On the subject of morality (chapter four in The Unintended Reformation), Brad Gregory performs a sleight of hand that is well-nigh remarkable since Protestant-Roman Catholic differences on ethics may be the most important feature of the break among Rome, Geneva, Wittenberg, and Canterbury. Gregory says:

This chapter argues that a transformation from a substantive morality of the good to a formal morality of rights constitutes the central change in Western ethics over the past half millennium, in terms of theory, practice, laws, and institutions. (184)

He goes on:

The fundamental historical realities that drove the central change were the religious disagreements and related sociopolitical disruptions of the Reformation era, because in the late Middle Ages, Christianity — with all its problems — was Western Europe’s dominant, socially pervasive embodiment of a morality of the good. As we have seen, Protestant rejections of the authority of the Roman church produced an open-ended range of rival truth claims about what the Bible meant. Correlatively, they yielded rival claims about what the Christian good was and how it was to be lived in community. (185)

What Gregory fails to consider is that his baseline for Christian ethics was precisely what was at issue in the medieval church and that the virtues Rome advocated were distinct from biblical morality. He fails to consider this because the stable Christian ethics that the Reformers abandoned were actually a synthesis of pagan and biblical truths — in other words, an unstable compound for the so-called good life.

Gregory argues that Christian ethics before the Reformation were synonymous with Aristotelian virtue ethics. What occurred over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was an abandonment of Aristotle:

. . . Aristotelian final causes were rejected and replaced by a conception of nature as a universal mechanism of efficient causes that encompassed human beings, and thus subsumed morality. Yet the elimination of any natural teleology from human life rendered not just problematic but incoherent the related notion of moral virtues as precisely those acquired human qualities and concrete practices whose rational exercise enables the disciplined reorientation of human passions and impulses, and thus the realization of the human good. If there are no final causes in nature, and human beings are no more than a part of nature like everything else, then there is not such thing as human nature conceived teleologically in Aristotelian terms. (181)

And perhaps if human nature conceived teleologically along Aristotelian lines leaves no room for discussing the work of the Holy Spirit in regeneration and sanctification. Sorry, but where exactly is the Christian conception of the good in this standard by which to evaluate early modern moral philosophy? Gregory doesn’t appear to suffer the anguish described by Paul in the Epistle to the Romans because the Notre Dame historian is seemingly more concerned with community (Europe) than with the individual (creature) who stands condemned by God’s law:

Based on logically antecedent truth claims about reality and history, late medieval Christian ideals were laden with other truth claims about how human beings should act so that they might pursue the common good in this life and be saved eternally by God in the next. In other words, Christianity on the eve of the Reformation entailed an eternally ramifying ethical discourse based on a metaphysics that was disclosed through a history and embedded within a politics. With its teleological ethics rooted in God’s self-revelation through his creation and his covenant with Israel, above all in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, medieval Christianity involved reciprocally related moral rules, the practice of moral virtues, and a moral community — the church — all of which were supposed to foster the common good and the salvation of souls. (190)

All of this reflection on virtue may have been valuable for European society. And this is why two-kingdom folks don’t mind a dose of Aristotle when it comes to talk about a shared life together with other persons. But when it comes to the elephant in the Christian room — namely, “what must I do to be saved?” or “who can stand in that great day?” — Aristotelian or Thomistic accounts of human flourishing just won’t comfort sin-sick souls like Martin Luther who saw a difference between the proximate goods of social virtues and the absolute good of keeping God’s law perfectly, entirely, and perpetually.