In his lecture on Luther’s earlier ethical views, which was published and then re-worked between 1919 and 1923, Karl Holl wrote in a way that today could be described as ‘luminous’. The American edition of that lecture, entitled The Reconstruction of Morality (Augsburg, 1979, translated by Fred W. Meuser and Walter R. Wietzke from the seventh German edition of 1948 and edited by James Luther Adams and Walter F. Bense) is a classic exposition of the Gospel. It is dense, deep, wide-ranging, and diagnostic. It’s hard to think of another book of its kind that just hits you between the eyes.
In the following quotation from The Reconstruction of Morality (page 94), Holl describes Christian morality as ‘instinctive’ rather than deliberated. The emphases are Mockingbird’s.
“Luther did not think that the highest goal is attained where rational deliberation makes the correct choice among the various possibilities of action. Action is truly moral, truly free, only when the good has become so instinctive that the only thought that presents itself is the correct one and this is at once implemented.“
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6 responses to “Karl Holl on Morality as Instinctive”
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I am just loving this Karl Holl series. Thanks.
Surely Holl is right that it is better to arrive at the knowledge and will to do the good in an unconscious and immediate union of feeling and heart and will — where one is not aware that there could have been any other "choice" possible but the one made.
Fitz Allison (channeling Augustine) is big on this and gives lots of examples using the language of lovers. Who would want a husband or wife who carefully reviewed the possible option of dismembering you or your kids on a nightly basis, but after reflection freely decided it was not the right thing to do? Who wants a girlfriend or boyfriend who's a latent serial killer? What we want is someone who, because the person loves us, is NATURALLY bound to a certain path — someone for whom certain things never even occur to them as options. One is only truly free (from alcoholism say, as another example) when certain compulsions never even present themselves to the mind (should I have a nightcap? should I go into that bar?) — they never even occur to you as alternatives.
So for sure I really like where Holl is going on this.
On the other hand, it strikes me that in this world there is always (sans the Parousia) going to a place for exactly this sort of conscious deliberation amongst ethical alternatives. As long as we live in a fallen world, we are going to be faced with ethical problems of great complexity — simply because the number of factors in them are huge and we are finite. And because Obama (Bush, Nixon, Clinton, JFK) is not only a finite man but a fallen one, I don't want him to just do whatever his heart tells him — I want reasoned debate about public policy where alternatives are carefully laid out and we can hear arguments made for them.
So while there's one sense in which Holl is absolutely right, there's another sense in which we are always going to need the very thing he sees in need of reconstruction.
Of course, I haven't read his book — just responding to the selection quoted here!
I think that Herr Dawg is absolutely correct. Holl points out the ideal of the "new man", who works from a place of spontaneity and love and not deliberation. The "old man" requires the first use of the Law and deliberation for basic social good. However, this is not ideal ethical action because it does not necessarily spring from the heart. Hearty action is, as Holl points out, the "highest goal", when one giving hand does not know what the other hand is doing.
It seems to me that Holl's train of thought (via Luther), as this quote reflects, brings together a bound will and a "charismatic" understanding of the work of God in the life of the believer, while at no time allowing the believer to analyze and/or take comfort inappropriately in the works (fruit) of the Holy Spirit. A nice cocktail!
Not sure how this "fits" with Romans 7, which is all about "moral choice", and which seems to depict the believer as always of two minds, in need of external deliverance on a second by second basis. The "deliverance" Paul speaks of is certainly not a rational choice among moral options, but the deliverance from internal conflict seems to come from an objective, outside source which delivers us from our divided selves, not a Holy Spirit experience that destroys and remakes the divided self into an instinctively "good" moral agent. This quote seems to suggest that the Christian is able, by God's grace as a "fruit" of the Holy Spirit, to engage in "moral" action that is entirely free and pure, as the result of an internal, holy instinct that is undivided and "unconflicted." I have never found this to be the case with me, but that probably says much more about my own spiritual condition than about Holl's theology! This may not be what Holl is saying here at all, since this is but a tiny snippet and there is no real context. I haven't read Holl other than the quotes posted here, and am therefore speaking out of my ignorance on the subject, but by invitation 😉
"Action is truly moral, truly free, only when the good has become so instinctive that the only thought that presents itself is the correct one and this is at once implemented."
I'm not sure how an action is considered "moral" if it's completely, 100 % natural. (In other words, a knee-jerk reaction.) If there is no choice to be made between right and wrong, no internal struggle whatsoever, then "morality" ceases to be an issue, doesn't it? The law becomes completely unnecessary. Wait, I guess that's the whole point. Never mind 🙂
Morality is a practice which may take place as a habit of behavior or, as Oakeshott puts it, as "a reflective application of a moral criterion." Much of the world would argue, I suspect, that the habit follows from the thought–we get to right behavior from properly figuring out what to do (or being told so; from the law).
Of course any propensity we have to do the right thing is much more a product of habit than of thought. and, for us, any such habit (that really succeeds) is a gift of grace rather than anything naturally attainable.