The problem with pursuing morality
-
In devoting so much of yesterday’s post to the subject of morality, I realized I needed a reminder of what I discovered back HERE: If you make morality an end in itself, rather than a means to an end, you’ll be worse off than if you hadn’t even tried to do the right thing.
Or, to quote C. S. Lewis (**):
Mere morality is not the end of life. You were made for something quite different from that. … The people who go on asking if they can’t lead a decent life without Christ don’t know what life is about; if they did they would know that ‘a decent life’ is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for. Morality is indispensable; but the Divine Life, which gives itself to us and which calls us to be gods, intends for us something in which morality will be swallowed up. We are to be re-made.
If you know that the ‘Divine Life’ is the ultimate goal and act accordingly, you become more moral in the bargain. If you aim only at being moral, you become the caricature of Christianity that secularists rightly despise: self-righteous, legalistic, judgmental and hypocritical.
It seemed worth revisiting, because with all the exploration into the subject I did yesterday, I was more and more uncomfortable that I was treating morality as the goal. In my experience, you’ll know a godly person, because they’ll also be moral. But someone that only wants to be moral is neither moral nor godly. Make sense? Probably not.
Okay, so … on with the countdown.Related posts:
- Transcending morality
- Real and artificial morality
- Conservatism and morality
- Praise for the Creator
- We’ll be right back, after this brief word from St. Anthony the Great
Leave a Reply
