The origin of legal life understanding

Western Christianity from its very first historical steps came into contact with Rome and had to reckon with the Roman spirit and the Roman way or way of thinking; ancient Rome, in fairness, is considered the bearer and spokesman of law. Law (jus) was the main element in which all his concepts and ideas revolved: jus was the basis of his personal life, and it also determined all his family, social and state relations. Religion was no exception - it was also one of the applications of law. In becoming a Christian, the Roman tried to understand Christianity from this point of view, and in it he sought first of all legal consistency.

This method of external understanding of salvation at first could not be dangerous for the Church: all its inaccuracies were more than covered by the faith and ardent zeal of Christians; even more, the possibility of explaining Christianity from the legal point of view was useful to him in some respects: it gave faith a scientific form, as it were, affirmed it. But this was during the heyday of church life. It was not so later, when the worldly spirit penetrated into the Church, when many Christians began to think not about how they could fulfill the will of God more perfectly, but, on the contrary, about how to fulfill this will more conveniently, with fewer losses for this world. At that time, the possibility of a legal formulation of the doctrine of salvation revealed its disastrous consequences.

Characteristic features of a legal union

A legal union arises when one person or family is unable to fight with the world around him. In order to secure a certain share of well-being, a person enters into an agreement with another person in the same position. They make mutual commitments and work for the common good. But this communion is not at all a communion of love, not a moral union; These people serve others only because otherwise they will not get what they want for themselves. The purpose of their life is not society, but their own self. The legal order, therefore, has as its task the juxtaposition of several selfishnesses, so that they do not interfere with each other and that each of them receives its due share. As such, the legal system can only benefit selfishness. - His first benefit is that instead of a living union, he offers a cold, external one. For the state or my fellow citizens it is not particularly important what my inner mood is, for them only my external behavior is important, because only the latter concerns their well-being, expresses my attitude towards them. This, of course, degrades the individual, turning him into a soulless screw in the social machine, but it also gives man such freedom, or rather such arbitrariness in his spiritual life, as he cannot obtain under any other system, especially under the moral one. The moral union demands conformity to the moral, penetrates with its demands and instructions into the very sanctuary of human conscience. The legal system never penetrates there, being content with observing the external agreed framework and leaving man as a complete master within itself.

This arbitrariness is increased by the consciousness of complete independence or non-obligation to anyone for one's well-being. For if others serve a man in any way, he knows that they serve not out of affection for him, but out of necessity or from a desire for the good of themselves. For this service, they receive the same amount from his side: the relationship is equal, and consequently he does not have to consider anyone his benefactor. True, this dooms a person to terrible loneliness, but self-love is loneliness in essence. The consciousness of independence, that vague specter of identity, is more valuable to the sinful self as such.

At the same time, all those services, even the most insignificant, which he renders to his allies, acquire the highest importance in the eyes of man. These services are made, in fact, apart from desire, not out of love for an ally, but simply out of a desire to receive equal reward. Therefore, a person demands this reward for himself, demands it as a matter of course, and will consider himself entitled to take revenge if this reward does not follow. Feelings of gratitude in the proper sense cannot be found in the soul of a self-lover.

Therefore, the certainty on which all unions are based does not have the same qualities as in a moral union. In the latter it is a joyful and at the same time humble hope; in the former, it is rather the assurance that the ally cannot deceive, since there is a certain guarantee by which he is in some way compelled to fulfill the obligation. There confidence rests on the free desire of the individual, and hence constant gratitude to him; here it is on something third, which compels the personality, and hence there is no gratitude, but only a selfish feeling of security. Man loses "that freedom of the child of God," which is his highest possession, but for self-love this freedom is too heavy for him not to exchange it for slavery, if only it would leave him at his desires.

Man's Relation to God from a Legal Point of View

It is not difficult to see what can happen if a person considers his relationship to God from a legal point of view.

The main danger of this point of view is that in it a person may consider himself entitled not to belong to God with all his heart and mind: in a legal union, such intimacy is not assumed and is not required; Only the external conditions of the union must be observed there. A person may not love the good, he may remain the same selfish, he must only fulfill the commandments in order to receive a reward. This, as well as possible, favors that mercenary, slavish mood that does good only because of the reward, without inner attraction and respect for it. True, this state of involuntary good deeds is necessarily experienced by every ascetic of virtue, and more than once in his earthly life, but this state should never be elevated to a rule, it is only a preliminary stage, and the goal of moral development is in perfect, voluntary good deeds. The legal point of view sins precisely because it sanctifies this preliminary, preparatory state as complete and perfect. And since the mercenary attitude to the will of God is sanctified, the door is also opened for all those conclusions that necessarily follow from this attitude.

In a legal union, a person does not stand before the face of God in the position of an unrequited sinner, who owes him everything: he is inclined to present himself as more or less independent, he expects to receive the promised reward not by God's mercy, but as a matter of due for his labors. The object of hope here, strictly speaking, is not God's mercy, but man's own powers; and the guarantee, the third which binds the Ally without making Him a Benefactor at the same time, is man's own affairs. Deeds thus become something valuable in themselves, something worthy of reward, a conclusion that could not be more appropriate for a selfish nature that has lost its original purity, which reluctantly forces itself to fulfill the commandments and therefore values its involuntary good at the highest price. Moreover, the dignity of merit is not ascribed to virtues, or to the constant dispositions of the soul, but to individual external actions, which, in turn, the mercenary mood tries to reduce as much as possible and make as formal as possible, according to the natural desire in the mercenary to achieve his payment with the least possible expenditure of effort. Man's life from free moral growth turns into soulless fulfillment of particular prescriptions.

The Development of a Legal View of Salvation in Catholicism

The mechanism developed in the Western Church did not fail to affect theological science, which, under the influence of the epoch, completely submitted to it and, in turn, contributed to its further development and, so to speak, to its formation. Scholasticism, with its worship of Aristotle, cared more about the formal harmony of its systems and coped little (not at all) with spiritual experience, with life. It is not surprising if it (scholasticism) adopted a legal point of view. Could a scholasticist reflect on its truth, when under each of its points he saw excerpts, let us add, taken out of connection with speech? And in this way, so to speak, typographical method of proof, scholasticism justified all the extreme conclusions of the legal worldview. The quite natural teaching about the mutual aid of the members of the Church was transformed under the pen and in the mind of the scholastic into a completely mechanical record of the actions of one person (saint) to another. The uncertain situation of souls who died in repentance, but did not bear fruit, worthy of repentance, not established in good, turned into purgatory, where man pays God with his torments for crimes committed on earth, and not yet paid. Pastoral guidance during confession took the absurd form of payment for sins and indulgences - absolution of sins without moral tension, without penitential feats. The sacraments turned into magical actions (opus operatum), in which bodily participation was needed rather than spiritual participation, etc. Sinful fear of moral work, using a successful pretext, invented many necessary teachings for itself and so polluted Western Christianity with all outsiders that it was difficult even to recognize the truth of Christ in it. It is not without reason that when the German reformers came to the idea that faith alone saves a person, this one, so common in Christianity and constantly on the lips of Sts. The expression of the Fathers seemed so unusual and terrible that some considered it to be heresy and the destruction of all morality, while others took it almost as some new revelation and finally distorted its meaning. - Such fruits were brought to the West by its legal point of view on salvation. Its main danger, we repeat, was that it made it possible for a person to limit himself to one appearance; moral work was forgotten, as it were. Hence the good Catholic was often a very bad Christian inside, but in spite of this he thought that he was being saved, and in this self-deception he perished.