The Era of Christian Dominance. Once established,
Christian thought dominated all of ethics and political
philosophy in the West until the breakaway under
secular and scientific influences gained strength by the
seventeenth century. Yet Christian thought itself in-
cluded a multitude of differing tendencies.
The Thomistic synthesis of Christian and Aristotelian
elements brought the juridical and goal-seeking frame-
works into an apparent unity. The central Aristotelian
conceptual apparatus, with its orientation towards the
good, was incorporated as a whole. But the end
changed from the kind of happiness Aristotle had
delineated in his natural teleology to the salvation goal
of the Christian theology. The crucial confrontation
of the good and the right comes, therefore, in the
meeting-point where the ultimate good is steered into
the channels of the juridical right. If the soul is directed
to God by its original nature in God's creation, it is
guided ultimately by God's law, which is juridical in
form and scope. In part, but only in part, this eternal
law can be apprehended by man's reason, and so is
seen as the natural law, expressive of man's nature.
Beyond lies what man must obey on grounds of revela-
tion.
In essence the concepts of right and wrong dominate
the system, as can be seen in the prominence of the
notion of sin, already basic in Augustine's thought. Yet
the good continues to operate through the weight of
the sanctions of eternal salvation and eternal damna-
tion, and also in the justification of the system as a
whole. The dramatic unity of the whole is most evident
in the literary presentation of Dante's Divine Comedy.
In the first part, the Inferno, there is a careful grading
of sins in the descent to the bottom of Hell, the distance
from God and the shutting out of God's light being
the measure of sin. In the third part, the Paradiso, there
is the ascent of the virtues towards the point of ultimate
union in the direct contemplation of God; but each
soul stays in its allotted place according to its capacity,
the spirit of love holding each and stilling its desire
to move further upward. In both the heavenly areas
and the nether areas, the categorial tension of good
and evil as against right and wrong is resolved. In the
heavenly, the love of God is the basis of that aspiration
which defines the good, and the right lies in the accep-
tance of the divine order. In the nether regions, the
clarity of the wrong is seen in the punishment of sin,
and the evil in the nature and intensity of the torments.
The emergence of the Protestant ethic in its different
forms was not a questioning of the good so much as
a vital alteration in the structure of the right. Salvation
remained the goal of aspiration but the system of rules
for its achievement was transformed. In Calvinism, the
assurance of salvation was to be sought in success in
one's calling, and a fresh cluster of virtues—the
“puritan” morality of hard work, sobriety, thrift, absti-
nence, justice—was required as a necessary condition.
Yet through this picture of the right we can discern
the content of the good changing into the worldly ideal
of success and the pursuit of wealth. The relation of
the Protestant ethic to the economic changes and the
rise of the bourgeoisie has been explored and debated
in the writings of Marx, Max Weber, R. H. Tawney,
and others. The language of the right still remains as
the language of natural law, in the treatises on morality
and politics, shifting to that of natural rights as the
concept of nature itself undergoes change, as individ-
ualism gains strength, and the process of secularization
gains momentum. The concept of the good is similarly
individualized and secularized, especially with the
growing impact of the sciences.
