By Deacon Scott Dodge–
Do what is good and avoid what is evil. This is morality in a nutshell. In a Christian tenor: love God with all your heart, might, mind and strength and love your neighbor as you love yourself. These deceptively simple ways of stating morality prompt two fundamental questions.
What is good and what is evil? It’s evident that we are capable of discerning many things that are good and many things that are evil, but it is not clear to us in every instance. Are there not things about which people disagree in good faith, things some say are good while others insist they are evil? The death penalty is one such topic currently being discussed among Catholics. Can killing someone serve his good as well as society’s?
Original sin was humanity’s desire to displace God and decide for ourselves what is good and evil. Even when conceived of in what might be called a semi-Nietzschean manner, which means in determining for ourselves what is good and evil we will not necessarily always choose evil, odds are sooner rather than later we will get it wrong.
Nonetheless, God permits us the freedom to attempt to dethrone him and enthrone ourselves. He does not launch lightning bolts from the sky when we choose evil, either knowingly or in the mistaken belief that it is good. Why? Because God loves us and so he would not cause us to live under such an imminent threat, which would practically force us to be good out of fear, not love.
It is often the case that once we grasp how free we are, we simply don’t want to be free. In an excursus found in his novel The Brothers Karamazov, entitled “The Grand Inquisitor,” Dostoevsky analyzed the terror we have of the freedom Christ gives us by putting Jesus himself before the grand inquisitor, who castigates the Lord for his incompetence as an effective deity. According to the human conception of what a god ought to be, Jesus is a joke.
I believe it is our terror of freedom that causes us to set forth simplified moralities that we call Christian. These moralities seek to make life simple and neat. But, very often life is complex and messy. Despite this, we keep trying to fashion a god in our image.
Christ taught and showed us that the only criterion by which to make moral judgments is love. God is love. It is because God is love that Christ became incarnate. Holiness consists in nothing other than loving perfectly, like Christ.
The question that arises from defining morality in terms of love of God and neighbor, is- Who is my neighbor? Jesus was asked this question immediately after defining morality as love. His response was the Parable of the Good Samaritan, which teaches that my neighbor is the person in need, the one I can help.
True morality cannot be reduced something we often refer to as “personal morality.” Adherents of such a morality hold it is possible achieve holiness without reference to or regard for their neighbor. Christian morality is practical and actionable: “Do to others whatever you would have them do to you. This is the law and the prophets” (Matt 7:12).
