From C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love:
"For us moderns the essense of the moral life seems to lie in the antithesis between duty and inclination . . . . [This] remains . . . the experience from which we all start. All our serious imaginative work, when it touches morals, paints a conflict: all practical moralists sing to battle or give hints about the appropriate strategy. Take away the concept of 'temptation' and nearly all that we say or think about good and evil would vanish into thin air. But when we first opened our Aristotle, we found to our astonishment that this inner conflict was for him so little of the essence of the moral life, that he tended to thrust it into a corner and treat it almost as a special case—that of the ακρατης. The really good man, in Aristotle's view, is not tempted. Where we incline to think that 'good thews inforced with pains' are more praiseworthy than mere goodness of disposition, Aristotle coolly remarks that the man who is temperate at a cost is profligate: the really temperate man abstains because he likes abstaining. The ease and pleasure with which good acts are done, the absence of moral 'effort' is for him the symptom of virtue."
Labels: Ethics
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Apparently, Lewis thinks that Aristotle, along with everyone else prior to St. Augustine, lacked a sufficient insight into the inner life to understand the true basis of virtue. I suspect that Lewis has in mind not Christianity as such, but a rather tired version of it. If I am not mistaken, Augustine, too, has been accused of "eudaimonism"—the idea that the aim of life is happiness rather than goodness; but Augustine can hardly be accused (at least not by Westerners, whose version of Christianity was largely formed by Augustine) of being un-Christian.
As the preceding quotation from Spencer suggests, we somehow reached the point, by the nineteenth century, of closely identifying goodness and joyless submission to external authority. The naturalistic (over-)reaction to this view is probably one of the main reasons for the contemporary collapse of moral belief.
If there is, as Lewis is claiming, a conflict on this fundamental level between Aristotelian and Christian ethics, it would seem to spell doom for Aquinas's synthesis of Christianity and Aristotle—a synthesis which is, so far as I know, still the foundation of Catholic ethics.
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