contributed to moral philosophy. Note: when he says “secular conceptions” here, I think he is referring to Greek and Roman moral philosophy, not necessarily to “secular” as we think of it more commonly today.

Here’s the (rather lengthy) quote:

This view of the role of the concept of the power of God may suggest that religious conceptions of morality are intelligible only insofar as they complement or otherwise elaborate upon existing secular conceptions. This suggestion is surely correct. If religion is to propound a set of rules or a set of goals successfully, it must do so by showing that to live in the light of such rules and goals will be productive of what men can independently judge to be good.

It would be absurd to deny that the world religions, and more especially Christianity, have been the bearers of new values. But these new values have to commend themselves by reason of the role that they can have in human life. There is, for example, no reason to quarrel with the contention that Christianity introduced even more strongly than the Stoics did the concept of every man as somehow equal before God.

Even if, from St. Paul to Martin Luther, this conviction appeared compatible with the institutions of slavery and serfdom, it provided a ground for attacking those institutions whenever their abolition appeared remotely possible. But insofar as the notion of the equality of men before God has moral content, it has so because it implies a type of human community in which nobody has superior rights of a moral or political kind to anyone else, but need is the criterion of one’s claim upon other people, and the type of community is to be commended or otherwise insofar as it provides a better or worse framework within which men’s ideals for themselves and for others can be realized. (114-115)

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