Norman Fiering and the Revision of Perry Miller

Norman Fiering and the Revision of Perry Miller Francis T. Butts During the century after 1650the theoretical foundations of Western moral philosophy underwent an extraordinary revolution. By the mid-1600s the skeptical and empirical mentality associated with the revolution in science and the demise of Scholasticism was beginning to undermine the traditional authority of religion and to provoke a sense of impending crisis in moral philosophy. In response there occurred a remarkable outburst of innovative speculation designed to resecure the ethical values of Christian civilization upon new secular moorings. Accepting the premises of the new critical outlook, many thinkers turned away from supernatural Christianity to formulate moral philosophies whose foundations were naturalistic. They took a number of tacks, but the foremost trend, exemplified by the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, sought to embed moral behavior in man's supposed sentiment of benevolence. The rise of this ''new moral philosophy" of "benevolism" is the subject of Norman Fiering's Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Centw~v Harvard. 1 To convey a sense of the immensity of the revolution in moral theory, Fiering reviews the history of ethical teaching in the West. The place of ethics, whose sources lie in pagan antiquity, was never settled in the Christian culture of medieval Europe. Pagan values were difficult to reconcile with Christian virtue. If true goodness rested upon the supernatural will of God, as expressed in Scripture and Revelation, in what sense could pagan morality Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 1986, 1-25 2 Francis T. Butts contribute to an upright Christian life? Some commentators, influenced by Augustine's voluntaristic conception of the will, denied pagan teaching any valuewhatsoever. On the whole, however, Western society found itself unable to dispense with Classical ethical writings. The teaching of the ancients was esteemed for its practical value in daily life, even if the virtues it advanced had no merit before God. Down to the middle of the seventeenth century the dominant attitude toward ethics was characterized by an intellectualist psychology that pitted man's powers of reason, which included his will, against the appetites of the body. Moral behavior was a matter of intellectual judgment guiding the will in controlling man's volatile and rebellious passions. Thus, despite Adam's fall,virtuous behavior was held to remain within the compass of man's natural reason. By the later seventeenth century, however, this traditional Aristotelian theory of moral decision-making was being supplanted by a radically different view which grounded virtue in man's heretofore contemned emotions. The locus of moral choice shifted from head to heart. The will was transformed from a rational appetite to the seat of the passions. The pessimistic anthropology of orthodox Christianity gave way to an optimistic celebration of man's intrinsic benevolence. Man was now said to be endowed with an inner moral sense which enabled him to apprehend virtue and vice intuitively and entirely apart from the fallible process of reasoning or the uncertain testimony of Revelation. The effect was to transfer the source of moral authority from the supernatural Word of God to the newly rehabilitated promptings of the human heart. This momentous intellectual upheaval was largely the work of British thinkers. Fiering traces the intellectual roots of benevolism back to Puritanism. Both Puritanism and sentimentalist ethics shared a temperamental aversion to the intellectualist psychology of the traditional ethics. The delineation of this often neglected connection is one of the strongest features of Fiering's well-informed study. In the evolution of Puritanism into sentimentalism, Cambridge Platonism,and inparticular Henry More's concept of the "boniform faculty,"played a key role. The boniform faculty was a heightened, irresistible, inward feeling which relished the divine. In this respect it resembled the Puritan conception of the regenerate will; but it was also a natural inclination toward love, benignity and benevolence. This emphasis upon man's natural taste for virtue made More an influential forerunner to Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Until the closing years of the seventeenth century both pagan and Christian ethics were taught at Harvard. As an academic subject the teaching of Peripatetic ethics predominated, although occasionally its legitimacy was challenged by pietisticAugustinians. These dissenters...