129. The ultimate purpose of morality
129. THE ULTIMATE PURPOSE OF MORALITY
Is morality the ultimate end of human life?
. . . [J]ust as the principal intention of human law is to create friendship (a kind of love) between man and man, so the chief intention of the divine law is to establish man in friendship with God. Now such likeness is the reason of (the motive for) love. . . . (But) there cannot possibly be any friendship of man to God, Who is supremely good, unless man becomes good; wherefore it is written (Lev 19:2; 11:45): You shall be holy, for I am holy (I-II,99,2).
As C. S. Lewis says, “The road to the Promised Land runs past Mount Sinai.” The moral law, and the virtues it defines and commands, is a necessary means to our ultimate end; but it is not that end.
God’s chosen people, who knew God better than anyone else in the world not because they were superior but because God had chosen them to reveal Himself most intimately to the world, appreciated the importance of morality better than any other people, because they knew that God was good: just, merciful, righteous, loving, perfect. The gods of all the other nations were imperfect and immoral. The Jews united religion and morality more closely than anyone else because they knew morality’s ultimate Source was not merely human but divine. To make the same point in the psychological dimension, the Jews uniquely united man’s two deepest instincts, the religious instinct to worship and the moral instinct to do good and not evil. The Jews were the world’s best psychologists.
Yet they also knew, however obscurely, that God had destined them to another world and another life, after death and the Resurrection. (They came to know this truth of the Resurrection of the body only gradually, the obscurity of their earlier prophets being supplemented by the increasing clarity of the later ones. God usually reveals Himself to man only gradually because man grows gradually, in mind as well as body.) And in that other world and life they would not need the many regulations that are made necessary by the weaknesses of “the flesh” (which in Scripture means fallen human nature, soul and body together). Their morality was absolute even in this world in the sense that their obligation to obey it was absolute, because it came from the absolute God Himself and it was absolutely true and right; but it was not absolute in the sense of being their ultimate end. Their ultimate end was something “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Cor 2: 9, quoted from Is 64:4). That ultimate destiny was an even more intimate relationship with God than faithful obedience to God’s law. It was real presence, union, love, and consequently joy—eternal joy. Morality was a training for that.
We can endure the presence of God only if we are like God, not unlike God; that is, if our very character is righteous, just, loving, and holy; if we are light and not darkness. For “God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all” (1 Jn 1:5). In Leviticus, the book of laws, God repeatedly told His people that this was the whole point of morality: “You must be holy because I am holy.” The end of morality is Godlikeness. The beginning and end of morality is the divine “I AM.”
And God will not let us go until we attain that. Thus Jesus repeats this Godlike demand in his Sermon on the Mount: “You, therefore, must be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48). That is why there is a Purgatory.
St. Thomas calls this loving union “friendship.” Aristotle noted that “friends have all things in common”, first of all their own selves, their nature, their character. In married love the two become one flesh; in friendship the two become one character. We must become Godlike in character to be God’s friends; we must become “pure of heart” so that we can “see God,” i.e., know Him as our Friend. For that is the end of morality: “This is eternal life, that they know you the only true God” (Jn 17:3). You can know many things about strangers or enemies but you can only know your friends.