Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff

admirers, not only in Germany and Russia but around the world.
    As in metaphysics and epistemology, so in ethics, which is their expression: something prepared the Germans morally for Hitler, and the figure at the root of modern developments is Kant. The primary force behind him in this case is not Plato, but the ethics of Christianity, which Kant carried to its climax.
    The major Greek philosophers did not urge self-sacrifice on men, but self-realization. Socrates, Aristotle, even Plato to some extent, taught that man is a value; that his purpose in life should be the achievement of his own well-being; and that this requires among other conditions the fullest exercise of his intellect. Since reason is the “most authoritative element” in man, writes Aristotle—the most eloquent exponent of the Greek egoism—“therefore the man who loves [reason] and gratifies it is most of all a lover of self.... In this sense, then, as has been said, a man should be a lover of self. . . .” 6
    Man is “sordid,” retorts Augustine, the leading Christian thinker before Aquinas; he is a “deformed and squalid” creature, “tainted with ulcers and sores.” Without God’s grace, man’s self is rotted, his mind is helpless, his body is lust-ridden, his life is hell. For such a creature, Augustine says, the moral imperative is renunciation. Man must give up the pagan reliance on reason and turn for truth to revelation—which is the virtue of faith. He must give up the prideful quest for a sense of self-value and admit his innate unworthiness, which is the virtue of humility. He must give up earthly pleasures in order to serve the Lord (and, secondarily, the needy), which is the virtue of love. Men must offer themselves to God “in sacrifice,” writes Augustine. God “did not leave any part of life which should be free and find itself room to desire the enjoyment of something else.” 7
    “And all that you [God] asked of me was to deny my own will and accept yours,” said Augustine, and the centuries of churchmen thereafter. Deny your will, echoes the German mystic Meister Eckhart, in a voice which carried to Luther and to Kant among many others. Practice the “virtue above all virtues,” obedience. “You will never hear an obedient person saying: ‘I want it so and so; I must have this or that.’ You will hear only of utter denial of self.... Begin, therefore, first with self and forget yourself!” 8
    Christianity prepared the ground. It paved the way for modern totalitarianism by entrenching three fundamentals in the Western mind: in metaphysics, the worship of the supernatural; in epistemology, the reliance on faith; as a consequence, in ethics, the reverence for self-sacrifice.
    But the Christian code, thanks to the Greeks’ influence, is more than an ethics of self-sacrifice. Christianity holds out to man a personal incentive, an infinite reward which each can hope to gain as recompense for his sacrifices: the salvation of his soul, his own soul, in blissful union with God. Like the Greeks before him, the virtuous Christian should be consumed by the desire for happiness—not for the this-worldly variety, but for an eternity of joy after death. And like the Greeks he should, at least to some extent, value himself—not his arrogant reason or lustful body, but the image of God in him, his true self: his spirit. The medieval moralist was caught in a contradiction. He urged man to forget his setf—in order to save his (true) self; to do his duty, scorning personal happiness—in order to experience the latter forever; to despise his own person, mind and body—yet love his neighbor as himself.
    When the medieval era drew to a close (owing to the rediscovery of Aristotle) and men turned once again to life in this world, thinkers began consciously to emulate the Greek approach to virtues and values. They began to advocate self-respect, self-realization, the cultivation cf reason, the pursuit of happiness, success on