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F.H. Bradley: An Unpublished Note on Christian Morality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
At some time between 1907 and 1912, probably very much nearer the earlier date, Bradley produced the first draft of an article on Christian morality. He did this in response to criticism that his moral ideas were anti-Christian. This charge was based mainly on the content of two articles that he published during 1894 in the International Journal of Ethics, one called ‘Some Remarks on Punishment’ and the other ‘The Limits of Individual and National Self-Sacrifice’. In these Bradley had maintained that the conventional ‘Christian’ belief in the sacredness of life undermined any sensible approach to punishment and any clear understanding of the moral importance of self-assertion (in contrast to self-sacrifice). It encouraged a squeamishness about retribution and ‘social surgery’. It devalued proper human ends and interests, and the rights and duties founded on them. There was needed ‘a correction of our moral view, and a return to a non-Christian and perhaps a Hellenic ideal’, one that would recognize the unlimited right of the moral organism (i.e. virtually the state) to dispose of its members and to use force internationally in defence of right. Bradley pulled no punches and had this to say about the self-styled ‘Christian’ party:
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page 175 note 1 Bradley's own estimate, in a letter written in 1921, was 1909. The outer limits are set by the date of the quotation from the Morning Post and the date of the later article ‘On the Treatment of Sexual Detail in Literature’. The two notes keyed by symbols are Bradley's own.
page 175 note 2 Reprinted in Collected Essays (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1935), VII and VIII, pp. 149–76.Google Scholar
page 175 note 3 Ibid. p. 149.
page 176 note 1 Ibid. pp. 173–4.
page 176 note 2 Mind, XXXIV, 133 (01 1925), 1–12, esp. pp. 9–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 176 note 3 Mrs de Glehn wrote: ‘I don't think he ever quite understood…the character and personality of Christ that still emerges out of the confusion, and affects so many in their deepest feeling and lives. It was the difficulty he always had of understanding a very – to him – foreign standpoint – so that he hurt where he had no idea or wish to hurt.’ The correspondence is with the manuscript in Merton Library, Bradley papers, II.B.9.
page 176 note 4 Collected Essays, pp. 618–27.
page 176 note 5 Ethical Studies (Oxford, 1876; second edition 1927).Google Scholar
page 177 note 1 Punctuation and spelling has been kept strictly as it is in the manuscript. Ed.
page 178 note 1 Contentio Veritatis, p. 86 [1902 ‘By Six Oxford Tutors’: W.R. Inge contributed an article on ‘The Person of Christ’, to which Bradley refers].Google Scholar
page 179 note 1 Cf. Collected Essays, p. 625: ‘Which is the higher being? Is it the man who strives to empty his mind of all that is sexual, to banish from his life all the beauty and all the romance that, based on sex, carries sex into an idealised world? Is it he who thus leaves his own nature at best vacant and starved, or opened perhaps to the inroad of that which turns it into “a cistern for foul toads to knot and gender in”? Such a question surely cannot be answered in the affirmative.’Google Scholar
page 180 note * ‘The Socialists were counted atheists. What was their crime? They desired our political system, our industrial system, and our land system to correspond with the teaching of the Master.’ (Keir Hardie, as reported in the Morning Post of Jan 14 1907.) Imagine the industrial and the land systems of Jesus of Nazareth. Think of the blindness and the self-deception involved in the above utterance. The only persons who say these things and really mean them are persons like the Doukhobors. And can there be anything more sickening than this dragging of the name of Jesus into our political disputes?
page 181 note * I am not suggesting that Christian morality outside of Protestantism is self-consistent. We have only to consider (to take one instance) how the practice of duelling is regarded in some orthodox Roman Catholic circles to see that the opposite is the case.
page 181 note 1 Cf. Bradley's, ‘The Presuppositions of Critical History’, Collected Essays, pp. 1–70.Google Scholar
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