MORALITY WITHOUT RELIGION

In his final exile to St. Helena, Napoleon observed to Gaspard Gourgaud that “a man may have no religion, and yet be moral.” This heavy-hearted remark of a thoroughly unhappy man can be easily reconciled with my earlier comment about the customary disconnect between faith and religion. While religion gives a boost to personal morality, it is the person’s faith, and not his religion, that generates his moral principles. Those who disagree with this might ask themselves the question: What is faith? To me, it is one’s mystical belief in a higher being, which is the one and only source of absolute morality. Without such a transcendent source, where does morality come from? To use Kantian language, all sources located within us amount to nothing better than a succession of “hypothetical imperatives,” whereas the “categorical imperative” relates to the universal, and, therefore, the transcendent. The moral person realizes that morality is not limited to one’s personal ends and means, but covers all, and its essence is one. Whether you call that essence “God,” or try to disassociate yourself, for some reason, from the language of religion, the substance remains the same, and you must have a faith in that essence in order to transcend the morally worthless “hypothetical” to reach the morally substantial “categorical.”


To complete Napoleon’s observation above, we might add that a man cannot be moral who has no personal faith.