In some respects the new morality is quite close to Christianity. Traditionally Christians have held that there are two ways of following the will of God: abiding by His commandments and harkening to His voice within us. In Luke 17:21 Jesus recommends the latter: “the kingdom of God is within you.” So did the church father Augustine: “I entered into the depths of my soul, and with the eye of my soul I saw the Light that never changes casting its rays over me.” In Augustine’s view, God is the interior light that powers our souls. The Reformation, too, developed the idea of the priesthood of the individual believer, in which each person looks within himself to discover God’s will. Outward behavior is not enough, because there is an inner self that only God perceives.
Secular morality breaks with Christianity in its counsel of inwardness as an autonomous moral source. Augustine and Luther presumed that the inward journey is merely the mode of access to the Creator, and through this relationship man finds joy andcompleteness. The secular innovation is to cut off the interior quest from any external source of authority, including God’s. Philosopher Charles Taylor explains this point of view: “I am free when I decide for myself what concerns me, rather than being shaped by external influences. Our moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves. Self-determining freedom demands that I break the hold of external impositions, and decide for myself alone.” So the inner light is now the final arbiter of how I should live my life. The self defines what is good and becomes the exclusive source of unity and wholeness.
Today’s secular morality is rooted in the romantic philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Rousseau’s thought we discover a deeper schism between liberal morality and Christianity. In the Christian view, human nature is corrupted by original sin. Original sin does not refer only to the sin of Adam and Eve; it also refers to the idea that our natures are, from the start, sinful. Augustine asks us to look at the infant, how thoroughly self-absorbed it is, how petulantly it strikes its little arms out at the nurse. If babies do not do harm, Augustine wryly notes, it is not for lack of will but only for lack of strength. In the Christian understanding, the inner self is corrupt, so we need God’s grace to enter from the outside and transform our fallen human nature. Christianity is a religion of self-overcoming.
In Rousseau’s understanding, by contrast, human beings were originally good but society has corrupted them. We are not to blame for our failings because “society made us do it.” Consequently, in order to discover what is good and true, we must dig deep within ourselves and recover the voice of nature in us. Rousseau never counseled a return to the primitive state. It is not a matter, he wrote in Emile, of moving back among the apes and the bears.’ But man’s original state can to some extent be recovered as a state of mind. Within us dwells an original being that is our true self, uncorrupted by the pressures of society. The problem is that the voice of this inner self has been rendered inaudible by the din of convention and artificially generated desires. By connecting with the inner self and giving its voice an authoritative role in our lives, we can avoid “selling out” to a mercenary society and recover our essential goodness. In the secular ethic, James Byrne reminds us, it is not God but we who are “the dispensers of our own saving grace.”
