Love is the sin for which we find it almost impossible to repent. That is why Paolo and Francesca, the two adulterers who inhabit the outer ring of Dante’s inferno, still cling together like doves, appealing to the law of love, “which absolves no one from loving.” Love has transported them into an almost transcendental state outside the real world, and yet more real than the world. Love of this kind is, quite literally, “beyond good and evil,” and that is why the new morality has become such a powerful justification for adultery. When the inner self commands love, it does so authoritatively, defiantly, and without regard to risk or cost or all other commitments. As C. S. Lewis once observed, erotic love of this kind tends to “claim for itself a divine authority.”
High rates of divorce in the West can be accounted for by the moral force generated by the secular ethic. Today the woman who leaves her husband says, “I felt called to leave. My life would have been a waste if I stayed. My marriage had become a kind of prison. I just had to follow my heart and go with Ted.” So divorce has become, as it never was before, a form of personal liberation, what Barbara Dafoe Whitehead terms “expressive divorce.”
Here we have the first hint of a serious problem with secular morality. In its central domain, that of love, it is notoriously fickle. It starts out very sure of itself, promising not just “I love you” but “I will always love you.” This is stated not hypocritically or cunningly but sincerely. Each time actress Elizabeth Taylor got married she could be heard on television saying something like, “This time I’ve got it right. This time it’s the real thing:’ Love’s permanence gives it moral power, the power to lift us above the narrow confines of ourselves and join with another person to become a higher unity. But, as I say, the inner selfhas repeatedly proven itself a liar. Even Rousseau, that great champion of the inner self, admits in Emile that in love “everything is only illusion.” Or as Lewis puts it, “Eros is driven to promise what Eros of himself cannot perform.” So the West has paid an enormous social price—evident in the ineffable sadness of the children of divorce—for its adoption of secular morality.
Moreover, there is a deeper and more fundamental problem with secular morality. This morality is based on the assumption that the inner self is good. Is this assumption correct? If we consult the great works of Western literature, the answer would seem to be a resounding no. Read Shakespeare’s plays or take in Wagner’s Ring trilogy. As great artists, Shakespeare and Wagner draw us into the inner depths of human nature, and what do we find there? We find gentleness and tenderness and sweetness and pity, to be sure, but we also find cruelty, brutality, lust, hatred, and envy. We find also schadenfreude, a word the Germans use to describe the pleasure we take in another person’s misery. Humans are, in their inner depths, cauldrons of good and evil mixed together.
Quite possibly evil predominates in this mixture, but that may not be apparent to us. A whole body of scientific and psychological scholarship shows that beneath the motives that we admit to ourselves, there are often less admirable motives at work. Even our good motives, such as pity and compassion, may be derived from feelings of superiority and condescension we are reluctant to acknowledge. Evolutionary psychology shows that apparent acts of generosity may in fact be propelled by selfish motives of self- aggrandizement and self-perpetuation. I am not saying that human nature is bereft of virtue. The propensity for good is certainly there, but so is the propensity for vice and evil. The question for secular morality is, in seeking the inner self, which self are you seeking? What principle do you have that distinguishes the good inner self from the bad inner self?
