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MORALITY AND FEAR OF PUNISHMENT
ethics of fear, though it may take a very liberal guise. All
utilitarian morality is based upon fear: spiritual ethics is the
only one that is not.
‘A different meaning attaches to what I should call anguish
and terror. In contradiction to fear, anguish implies yearning,
striving upwards and pain from being down below. What we
feel toward God may be mystic terror—terror at the fathomless
mystery—and we may feel a yearning for God. To introduce
fear into our attitude to God is to introduce a category of
ordinary natural life into a higher realm to which it is not
applicable. There may be fear of wild beasts or of infectious
disease, but not of God. One may be afraid of the powers of this
world, of tsars, commissars or gendarmes, but not of God. This
is an important and far-reaching distinction.’
While it is impossible either by way of quotation or summary
to do justice to the superb sweep of Berdyaev’s insight into this
matter, the essence of the distinction he makes can perhaps be
made clear by reference to our own experience of a similar
difference between the realms of social and personal action.
As Berdyaev points out, social morality is necessarily rooted
in animal fear. As physical beings, we need each other and are
needed by each other for what we can contribute to corporate
utilitarian tasks. The reward of our participation in these tasks
is a measure of freedom from privation, and such a degree of
physical security as the social organisation can provide. The
prevailing social morality defines the terms on which we are
accepted by the body-corporate, and we fear to affront it
because we fear the physical weakness and privation we must
suffer if we are repudiated by it.
But we are social creatures: and to say this does not merely
mean that we are gregarious. Deeper than our need of physical
satisfactions and securities is our need of communion, or freedom
from loneliness: loneliness not in the sense of mere solitude, but
of that imprisonment of the self within itself which occurs when
a human being cannot reach out and grasp the loving, trusting
hand of another, and thus experience what R. G. Collingwood
describes as ‘not strength within the self or the strength of
another self, but strength in the relation between selves’. This is
the strength of love.
When we behave in a manner that threatens to break this
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