Aristotelian Ethics

“Aristotelian Ethics, Corrected by the Standard of Holy Scripture” — the subtitle states the whole program. Johannes Crell writes neither a commentary on Aristotle nor an ethics of his own from the ground up. He takes the framework of the Nicomachean Ethics and leads it, chapter by chapter, to where, by his conviction, it belongs: under the commandment of Christ.

1. What Kind of Book This Is

The Ethica Aristotelica grew out of the teaching at the Academy of Raków and bears its sense of order: definition, division, opposing opinion, examination, result — chapter after chapter the same movement. It was printed only in 1681, almost fifty years after Crell’s death, at “Cosmopoli” by “Eugenius Philalethes.” Place of printing and printer are fictitious, as was the rule with Socinian books of those years.

The undertaking is riskier than it sounds. Whoever merely rejects the ancient doctrine of virtue makes things easy for himself; whoever merely adopts it, no less so. Crell does neither. He begins with a determination that looks like a formality and yet already contains everything:

Ethics is a practical discipline that sets forth the way by which man attains happiness. It is called ethics, or the doctrine of morals, because it sets forth the morals of men, that is, the actions of the virtues and of the vices.Johannes Crell, Aristotelian Ethics — Preliminary Remarks on the Nature and Study of Ethics

The four parts he takes over from Aristotle, and he gives reasons for their order: happiness and virtue are “the leading or first parts,” pleasure and friendship “subordinate and added for the sake of the first.” The order of exposition is the resolutive one (ordo resolutivus): it proceeds from the end to the means, that is, from happiness backwards to the virtues.

About the precision attainable here he harbors no illusions. The mode of teaching is “less strict, namely on account of the inconstancy of the subject matter,” for human actions “vary to an astonishing degree because of the diversity of circumstances.” Whoever demands mathematical rigor of an ethics has not understood the matter.

Who Should Read This Book

Crell requires a particular reader — and the sentence with which he justifies this is the key passage of the whole work. The true hearer is the one who “possesses some experience and practice in human actions” and has already brought the unruly desires of his soul into some order. Otherwise he will either fail to grasp what is set forth or will “hear it without fruit, because the force and onslaught of the affections stand in his way” — and then:

… and he will not attain the end of this doctrine — which is not knowledge, but action.Johannes Crell, Aristotelian Ethics — Preliminary Remarks on the Nature and Study of Ethics

Ethics here is not a subject matter but a training. That also explains why the book contains so many precepts: nearly every chapter ends with numbered rules for the particular case.

2. First Part: On Happiness

Six chapters, four questions. Crell names them himself: whether happiness exists; what it is; of what quality it is; whence it comes. As an appendix follows what is opposed to it.

That It Exists

The first question is no trifle: if happiness did not exist, “one would dispute in vain about the way to attain it, and this doctrine would be wholly useless.” Crell conducts the proof by way of the equation of the highest good with the last end — both being “the same in substance” — and by way of a gradation of goods that must end somewhere. The last end is that “which is sought only for its own sake, but never for the sake of anything else.”

What It Is Not

Then he clears the ground. The false opinions he sorts according to their origin: two come from the multitude — that happiness lies in the pleasure of the body or in wealth; from “the more refined and learned men” come the more demanding errors: honor, the mere habitus of virtue, the contemplation of the Idea of the Good. Each is refuted singly. Against the pleasure of the body, for instance:

That the pleasure of the body is not the highest good of man is evident from the fact that it is common also to the beasts and to the most depraved of men; further, from the fact that it concerns only the inferior part of man, namely the body, and in no way the soul or the mind, whose activities it even often impedes.Johannes Crell, Aristotelian Ethics — What Happiness Is

Wealth is ruled out because it is always sought for the sake of something else and thus fails the basic condition of a last end. Honor is ruled out because it lies more in those who honor than in the one honored. It is noteworthy that the mere habitus of virtue is ruled out as well: what makes a man happy is not the possession of virtue but its exercise.

What It Is

Four interlocking determinations, all derived from the first: happiness is the highest good of man; it is the last end of human life; it is that for the sake of which all else is sought, while it itself is sought only for its own sake; and it is the most perfect good. The proper, Aristotelian definition then runs: an activity of the soul endowed with reason in accordance with the most perfect virtue, in a complete life.

Every piece of this definition receives its own justification — that the genus is activity and not habitus, that the bearer is the rational soul, that it is a matter of the most perfect virtue, and that a “complete life” belongs to it, that is, duration.

Of What Quality It Is

Here Crell works with the Greek concept of autarkeia. Happy is that good which is content with itself and “suffices of itself to make a life worth choosing” — and to this belongs constancy, for a good that changes is of no use as a last end. From this it follows that the remaining kinds of goods accrue to happiness as well: the delightful, those belonging to honor, the useful.

By the pleasure that accompanies happiness we understand above all the tranquility of mind and the joy of a right conscience.Johannes Crell, Aristotelian Ethics — Of the Quality of Happiness

There follows a very sober list of the means: goods of the soul (natural and acquired), goods of the body, external goods — friendship, honors, wealth. In each case Crell asks after the right measure. Happiness needs external goods, but “as far as is enough”; everything beyond that does not belong to the matter.

Whence It Comes

Two causes. The first and more remote is God: “If God is the author of any good — and that he certainly is — he will far more be the author of happiness.” The consideration of this, however, “belongs to a higher science,” that is, to theology. The second and nearer causes are virtue itself and the practice by which it is acquired. Expressly not: fortune. Thus it is settled already in the first part that everything further depends on man himself.

The Opposite

Two things are opposed to happiness: perfectly, misery; imperfectly, a middle state between the two, which Crell compares to the colors between white and black. Misery is the condition of one “who lives shamefully, especially over a long time” — and both cases are grievous:

If he knows his misery, he is torn by crueler torments of conscience than if he were being tortured in the bull of Phalaris. If he does not feel it, he has laid aside reason and has sunk to a beast and a block of wood.Johannes Crell, Aristotelian Ethics — On What Is Opposed to Happiness

For this, many vices are not needed; “one suffices, especially a consummate and grave one, such as injustice, cruelty, avarice, licentiousness.”

3. Second Part: The Foundation of the Doctrine of Virtue

33 chapters — the heart of the work. The first half clarifies the tools with which each individual virtue is later treated.

Three Meanings of “Virtue”

As always, Crell begins with the word. Virtue, in the widest sense, means the excellent condition of any thing whatever — “in this sense we ascribe a virtue even to animals and to inanimate things.” In the narrower sense it means human virtue, “which is acquired by one’s own effort.” In the narrowest, moral virtue. What is treated is the second. The general determination runs:

This human virtue may, considered in general, be determined thus: a habitus of the soul endowed with reason which makes that soul perfect and makes its work good.Johannes Crell, Aristotelian Ethics — Definition of Human Virtue

The subordinate clause “acquired by one’s own effort” is no empty phrase — on it hangs the entire Socinian doctrine of the free will. The division into intellectual and moral virtue Crell justifies from the bearer: the rational soul partakes of reason partly of itself (the intellect), partly only incidentally, insofar as it lets itself be guided by reason (the appetitive faculty).

Why Virtue Is a Habitus

A chapter of its own, giving the reason why the definition works with the word habitus. In the appetitive faculty there are only three things — faculty, affection, and habitus; virtue is neither faculty nor affection; therefore the habitus remains. Crell notes in passing the difference between scholastic and everyday usage: the philosophers take habitus narrowly, for a condition “deeply impressed by repeated actions and brought to the highest development”; ordinary usage calls mere dispositions, and even custom, by the same name.

Whence Virtue Comes: Nature, Teaching, Practice

Three efficient causes. Nature gives two things: receptivity and a hormé, “an impulse and an inclination.” This inclination is twofold — a general one, belonging to all men and springing from reason, and a special one in extraordinarily gifted natures. The ground of the general one is anthropologically noteworthy:

… that there is implanted in him, as it were, a certain keenness of sight, so that he can distinguish the morally good from the base, especially when some practice is added; and that he loves it by nature and holds it worth striving for, even though it may otherwise be bound up with pain, disgrace, or some harm.Johannes Crell, Aristotelian Ethics — On the Efficient Causes of Virtue

To these are added teaching and practice. The chapter closes with eleven general precepts of virtue — the practical sum of the whole, before any individual virtue has even been mentioned.

The Matter: The Affections

The object of virtue is above all the affections. Crell defines: “An affection is a movement of the appetitive faculty which arises from pleasure or pain and aims at either pursuing or fleeing a thing.” He posits eight basic kinds — love, hatred, hope, fear, joy, sorrow, gratitude, anger — all reducible to love and hatred; the rest are species or degrees of these.

Decisive is his stand against the Stoa. Whoever determines virtue as freedom from the affections has “gone further than was right”: the evil is not the affections themselves but their excess. In Crell the affection is not the enemy of virtue but its material. Virtue does not consist in having no anger, but in having it rightly.

The Mean

The form of virtue lies in two things: in the mean (mediocritas) and in choice (proairesis). The mean Crell first determines generally as that “which lies midway between the too much and the too little,” and supports the proposition with Theognis (“In all things the middle is best”), Phocylides, and Horace — and then with a reason drawn from the arts: if even the arts aim at the mean in their works, “then virtue too will aim at the same and keep to it, and far more than the arts do, since virtue is more exact and finer than they.”

Important is the qualification: what is meant is not the arithmetical mean of the thing, but the mean relative to us. What is moderate for one man is too much for another. And this mean “has a certain breadth” — it is not a point that one either misses or hits. To every virtue belong two vices, the excess and the deficiency, and each time Crell compares which of the two is the worse; they conflict “not equally” with virtue.

Voluntary, Willed, Free

Four chapters work out what can be imputed to man at all. Crell distinguishes sharply: animals and small children also act voluntarily, for sense perception and appetite suffice for that; only he acts willingly who uses reason. Involuntary is what happens by force or from ignorance — whereupon he separates culpable from inculpable ignorance. With particular care he treats the “mixed actions,” that is, what one does in order to avoid a greater evil: he distinguishes four cases, of which one deserves praise, one blame, and one indulgence.

In the chapter on the will there then falls the sentence on which Socinian ethics rests:

More completely, however, the nature of the will can be explained by saying that it is the faculty which pursues what reason apprehends as good and rejects what reason apprehends as bad; and which, when something bad is mixed with the good, freely either seizes or rejects it, indeed freely makes its selection even between two goods or two evils. And this freedom of the will is called decision.Johannes Crell, Aristotelian Ethics — On the Will and on Human Free Decision

There follow the proofs “that such a power of will is innate in us.” For an ethics that really demands something of man this is the necessary presupposition — and for Socinianism the point at which it parts from Luther and Calvin.

Deliberation and Choice

Two chapters on the way from reflection to selection. Deliberation is not about everything: about the eternal and unchangeable — God, the mathematical propositions, “that twice two is four” — there is no deliberation, but only about the changeable, and there only about what lies in our power. Choice itself is then “a selection in preference to something else,” and Crell holds fast that, unlike the merely voluntary, it never happens suddenly: “as when I suddenly fall into the arms of a friend arriving unexpectedly, or when I at once strike back at one who strikes me unawares.”

4. The Moral Virtues in Detail

Before enumerating them, Crell draws a boundary: here it is a question of virtues “which are wholly human and which do not of themselves and in the proper sense refer to God — as piety or religion does.” Those belong to theology. And then he at once adds the qualification that carries the whole book: the perfection of these human virtues, too, became known only through divine revelation.

The division proceeds in three genera: virtues that first concern ourselves; those that first look to others; and those that stand in between. The first genus he orders according to the goods at issue — the pleasures of the body, honors, wealth.

Temperance

The virtue that “deals with the animal pleasures of taste and touch, that is, with the pleasures of food and drink and with the sexual ones.” The Greek name sophrosyne means for Crell “preserving prudence,” for “nothing is more opposed to prudence than licentiousness.” It falls into sobriety and chastity, and both are furnished with very concrete precepts: on the quantity and quality of food, on time and place, on desire, and on the pain that its absence causes.

Magnanimity and Modesty

A pair of virtues that differ “in degree rather than in kind”: magnanimity moves among great and unusual honors, modesty among the ordinary ones. The word magnanimity Crell first takes broadly — then it includes temperance and fortitude as well and is “as it were their consummation and a kind of sublimity” — then narrowly, for the virtue concerned with great external things.

Modesty he defines as “the virtue that keeps the desire for honor within the right measure,” and separates it from the Latin humilitas, which among the Romans denoted pusillanimity. The two virtues do not cancel each other: everyone must know himself — “one’s dignity is to be considered, so that no one throw himself away on unworthy things or, from faintheartedness of mind, shrink back from splendid ones; but one’s lowliness and unworthiness as well, so that he not exalt himself too much.”

Fortitude and Patience

Crell divides the one virtue into two: fortitude in the narrower sense deals with evils still impending, that is, with dangers; patience with those present. “The former governs fear and confidence, the latter sorrow.” Its kinship with magnanimity is close: to fortitude belongs contempt for human things and for life itself.

Here too stands the distinction on which the question of war later hangs: civil fortitude, which Aristotle describes, and Christian fortitude, which Scripture describes. More on this below.

Meekness and Clemency

One of the longest and most practical chapters. Crell first gives the reason why it must follow upon fortitude:

Upon fortitude there rightly follows meekness, which serves it as a bridle, as it were. For if you do not moderate anger according to the precept of meekness, fortitude will degenerate into rash temerity and will take dangers upon itself not for the sake of the morally good, but in order to sate the desire for revenge — which is foreign to true fortitude.Johannes Crell, Aristotelian Ethics — On Meekness and Clemency

Anger itself is defined as “the desire to repay pain, sprung from the opinion that one has suffered injustice.” Under this name Crell includes hatred as well, “which is an inveterate anger.” Then follow the precepts, graded according to persons: toward superiors, toward equals, toward subordinates — and for those who rule, separately, the rules of clemency, divided according to the remission and the infliction of punishments.

Justice, Right, and Equity

Three chapters and a fourth with disputed questions. Justice Crell determines at first in soberly juridical terms: the virtue “by which we render what is owed to another” — and owed means that to which someone is bound in such a way “that, if he does not render it, one may sue him at civil law.” Then he distinguishes general and particular justice, the latter again into distributive and contractual.

The chapter on right displays the care characteristic of a Socinian: right is ambiguous — on the one hand exousia, the permission to do something, on the other the obligation to render something. There follow natural right and positive right, public and domestic right, and equity as the correction of the rigid letter.

The disputed questions in the fourth chapter show the schoolman in his element: can injustice be done to one who consents? Answer: no — “in willing himself to suffer the harm from another, he relinquishes his right.” Does he too obtain his right who suffers a just punishment? Answer: to suffer something just and to obtain one’s right are two different things.

Beneficence, Liberality, Magnificence

The dealing with what is one’s own. Beneficence is “that virtue which provides for the advantage and benefit of another without civil law compelling it to do so”; liberality is its narrower form, which does good by giving. Crell treats the acquisition, the keeping, and the spending of money separately, and then poses the classic questions: to whom one is to give, what and how much, in what manner — and what ought to follow upon a benefit. To this is joined gratitude with its “threefold task” and, as its opposite, ingratitude.

Magnificence (magnificentia) concerns the great and rare expenditures. It is “not a matter for all men nor for all times,” but for wealthy and distinguished men. What one is to be magnificent for, Crell lists concretely — and the order is telling: for the support of those who teach or learn theology; to spread books on divine matters in print; to undertake journeys for the advancement of the truth; to erect meeting houses. This is the program of a congregation that lived by academy and printing press.

The Social Virtues

With truthfulness a group of its own begins: the virtutes homileticae, “which move in shared life and in familiar intercourse.” Truthfulness is “the virtue that prudently maintains the agreement of words with things”; from it Crell derives fidelity:

Fidelity is constancy in words and agreements, that is, the truth of promises. … It is the foundation of that justice which shows itself in voluntary contracts. For it is the business of justice to assign to another his right and to pay him what is owed to him.Johannes Crell, Aristotelian Ethics — On Truth, or Truthfulness

The vices of this virtue he enumerates in a long series: delight in lying, faithlessness, wicked cunning, perjury, abusiveness, blasphemy, false witness, defamation, talebearing, slander — and, on the other side, “excessive candor in speech” and presumption. In Crell, too much openness is likewise a fault.

There follow affability — “the virtue that, in civil intercourse, attunes speech and outward actions to the serious joy of others” — with very exact precepts on praising and blaming, and decorum together with dignity: countenance, movement, bearing, speech, dress. Crell’s description is a small picture of manners: the countenance should be that of a man “engaged in serious matters — yet so that it be not gloomy or grim”; the speech “calm, steady, a little slower, not precipitate, not shrill, not contentious.”

Wit — A Virtue Crell Nearly Strikes Out

The most unusual chapter. Aristotle counts witty jesting (eutrapelia) among the virtues; Crell hesitates:

At the outermost edge of the virtues hangs wit, and it hangs there barely; for with perfect virtue it can hardly be reconciled.Johannes Crell, Aristotelian Ethics — On Wit

The reason is a passage of Scripture: in Eph. 5:4 Paul expressly forbids eutrapelia as well. Crell resolves this not by explaining it away, but by distinguishing: jests “aimed only at laughter and merriment and bringing the hearers no benefit whatever” fall under the prohibition; those that season something serious and are of use remain permitted — for “sometimes a man may be admonished in jest whom it would profit less to admonish with a stern countenance.” The chapter shows the method of the whole book in miniature.

Heroic Virtue and Imperfect Virtue

Two chapters that extend the scale upward and downward. Heroic virtue is “a moral virtue of such excellence that he who has it seems to surpass the ordinary condition of human nature”; it is recognized by the fact that a man accomplishes what is hardest among the actions of virtue. Its opposite is brutishness — the man who sinks below the human condition.

At the lower end stand the imperfect virtues: continence and steadfastness, “as it were steps and dispositions toward the perfect ones.” The difference from the temperate man is fine and important: the temperate man no longer has pleasure against him; the continent man overcomes it anew each time. Crell even asks “how the incontinent man can err against his own conviction” — the old Socratic question, taken seriously.

5. The Intellectual Virtues

Six chapters. Intellectual virtue Crell determines as “a habitus of the mind by which we apprehend the true,” and justifies the mention of truth on the ground that every virtue must make the work of its bearer good — and the work of the intellect is knowing.

There are five, distinguished according to their objects: art, prudence, understanding, science, and wisdom. With the principles understanding is concerned, with the conclusions derived from them science, with both together wisdom.

• Art — “a habitus that produces something according to right reasoning.” Crell distinguishes the liberal arts (logic, rhetoric, poetics, grammar) from the mechanical ones (tailoring, shoemaking, lyre-playing, fencing).
• Prudence — “the habitus of deliberating rightly”; it provides for the conduct of the whole of life, in contrast to partial prudence, which counsels rightly only in particular matters. To its attainment belong keenness of mind, instruction, practice — and moral virtue.
• Understanding — the habitus “by which the principles of the sciences are known,” that is, those propositions which can no longer be proved, “else the matter would run on into the infinite.”
• Science — the certain knowledge of the conclusions that are proved through their causes.
• Wisdom — the summit: “the habitus that is, as it were, fused together out of understanding and science.”

That prudence presupposes moral virtue is no incidental remark: whoever is in the grip of an affection counsels himself badly. In Crell the intellectual virtues hang upon the moral ones — and conversely, for prudence he calls “the eye of the virtues.”

Contemplation or Action?

The last chapter of the second part takes up the question left open in the first. There cannot be several simply last ends, says Crell with Aristotle: “Nature does not make things as the smiths make the Delphic knife” — which served at once for sacrificing and for fighting — “but one thing for one purpose.” Then he proves with five reasons that contemplation takes precedence over action.

And then he defers the result. The contemplation that falls within this life is “exceedingly imperfect”; the perfect one is still outstanding and belongs to the life to come, in which we shall see God as he is. For precisely this reason we may and must again and again leave it and turn to action. The precedence remains — but it is postponed. For a book whose first chapter says that the end of this doctrine is not knowledge but action, this is the only possible solution.

6. Third Part: On Pleasure

Three chapters, and Crell gives a special reason why they belong here. Not only because pleasure is closely bound up with happiness and is an object of virtue, but because it, “together with its opposite, pain, has the greatest power to form morals and to direct them either toward virtue or toward vice.” Since pleasure or pain is mixed into every action and we by nature pursue pleasure, it is the strongest lever of moral education.

The definition is Aristotelian: “Pleasure is the consummation of the operations of the cognitive faculty.” There follow six divisions. The first distinguishes pleasure simply so called from the merely incidental:

Called pleasure simply and in itself is that which appears as pleasure to those who are well constituted according to nature. … Incidental pleasures are those which appear as pleasures to persons suffering from some defect, whether of soul or of body.Johannes Crell, Aristotelian Ethics — Divisions of Pleasure

The second division separates the pleasures of the mind from those of the senses: “The former man has in common with God and the blessed spirits, the latter with the beasts.” In the third chapter the disputed questions are treated — whether every pleasure is good, whether it can be lasting, and what the state midway between pleasure and pain is. Of hostility to pleasure there is nowhere a trace: in the wide sense of the word every pleasure is good, in the narrow sense — that of the morally good — not every one.

7. Fourth Part: On Friendship

Twelve chapters — the part that modern ethics has lost and that in Crell receives astonishingly much space.

Why It Is Necessary

Crell carries the necessity through all situations of life: in private and in public, in good fortune and in misfortune, in early childhood, in boyhood, in manhood, in old age. In good fortune one needs friends for two reasons — because beneficence is “exercised upon them most of all and in the most honorable way,” and because “the possession of no good is delightful without companions.” He cites Cicero: we use “neither water nor fire in more places than friendship,” and whoever takes it out of life “seems to take the sun out of the world.”

What It Is

Friendship is a mutual and manifest goodwill by which the one wishes the other good for that other’s own sake.Johannes Crell, Aristotelian Ethics — On the Definition of Friendship

Every word of this definition is examined: not every goodwill is friendship, for some is not mutual, some is not known to the other, some is “wholly inactive, that is, not joined with a desire for intercourse.”

Five Divisions

• In itself and incidental — the former springs from virtue, the latter from the useful or the pleasant. Friendship in itself “applies only to good men” and is lasting; the incidental kind is unstable, “because the goods themselves on which it rests are perishable too.”
• Simple and mixed — simple, when both seek the same thing; mixed, when they seek different things: “as when the one seeks gain, the other pleasure. Thus between the prince and the soldier there subsists a friendship of utility: the former seeks power, the latter his pay.”
• Between equals and between unequals — the one is called the friendship of equality, the other that of pre-eminence; to the latter belong father and son, husband and wife, magistrate and subject, teacher and pupil.
• Civil and domestic — here Crell inserts an entire doctrine of the forms of the state: three right forms (kingship, aristocracy, timocracy) and three perverted ones (tyranny, oligarchy, democracy), with their images in the household.
• In habitus and in use — the one lies “hidden in the hearts of friends,” the other makes itself known in deed. If intercourse is lacking, friendship gradually dies out: “hence the common proverb says that many friendships perish through silence.”

Precepts and Disputed Questions

A chapter of its own treats how friendship is to be contracted, preserved, and, if need be, dissolved. The first rule runs: “Do not give your hand to just anyone, but investigate thoroughly the morals and the fidelity of him with whom you wish to contract a closer friendship.” How fidelity is recognized, Crell also says: “in secrets, in money and honors, but most of all in misfortune.” To this is added Cicero’s warning, which he cites approvingly — that in acquiring friendships one should use such care “that we never begin to love one whom we might at some time come to hate.”

There follow fourteen disputed questions. One of them is whether a father is to be obeyed in every matter. Crell’s answer is refreshingly sober: no — “only in what pertains to him and of which he has knowledge.” In the conferring of offices he is not to be preferred to those who can discharge them better, “nor must a sick son obey his father more than his physician.” Two things, however, are owed to parents in every case: the fitting honor and sustenance.

Goodwill, Concord, Self-Love

Three chapters on what is akin to friendship. Goodwill can be directed toward strangers, “indeed even toward the dead” — Crell gives the example of the reader who would rather see Pompey victorious than Caesar, and of the spectator who suddenly wishes a boxer to win without doing anything for him.

Concord is civil friendship: the agreement of the citizens “in those things which concern the benefit of the whole commonwealth and lie within their power.” It is possible almost only among the good, for the bad “do everything for the sake of their own advantage and surge back and forth like the Euripus.” Important: concord is not mere sameness of opinion — it “aims at action and consists not only in the intellect, but far more in the affection and in the will.”

The last chapter treats self-love. Crell examines the four marks of true friendship in order — that one wishes the friend well; that one wishes him the good for his own sake; that one agrees with him and rejoices in the same things; that one gladly associates with him — and shows that all four apply to the relation to oneself as well, “unless he were bad in the extreme.” The result reverses the usual expectation:

For since a friend is a second self, we must be disposed toward him as toward ourselves. … But as only the good man is truly a friend to himself, so he alone is truly a friend to others.Johannes Crell, Aristotelian Ethics — On Self-Love

In Crell self-love is not the opposite of love of neighbor, but its measure — and at the same time a touchstone: whoever is at odds with himself can be a friend to no one else.

8. Where Crell Contradicts Aristotle

In three places, and all three hang together. What is noteworthy in this is not the contradiction, but how much is left standing: anger remains an affection that admits of the mean and whose deficiency Crell censures as much as its excess; the division of the virtues remains; the doctrine of the habitus remains; the analysis of voluntariness remains; the precedence of contemplation remains. What is struck out is struck out deliberately.

The Pride of the Magnanimous Man

Magnanimity Crell keeps as a virtue and unfolds it in nine precepts. But he strikes from it what Aristotle concedes to it by way of haughtiness:

Even when the highest honors are bestowed upon the magnanimous man, he does not on that account spurn and despise others in comparison with himself — however much Aristotle may seem to concede this to him — but renders to each one the honor due to him and recognizes and esteems all the good that he sees in them; and in all he reveres the image of God.Johannes Crell, Aristotelian Ethics — On Magnanimity

The same recurs with modesty: the modest man despises no one in comparison with himself, “however mean and lowly that other may otherwise be,” and reveres “in all men the image of God that they bear.” Not even the open hatred that Aristotle permits the magnanimous man does Christian piety concede to him. With this the point is struck at which ancient honor-ethics and Christian ethics become irreconcilable: honor remains a good, but it may not subsist at the cost of another.

Violence on One’s Own Authority

In the chapter on meekness Crell draws the line that is characteristic of the Polish Brethren. Whoever suffers injustice from a more powerful man should “never resist him by force,” but protect himself by legal means, avert the injustice by entreaty, evade him — or bear it patiently. Among equals, recourse to law is to be preferred to the law of the fist, and the magistrate may be invoked, but with one condition: it must not look “as if you had already avenged yourself,” and no graver evil may befall the one denounced than the one that threatened you.

There is such a thing as self-defense — narrowly bounded:

If place or time do not permit calling upon the help of the magistrate, but the intended injustice is intolerable, then to ward it off we may employ even such means as contain something violent or harsh … yet so that far less evil fall back upon him who means to do the injustice than would have fallen back upon us from his deed, and that he himself meanwhile become unfit neither for amendment nor for earning his livelihood by work.Johannes Crell, Aristotelian Ethics — On Meekness and Clemency

That is a remarkably precise boundary: self-defense yes — but it may take neither life nor that “which in a certain way belongs to the preservation of life.” Whoever goes beyond this “repays either like with like or something heavier than the injustice he feared” — and has thereby arrived at revenge, which Crell forbids throughout.

Martial Fortitude

Fortitude migrates from the battlefield to standing firm in suffering. Crell distinguishes civil fortitude, which Aristotle describes, from Christian fortitude, which Scripture describes — and the difference lies at a single point: in the question which is the noblest kind of death. For Aristotle it is death in battle, for commonwealths and kings honor it most highly; by God’s judgment it is the death “that one takes upon oneself for the sake of righteousness.” Civil fortitude, however, has “lost the name of a virtue from the moment when immortality was revealed to all men alike.”

Christian fortitude he divides into three kinds: the danger taken upon oneself for the sake of divine truth, that taken for the sake of piety, and that taken for others — “especially for the brethren.” The traditional conditions of a just war he reports in full and soberly, in indirect speech: just cause, lawful authority, timely declaration, no poison and no guile, no cruelty toward the vanquished, no violence against the unarmed, sparing of the innocent. And then he draws the line:

But even if all this were observed in wars — which happens most rarely, or rather never — there is nevertheless today no sufficiently just cause that could move anyone to shed blood, especially the blood of so many men … There is no salvation in war. Hence even the heathen have held that the most unjust peace is to be preferred to the justest war.Johannes Crell, Aristotelian Ethics — On Fortitude and Patience

Behind this stands no rigorism, but a calculation: the outcome of wars is uncertain, the damage as a rule exceeds what was fought for, and the commandment to love one’s enemies remains in force. His closing sentence is his sharpest:

I do not repeat the commandments of God which bid us love our enemies. A subtle love indeed, which utterly destroys the very one it is supposed to love!Johannes Crell, Aristotelian Ethics — On Fortitude and Patience

And behind it, as the ground of this composure, stands citizenship in the heavenly fatherland: what we have here is “given us for use and not for possession” — “so that even its loss is easy, if only we preserve a right conscience, which no one can wrest from us against our will.”

9. The Message of the Book

Crell’s answer to the question of what happens to a philosophical tradition when one takes it seriously and at the same time contradicts it runs: neither accommodation nor rupture, but patient examination, piece by piece, with the reasons in the open. He does not reject Aristotle because he was a heathen — that would be the cheap argument, and Crell never makes it. He examines the propositions one by one and lets stand what holds. Of 54 chapters, three end in a contradiction.

Behind this stands the conviction that separates Socinianism from the great confessions of its time: that the Sermon on the Mount is a binding law and not an unattainable counsel for the few; that man can really choose and therefore is really responsible; and that an ethics which demands of man nothing that he is also able to do would be no ethics at all.

And something else is striking when one reads the book as a whole: it is unpolemical. It names no opponents, conducts no confessional disputes, and nowhere claims to set forth a special Socinian doctrine. It explains, distinguishes, weighs — and in doing so arrives at positions where hardly anyone in the Europe of 1681 wished to stand.