Christian Ethics

Johannes Crell wrote two ethics. The one works its way through Aristotle. The other takes the opposite path: it does not ask how the ancient doctrine of virtue may be corrected from the Bible, but which virtues and vices Scripture itself knows, how it names them and how it orders them. Five books, some eighty chapters — from the concept of virtue to the duties of spouses, magistrates, the rich and the poor.

1. The procedure: first the words, then the matter

Crell’s method is the same on every page and at first disconcerting to the untrained reader. Before he says what a virtue is, he investigates in which senses Scripture uses the word virtue (Greek ἀρετή). Before he passes judgement on the oath, he clarifies what swearing means at all. Before he treats of knowledge, he enumerates the five words by which Scripture designates it — knowledge, wisdom, understanding, prudence, perception — and examines each one singly.

Behind this stands a recurring observation: Scripture uses the same words now broadly, now narrowly, now properly, now figuratively. “The fear of God has as many meanings as love,” it says tersely at the beginning of one chapter. Whoever passes over these distinctions builds his ethics upon homonyms. The technical language of the schools remains Crell’s tool — habitus, voluntarium, mediocritas stand on every other page —, but it no longer has the last word.

The very first sentence of the work shows how concisely he can define once the preliminary work is done:

Christian virtue is a disposition of the mind which aims at that perfection of man which is described in the doctrine of Christ.Johannes Crell, Christian Ethics — On Christian Virtue in General

Two things are contained in this. First: virtue is a habitus, hence nothing momentary and nothing imputed, but an acquired, lasting disposition — it can be practised and it can be lost. Second: its measure is not nature, and not reason alone, but “the doctrine of Christ.” With that the course is set.

2. Why this ethics turns out differently

The doctrinal decisions of Socinianism are no side matter for an ethics — they force it into another form:

1. Without a doctrine of satisfaction, no mere obedience of gratitude. Whoever does not understand the atonement as a payment carried out cannot treat obedience as subsequent thankfulness. He must give it a weight of its own — ethics becomes relevant to salvation instead of decorative.
2. With a free will, no irresistible grace. Virtue can then not be described as an effect that happens to man, but as something acquired, practised and failed. Hence the work has a chapter of its own on the degrees of piety — in Crell there are beginners and advanced.
3. Without original sin as inherited guilt, the transition from the vices to virtue remains a real way, which Crell describes expressly — and no mere switching of status.

Whoever expects, however, that the book will proclaim the sharp demands of the Sermon on the Mount as a programme will be surprised. Crell proceeds more soberly. His chapter on the oath places swearing under the parts of divine honour and then asks under what conditions it rightly takes place; there he does not cite the Sermon on the Mount a single time. This is no retreat, but method: he first ascertains what Scripture says about a matter, and lets the conclusions arise from it instead of setting them before it.

3. First book: virtue and the virtues of the understanding

The foundation. After the concept of Christian virtue follow the virtues of the understanding, defined as “a disposition of the mind by which we know, judge, or approve with our assent that which belongs to the Christian religion and to piety.” They fall into two kinds: knowing and judging (knowledge, prudence) and assenting (faith, hope).

Knowledge

The chapter is a work upon the word-field of the New Testament vocabulary: five words, their object, the manner in which Scripture expresses it, the properties of this knowledge — and then two divisions. The first distinguishes more exact from less exact knowledge, the second effective from ineffective. In substance this means: there is a knowing that remains without consequence, and Crell treats it as a defective form, not as a lesser degree. At the end stands its opposite, ignorance, and beside it “the wisdom of this world,” which James calls “earthly, sensual and devilish.”

Prudence and the striving to know

Upon prudence there follows an appendix which properly would stand elsewhere — Crell inserts it “because of its very great kinship with the virtues of the understanding.” It concerns a disposition for which Greek has a word only for the opposite: asynesia. Crell renders it as “a willing lack of understanding or a willing folly” — not the want of knowledge, but the want of effort to consider things rightly. The corresponding virtue he calls “the striving to know”:

It is … such a disposition of the mind whereby it comes about that you will to know and to foresee that which it befits a Christian man to know and to foresee.Johannes Crell, Christian Ethics — On the Striving after Wisdom and Prudence

For a movement whose watchword was “Prove all things,” this small appendix is programmatic: not to know is a misfortune, not to will to know is guilt.

Faith and hope

Both are first sorted according to their meanings. From fides Crell at the very outset separates two meanings that belong elsewhere: fidelity, “which is a moral virtue,” and that particular gift of the Spirit of the earliest age. What remains is faith as the assent of the understanding to what God has revealed — in the widest sense also to what one sees with the eyes, then more narrowly to what one does not see.

And here it becomes interesting, for with that which one does not see “something voluntary seems to be added, so that this faith is something mixed and belongs partly to the understanding, partly to the will.” In Crell, faith is neither a mere holding-for-true nor a mere resolve, but both at once. There follow justifying faith, its properties, its relation to trust, and the question why Scripture chooses precisely this word.

Hope he determines as “the expectation of a future good,” to which, he says, one might add: “of one to be obtained from God or from Christ.” It contains two things — a certainty and a desire. From trust it differs in that trust is directed to the person upon which it rests, but hope to the thing.

4. Second book: holiness as a whole

Before Crell proceeds to the individual virtues, he treats of their sum: holiness or piety (sanctitas, pietas). He defines it threefold, offering a choice: “the sum of all Christian virtues that pertain to morals; or, if one prefers: the habitus of acting according to the commandments of Christ; or, if it please: the observance of the commandments of God or of Christ.”

The will, the purpose and conscience

The introductory chapter clarifies the subject and the form of moral virtue: its seat is the will, its form the habitus, and to it belongs the purpose of acting. Then comes the section which is decisive for the understanding of the whole work — conscience. Crell calls it that which God “has appointed as the inward and nearest norm and rule of our purposes and actions, and as it were as the exactor and judge of our duty,” and explains this with an image drawn from market law:

The matter stands just as if the magistrate publicly established a fixed measure of things, say an ell, a measuring rod, or a pound, to which all private measures must be conformable; with which public measure no one measures anything of what is sold or bought, but each measures the several things with his private measure, adjusted to that one — and rightly, if that private measure is thoroughly conformable to the public one, but badly if it is not.Johannes Crell, Christian Ethics — On the Virtues of the Will, or of Morals

Thus God “has publicly set forth his law to all in the doctrine of Christ”; yet no one can make use of this norm immediately, but only through his own conscience. With that the doctrine of Christ stands objectively fixed — and is nevertheless accessible to each individual only through his conscience. From precisely this doubleness there follows later Crell’s position on freedom of conscience. The chapter closes with “three weightiest questions” concerning the erring conscience and the Pauline rule about doubt.

The foundation: the uprightness of the mind

Holiness itself Crell treats in three members — foundation, transition, the thing itself. The foundation is “the uprightness of the mind,” and this is “nothing other than the love of the honourable, or the voluntary inclination of the mind to the pursuit of virtue.” Its opposite: hatred against virtue.

Here too stand the most delicate questions of the book, and Crell poses them himself: how far does the freedom of the will reach? Is virtue loved for its own sake? Why has God attached a reward to virtue at all — and does the hope of reward not diminish the worth of the action? He evades none of them. That virtue is rewarded does not make it a piece of business; and that it is lovable for its own sake does not make the reward superfluous.

The transition from the vices to virtue

A chapter that exists in no Lutheran or Reformed ethics in this form — because there the transition is a juridical act and not a movement. Crell gathers “some thirty and more” manners of speech by which Scripture describes it, and orders them according to simple words and whole phrases, according to complete and less complete ones. In the first place stands conversion:

As concerns the simple words, there occurs in the first place the word penance, or rather conversion, in Greek μετάνοια, which properly denotes the change of the mind for the better, and indeed such a change as also draws after it the change of the actions for the better. For μετανοεῖν means: to grow wise after the deed.Johannes Crell, Christian Ethics — On the Transition from the Vices to Virtue

Good works

The definition is broad and at the same time exact: good works are all actions “which agree with the commandments of God and of Christ” — and indeed not only those expressly prescribed, but also those “which are derived from them by parity of reasoning or by another legitimate inference.” Crell even adds that an action can be good even when the agent has not thought of the commandment at all, because there is a “rule of good works prior in its nature, upon which the commandments of God and of Christ themselves depend.”

There follow the divisions — inward and outward works, the threefold division, the fourfold division according to Matt. 22:37, works before and after the habitus, single actions and habit — and then again a work upon the word-field: the proper phrases of Scripture, the metonymical, the metaphorical, and a section of its own on imitation.

The degrees of piety

Here Crell draws the consequence of the free will. The degrees he measures by constancy and readiness. And the determination of constancy is remarkably mild:

For Holy Scripture, above all that of the New Covenant, and likewise common usage, call holy and pious not only him who has never failed in anything, but also him who for the most part performs what accords with virtue and piety, though he may sometimes stumble out of weakness or out of error or out of some inadvertence.Johannes Crell, Christian Ethics — On the Degrees of Piety

Readiness is the second axis: “that one feels delight in his actions” — it springs from the flesh being so far subdued that the exercise of virtue no longer causes any great difficulty. From this there arise three degrees of holiness and three opposed degrees of impiety, together with further distinctions according to aids and occasions, according to the several virtues, according to time and duration — and finally the distinction of an intensive from an extensive perfection: in depth and in breadth.

Properties of piety

The first is carefulness, and its first part is “the circumspection or watchfulness which excludes all security, that is, a certain spiritual sleep.” The second is perfection, the third that holiness is wholly spiritual.

5. Third book: the duties towards God

The first half of piety: all that properly concerns God. Crell distinguishes broad and narrow parts of pietas — some reach so far that they embrace the whole of piety, others denote a definite portion. And he notes a connection which he afterwards needs more than once: honour and love belong together, for “honour flows from love and without it is in truth no honour at all; the former in turn is powerless if the latter does not follow.”

Trust, love, fear

Trust in God and in Christ stands at the beginning. Crell treats it between two extremes: the tempting of God on the one side and presumption on the other — and then expressly poses the question “whether it be worse to trust God too much or too little.”

In the love of God he distinguishes three meanings and asks what it means to love God “with all the heart, all the soul and all the strength.” The fear of God he divides into the servile and the filial; its opposite in defect is not to fear God, in excess superstition. Both chapters rest throughout upon the comparison of passages: that “to fear” in Deut. 10:20 means “to reverence,” Crell shows from the fact that Christ renders the same words in Matt. 4:10 by “to worship.”

The honour of God

The central chapter of the third book — according to Crell it comprises “almost the whole of pietas.” He separates inward and outward honour and defines both separately: the inward is “the reverence and awe towards the Godhead, sprung from the contemplation of its majesty and of its highest beneficence towards us”; the outward is the sign thereof. And because a sign can be true or deceptive, “outward honour is now true, now feigned.”

… above all if one considers that outward honour without the inward is nothing before God, whereas the inward without the outward is often in the highest degree acceptable.Johannes Crell, Christian Ethics — On the Parts and Kinds of Divine Honour

Three parts he posits: adoration in the strict sense, service, and the proclamation of the Godhead, together with confession. And he treats very exactly what counts as adoration “in itself” and what only “incidentally” — including the question of the angels in the Old Covenant. For an antitrinitarian congregation this section was no side issue: whoever determines to whom adoration is due decides the Christology. At the end stand the vices: idolatry in the wider and in the narrower sense, and “what is neighbouring upon idolatry.”

The oath

Crell places it among the parts of divine honour “which is accomplished chiefly by speech,” in the second place, and defines:

But to swear properly means: to confirm something in a holy manner and with religious awe, and indeed chiefly in such wise that the Godhead — whether openly or tacitly — is invoked as witness and avenger of the truth.Johannes Crell, Christian Ethics — On the Oath

Then follows what is to be asked after this determination: wherein the divine honour consists in the oath, which are the two extremes, what holds when one swears by a name that is not to be invoked, what in an unworthy or uncertain matter, what is to be thought of ambiguity in oaths, how it stands with imposing the oath upon others, with the oath taken together with co-swearers, and with adjuration. The Sermon on the Mount does not occur. This is the most remarkable reticence of the book: the question over which the Polish Brethren wore themselves out for decades Crell treats as a question of the right worship of God — and leaves the conclusions to the reader.

Praise, the Lord’s Supper, prayer

Under the praise of God Crell comprises “all those statements by which something excellent or outstanding is ascribed to God or affirmed of him.” To this belong thanksgiving, singing in the praise of God — and a section of its own on thanksgiving “also for adverse things.”

To the Lord’s Supper he devotes a treatment of its own, although it falls under thanksgiving. The ground is theologically instructive: the benefit celebrated in the Lord’s Supper is the most eminent, because it “is the very greatest proof of the divine love towards us.” Here Crell distinguishes carefully between the greatness of the good and the greatness of the love: forgiveness and eternal life are a greater good than the death of Christ — “yet the force of the divine love is greater,” for God gave his Son and the Son gave himself. The Lord’s Supper thus stands here not as a means of grace, but as the “rite of the Lord’s Supper, which is instituted for the celebration of the death of Christ.”

Prayer, finally, receives a rubric of its own, because it does not fit into the pure rendering of honour: it “looks not only to the divine honour, but is also openly and unconcealedly referred to some good of ours which we desire to obtain by this way.” Three chief points Crell works through: what and for whom one is to pray; of what sort he must be who prays; of what sort the prayer itself must be.

6. Fourth book: the duties towards our neighbour

The most extensive book. It begins with a clarification of terms which one would not expect today: who is the neighbour? Crell follows “the common usage of the theologians” and understands by it all men — but holds fast that Scripture itself speaks more narrowly and “commonly opposes the neighbour to the stranger and the distant, and above all to enemies, as appears from Matt. 5:43.” Under the Gospel those are then called neighbours in a special sense “who partake with us of the same religion.” The extension is therefore not obtained by stealth, but grounded.

What we owe: justice, equity, fidelity

Crell divides the duties towards others by a clear criterion: either they are “owed after a human manner” — then we impart to the other his right — or they proceed “from a certain goodness and inclination of feeling” — then we render to him that “which is of our right.” The former belongs to justice, the latter to love.

Equity (epieikeia) he determines as “a virtue which mitigates the rigour of the law, or … a justice tempered by a certain goodness,” and names its two tasks. The first: when you demand something, do not press the other too sharply, but rather demand less than you could demand by strict right. The second concerns the opposite direction — when you could indeed defend yourself with a semblance of right, but weighty reasons speak against it. The example given is concrete: someone who could appeal to the letter of a contract and yet “prefers to follow the sense of the law or of the contract … and so to desist from his own advantage.”

Fidelity belongs to justice and extends expressly also to tacit promises: when someone “shows by look or gesture that he will do something,” or when he takes upon himself an office “by virtue of which he is afterwards urged to do something, even though he has never expressly said that he would do it.” Its opposites Crell treats singly: faithlessness, fraud, betrayal.

What flows from love

Here begins that to which no debt obliges. Love Crell takes at first narrowly — as “that virtue by which we impart to our neighbour what we do not owe him by common right” — and then distinguishes two usages of Scripture:

Hence one might say that now only the source of the duties, now together with the source also those little brooks, that is, the duties flowing from it, are comprehended under this name.Johannes Crell, Christian Ethics — On Love

Mercy he delimits sharply: it is narrower than love, for it “is moved only towards those who either are wretched or can be so; love, on the other hand, can be exercised even towards the most blessed.” It is therefore “love towards those who are subject to any evils” — expressly also where the evil merely threatens.

The virtues flowing from love Crell orders according to whether they forbid evil or enjoin good. To do evil is forbidden by meekness and long-suffering; to render good is enjoined by joy, kindness and beneficence; both at once are concerned in peace.

Meekness and long-suffering

Meekness is “the virtue which is concerned with the moderation of anger” — and it moderates it in three ways: that you be not angry when you ought not; not more vehemently than you ought; not longer than you ought. Long-suffering is “a certain perfection” of meekness: “what the former performs simply, the latter performs over a long time.”

The first duty he unfolds with examples which show the tone of the book well: not to be angry when there is no just cause — “for example when someone admonishes you and rightly rebukes your deeds; nay even when he does so wrongly, provided that he who does it does not know the truth and does it out of love for you.” Not to be angry with him with whom one ought not to be angry, “such as parents or other benefactors or the magistrate.” And not at a time or in a place where it least befits, “for example in the congregation or when holy things are being transacted.”

In this chapter there stands also the passage in which Crell himself admits where his ethics has an open seam:

Although we have not settled throughout that question, whether it be lawful also to maim a limb or to carry out the death penalty upon evildoers; rather we have set down what has hitherto been received in our churches, and even now it does not please us to go deeply into the matter here.Johannes Crell, Christian Ethics — On Meekness and Long-Suffering

The sentence is more instructive than many a doctrinal decision. Crell knows that the question is not decided; he names the standing of the churches and halts, instead of forcing an answer. The same reticence marks the whole book — and it is the reason why it did not become a book of edification.

Joy, kindness, beneficence, peace

Four virtues which one does not necessarily expect in an ethics. Joy from Gal. 5:22 Crell interprets, after lengthy weighing, not as rejoicing with another over another’s good, but as “such a virtue by which one is wont to prepare joy for other Christians” — hence as the capacity to make one’s presence agreeable to others. Kindness (χρηστότης) denotes, with a view to usage, “rather a certain agreeableness and grace which one offers to another” than mere usefulness.

Beneficence (εὐποιΐα) provides “for the advantage of others”; Crell shows from Gal. 5:22 that it appears there under the name ἀγαθωσύνη, and treats gratitude in the same chapter. Peace, finally, is “a certain conjunction of minds and of life whereby it comes about that the one is in no point burdensome to the other.” It is twofold — civil and Christian —, and the distinction has a practical point:

Therefore Christians ought to cultivate the former, so far as in them lies, with all men, but the latter only with those who partake of the same Christian religion.Johannes Crell, Christian Ethics — On Peace, or On Zeal for Concord

Among the extremes Crell reckons not only discord, but also “too close a fellowship,” as well as factions and conspiracies — the perversion of peace into the forming of cliques.

7. Fourth book, second part: the duties towards ourselves

The third part of holiness. Crell orders it according to that about which the virtue turns: about spiritual or about earthly goods, and in each case about the corresponding evils. “About goods turns the desire for them and the joy springing from it. About evils turn fear and pain: fear when they threaten, pain when they are present.”

The spiritual goods

The desire for them Crell grounds upon the Beatitudes — “they that hunger and thirst after righteousness” — and refers it above all to “the blessed immortality promised to us and confirmed by the surest testimonies.” The joy flowing from it he treats with Paul: “to rejoice always” is to be understood “as the condition of this our life permits” — for “it cannot be otherwise than that some pain intervene and disturb this our joy.” An ethics that permits sorrow without declaring it a fault.

Fear is here “that emotion which springs from the contemplation of the divine punishments … and which spurs you on to the zeal of piety”; pain is that sadness “which springs from the contemplation of the sins committed by us.” And Crell adds a sober psychological observation: most men grieve “less over the shamefulness of their deeds themselves than over the fact that they have in this way drawn upon themselves the divine anger.”

The earthly goods

Magnanimity and equanimity show themselves in both, in goods as in evils, and stand to one another as cause and effect: it belongs to magnanimity “to despise human things and to count them as nothing — yet with right reason and judgement —, whence it follows that in either fortune you preserve an even measure and are neither borne aloft by the favourable nor cast down by the adverse.”

The contempt of earthly goods Crell conceives astonishingly moderately: those goods are to be despised “in so far as they are not necessary for passing this life conveniently.” And with life itself he draws the same line: to love it is unavoidable and right; “but to want to preserve life when it is to be given up means to love it too much.”

There follow moderation, which in Scripture mostly means sobriety; contentment (αὐτάρκεια), “whereby it comes about that you rest content with those things which are necessary for passing your own life and that of your household conveniently for the present time”; and finally fortitude, patience and constancy.

In the case of contentment Crell makes a distinction which cuts the ground from under the reproach of flight from the world: the “present time” does not mean the present day, “nay not even a month,” but the whole span for which one must reasonably provide now. The word of Jesus about the morrow forbids anxiety, not provision.

What concerns ourselves and others at once

The fourth part of holiness. Modesty (ταπεινοφροσύνη) is “a virtue which bridles the desire for honour and produces in us a moderate estimation of ourselves or of our dignity” — and Crell notes expressly that the Latin humilitas counted as a vice among the Roman writers. The New Testament makes of it a virtue; the language of the heathen does not suffice for it.

Bashfulness guards against “anything unseemly being perceived in you by others”; gravity preserves “a certain becoming constancy” in outward things and is especially needful to those “who have to guide the morals and the life of others.”

Candour and truthfulness form a pair: the former the genus, the latter the species; the former shows itself in everything whereby the motions of the mind are expressed, the latter properly in speech. And here too the doctrine of the mean holds — openness is a virtue, not an automatism:

But in calling it a virtue we thereby indicate that candour is a certain mediocritas, that is, that in this matter a certain moderation and prudence is to be applied, lest without distinction anything whatever, or in any place whatever, or at any time whatever, or towards anyone whatever be disclosed, but only to those who have need of it, and when and so much as is needful.Johannes Crell, Christian Ethics — On Candour and Truthfulness

Its counterpart is discretion, the virtue of concealing — whose better-known extreme, garrulity, Crell fixes upon 1 Timothy 5:13.

Works that go beyond duty

A chapter of its own, which opens a third class between things indifferent and what is necessary to salvation: things which are “in themselves highly praiseworthy and most worthy of a Christian man,” without being simply necessary. Crell gives the ground why there may be such: out of equity God did not wish to bind us “to laws so narrow,” but willed “that there should be some things wherein the piety of men … might freely exert itself and strive ever again after a greater perfection.”

The scholastic designation he expressly rejects: “works of supererogation” is a term “which is both inept and superstitious,” because it is supposed that they can be imputed to others. But, he adds, “when the errors that turn upon this matter have been removed, the matter itself is by no means to be rejected.” Five examples he adduces: the undertaking of an office in the Church; the free preaching of the Gospel after the example of Paul; the community of goods among the first Christians; celibacy; fasting.

The treatment of the community of goods shows his manner of reading. He holds fast that it “proceeded from a certain superabundance of the love of the one towards the other,” but was not commanded — and grounds this upon Peter’s word to Ananias: while it remained, was it not thine own? Whoever makes a commandment of it reads against the text; and so does whoever thinks lightly of it.

Things indifferent

Adiaphora are for Crell “those things which in themselves are neither honourable nor shameful, neither seemly nor unseemly” — in themselves, for through circumstances and use they become the one or the other: “Thus eating and drinking is in itself indifferent, but not in any manner whatever.” For the doubtful case he gives a rule of thumb which contains the whole earnestness of Socinian piety:

… it follows that if he cannot defer the action — for that is to be done when the matter permits it —, he should incline to the side which is safer. But the safer, generally speaking, is that which is more contrary to the flesh.Johannes Crell, Christian Ethics — On the Use of Indifferent or Middle Things

The duty of the whole Church

What not the individuals, but the assembled congregation has to do. Crell makes clear that by Church he understands “chiefly each single church,” hence the local congregation: “the company of men who come together more often in the same place for the sake of religion.” Three objects he treats: the election to the ecclesiastical offices, church discipline, and the common expenditures together with the alms.

8. Fifth book: the particular duties of the estates

Here it becomes concrete to the point of discomfort. Crell first gives the ground why this book is needed at all: the particular does indeed follow from the general and can “be derived from it by a prudent man” — but not by everyone. Then he divides: the Christians as members of the Church, and the same Christians “considered outside the Church,” whereby he expressly makes clear: meant are not those who do not belong to it, but the same men in their worldly relations.

The offices of the congregation

Crell distinguishes officeholders and private persons — the latter Scripture calls ἰδιῶται, “those who are of the people.” Among the officeholders he separates those who lead from those who serve. And he puts forward in passing an assertion which at that time was anything but self-evident:

For from the Epistle to Titus, ch. 1, it stands sufficiently open and established that presbyter and bishop are the same, that is, elder and overseer of the church.Johannes Crell, Christian Ethics — Division of the Members of the Church

There follow the chapters on the elders (election according to 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, then the conduct of the office, leadership, prayer for the congregation), on the teachers (with two offices, teaching and praying, and a regular homiletics: what is to be set forth, how one prepares oneself, how one is to treat the various kinds of hearers), on the deacons and on the hearers, whose whole duty Crell sums up “under the name of honour”: love and reverence, obedience, maintenance, intercession and support.

The deaconesses

The chapter that falls out of the series — and the quietest surprise of the book. Crell holds fast that in the ancient Church there were women “who served the saints or the Christian people in the name of the church in the things that belong to this life,” and that this office has fallen out of use. And then:

For although this estate has today ceased in the Church, it can nevertheless be restored, and especially in the more numerous congregations care should be taken that this be done.Johannes Crell, Christian Ethics — On the Deaconesses

Crell goes through the conditions of election — widowhood, an age of sixty years, blameless morals — and then does something characteristic of his way of thinking: he examines whether the age limit is binding. The purpose of the provision, he says, was twofold; but if the service is for “the strangers, the poor and the sick,” then “many widows who count sixty years might, because of the weakness of their strength, appear unfit for services of this kind.” Hence a “certain relaxation” belongs here, “which is left to the prudence of the church.” An office for women, restored and adapted to practice — noted down in 1630, without any emphasis.

Sex, age, estate of life

Outside the congregation Crell orders according to three distinctions: sex, age and estate of life. He does so with the self-evident assumptions of his time — to the male sex belongs “a greater courage,” to women measure in dress and silence in the congregation. Remarkable here too is the method: what men first need is “the moderation of anger and meekness; for in great minds fitted for ruling … the affect of anger is wont easily to break forth.” Where others ground dominion, Crell distributes duties.

With regard to age he confines himself to the older and the younger and begins with a rule of equality: those who are equal in age should “deal with one another as brothers and sisters” and meet one another “with equal reverence and mutual love.” To the older belongs a particular gravity, because without standing they cannot lead.

In the case of the unmarried and widows he gives first the Pauline rule — better to marry than to burn — and then the condition: whoever marries should do it “in the Lord,” hence only with believers. The ground is again an inference from the lesser to the greater: with him with whom the doctrine of Christ forbids us to have intercourse and to eat bread, one may all the less be “joined by that bond, than which none other in the whole of life is greater and closer.”

Household and dominion

The domestic community Crell divides threefold — spouses, parents and children, masters and servants —, the civil community is that between the magistrate and the subjects. In the household codes he makes an observation which shows his manner of reading well: in such pairs Scripture likes to begin with the subordinate — first wives, children and servants —, “because it befits him who is in the state of obeying to anticipate the other with his own duty.” He himself then reverses the order where the matter requires it.

To parents he prescribes “an honourable upbringing,” by which he understands nourishment and instruction; in nourishment “both luxury is to be avoided and that meanness which sometimes depresses aspiring talents and takes from them the alacrity to take up honourable studies.” A section of its own asks “how far parents may go in matters of religion.”

The duty of masters he sums up “in a single word”: equity — “that justice which is opposed to harshness and joined with a certain mildness.” They must command what is suited to the strength, the age and the disposition of each, and may “not lay on an unbearable yoke.” Even bondsmen are owed wages “already by the right of equity and of humanity.” And then follows the sharpest sentence of the book on social conditions:

For it is most unworthy to forsake him whose faithful labour you have enjoyed in good health or in the flower of his age, once he is sick or consumed by age, and to set the man in the same place as the horse which, so long as it is fit for work, is tended, but as soon as it has become useless is neglected — although more humane masters do not treat even a horse so.Johannes Crell, Christian Ethics — On the Duty of Masters and of Servants

The magistrate and the subjects

The chapter over which the Polish Brethren had quarrelled for decades — and Crell approaches it entirely without polemic:

It is the duty of the magistrate to care for the public good, that is, for the peace and the prosperity of the commonwealth, in such a manner that the men under its rule may both worship God piously and for the rest live honourably. … But for this it is required that they protect the good and regard them with praise, honour and rewards, but on the other hand punish the wicked and hold them in check.Johannes Crell, Christian Ethics — On the Duty of the Magistrate and of the Subjects

The magistrate is thus not rejected, but taken into service — and at once bound to its purpose. Where Paul in Rom. 13 names the sword, Crell counters with a fine but decisive remark: the Apostle is speaking there “not of what in fact really happens, but of what the duty of the magistrate absolutely requires.” Rom. 13 is thereby no licence for the existing power, but its measure.

And then follows the section which lifts this chapter out of its age. To the care for religion there belongs, in Crell, also its limit:

Nevertheless it may meanwhile do violence to no man and to no man’s conscience, and compel no one to any religion — which must be freely accepted — …, nor ever forbid that the people, at least in secret, worship God according to the persuasion of their mind.Johannes Crell, Christian Ethics — On the Duty of the Magistrate and of the Subjects

He does not stop at the principle, but reckons up why toleration is also prudent: where many follow another religion, it is better “to grant them public places in which they can satisfy the religion of their mind” than to drive them into secret assemblies — “especially since that prohibition of holy assemblies is wont to stir up resentment, and the oppressed, even when their cause is sometimes the worse, win for themselves the favour of others.” And from this he draws the conclusion for the prince: instead of compelling, he should “institute public conferences and disputations in order to convict the errors,” and see to it that men are trained “who can ably defend the truth.”

Here, in a textbook of ethics and not in a polemical tract, stands the argument which seven years after his death was to make Crell famous under the title Vindiciae pro religionis libertate — embedded in the sober doctrine of the duties of an estate. And even where Crell gives the magistrate a charge — to proceed against the veneration of images —, the sentence ends with the clause: “the freedom of consciences remaining inviolate.”

The rich and the poor

The closing chapter. Crell follows 1 Timothy 6:17 and names first the vices which the rich have to avoid: pride — “for riches are wont quite particularly to puff up the mind of men” —, trust in riches, avarice together with unmercifulness, and luxury. The second point is grounded expressly: with riches it seems that “everything can be procured,” and in the end one believes “that life itself rests upon them; which thing has already deceived many.” To the poor Scripture prescribes duties of their own, and these too Crell enumerates, before the work ends with a short conclusion.

9. The message

The Christian Ethics does not claim that Christianity brought a new morality which one need only hold up against the ancient one. It claims something more demanding: that Scripture contains a doctrine of virtue of its own, complete and ordered in itself — one need only raise it up instead of presupposing it. Precisely this the book accomplishes, and it accomplishes it in the only form which Crell allows: conceptually clean, proved passage by passage, without rhetorical shortcut.

From this follows the practical earnestness which separated the Polish Brethren from their contemporaries. If the Sermon on the Mount is law in force, if the will is free and if obedience has a weight of its own, then piety is nothing inward, but a form of life which can be read off from one’s dealing with anger, money, power and suffered injustice. This is the reason why the fifth book does not have the effect of an appendix, but of a goal: an ethics which did not reach down to the aging servant and to the oppressed dissenter would have missed its own premise.

When Crell wrote, Raków was still the centre of a living commonwealth with an academy and a printing house. Five years after his death the Sejm had both closed; in 1658 the Socinians were banished from Poland. One reads the chapters on fortitude, patience and constancy differently when one knows that for their first readers they did not remain an exercise — and the section on freedom of conscience differently when one knows that it was written by men from whom it was soon to be taken away.