In Memorium
Or. T. N. SHIVAPURI
Chemisi'ry D e p a r t m e n t Allahabad Universify ALLAHABAD
Born . • l6th February, 1919
Joined Service . . 11th October, 1949 Died . . 10th November, 1961
A PREFACE TO MORALS
Bv IF ALTER LI PPM ANN
PUBLIC 0 PI MON THE GOOD SOCIETY THE METHOD OF FRFFDOM IXTrRPRFTATIOVS, X93I-I932 A PREFACE TO POLITICS DRIFT A\D MA‘STERY THE STAKES OF DIPLOMACY LIBERTY A\D THE NEWS THE PHANTOM Pt BLIC MAN OF DFSTINY AMERICAN INQUISITORS
WALTER LIPPMANN
LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD RUSKIN HOUSE, MUSEUM STREET, W.C.l
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
VI, Lost Provinces 84
1. Business . , 84
2. The Family ... 88
3. Art ... 94
a. The Disappearance of Religious Paint-
ing 94
b. The Loss of a Heritage .... 96
c. The Artist Formerly 98
d. The Artist as a Prophet , . . . 101
e Arc for Art’s Sake 104
f. The Burden of Originality . . . 106
VIL The Drama of Destiny 112
1. The Soul in the Modern World . . . . 112
2. The Great Scenario 115
3. Earmarks of Truth .... . . 118
4 On Reconciling Religion and Science . . 121
5. Gospels of Science 125
6. The Deeper Conflict , . .... 131
7. Theocracy and Humanism , . . 133
5. iiarmarks of Iruth . . . . . . xi...*
4. On Reconciling Religion and Science . . 121
PART II
THE FOUNDATIONS OF HUMANISM
Introduction 143
VIII, Golden Memories 145
IX. The Insight of Humanism 152
1. The Two Approaches to Life . , . . 152
2. Freedom and Restraint 153
3 The Ascetic Principle ...... 158
4 Oscillation between Two Principles . . .164
5. The Golden Mean and Its Difficulties . . 166
6. The Matrix of Humanism 171
CHAPTER
CONTENTS
PAGE
7 The Career of the Soul 175
8. The Passage into Maturity 1^-5
9 The Function of High Religion 191
X. High Religion and the AIodlrn World 19“i
1. Popular Religion and the Great Teachers 19*^'
2. The Anstocracic Principle 197
3. The Peculiarity of the Modern Situation 200
4. The Stone Which the Builders Rejected 203
PART III
THE GENIUS OF MODERNITY
XL The Cure or Souls . , . 213
1. The Problem of Evil , . , . ,213
2. Superstition and Self-Consciousness , . 217
3. Virtue . ... 221
4. From Clue to Practice , . . , . 226
XII. The Business of the Great Society . . 232
1. The Invention of Invention , . 232
2. The Creative Principle in Modernity 235
3. Naive Capitalism . 2*11
4. The Credo of Old-Style Business . . . 2r4
5. Old-Style Reform and Revolution . . 247
6. The Diffusion of the Acquisitive Instinct 252
7. Ideals 257
XIIL Government in the Great Sooety . , . 260
1. Loyalty ... 260
2. The Evolution of Loyalty 26 >
3. Pluralism 267
4. Live and Lee Live 269
5. Government in the People 2^2
6. Politicians and Statesmen 279
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
XIV. Love in the'Creat Society 284
1, The External Control of Sexual Conduct . 284
2* Birth Control . . 288
3. The Logic of Birth Control 293
4. The Use of Convention 299
5. The New Hedonism 301
6* Marriage and Affinity 307
7. The Sdiooling of Desire 311
XV. The Moralist in an Unbelieving World . . 3i4
1. The Declaration of Ideals 314
2. The Choice of a Way 320
3. The Religion of the Spirit 326
Appendk: Acknowledgments and Notes . . . . 331
Index 339
cviin
PART I
THE DISSOLUTION OF THE ANCESTEIAL ORDER
ts King, having driven out Zeus ”
Aristophanes,
A PREFACE TO MORALS
CHAPTER I
THE PROBLEM OF UNBELIEF 1. Whirl is King
\mong those who no longer believe in the religion of tiieir fathers, some are proudly defiant, and many are in- different. But there are also a few, perhaps an inaeasing number, who feel that there is a vacancy in their lives. This inquiry deals with their problem. It is not intended to disturb the serenity of those who are unshaken in the faith they hold, and it is not concerned with those who are still exhilarated by their escape from some stale orthodoxy. It is concerned with those who are perplexed by the con- sequences of their own irreligion. It deals with the prob- lem of unbelief, not as believers are accustomed to deal with It, in the spirit of men confidently callmg the lost sheep back into the fold, but as unbelievers themselves must, I think, face the problem if they face it candidly and without presumption.
"When such men put their feelings into words they are likely to say that, having lost their faith, they have lost the certainty that their lives are significant, and that it mat- ters what they do with their lives. If they deal with young people they are likely to say that they know of no com- pelling reason which certifies the moral code they adhere to, and that, therefore, their own preferences, when tested by the ruthless curiosity of their children, seem to have no
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sure foundation of any kind. They are likely to point to the world about them, and to ask whether the modern man possesses any critenon by which he can measure the value of his own desires, whether there is any standard he really believes in which permits him to put a term upon that pursuit of money, of power, and of excitement which has created so much of the turmoil and the squalor and the explosiveness of modern civili2ation.
These are, perhaps, merely the rationalizations of the modern man’s discontent. At the heart of it there are likely to be moments of blank misgiving in which he finds that the civilization of which he is a part leaves a dusty taste in his mouth. He may be very busy with many things, but he discovers one day that he is no longer sure they are worth doing. He has been much preoccupied; but he is no longer sure he knows why. He has become involved in an elaborate routine of' pleasures; and they do not seem to amuse him very much. He finds it hard to believe that doing any one thing is better than doing any other thing, or, in faa, that it is better than doing nothing at all. It occurs to him that it is a great deal of trouble to live, and that even in the best of lives the thrills are few and far between. He begins more or less consciously to seek satisfactions, because he is no longer satisfied, and all the while he realizes that the pur- suit of happiness was always a most unhappy quest. In the later stages of his woe he not only loses his appetite, but becomes excessively miserable trying to recover it. And then, surveying the flux of events and the giddiness of his own soul, he comes to feel that Aristophanes must have beien thinking of him when he declared diat "Whirl is King, having driven out Zeus.”
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2. False Frophedes
The modem age has been rich both in prophecies that men would at last inherit the kingdoms of this world, and in complaints at the kind of world they inherited. Thus Petrarch, who was an early viaim of modernity, came to feel that he would "have preferred to be bom in any other period” than his own; he tells us that he sought an escape by imagining that he lived in some other age. The Nineteenth Century, which begat us, was forever blowing the trumpets of freedom and pro- viding asylums in which its most sensitive children could take refuge. Wordsworth fled from mankind to rejoice in nature. Chateaubriand fled from man to rejoice in savages. Byron fled to an imaginary Greece, and William Morris to the Middle Ages. A few tried an imaginary India. A few an equally imaginary China Many fled to Bohemia, to Utopia, to the Golden West, and to the Latin Quarter, and some, like James Thomson, to hell where they were
gratified to gain That positive eternity of pain Instead of this insufferable inane.
They had all been disappointed by the failure of a great prophecy. The theme of this prophecy had been that man is a beautiful soul who in the course of history had somehow become enslaved by
Scepters, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes Of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance,
and they believed with Shelley that when "the loathsome mask has fallen,” man, exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king over himself, would then be "free from guilt or
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pain.” This was the orthodox liberalism to which men turned when they had lost the religion of their fathers. But the promises of liberalism have not been fulfilled. . We are living in the midst of that vast dissolution of anaent habits which the emancipators believed would restore our birthright of happiness. We know now that they did not see very clearly beyond the evils against which they were rebelling. It is evident to us that their prophe- cies were pleasant fantasies which concealed the greater difficulties that confront men, when having won the free- dom to do what they wish — ^that v/ish, as Byron said:
which ages have not yet subdued In man — to have no master save his mood,
they are full of contrary moods and do not know what they wish to do. We have come to see that Huxley was bright when he said that “a man’s wotst difficulties begin When he is able to do as he likes.”
The evidences of these greater difficulties lie all about us: in the brave and brilliant atheists who have defied the Methodist God, and have become very nervous; in the women who have emancipated themselves from the tyranny of fathers, husbands, and homes, and with the in- termittent but expensive help of a psychoanalyst, are now endurmg liberty as interior decorators; in die young men and women who are world-weary at twenty-two; in the multitudes who drug themselves with pleasure; m the crowds enfranchised by the blood of heroes who cannot be persuaded to take an interest in their destiny; in the millions, at last free to think without fear of priest or policeman, who have made the moving piaures and the popular newspapers what they are.
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These are the prisoners who have been released. They ought to be very happy. They ought to be serene and composed. They are free to make their own lives. There are no conventions, no tabus, no gods, priests, princes, fathers, or revelations which they must accept. Yet the result is not so good as they thought it would be. The prison door is wide open. They stagger out into trackless space under a blinding sun. They find it nerve-wracldng. ''My sensibility,’* said Flaubert, "is sharper than a razor s edge; the creaking of a door, the face of a bourgeois, an absurd statement set my heart to throbbing and com- pletely upset me." They must find their own courage for battle and their own consolation in defeat. They com- plain, like Renan after he had broken with the Church, that the enchanted circle which embraced the whole of life IS broken, and that they are left with a feeling of emptiness "like that which follows an attack of fever or an unhappy love affair." Where is my home? cried Nietzsche: "For it do I ask and seek, and have sought, but have not found it.* O eternal everywhere, O eternal now'here, O eternal in vain.’*
To more placid temperaments the pangs of freedom are no doubt less acute. It is possible for multitudes in time of peace and security to exist agreeably — somewhat inco- herently, perhaps, but without convulsions — to dream a little and not unpleasantly, to have only now and then a nightmare, and only occasionally a rude awakening. It is possible to drift along not too discontentedly, somewhat nervously, somewhat anxiously, somewhat confusedly, hoping for the best, and believing in nothing very much. It is possible to be a passable citizen. But it is not pos- sible to be wholly at peace. For serenity of soul requires
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some better organization of life than a man can attain by pursuing his casual ambitions, satisfying his hungers, and for the rest accepting destiny as an idiot’s tale in which one dumb sensation succeeds another to no known end. And it is not possible for him to be wholly alive. For that depends upon his sense of being completely engaged with the world, with all his passions and all the faculties in rich harmonies with one other, and in deep rhythm with the nature of things.
These are the gifts of a vital religion which can bring the whole of a man into adjustment with the whole of his relevant experience. Our forefathers had such a religion. They quarrelled a good deal about the details, but they had no doubt that there was an order in the universe which justified their lives because they were a part of it. The acids of modernity have dissolved that order for many of us, and there are some in consequence who think that the needs which religion fulfilled have also been dissolved. But however self-sufficient the eugenic and perfectly edu- cated man of the distant fumre may be, our present ex- perience is that the needs remain. In failing to meet them, it is plain that we have succeeded only in substimt- ing trivial illusions for majestic faiths. For while the modem emancipated man may wonder how anyone ever believed that in this universe of stars and atoms and mul- titudinous life, there is a drama in progress of which the principal event was enaaed in Palestine nineteen hundred years ago, it is not really a stranger fable than many which he so readily accepts. He does not believe the words of the Gospel but he believes the best advertised notion. The older fable may be incredible to-day, but .when it
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was credible it bound together the whole of experience upon a stately and dignified theme. The modern man has ceased to believe m it but he has nor ceased to be credulous, and the need to believe haunts him. It is no wonder that his impulse is to turn back from his freedom, and to find someone who says he knows the truth and can tell him what to do, to find the shrine of some new god, of any cult however newfangled, where he c^n kneel and be comforted, put on manacles to keep his hands from trem- bling, ensconce himself in some citadel where it is safe and warm.
For the modern man who has ceased to believe, without ceasing to be credulous, hangs, as it were, between heaven and earth, and is at rest nowhere. There is no theory of the meaning and value of events which he is compelled to accept, but he is none the less compelled to accept the events. There is no moral authority to which he must mrn now, but there is coercion in opinions, fashions and fads. There is for him no inevitable purpose in the universe, but there are elaborate necessities, physical, political, eco- nomic. He does not feel himself to be an aaor in a great and dramatic destiny, but he is subject to the massive powers of our civilization, forced to adopt their pace, bound to their routine, entangled in their conflias. He can believe what he chooses about this civilization. He carmot, however, escape the compulsion of modern events. They compel his body and his senses as rathlessly as ever did king or priest. They do not compel his mind. They have all the force of natural events, but not their majesty, all the tyrannical power of ancient instimtions, but none- of their moral certainty. Events are there, and they
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power him. But they do not convince him that they have that dignity which inheres in that which is necessary and in the nature of things.
In the old order the compulsions w^ere often painful, but there was sense m the pain that was inflicted by the will of an all-knowing God, In the new order the com- pulsions are painful and, as it were, accidental, unneces- sary, w^anton, and full of mockery. The modern man does not make his peace with them. For in effect he has re- placed natural piety with a grudging endurance of a series of unsanctified compulsions. When he believed that the unfolding of events was a mamfestation of the v/ill of God, he could say: Thy will be done. ... In His will is our peace. But when he believes that events are deter- mined by the votes of a majority, the orders of his bosses, the opinions of his neighbors, the laws of supply and demand, and the decisions of quite selfish men, he yields because he has to yield. He is conquered but unconvmced.
3. Sorties and Retreats
It might seem as if, in all this, men were merely going through once again what they have often gone through before. This is not the first age in which the orthodox religion has been in conflia with the science of the day. Plato was born into such an age. For tw'O centuries the philosophers of Greece had been critical of Homer and of the popular gods, and when Socrates faced his accusers, his answer to the accusation of heresy must certainly have sounded unresponsive. *1 do believe,” he said, ''that there are gods, and in a higher sense than that in which
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my accusers believe in them Thar is all very well. But to believe in a '"higher sense*' is also to believe in a dif- ferent sense.
There is nothing new in the fact that men have ceased to believe in the religion of their fathers In the history of Catholic Christianity, there has always existed a tradi- tion, extending from the authors of the Fourth Gospel tlirough Origen to the neo-Platonists of modern times, which rejects the popular idea of God as a power aaing upon events, and of immortality as everlasting life, and translates the popular tl'^eology into a symbolic statement of a purely spiritual experience. In every civilized age there have been educated and discerning men who could not accept literally and simply the traditions of the ancient faith. We are told that during the Periclean Age "among educated men everything was in dispute- political sanctions, literary values, moral standards, religious con- victions, even the possibility of reaching any truth about anything." When the educated classes of the Roman world accepted Christianity tliey had ceased to believe in the pagan gods, and were much too critical to accept the primitive Hebraic theories of the creation, the redemption, and the IMessianic Kingdom which were so central in the popular religion. They had to do what Socrates had done; they had to take the popular theology in a "higher” and therefore in a di&rent sense before they could use it. Indeed, it is so unusual to find an age of active-minded men in which the most highly educated are genuinely orthodox in the popular sense, tliat the Thirteenth Cen- tury, the age of Dante and St. Tliomas Aquinas, when this phenomenon is reputed to have occurred, is regarded
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as a unique and wonderful period in the history of the world. It is not at all unlikely that there never was such an age in the history of civilized men.
And yet, the position of modern men who have broken with the religion of their fathers is in certain profound ways different from that of other men in odier ages. This is the first age, I think, in the history of mankind when the circumstances of life have conspired with the intellectual habits of the time to render any fixed and authoritative belief incredible to large masses of men. The dissolution of the old modes of thought has gone so far, and is so cumulative in its effect, that the modern man is not able to sink back after a period of prophesying into a new but stable orthodoxy. The irreligion of the modern world is radical to a degree for which there is, I think, no counterpart. For always in the past it has been possible for new conventions to crystallize, and for men to find rest and surcease of effort in accepting them.
We often assume, therefore, that a period of dissolution wiE necessarily be followed by one of conformity, that the heterodoxy of one age will become the orthodoxy of the next, and that when this orthodoxy decays a new period of prophesying will begin. Thus we say that by the time of Hosea and Isaiah the religion of die Jews had become a system of rules for transacting business with Jehovah. The Prophets then revivified it by thundering against the conventional belief that religion was mere burnt offering and sacrifice. A few centuries passed and the religion based on the Law and the Prophets had in its turn become a set of mechanical rites manipulated by the Scribes and the Pharisees. As against this system Jesus and Paul
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preached a religion of grace, and against the "letter” of the synagogues the "spirit” of Christ. But the inner light which can perceive the spirit is rare, and so shortly after the death of Paul, the teaching gradually ceased to appeal to direct inspiration in the minds of die believers and became a body of dogma, a "sacred deposit” of die faith "once for all delivered to the saints.” In the succeeding ages there appeared again many prophets who thought they had widiin them the revealing spirit. Though some of the prophets were burnt, much of the prophesying was absorbed into the canon. In Luther this sense of revela- tion appeared once more in a most confident form. He rejected the authority not only of the Pope and the clergy, but even of the Bible itself, except where in his opinion the Bible confirmed his faith. But in the establishment of a Lutheran Church the old difficulty reappeared: the inner light which had burned so fiercely in Luther did not burn brightly or steadily in all Lutherans, and so the right of private judgment, even in Luther’s restricted use of the term, led to all kinds of heresies and abominations. Very soon there came to be an authoritative teaching backed by tlie power of the police. And in Calvinism the revolt of the Reformation became stabilized to the last degree. "Everything,” said Calvin, "pertaining to the perfect rule of a good life the Lord has so comprehended in His law that there remains nothing for man to add to that sum- mary.”
Men fully as mtelligent as the most emancipated among us once believed that, and I have no doubt that the suc- cessors of Mr. Darrow and Mr. Mencken would come to believe something very much like it if conditions per- mitted them to obey the mstinct to retreat from the chaos
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of modernity into order and certainty. It is all very well to talk about being the captain of your soul. It is hard, and only a few heroes, saints, and geniuses have been the captains of their souls for any extended period of their lives. Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort which it brings. "If, outside of Christ, you wish by your own thoughts to know your relation to God, you will break your neck Thunder strikes him who exam- ines.” Thus spoke Martin Luther, and there is every reason to suppose that the German people thought he was talking the plainest commonsense. "He who is gifted with the heavenly knowledge of faith,” said the Council of Trent, "is free from an inquisitive curiosity.” These words are rasping to our modern ears, but there is no occasion to doubt that the men who uttered them had made a shrewd appraisal of average human namre. The record of experience is one of sorties and retreats. The search for moral guidance which shall not depend, upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledg- ment of some new authority.
4. Deep Dissolution
This same tendency manifests itself in the midst of our modem uneasiness. We have had a profusion of new cults, of revivals, and of essays in reconstruction. But there is reason for thinking that a new crystallization of an enduring and popular religion is ynlikely in the mod- ern world. For analogy drawn from the experience of the past is misleading.
When Luther, for example, rebelled against the author-
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ity of the Church, he did not suppose the way of life for the ordinary man would be radically altered. Luther supposed that men would continue to behave much as they had learned to behave under the Catholic discipline. The individual for whom he claimed the right of private judgment was one whose prejudgments had been well fixed in a Catholic society. The authority of the Pope was to be destroyed and certain evils abolished, but there was to remain that feeling for objeaive moral certainties which Catholicism had nurtured. When the Anabaptists carried the practice of his theory beyond this point, Luther denounced them violently. For what he believed in was Protestantism for good Catholics. The reformers of the Eighteenth Cenmry made a similar assumption. They really believed in democracy for men who had an aristocratic training Jefferson, for example, had an instinctive fear of the urban rabble, that most democratic part of the population. The society of free men which-he dreamed about was composed of those who had the discipline, the standards of honor and the taste, with- out the privileges or the corruptions, that are to be found in a society of well-bred country gentlemen.
The more recent rebels frequently betray a somewhat similar inability to imagine the consequences of their own victories. For the smashing of idols is in itself such a preoccupation that it is almost impossible for the icon- oclast to look clearly into a fumre when there will not be many idols left to smash. Yet that fumre is begin- ning to be our present, and it might be said that men are conscious of what modernity means insofar as they realize that they are confronted not so much with the
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necessity of promoting rebellion as of dealmg with the consequences of it. The Nineteenth Century, roughly speaking the time between Voltaire and Mencken, was an age of terrific indictments and of feeble solutions. The Marxian indictment of capitalism is a case m point. The Nietzschean transvaluation of values is another; it is magmficent, but who can say, after he has shot his arrow of longing to the other shore, whether he will find Caesar Borgia, Henry Ford, or Isadora Duncan? Who knows, having read Mr. Mencken and Mr. Sinclair Lewis, what kind of world will be left when all the boobs and yokels have crawled back in their holes and have died of shame?
The rebel, while he is making his attack, is not likely to feel the need to answer such questions. For he moves in an unreal environment, one might almost say a^ parasitic environment. He goes forth to destroy Caesar, Mammon, George F. Babbitt, and Mrs. GrOndy. As he wrestles with these demons, he leans upon them. By inversion they offer him much the same kind of support which the conformer enjoys. They provide him with an objective which enables him to know exactly what he thinks he wants to do. His energies are focussed by his indignation. He does not suffer from emptiness, doubt, and division of soul. These are the maladies which come later when the struggle is over. While the rebel is in conflia with the established nuisances he has an aim in life which absorbs , all his passions. He has his own sense of righteousness and his own feeling of communion with a grand purpose. For in attacking idols there is a kind of piety, in over- throwing tyrants a kind of loyalty, in ridiculing smpidities
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an imitation of wisdom. In the heat of battle the rebel is exalted by a whole-hearted tension which is easily mis- taken for a taste of die freedom that is to come. He is under the spell of an illusion. For what comes after the struggle is not the exaltation of freedom but a letting down of the tension that belongs solely to the struggle itself. The happiness of the rebel is as transient as the iconoclasm which produced it. When he has slam the dragon and rescued the beautiful maiden, there is usually nothing left for him to do but write his memoirs and dream of a time when the world was young.
What most distmguishes the generation who have* approached maturity since the debacle of idealism at the end of the War is not their rebellion against the religion and the moral code of their parents, but their disillusion- ment with their own rebellion. It is common for young men and women to rebel, but that they should rebel sadly and without faith in their own rebellion, that they should distrust the new freedom no less than the old certainties — that is something of a novelty. As Mr. Canby once said, at the age of seven they saw through their parents and charaaerized them in a phrase. At fourteen they saw through education and dodged it. At eighteen they saw through morality and stepped over it. At twenty they lost respea for their home towns, and at twenty-one they discovered that our social system is ridiculous. At twenty- three the autobiography ends because the author has run through society to date and does not know what to do next. For, as Mr. Canby might have added, the idea of reforming that society makes no appeal to them. They have seen through all that. They cannot adopt any of
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the synthetic religions of the Nineteenth Century. They have seen through all of them
They have seen through the religion of nature to which the early romantics turned for consolation. They have heard too much about the brutality of natural seleaion to feel, as Wordsworth did, that pleasant landscapes are divine. They have seen through the religion of beauty because, for one thing, they are too much oppressed by the ugliness of Main Street. They cannot take refuge m an ivory tower because the modern apartment house, with a radio loudspeaker on the floor above and on the floor below and just across the courtyard, will not permit it. They cannot, like Mazzmi, make a religion of patriotism, because they have just been demobilized. Tliey cannot make a religion of science like the post-Darwmians because they do not understand modern science They never learned enough mathematics and physics. They do not like Bernard Shaw’s religion of creative evolution because they have read enough to know that Mr. Shaw’s biology is literary and evangelical. As for the religion of progress, that is pre-empted by George F. Babbitt and the Rotary Club, and the religion of humanity is utterly unacceptable to those who have to ride in the subways during the rush hour.
Yet the current attempts to modernize religious creeds are inspired by the hope that somehow it wilFbe possible to construct a form of belief which will fit into this vacuum. It is evident that life soon becomes distraaed and tiresome if it is not illuminated by communion with what William James called *'a wider self through which saving experiences come.” The eager search for new reli-
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gions, the hasty adherence to cults, and the urgent appeals for a reconciliation between religion and science are con- fessions tliat to the modern man his activity seems to have no place in any rational order. His life seems mere restlessness and compulsion, rather than conduct lighted by luminous beliefs. He is possessed by a great deal of excitement amidst which, as Mr Santayana once remarked, he redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim
For in the modern age, at first imperceptibly with the rise of the towns, and then catastrophically since the mechanical revolution, there have gone into dissolution not only the current orthodoxy, but the social order and the ways of living which supported it. Thus rebellion and emancipation have come to mean something far more drastic than they have ever meant before. The earlier rebels summoned men from one allegiance to another, but the feeling for certainty in religion and for decorum in society persisted. In the modern world it is this very feeling of certainty itself which is dissolving. It is dis- solving not merely for an educated minority but for every- one who comes within the orbit of modernity.
Yet there remain the wants which orthodoxy of some sort satisfies. The natural man, when he is released from restraints, and has no substitute for them, is at sixes and sevens with himself and the world. For in the free play of his uninKibited instincts he does not find any natural substitute for those accumulated convictions which, how- ever badly they did it, nevertheless organi2ed his soul, economized his effort, consoled him, and gave him dignity in his own eyes because he was part of some greater whole. The acids of modernity are so powerful that they do not
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tolerate a crystallization of ideas which will serve as a new orthodoxy into which men can retreat. And so the modern world is haunted by a realization, which it becomes constantly less easy to ignore, that it is impossible to reconstruct an enduring orthodoxy, and impossible to live well without the satisfactions which an orthodoxy would provide.
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CHAPTER II
GOD IN THE MODERN WORLD 1. Imago Dei
By the dissolution of their ancestral ways men have been deprived of their sense of certainty as to why they were born, why they must work, whom they must love, what they must honor, where they may turn in sorrow and defeat. They have left to them the ancient codes and the modern criticism of these codes, guesses, intui- tions, inconclusive experiments, possibilities, probabilities, hypotheses. Below the level of reason, they may have un- conscious prejudice, they may speak with a loud cocksure- ness, they may act with fanaticism. But there is gone that ineffable certainty which once made God and His Plan seem as real as the lamppost.
I do not mean that modern men have ceased to believe m God. I do mean that they no longer believe m him simply and literally. I mean that they have defined and refined their ideas of him until they can no longer hon- estly say that he exists, as they would say that their neigh- bor exists. Search the writings of liberal churchmen, and when you come to the crucial passages which are intended to express their belief in God, you will find, I think, that at just this point their uncertainty is most evident.
The Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick has written an essay, called “How Shall We Think of God?”, which ilius-
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trates the difficulty. He begins by saying that "believing in God without considering how one shall picture him is deplorably unsatisfaaory.*' Yet the old ways of piauring him are no longer credible. We cannot think of him as seated upon a throne, while around him are angels playing on harps and singing hymns. "God as a king on high — our fathers, living under monarchy, rejoiced in that image and found it meaningful. His throne, his crown, his scepter, his seraphic retinue, his laws, rewards, and punish- ments— ^how dominant that piaure was and how persistent is the continuance of it in our hymns and prayers! It was always partly poetry, but it had a prose background r^there really had been at first a celestial land above the clouds where God reigned and where his throne was m the heavens.*'
Having said that this picture is antiquated, Dr. Fosdick goes on to state that "the religious man must have imagi- nations of God, if God is to be real to him.’* He must "picture his dealing with the Divine in terms of personal ^relationship." But how? "The place where man vitally . finds God ... is within his own experience of good- ness, truth, and beauty, and the truest images of God are therefore to be found in man’s spiritual life." I should be the last to deny that a man may, if he chooses, think of God as the source of all that seems to him worthy in human experience. But certainly this is not 'the God of the ancient faith. This is not God the Father, the Law- giver, the Judge. This is a highly sophisticated idea of God, employed by a modern man who would like to say, but cannot say with certainty, that there exists a personal God to whom men must accommodate themselves.
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2. An lndefi72ite God
It may be that dear and unambiguous statements are nor now possible m our intellectual climate. But at least we should not forget that the religions which have domi- nated human history have been founded on what the faithful felt were undeniable faas. These facts %vere mysterious only in the sense that they were uncommon, like an eclipse of the sun, but not m the sense that they were beyond human experience No doubt there are pas- sages m the Scriptures written by highly cultivated men m which the Divine nature is called mysterious and unknowable But these passages are not the rock upon which the popular churches are founded. No one, I think, has truly observed the religious life of simple people without understanding how plain, how literal, how natural they take their supernatural personages to be.
The popular gods are not indefinite and unknowable They have a definite history and their favorite haunts, and they have often been seen. They walk on earth, they might appear to anyone, they are angered, they are pleased, they w^eep and they rejoice, diey eat and they may fall in love The modern man uses the w'ord ' super - natural’ to describe something that seems to him not quite so credible as the things he calls natural. This is not the supernaturalism of the devout. They do not distin- guish two planes of reality and two orders of certainty. For them Jesus Christ was bom of a Virgin and w'as raised from the dead as literally as Napoleon w^as Emperor of the French and returned from Elba.
This is the kind of certainty one no longer finds m the
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utterances of modern men. I might cite, for example, a typically modern assertion about the existence of God, made by Mr. W. C. Brownell, a critic who could not be reproached with insensitiveness to the value of traditional beliefs. He wrote that "the influence of the Holy Spirit, exquisitely called the Comforter, is a matter of aaual experience, as solid a reality as that of elearo-magneasm.” I do not suppose that Mr. Brownell meant to admit the least possible doubt. But he was a modern man, and surreptitiously doubt invaded his certainty. For elearo- magnetism is not an absolutely solid reality to a layman’s mind. It has a questionable reality. I suspect that is why Mr. Brownell chose this metaphor; it would have seemed a little too blunt to his modern intelligence to say that his faith was founded not on electto-magnetism, but as men once believed, on a rock.
The attempts to reconstrua religious creeds are beset by the modern man’s inability to convince himself that the constitution of the universe includes facts which in our skeptical jargon we call supernatural. Yet as William James once said, "religion, in her fullest exercise of func- tion, is not a mere illumination of faas already elsewhere given, not a mere passion, like love, which views thmgs in a rosier light. . . . It is something more, namely, a postulator of new facts as well.’’ James himself was strongly disposed toward what he so candidly described as "overbeliefs’’; he had sympathy with the beliefs of others which was as large and charitable as any man’s can be. There was no trace of the intellectual snob in William James; he was in the other camp from those thin argumentative rationalists who find so much satisfaaion
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in disproving wh'at other men hold sacred. James loved cranks and naifs and sought them our for the wisdom they might have. But withal he was a modern man who lived toward the climax of the revolutionary period. He had the Will to Believe, he argued eloquently for the Right to Believe. But he did not wholly believe. The utmost tliat he could honestly believe was something which he confessed would "appear a sorry underbelief” to some of his readers. “Who knows,” he said, "whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor overbeliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more effeaively faithful to his own greater tasks?” Who knows? And on that question mark he paused and could say no more.
3. God in More Senses Than One But even if there was some uncertainty as to the exist- ence of the God whom William James described, he was at least the kind of God with whom human beings could commune. If they could jump the initial doubt they found themselves in an exciting world where they might live for a God who, like themselves, had work to do. James wrote the passage I have quoted in 1902. A quarter of a century later Alfred North Whitehead came to Harvard to deliver the Lowell Lectures. He undertook to define God for modern men,
Mr. Whitehead, like William James, is a compassion- ate man and on the side of the angels. But his is a wholly modernized mind in full command of all the conceptual instruments of scientific logic. By contrast with the austerity of Mr. Whitehead’s thinking, James, with his
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chivalrous offer of fealty to God, seemS like one of the last of the great romantics. There is a God in Mr. White- head’s philosophy, and a very necessary God at that. Unhappily, I am not enough of a logician to say tliat I am quite sure I understand what it means to say that "God is not concrete, but He is the ground for concrete actuality.” There have been moments when I imagined I had caught the meaning of this, but there have been more moments when I knew that I had not. I have never doubted, however, that the concept had meaning, and that I missed it because it was too deep for me. Why then, it may be asked, do I presume to discuss it? My answer is that a conception of God, which is incompre- hensible to all who are not highly trained logicians, is a possible God for logicians alone. It is not presumptuous to say of Mr. Whitehead’s God what he himself says of Aristotle’s God: that it does "not lead him very far toward the production of a God available for religious purposes.”
For while this God may satisfy a metaphysical need in the thinker, he does not satisfy the passions of the believer. This God does not govern the world like a king nor watch over his children like a father. He offers them no purposes to which they can consecrate themselves; he exhibits no image of holiness they can imitate. He does not chastise them in sin nor console them in sorrow. He is a principle with which to explain the faas, if you can '’understand the explanation. He is not himself a per- sonality who deals with the facts. For the purposes of religion he is no God at all; his universe remains stonily unaware of man. Nothing has happened by accepting
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Mr. Whitehead^s definition which changes the inexorable character of that destiny which Bertrand Russell depicted when he wrote that
we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the dicker- ing light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour; from the great night without, a chill blast breaks m upon our refuge, all the loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is concen- trated upon the individual soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears.
It is a nice question whether the use of God’s name is not misleading when it is applied by modernists to ideas so remote from the God men have worshiped. Plainly the modernist churchman does not believe in the God of Genesis who walked in the garden m the cool of the evening and called to Adam and his wife who had hidden themselves behind a tree; nor in the God of Exodus who appeared to Moses and Aaron and seventy of thf Eiders of Israel, standing with his feet upon a paved walk as if it were a sapphire stone; nor even in the God of the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah who in his compassion for the sheep who have gone astray, having Turned everyone to his own way, laid on the Man of Sorrows the iniquity of us all.
This, as Kirsopp Lake says, is the God of most, if not all, the writings in the Bible. Yet '’however much our inherited sentiments may shrink from the admission, the scientists are to-day almost unanimous m saying that the universe as they see it contains no evidence of the exist-
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ence of any gnthropomotphic God whatever. The experi- mentalist modernist) wholly agrees that this is so. Nevertheless he refuses as a rule, and I think rightly — to abandon the use of the word 'God.’ ” In justification of this refusal to abandon the word 'God,’ although he has abandoned the accepted meaning of the word. Dr. Lake appeals to a tradition which reaches back at least to Origen who, as a Christian neo-platonist, used the word 'God’ to mean, not the King and Father of creation, but the siun of all ideal values. It was this redefinition of the word 'God,’ he says, which "made Christianity possible for the educated man of the third century” It is this same redefinition which still makes Christianity possible for educated churchmen like Dr. Lake and Dean Inge.
Dr. Lake admits that although this attractive bypath of tradition "is intelleaually adorned by many princes of thought and lords of language” it is "ecclesiastically not free from reproach.” He avows another reason for his use of the word 'God’ which, if not more compelling, is certainly more worldly. "Atheist” has meant since Roman times an enemy of society; it gives a wholly false impres- sion of the real state of mind of those who adhere to the platonic tradition. They have been wholly without the defiance which "atheism” connotes; on the contrary they have been a few individuals in each age who lived peace- ably within the shelter of the church, worshiping a some- what different God inwardly and in their own way, and often helping to refresh the more mundane spirit of the popular church. The term "agnostic” is almost as unavail- able. It was invented to describe a tolerant unbelief in the anthropomorphic God. In popular usage it has come
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to mean about the same thing as atheist, for the instinct of the common man is sound in these matters. He feels that those who claim to be open-minded about God have for all practical purposes ceased to believe m him. The agnostic's reply that he would gladly believe if the evi- dence would confirm it, does not alter the fact that he does not now believe. And so Dr. Lake concludes that the modernist must use the word 'God' in his own sense, '^endeavoring partly to preserve Origens meaning of the word, and partly shrinking from any other policy as open to misconstruction.''
I confess that the notion of adopting a policy about God somehow shocks me as intruding a rather worldly consideration which would seem to be wholly out of place. But this feeling is, I am sure, an injustice to Dr. Lake who is plainly and certainly not a worldling. He is moved, no doubt, by the conviction that in letting 'God' mean one thing to the mass of the devout and another to the educated mmority, the loss of intellectual precision is more than compensated by the preservation of a community of feeling. This is not mere expediency. It may be the part of wisdom, which is profounder than mere reasoning, to wish that intellectual distinctions shall not divide men too sharply.
But if it is wisdom, it is an aristocratic wisdom. And in Dean Inge's writings this is frankly avowed. "The strength of Chrisriamty," he says, "is in transforming the lives of individuals — of a small minority, certainly, as Christ clearly prediaed, but a large number in the aggre- gate. To rescue a little flock, here and there, from materialism, selfishness, and hatred, is the task of the
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Church of Christ in all ages alike, and there is no likeli- hood that It will ever be otherwise.”
But in other ages, one thing was otherwise. And in this one thing lies the radical peculiarity of the modern difficulty. In other ages there was no acknowledged distinction betw'een the ultimate beliefs ot the educated and the uneducated. There were differences in learning, in religious genius, m the closeness of a chosen few to God and his angels Inwardly there were even radical differ- ences of meaning But critical analysis had not made them oven and evident, and the common assumption was that there was one God for all, for the peasant who saw him dimly and could approach him only through his patron saint, and for the holy man who had seen God and talked with him face to face. It has remained for churchmen of our era to distinguish two or more different Gods, and openly to say that they are different. This may be a triumph of candor and of intelligence. But this very consciousness of what they are doing, these very honest admissions that the God of Dean Inge, for exam- ple, IS only in name the God of millions of other pro- testants — that is an admission, when they understand it, which makes faith difficult for modern men.
4. The Protest of the Fundamentalists
Fundamentalism is a protest against all these definitions and attenuations which the modern man finds it necessary to make. It is avowedly a reaaion within the Protestant communions against what the President of the World’s Christian Fundamentalist Association rather accurately described as "that weasel method of sucking the meaning
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out of words, and then presaiting the empty shells in an attempt to palm them off as giving the Christian faith a new and another interpretation/' In actual practice this movement has become entangled with all sorts of bizarre and barbarous agitations, with the Ku Klux Klan, with fanatical prohibition, with the *'anti-evolution laws,^"^ and with much persecution and intolerance. This in Itself is significant. For it shows that the central truth, which the fundamentalists have grasped, no longer appeals to the best brains and the good sense of a modern com- mumty, and that the movement is recruited largely from the isolated, the inexperienced, and the uneducated.
Into the politics of the heated controversy between modernists and fundamentalists I do not propose here to enter. That it is not merely a dispute in the realm of the spirit is made evident by the President of the Funda- mentalist Association when he avers that 'nothing" holds modernists and fundamentalists together except "the bil- lions of dollars invested. Nine out of ten of these dollars, if not ninety-nine out of every hundred of them, spent to construct the great denominational umversities, col- leges, schools of second grade, theological seminaries, great denominational mission stations, the multiplied hos- pitals that bear denominational names, the immense pub- lication societies and the expensive societies were given by fundamentalists and filched by modernists. It took hundreds of years to collect this money and construct these institutions. It has taken only a quarter of a cen- tury for the liberal bandits to capture them. ..."
Not all the fundamentalist argument, however, is pitched at this level. There is also a reasoned case against
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the modernists. Fortunatel;^ this case has been stated in a little book called Christianity and Liberalism by a man who is both a scholar and a gentleman. The author is Professor J. Gresham Machen of the Princeton Theological Seminary. It is an admirable book. For its acumen, for its saliency,' and for its wit this cool and stringent defense of orthodox Protestantism is, I think, the best popular argument produced by either side in the current contro- versy. We shall do well to listen to Dr. Machen.
Modernism, he says, "is altogether in the imperative mood,” while the traditional religion "begins with a tri- umphant indicative.” I do not see how one can deny the force of this generalization. "From the beginning Qiristianity was certainly a way of life. But how was the life to be produced? Not by appealing to the human will, but by telling a story; not by exhortation, but by the nar- ration of an event.” Dr. Machen insists, rightly I think, that the historic influence of Christianity on the mass of men has depended upon their belief that an historic drama was enaaed in Palestine nineteen hundred years ago dur- ing the reign of the Emperor Tiberius. The veracity of that story was fundamental to the Christian Church. For while all the ideal values may remain if you impugn the historic record set forth in the Gospels, these ideal values are not certified to the common man as inherent in the very nature of things. Once they are deprived of their root in historic faa, their poetry, their symbolism, their ethical significance depend for their sanaion upon the temperament and experience of the individual ^liever. There is gone that deep, compulsive, organic faith in an external faa which is the essence of religion for all but
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that very small minority who can live within themselves in mystical communion or by the power of their under- standing. For the great mass of men, if the history of religions is to be trusted, religious experience depends upon a complete belief in the concrete existence, one might almost say the materialization, of their God. The fundamentalist goes to the very heart of the matter, there- fore, when he insists that you have destroyed the popular foundations of religion if you make your gospel a sym- bolic record of experience, and reject it as an actual record of events. ^
The liberals have yet to answer Dr. Machen when he says that "the Christian movement at its inception was not just a way of life in the modern sense, but a way of life founded upon a message. It was based, not upon mere feelmg, not upon a mere program of work, but on an account of facts.” It was based on the story of the birth, the life, the ministry, the death, and the resurreaion of Jesus Christ. That story set forth the facts which certify the Christian experience. Modernism, which in varying degree casts doubt upon the truth of that story, may therefore be defined as an attempt to preserve seleaed parts of the experience after the faas which inspired it have been rejeaed. The orthodox believer may be mis- taken as to the faas in which he believes. But he is not mistaken in thinking that you cannot, for the mass of men, have a faith of which the only foundation is their need and desire to believe. The historic churches, without any important exceptions, I think, have founded faith on clear statements about matters of faa, historic events, or physical manifestations. They have never been con-
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tent with a symbolism which the believer knew was merely symbolic. Only the sophisticated in their private meditations and in esoteric writing have found satisfac- ytion in symbolism as such.
Complete as was Dr. Machen s victory over the Prot- estant liberals, he did not long remain in possession of the field. There is a deeper fundamentalism than his, and It is based on a longer continuous experience. This is the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. From a priest of that church, Father Riggs, has come the most searching criticism of Dr Machen' s case. Writing in the Commomueal Father Riggs points out that ‘'the funda- mentalists are well-nigh powerless. They are estopped, so to speak, from stemming the ravaging waters of agnos- ticism because they cannot, while remaining loyal to the (Protestant) reformers ... set limits to destructive criticism of the Bible without making an un-Protestant appeal to tradition.** Father Riggs, in other words, is asking the Protestant fundamentalists, like Dr. Machen, how they can be certain that they know these ]acts upon which they assert that the Christian religion is founded.
They must reply that they know tliem from reading the Bible. The reply is, however, unsatisfying. For obvi- ously there are many ways of reading the Bible, and there- fore the Protestant who demands the right of private judg- ment can never know with absolute certainty that his reading is the correct one. His position in a skeptical age is, therefore, as Father Riggs points out, a weak one, because a private judgment is, after all, only a private judgment. The history of Protestantism shows that the exercise of private judgment as to the meamng of Scrip-
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ture leads not to universal and undeniable dogma, but to schism within schism and heresy within heresy From the point of view, then, of the oldest fundamentalism of the western world the error of the modernists is that they deny the facts on which religious faith reposes; the error of the orthodox Protestants is that although they affirm the facts, they reject all authority which can verify them ; the virtue of the Catholic system is that along with a dogmatic affirmation of the central facts, it provides a living authority in the Church which can ascertain and demonstrate and verify these facts,
5. In Man's Image
The long record of clerical opposition to certain kinds of scientific inquiry has a touch of dignity when it is realized that at the core of that opposition there is a very profound understanding of the religious needs of ordinary men. For once you weaken the belief that the central facts taught by the churches are faas m the most literal and absolute sense, the disintegration of the popular religion begins We may confidently declare that Mr. Santayana is speaking not as a student of human nature, but as a culavated unbeliever, when he writes that *'the idea that religion contains a literal, not a symbolic, rep- resentation of truth and life is simply an impossible idea." The idea is impossible, no doubt, for the children of the great emancipation. But because it is impossible, religion Itself, in the traditional popular meaning of the term, has become impossible for them.
If it is true that man creates God in his own image, it is no less true that for religious devotion he must remain
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unconscious of that fact. Once he knows that he has created the image of God, the reality of it vanishes like last night’s dream. It may be that to anyone who is impregnated with the modern spirit it is almost self- evident that the truths of religion are truths of human experience. But this knowledge does not tolerate an abiding and absorbing faith. For when the truths of religion have lost their connection with a superhuman order, the cord of their life is cut. What remains is a somewhat archaic, a somewhat questionable, although a very touching, quaint medley of poetry, rhetoric, fable, exhortation, and insight into human travail. When Mr. Santayana says that * 'matters of religion should never be matters of controversy” because "we never argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion,” he expresses an ulti- mate unbelief.
For what would be the plight of a lover, if we told him that his passion was charming,^ — though, of course, there might be no such lady as the one he loved.
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CHAPTER III
THE LOSS OF CERTAINTY
1. W^ays of Reading the Bible
It is important to an understanding of this matter that we should not confuse the modern practice of redefining God with the ancient use of allegory.
From the earliest days the words of the Bible have been embroidered with luxuriant and often fantastic meanings. In Leviticus it says, for example, that the meal offering may be baked in an oven, fried in a pan, or toasted on a plate This passage, says Origen, proves that Scripture must have three meanings. It came to have any number of meanings. Thus St Augustine explained that Eden meant the life of the blessed, and its four rivers the four virtues; farther on in the same chapter he declares that Eden is the Church, and that its four rivers are the four Gospels.
In the same manner Wyclif in a later age preached a sermon explaining the parable of the Good Samaritan. The man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho rep- resents Adam and Eve; the robbers are the fiends of hell; the priest and Levite who went by on the other side are the patriarchs, saints, and prophets who failed to bring salvation;' the Good Samaritan is Jesus; the wine which he pours into his wounds is sharp words to prick men from sin, and the oil is hope. . , . Savonarola, we are
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told, preached during the whole of Lent, 1492, taking as his text Noah’s Ark and "giving each day a different inter- pretation of the ten planks of which the Ark was com- posed.”
By this method of interpretation the devout adapted the Bible to their own uses, smoothing away its contra- dictions and explaining away passages, like the command in Genesis to kill uncircumcised children, which, read lit- erally, would have seemed to them barbarous and immoral. We must be careful, however, not to misunder- stand this method of thought. When they said that the beautiful woman in the Song of Solomon was the Church, they were not conscious, as we are, that this is a figure of speech. There had not entered into their habits of thought the kind of analytical precision in which one thing can mean only one thing. It is no contradiction to say that the allegory was taken literally; certainly there was no sense of unreality about it, as there is for us. "These and similar allegorical interpretations may be suit- ably put ...” says St. Augustine, speaking here to the educated minority, "without giving offense to anyone, while yet we believe the strict truth of the history con- firmed by its circumstantial narrative of facts.”
But at last men became too analytical and too self- conscious to accept the naive use of allegory. They realized that allegory was a loose method of interpreta- tion which lent itself easily to the citing of scnpture in order to justify heresy. If the ten planks in Noah’s Ark could mean a different set of truths on each day in Lent, there was no telling what they might come to mean in the end. It was clear, therefore, that allegory was danger-
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ous and might, as Luther said, '"degenerate into a mere monkey game’’; it was wanton, like "'a sort of beautiful harlot who proves herself spiritually seductive to idle men.”
This danger was a result of tlie general loosening of organic faith which was already evident m Luther’s day. To men who had the unconscious certainties about God and his universe, allegory was a perfectly safe method of interpreting the Bible because all the interpretations, how- ever fantastic, were inspired by the same pre-judgments and tended therefore to confirm the same convictions. The allegories of simple men are like many-colored flowers in one garden, growing from the same soil, watered by the same rams, turning their faces toward the same sun. But as men became emancipated from their ancestral way of life, their convictions about God and destiny and human morality changed. Then the method of allegory ceased to be the merely exuberant expression of the same ancient truths, and became a confusing method of rationali2mg all kinds of new experiments. It promoted heresy because men had become heretical, where once, while men were devout, it had only embroid- ered their devotions.
"To allegori2e is to juggle with Scripture,” said Lu'ther, The Protestant Reformers could not tolerate that. For they lived in an age when faith was already disintegrat- ing, and they had themselves destroyed the authority of an infallible source of religion. "We must,” wrote Calvin, "entirely rejea the allegories of Origen, and of others like him, which Satan, with the deepest subtlety, has endeavored to* mtroduce into the Church, for the
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purpose of rendering the doarine of Scripture ambiguous and destitute of all certainty and firmness.”
The insistence of the Reformers on a literal interpreta- tion of the Bible had, as Dr. Fosdick points out, two unforeseen results. It led to the so-called Higher Criticism which in substance is nothing but a scientific attempt to find out what the Bible did mean literally to those who wrote It. And this in turn made it pracucally impossible for modern men to believe all that the Bible literally says. When they read the Bible as allegory they found in it unending confiirmation of what they already believed. But when they read it literally, as history, as astronomy, and biology, and as a code of laws, it contradicted at many crucial points the praakal working conviaions of their daily lives. "The consequence is,” says Dr. Fosdick, "that we face the Biblical world made historically vivid over against the modern world presently experienced, and we cannot use the old method (i.e. allegory) of accom- modating one to the other.”
2. Modernism: Immortality as an Example
This predicament forced modern churchmen to seek what Dr. Fosdick calls "a new solution.” They could not believe that the Bible was taken down, as John Donne put it, by "the Secretaries of the Holy Ghost.” Yet they believed, as every sane man does, that the Bible contains wisdom which bears deeply upon the conduCT of human life. Their problem was to ^d a way of picking and choosing passages in the Saipmres, and then of inter- preting those which were chosen in such a way as to make them credible to modem men. They had to find some
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way of setting aside the story that God made Eve out of Adam's rib, that God commanded the massacre of whole populations, and that he enjoyed the slaughter of animals at the sacrifice; but they had at the same time to find a way of preserving for the use of modern men the lessons of the ministry of Jesus and the promise of life everlasting.
The method they employ is based on a theory. It is a theory that the Bible contains * ‘abiding messages" placed in a “transient setting." The Bible, for example, is full of stories about devils and angels. Now, modern men do not believe in devils and angels. These are “categories" which they have outgrown. But what the devils and angels stood for are evils and blessings which modern men still encounter. We have, therefore, only to “decode" the Bible, and where it speaks of devils to see temptations, sin, disease, pain, and suffering, which have a psychic origin; where it speaks of angels to remember that sense of unseen friendliness which may help us at a crisis in our lives. The old wine is still good, but it needs to be put in new bottles. “The modern preacher's responsi- bility is thus to decode the abiding meanings of Scripture from outgrown phraseology."
This is not so difficult a thing to do for the devils and the angels. But a little refleaion will show, I think, that in dealing with the major themes of religion, the soluuon is not so easy. The real difficulty appears when Dr. FosJick attempts to decode the biblical promise of immortal life.
He begins by rejeaing completely the resurrection of the flesh and any kind of immortality which is imagined as the survival of the physical person. Yet he believes
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in "the persistence of personality through death.” For he maintains that without this belief the final victory of death would signify "the triumphant irrationality of exist- ence”; not to believe in immortality is to submit to "mental confusion.” Speaking quite frankly, however, he cannot easily imagine "a completely disembodied exist- ence.” Yet It is obviously not easy to imagine the persist- ence of personality through death once you have made up your mind not to imagine a concrete heaven inliabited by well-defined persons
Modern churchmen, like Dean Inge for example, who have faced the difficulty more boldly than Dr. Fosdick does, arrive at an intelligible explanation of what they mean by immortality But they mean something which is not only very difficult to understand, but extremely difficult for most men to enjoy when they have under- stood It. They inject intelligible meaning into the word "eternal” by employing it in a sense which is wholly different from that which the common man employs. By immortality he means life that goes on age after age withoyt stopping. But the modern churchmen who have really clarified their minds are platonists. They apply the word "eternal” to that which is independent of time and existence. Between the two conceptions there is the profoundest difference, for in the commonsense of the worldling existence is so precious that he wishes it to continue for ever and ever. But to the platonist exist- ence, or embodiment, is transient, accidental, irrational; only that is permanent which is timeless. Commonsense demands that if we are immortal we should meet our friend again later and continue our friendship; the pla-
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tonist loves the memory of his friend after death as he loved an ideal image of him during his life. In com- muning with his memories and his ideals he knows him- self to be in touch with eternal things. For not even the gods, says Homer, can undo the past; no accident of mortality can destroy anything which can be represented in the mind. Heroes die, but that such heroic deeds were done is a chapter forever, as Mr Santayana says, in any complete history of the universe. The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal ; but ideas are immortal.
I do not know whether I have known hov/ to state clearly what is meant by this platonic view to which, in varying degrees of clarity, all emancipated minds turn when they talk of immortality. But, at least, it is clear that it is a conception which calls for a radically different adjustment to life than that to which the worldling is accustomed. He desires objects to love, goods and suc- cesses that are perishable, and he wishes them not to perish. Before he can enter the platonic world, before he can even attain to a hint of its meaning, he must abandon the very desires of which his hope of immor- tality IS the expression. He must detach himself from his wish to acquire and possess objects that die; he must learn what it means to possess things not by holding them, but by understanding them, and to enjoy them as objects of eflecnon. He must not only cease to desire immortality as he conceives it, but the material embodi- ment of things as well. Then only, when he has renounced his love of existence, can he begin to love the forms of existence, and to live among imperishable ideas.
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Then, and in this sense only, does he enter into eternal life.
The ordinary man, when he hears this doctrine expounded, is almost certain to say with the Indian sage: "the worship of the Impersonal laid no hold upon my heart.” His heart is set on the enjoyment .of worldly goods, and the doctrine, for all but a few exceptional spirits, requires a radical change of heart. It is forbid- ding except to the few in whom "the intellect (is) pas- sionate and the passions cold.” For it demands a con- version of their namral desire to possess tangible things into a passion to understand intangible and abstract things. This philosophy is ascetic, unworldly, and pro- foundly disinterested.
Now It can be argued that this is precisely what the Gospels teach as to the meaning of salvation. Excellent authority can be cited from the Gospel of John and the Epistles of St. Paul to justify this form of the Christian tradition: "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” . . . "the things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal” ... "I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind.” It can hardly be denied, as Dean Inge says, that "we are able to carry back to the fountain-head that Christian tradition” which may quite accurately be described as die religion of the spirit. But mixed with it in the Scripture, there is the other tradition, the popular tradition which may be called the religion of common- sense. Out of this latter have grown the institutions of the church and the faith of the mass of men. The religion of the spirit has been reserved for a few, "a succession
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of lives which have been sheltered rather than inspired by the machinery and statecraft of a mighty institution/' and while the few who lived the life of the spirit have undoubtedly done much to inspire the popular religion with new insight, they have been, on the whole, a group apart.
Yet those who belonged to these two distinct traditions did use the same churches and the same symbolism. There was an even deeper bond of unity between them. Both believed that renunciation and self-discipline are the way of salvation — in the religion of the spirit as the way to enter now into love of eternal things; in the religion of commonsense as a rather heavy price paid to God in return for everlasting happiness after death -It may be argued, therefore, by churchmen like Dr. Fosdick, that the "'abiding message" of the Bible about immortality is that men must renounce the world in order to win eter- nity. That some men mean by eternity a bnd of per- petual motion and others a kind of abstraction is merely a difference in their habits of thought, and does not impair the validity or the importance of the central experience. If they will renounce their worldly passions, they will find what the idea of eternity has to give, no matter what they imagine it to mean.
Bur although Dr. Fosdick implies that this solves the difficulty, it can be shown, I believe, that it does not. What he has succeeded in doing is to disentangle from the Bible a meaning for immortality which has a noble tradition behind it and is at the same time intelleaually possible for a modern man. But the history of religion ought to put us on guard against assuming too easily
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that a statement of the purest truth is in itself capable of affecting the lives of any considerable number of people Dean Inge, who is a very much more clear- headed churchman, says quite frankly that "a religion suc- ceeds, not because it is true, but because it suits the worshippers” Merely to tell men, however fervently, that they may conquer mortality by renouncing the flesh, will not go far toward persuading many of them to renounce the flesh There must be, as there has been in all the historic religions, something more than a state- ment of the moral law. There must be a psychological machinery for enforcing the moral law.
For diose who are suited to the religion of the spirit no machinery is needed. But for the mass of men who are not naturally suited to it, a machinery which compels this conversion is indispensable. Jesus in his time, and Gautama Buddha before him, taught a moral law which was addressed to those who could receive it. They were not many. Buddhism and Christianity became world religions centuries after the death of their founders, and only when there had been added to the central message a great organized method of teaching it.
The essence of such an organization is the title to say with apostolic certainty that the message is true. Church- men, like Dr. Fosdick, can make no such claim about their message. They reject revelation. They reject the authority of any ciiurch to speak directly for God. They rejea the literal inspiration of the Bible. They reject altogether many parts of the Bible as not only umnspired, but false and misleadmg. They do not believe in God as a lawgiver, judge, father, and spectator of human life.
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When they say that this or that message m the Bible is 'permanently valid/' they mean only that in their judg- ment, according to their reading of human experience, it is a well-tested truth. To say this is not merely to deny that the Bible is authoritative in astronomy and biology, It IS to deny equally that it is authoritative as to what is good and bad for men. The Bible thus becomes no more than a revered collection of hypotheses which each man may reject or accept in the light of his own knowledge.
The lessons may still be true. But they are robbed of their certainty. Each man is thrown back upon his own resources ; he is denied the support which all popular religion offers him, the conviction that outside himself there is a power on which he can and must lean for guidance In the ancient faith a man said- 'T believe this on the authority of an all-wise God.” In the new faith he is in effect compelled to say. 'T have examined the alleged pronouncements of an all-knowing God , some of them are obviously untrue, some are rather repulsive, others, however, if they are properly restated, I find to be exceedingly good ”
Something quite fundamental is left out of the mod- ernist creeds. At least something which has hitherto been quite fundamental is left out. That something is the most abiding of all the experiences of religion, namely, the conviaion that the religion comes from God. Sup- pose It were true, which it plainly is not, that Dr Fosdick by his process of selection and decoding has retained 'pre- cisely the thing at which the Bible was driving.” Still he would be without the thing on which popular religion
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has been founded. For the Bible to our ancestors was not simply, as he implies, a book of wisdom. It was a book of wisdom backed by the power of God himself. That IS not an inconsiderable difference. It is all the difference there is between a pious resolution and a moral law.
The Bible, as men formerly accepted it, contained wis- dom certified by the powers that govern the umverse. It did not merely contain many well-tested truths, similar in kmd to those which are to be found in Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, and Bernard Shaw. It contained truths which could not be doubted because they had been spoken by God through his prophets and his Son. They could not be wrong. But once it is allowed that each man may selea from the Bible as he sees fit, judging each passage by his own notions of what is “abiding,” you have stripped the Scriptures of their authority to command men’s con- fidence and to compel their obedience. The Scriptures may still inspire respea. But they are disarmed.
3. What Modernism Leaves Out Many reasons have been adduced to explain why people do not go to church as much as they once did. Surely the most important reason is that they are not so certain that they are going to meet God when they go to church. If they had that certainty they would go. If they really believed that they were being watched by a Supreme Being who is more powerful than ail the kings of earth put together, if they really believed that not only their aaions but their secret thoughts were known and would be ranembered by the aeator and ultimate judge of the
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universe, there would be no complaint whatever about church attendance. The most worldly would be in the front pews, and preachers would not have to resort so often to their rather desperate expedients to attract an audience. If the conviction were there that the creed professed was invincibly true, the modern congregation would not come to church, as they usually do to-day, to hear the preacher and to listen to the music. They would come to worship God.
■ Religious professions will not work when they rest merely on a kind of passive assent; or on intricate reason- ing, or on fierce exhortation, or on a good-natured con- spiracy to be vague and highflown. A man cannot cheat about faith. Either he has it in the marrow of his bones, or in a crisis, when he is distracted and in sorrow, there is no conviction there to support him. Without complete certainty religion does not offer genuine consolation. It is without the strength to compensate our weakness. Nor can it sanction the rules of morality. Ethical codes cannot lay claim to unhesitating obedience when they are based upon the opinions of a majority, or on the notions of wise men, or on estimates of what is socially useful, or on an appeal to patriotism. For they depend then on the force which happens to range itself behind them at a particular time; or on their convenience for a moment. They are felt to be the outcome of human, and therefore quite fallible, decisions. They are no necessary part of the government of the universe. They were not given by God to Moses on Smai. They are not the command- ments of God speaking through his Infallible Church.
A human morality has no such sanaion as a divine.
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The sanaion of a divine morality is the certainty of the believer that it originated with God. But if he has once come to think that the rule of conduct has a purely human, local, and temporal origin, its sanction is gone. His obedience is transformed, as ours has been by knowl- edge of that sort, from conviction to conformity or cal- culated expediency.
Without certainty there can be no profound sense that a man's own purpose has become part of the purpose of the whole creation. It is necessary to believe in a God who is active in the world before a man can feel himself to be, as St. Paul said, **a fellow laborer" with God. Yet this sense of partnership with a Person who transcends the individual’s own life, his own ego, and his own capacities, is fundamental in all popular religion. It underlies all the other elements of religion. For in the certainty that he is enlisted with God, man finds not only comfort in defeat, not only an ideal of holiness which persuades him to renounce his immediate desires, but an ecstatic mobilizing of all his scattered energies in one triumphant sense of his own infinite importance.
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CHAPTER IV
THE ACIDS OF MODERNITY 1. The Ktngly Pattern
What I have said thus far can be reduced to the state- ment that it IS difficult for modern men to conceive a God whom they can worship. Yet it would be a crude misunderstanding of religious experience to assume that it depends upon a clear conception of God. In truly reli- gious men the experience of God is much more intensely convincing than any definition of his nature which they can put into words. They do not insist on understanding that w^hich they believe, for their belief gives them a con- sciousness of divinity which transcends any conviction they could reach by the understanding. They are not oppressed by the conflict between reason and faith because the tes- timony of faith is irresistible. It may become so irre- sisuble that any attempt to understand is finally held, as It was by John Chrysostom, to be an impertinence.
St. Chrysostom, who is described by the Catholic Ency- clopedia as the most prominent doctor of the Greek Church and the greatest preacher ever heard in a Chris- tian pulpit, is a striking example of how in other ages a man who was both learned and devout was able to surmount the intellectual difficulties which to-day cause so much trouble for modernists and fundamentalists alike. Chrysostom was born at Antioch in the middle of the Fourth Century and grew up m a time when the intel-
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lectual foundations of Christianity were intensely disputed. The Catholic theology had not yet emerged victoriously, and Antioch was the theatre of fierce struggles between Pagans, Manichasans, Gnostics, Arians, Jews, and others These struggles turned in considerable measure upon just such attempts to define and comprehend God as now confuse the teaching of the Protestant Church. Among the sectarians there were some who claimed that it was possible "to know God exactly” and it was against them that Chrysostom preached that "he insults God who seeks to apprehend His essential being.” For "the difference between the being of God and the being of man is of such a kind that no word can express it and no thought can appraise it. . . . He dwells, says St. Paul, in an unapproachable light.” Even the angels in heaven are stupefied by the glory and majesty of God: "Tell me,” he says, "wherefore do they cover their faces and hide them with their wings? Why but that they cannot endure the dazzling radiance and its rays that pour from the Throne?”
Here in language so eloquent that the author became known as Chrysostom, "the golden-mouthed,” we have the doarine that "a comprehended God is no God,” that "God is incomprehensible because He is blessed and blessed because He is incomprehensible.” But if we look more closely at what Chrysostom actually says, it is appar- ent that he has a much clearer idea of God than he knows. He conceives of God as the creator, the ruler, and the judge of the universe. When he says that God is incom- prehensible he means that it is impossible for a human being to* imagine what it would be like to be God. But
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that does not prevent Chrysostom from knowing what it IS like to be the creature of the incomprehensible God. He is very definitely on his knees before the throne of a divine king whose radiance is so dazzling that he cannot look his Lord in the face.
There is thus a very solid intelleaual conception embedded in the faith of this great teacher who staked everything on the assertion that it is impossible to con- ceive God. The conception is there but it has not been isolated and realized. It is unconsciously assumed. We find the same thing in Luther when he said venture to put my trust in the one God alone, the invisible and incomprehensible, who hath created Heaven and Earth and IS alone above all creatures For in spite of the fact that Luther calls God incomprehensible, he is able to make a number of extremely important statements about him He is able to say that God is the only God, that he created the earth, that there is a heaven, that God created heaven, and that God alone is above all his crea- tures. To know that much about God is to comprehend the function of God if not his nature.
Now if we examine the religious difficulty of modern men, we find, I think, that they do not lack the sense of mystery, of majesty, of terror, and of wonder which over- whelm Chrysostom and Luther. The emotional disposi- tion is there. But it is somehow inhibited from possessing them utterly. The will to believe is checked by some- thing in their experience which Chrysostom did not have. That something is the sense that the testimony of faith is not wholly credible, that the feeling of sanctity is no assurance of the existence of sacred powers, that awe and
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wonder and terror in the breast of the believer are not guarantees that there exist real objects that are awful and wonderful. The modern man is not incapable of faith, but he has within him a contrary passion, as mstinctive and often as intense as faith, whidi makes incredible the testimony of his faith.
It IS that contrary passion, and not the thin argumenta- tion of atheists and agnostics, which lies, I think, at the root of what churchmen call modern irreligion. It is that passion which they must understand if they are ever to understand the modem religious difficulty. For just as men could surmount any intellectual difficulty when their passion to believe was whole-hearted, so to-day, when the passion to disbelieve is so strong, they are unable to believe no matter how perfealy their theological dilem- mas are resolved.
We must ask ourselves, then, what there is in modern men which makes the testimony of faith seem more or less incredible to them. We have seen in the citations from Chrysostom and Luther that the testimony of faith really contains a large number of unconscious statements of fact about the umverse and how it is governed. It is these statements of faa which we are no longer able to assume unconsciously, and having become conscious of them they are rather incredible. But why are they no longer unconsciously assumed and why are they incredi- ble? The answer is, I thmk, that they have ceased t. be consistent with our normal experience in ordinary ajffairs.
The faitli of Chrysostom and Luther is entangled with, and supported upon, the assumption that the universe
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was created and is governed by a father and king. They had projected upon the universe an imaginary picture which reflected their own daily experience of government among men. These pictures of how the universe is gov- erned change with men’s political experience. Thus it would not have been easy for an Asiatic people to imagine the divine government in any other way but as a despot- ism, and Yahveh, as he appears in many famous portraits in the Old Testament, is very evidently an Oriental mon- arch inclined to be somewhat moody and very vain. He governs as he chooses, constrained by no law, and often without mercy, justice, or righteousness. The God of mediaeval Christianity, on the other hand, is more like a great feudal lord, supreme and yet bound by covenants to treat his vassals on earth according to a well-established system of reciprocal rights and duties. The God of the Enlightenment m the Eighteenth Century is a constitu- tional monarch v/ho reigns but does not govern And the God of Modernism, who is variously pictured as the Han vital within the evolutionary process, or as the sum total of the laws of nature, is really a kind of constitu- tionalism deified.
Provided that the piaure is so consistent with experi- ence that It is taken utterly for granted, it will serve as a background for the religious experience But when daily experience for one reason or another provides no credible analogy by which men can imagine that the uni- verse is governed by a supernatural king and father, then the disposition to believe, however strong it may be at the roots, is like a vine that reaches out and can find nothing solid upon which to grow. It cannot support
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itself. If faith is to flourish, there must be a conception of how the universe is governed to support it.
It is these supporting conceptions — the unconscious assumption that we are related to God as creatures to creator, as vassals to a king, as children to a father — that the acids of modernity have eaten away. The modern man’s daily experience of modernity makes instinctively incredible to him these unconscious ideas which are at the core of the great traditional and popular religions. He does not wantonly rejea belief, as so many churchmen assert. His predicament is much more serious. With the best will in the world, he finds himself not quite believing.
In the last four hundred years many influences have conspired to make inaedible the idea that the universe is governed by a kingly person. An account of all of these influences would be a history of the growth of modern civilization. I am attempting nothing so comprehensive or so ambitious. I should like merely to note certain aspects of that revolutionary change which, as Lord Acton says, came "unheralded” and "founded a new order of things . . . sapping the ancient reign of continuity.” For that new order of things has made it impossible for us to believe, as plainly and literally as our forefathers did, that the universe is a monarchy administered on this planet through divinely commissioned, and, therefore, unimpeachably authoritative ministers.
2. Landmarks
In a famous passage at the beginning of Heretics, Mr. Qiesterton says that "nothing more strangely indi- cates the enormous and silent evil of modern society than
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,the extraordinary use which is made nowadays of the word 'orthodox/ In former days the heretic was proud of not being a heretic. It was the kingdom of the world and the police and the judges who were heretics. He was orthodox. All the tortures born out of forgotten hells could not make him admit that he was heretical. But a few modern phrases have made him boast of it. He says with a conscious laugh, 'I suppose I am very heretical,’ and looks around for applause. The word 'heresy’ not only means no longer being wrong; it practi- cally means being clear-headed and courageous.”
Mr. Chesterton goes on to explain that this change of attitude has come about because "people care less for whether they are philosophically right than they used to care.” It may be so. But if they cared as much or more, it would not help them. To be orthodox is to believe in the right doctrines and to follow the ancient rules of living deduced from a divine revelation. The modern man finds that the doctrines do not fit what he believes to be true, and that the rules do not show him how to condua his life. For he is confronted at every turn with radical novelties about which his inherited dogma teaches -him something which is plainly unworkable, or, as is even more often the case, teaches him nothing at all.
In the old world there were, of course, novelties, too. But the pace of change was so slow that it did not seem to cause radical change. There was ample time to make subtle and necessary revisions of the fundamental assump- tions of right and wrong without seeming to challenge the distinaion between right and wrong. Looking back at it in long perspective we can see now that there was
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a constant evoluuon of the Christian faith from the Apostles to the later councils of the Church. But in relation to the life of any individual the change was so slow that men could honestly believe that the Catholicism of Hildebrand was identical with the Christianity of Paul. Men had few means of reconstructing the past, and few ways of knowing how great was the variety of belief at any one time within the frontiers of Christendom. Within their horizon, change came too slowly to seem like change, because only that seems to move which moves rather fast.
For that reason the large changes which took place were not vividly realized. The small, quick changes, of which men were conscious, could therefore easily be made to seem, especially since men were not too exact and observ- ant, as inevitable deduaions from unchanging premises. Even in the great arguments over the namre of Christ, die tights of Church and Empire, the meanmg of grace and transubstantiarion, both sides appealed in theory to the same premises. Each side asserted that it was follow- ing the true revelauon. And since ordmary men for the most part never heard the other side, except from their own priests and doaors, they had no reason for doubting that the side on which they happened to find thanselves was absolutely tight. They did not have to choose between competing creeds; they had merely to defend their creed, which was the true one, against the enemies of God. And so if they were disturbed by the quarrel, they were not disturbed much by doubt.
The grand adjustments were taken for granted, and within that framework men could make the minor adjust- ments patiently and elaborately, letting them become
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habitual and well-worn. This, perhaps, is the secret of the charm that an old civilization has for us to-day. We feel that here is a way of life which men have had time to refine and to embellish. The modern man in a pro- gressive commumty has neither the time nor the energy for this delightful superficiality. He is too busy solving fimdamental problems. He is so free to question his premises that he is no longer free to work out his con- clusions. His philosophy of life is like the skyscraper; it is nine-tenths structure. So much effort has gone into constructing it, and making it fit to bear the strains, it is so neAr and yet it will so soon be out of date, that nobody is much interested in the character of it. But a mediaeval cathedral, like the mediaeval philosophy, was built slowly over generations and was to last forever; it is decorated inside and out, where it can be seen and where it cannot be seen, from the crypt to the roof.
The modern man is an emigrant who lives in a revolu- tionary society and inherits a protestant tradition. He must be guided by his conscience. But when he searches his conscience, he finds no fixed point outside of it by which he can take his bearings. He does not really believe that there is such a point, because he himself has moved about too fast to fix any point long enough in his mind. For the sense of authority is not established by argument. It is acquired by deep familiarity and indurated associa- tion. The ancient authorities were blended with the ancient landmarks, with fields and vineyards and patri- archal trees, with ancient houses and chests full of heir- looms, with churchyards near at hand and their ancestral graves, with old m^ who remembered wise sayings they
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had heard from wise old men. In that kind of setting it is natural to believe that the great truths are known and the big questions settled, and to feel that the dead them- selves are still alive and are watching over the ancient faith.
But when creeds have to be proved to the doubting they are already blighted; arguments are for the unbe- lievers and the wavermg, for diose who have never had, ,and for those who have lost these primordial attachments, taith is not a formula which is agreed to if the weight of evidence favors it. It is a posture of man’s whole being which predisposes him to assimilate,^ not merely to believe, his creed. When the posture is native to him, in tune with the rhythm of his surroundings, his faith is not dependent upon intellectual assent. It is a serene and whole-hearted absorption, like that of the infant to its mother, in the great powers outside which govern his world. When that union of feeling is no longer there, as it is not there for a large part of our talkative funda- mentalist sects, we may be sure that corrosive doubting has begun. The unlovely quality of much modern religi- osity is due to these doubts. So much of its belief is synthetic. It is forced, made, insisted upon, because it is no longer simple and inevitable. The angry absurdities which the fundamentalists propound against "evolution” are not often due to their confidence in the inspiration of the Bible. They are due to lack of confidence, to doubt resisted like an annoying tune which a man cannot shake out of his head. For if the militant fundamentalists were utterly sure they are right, they would 'exhibit some of that composure which the truly devout display. Did they
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really trust their God, they would trust laws, politicians, and policemen less. But because their whole field of con- sciousness is trembling with uncertainties they are in a state of-fret and fuss; and their preaching is frousy, like the seduaions of an old coquette.
3. Barren Gwund
The American people, more than any other people, is composed of individuals who have lost association wnth their old landmarks They have crossed an ocean, they have spread themselves across a new continent. The American who still lives in.his grandfather s house feels almost as if he were living in a museum. There are few Americans w^ho have not moved at least once since their childhood, and even if they have staid where they were born, the old landmarks themselves have been carted away to make room for progress. That, perhaps, is one reason why we have so much more Americanism than love of America. It takes time to learn to love the new gas station which stands where the wild honeysuckle grew. Moreover, the great majority of Americans have risen in the world. They have moved out of their class, lifting the old folks along with them perhaps, so that together they may sir by the steam pipes, and listen to the crooning of the radio. But more and more of them have* moved not only out of their class, but out of their culture; and then they leave the old folks behind, and the continuity of life is broken. For faith grows w^ell only as it is passed on from parents to their children amidst surroundings that bear witness, because nothing changes radically, to a deep permanence in the order of the world. It is true,
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no doubt, that in this great physical and psychic migration some of the old household gods are carefully packed up and put with the rest of the luggage, and then unpacked and set up on new altars m new places. But what can be taken along is at best no more than the tree which IS above the ground. The roots remain m the soil where first they grew.
The sidewalks of a dty would in any case be a stony soil in which to transplant religion. Throughout history, as Spengler pomts out, the large aty has bred heresies, new cults, and irreligion. Now when we speak of modern civilization we mean a civilization dominated by the cul- ture of the great metropolitan centers. Our own civiliza- tion in America is perhaps the most completely urbamzed of all. For even the American farmers, though they live in the country, tend to be suburban rather than rural. I am aware of how dominating a role the population outside the great aties plays in American life. Yet it is in the large cities that the tempo of our civilization is deter- mined, and the tendency of mechanical inventions as well as economic policy is to create an irresistible suction of the country towards the city.
The deep and abiding traditions of religion belong to the countryside. For it is there that man earns his daily bread submitting to superhuman forces whose behavior he can only partially control. There is not much he can do when he has ploughed the ground and planted his seed except to wait hopefully for sun and rain from the sky. He is obviously part of a scheme that is greater than himself, subjea to elements that transcend his powers and surpass his imderstanding. The dty is an add that dis-
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solves this piety. How different it is from an ancient vineyard where men cultivate what their fathers have planted. In a modern aty it is not easy to mamtain that "reverent attachment to the sources of his being and the steadying of his life by that attachment.” It is not natural to form reverent attachments to an apartment on a two- year lease, and an imitation mahogany desk on the thirty- second floor of an office building. In such an environ- ment piety becomes absurd, a butt for the facetious, and the pious man looks like a piauresque yokel or a stuffy fool.
Yet without piety, without a patriotism of family and place, without an almost plant-like implication in unchangeable surroundings, there can be no disposition to believe in an external order of things. The omnipotence of God means somethmg to men who submit daily to the cycles of the weather and the mysterious power of nature. But the city man puts his faith in furnaces to keep out the cold, is proudly aware of what bad sewage his ances- tors endured, and of how ignorantly they believed that God, who made Adam at 9 a.m. on Oaober 23 in the year 4004 B.C., was concerned with the behavior of Adam’s children.
4. Sophisticated Violence
Much effort goes into finding substimtes for this rad- ical loss of association. There is the Americanization movement, for example, which in some of its public manifestations has as much resemblance to patriotism as the rape of the Sabine women had to the love of Dante for Beatrice. There is the voaferous nationalism of the
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hundred percenters which is always most eloquent when it is about to be most rowdy. There are the anxious out- cries of the sectarians who in their efforts to, revive the religion of their fathers show the utmost contempt for the aspirations of their sons. There is Mr. Henry Ford hastily collecting American antiques before his cars destroy the whole culmre which produced them. There is Mr. Lothrop Stoddard looking every man in the eye to see whether it is Nordic blue. There are a thousand and one patently artificial, sometimes earnest, often fan- tastic fundamentalist agitations. They are all attempts to impose quickly by one kind of sophisticated violence or another a posture of faith which can be genuine only when It belongs to the unquestioned memories of the soul. They are a shrill insistence that men ought to feel that which no man can feel who does nor already feel it in the marrow of his bones.
Novelties crowd the consciousness of modern men. The machinery of intelligence, the press, the radio, the moving picture, have enormously multiplied the number of unseen events and strange people and queer doings with which he has to be concerned. They compel him to pay attention to faas that are detached from their backgrounds, their causes and their consequences, and are only half known because they are nor seen or touched or actually heard. These experiences come to him having no beginning, no middle, and no end, mere flashes of publicity playing fitfully upon a dark tangle of circum- stances. I pick up a newspaper ^t the start of the day and I am depressed and rejoiced to learn that: anthracite miners have struck in Pennsylvania; that a price boost
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plot is charged; that Mr. Ziegfeld has imported a blonde from England who weighs 112 pounds and has pretty legs; that the Pope, on the other hand, has refused to receive women in low-necked dress and with their arms bare; that airplanes are flying to Hawaii; and that the Mayor says that the would-be Mayor is a liar. . . .
Now in an ordered universe there ought to be place for all human experiences. But it is not strange that the modern newspaper reader finds it increasingly difiicult to believe that through it all there is order, permanence, and conneaing principle. Such experience as comes to him from the outside is a dissonance composed of a thou- sand noises. And amidst these noises he has for inner guidance only a conscience which consists, as he half sus- pects, of the confused echoes of earlier mnes.
5. Rulers
He cannot look to his betters for guidance. The American social system is migratory, revolutionary, and protestant. It provides no recognized leaders and no clear standards of conduct. No one is recognized as the interpreter of morals and the arbiter of taste. There is no social hierarchy, there is no acknowledged ruling class, no well-known system of rights and duties, no code of manners. There are smart sets, first families, and suc- cessful people, to whom a good deal of deference is paid and a certain tribute of imitation. But these leaders have no real authority in morals or in matters of taste because they themselves Have ^ew standards that are not the fashions of a season. They exercise, therefore, an almost autoaatic power over deportment at the country club.
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But what they believe about God, salvation, or the destiny of America nobody knows, not even they themselves.
There have been perhaps three ruling classes in Amer- ica, the Puritan merchants, the Knickerbocker gentry, and the Cavalier planters of the South. Each presided for a few generations over an ordered avilization. But the New Englanders uprooted themselves and went west, and those who have been left behind are marooned in a flood of aliens. The Knickerbocker squirearchy dissolved in the commercial greatness of New York, and the southern aristocracy was overthrown and ruined by a social revo- lution which culminated in the Civil War. They have left no successors, and unless and until American society becomes stabilized once more somewhere for a few gen- erations, they are not likely to have any successors.
Our rulers to-day consist of random collections of suc- cessful men and their wives. They are to be found in the inner circles of banks and corporations, in the best clubs, in the dominant cliques of trade unions, among the polit- ical churchmen, the higher manipulating bosses, the lead- ing professional Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Irish, Germans, Jews, and the grand panjandrums of the secret societies. They give orders. They have to be con- sulted. They can more or less effeaively speak for, and lead some part of, the population. But none of them is seated on an assured throne, and all of them are forever concerned as to how they may keep from being toppled off. They do not know how they -happen to be where they axe, although they often expl^n what are the secrets of success. They have been educated to achieve success; few of them have been educated to exercise power. Nor
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do they count with any confidence upon retaining their power, nor of handing it on to their sons. They live, therefore, from day to day, and they govern by ear. Their impromptu statements of pohcy may be obeyed, but nobody seriously regards them as having authority.
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CHAPTER V
THE BREAKDOWN OF AUTHORITY 1. God’s Government
The dissolution of the ancestral order is still under way, and much of our current controversy is between those who hope to stay the dissolution and those who would like to hasten it. Tlie prime fact about modernity, as it presents itself to us, is that it not merely denies the central ideas of our forefathers but dissolves the disposition ’ to believe in them. The ancestral tradition still lives in many corners of the world. But it no longer represents for us, as it did for Dante and for St. Thomas Aquinas seven hundred years ago, the triumphant wisdom of the age. A child born in a modern city may still learn to use the images of the theological drama, hut more or less consciously he is made to feel that in using them he is not speaking of things that are literally and exactly true.
Its dogma, as Mr. Santayana once said, is insensibly understood to be nothing but myth, its miracles nothing but legend, its sacraments mere symbols, its bible pure literature, its liturgy just poetry, its hierarchy an admin- istrative convenience, its ethics an historical accident, and its whole function simply to lend a warm mystical aureole to human culture and ignorance* The modern man does not take his religion as a real account of the constitution, the government, the history, and the actual destmy of the
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universe. With rare exceptions his ancestors did. They believed that all their activities on this earth had a sequel in other activities hereafter, and that they themselves in their own persons would be alive through all the stretches of infinite time to experience this fulfilment. Tlie sense of actuality has gone out of this tremendous conception of life; only the echoes of it persist, and in our memories they create a world apart from the world in which we do our work, a noble world perhaps in which it is refreshmg to dwell now and then, and in anxiety to take refuge. But the spaces between the stars are so great; the earth is now so small a planet in the skies; man is so close, as St. Francis said, to his brother the ass, that in the daylight he does not believe that a great cosmic story is being unfolded of which his every thought and act is a signifi- cant part. The universe may have a conscious purpose, but he does not believe he knows just what it is; humanity may.be acting out a divine drama, but he is not certain that he knows the plot.
There has gone out of modern life a working conviction that we are living under the dominion of one supreme ideal, the attainment of eternal happiness by obedience to God’s will on earth. This conviction found its most perfect expression in the period which begins with St Augustine’s City of God and culminates in the Divine Comedy of Dante. But the underlying intuitions are to be found in nearly all popular religion; they are the creature’s feeling of dependence upon his creator, a sense that his destiny is fixed by a being greater than himself. At the bottom of it there is a conviction that the universe is governed by superhuman persons, that the daily visible
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life of the world is constitutionally subjea to the laws and the will of an invisible government. What the thinkers of the Middle Ages did was to work out m elaborate detail and m grandiose style the constitutional system under which supernatural government operates. It is not fanciful, and I hope not irreverent, to suggest that the great debates about the nature of the Trinity and the Godhead were attempts to work out a theory of divine sovereignty; that the debates about election and predesti- nation and grace are attempts to work out a theory of citizenship in a divine society. The essential idea which dominates the whole speculation is man*s relation to a heavenly king.
As this idea was finally worked out by the legists and canonists and scholastics
every ordering of a human community must appear as a component part of that ordering of the world which exists because God exists, and every earthly group must appear as an organic member of that Ctvt^as Det, that God-State, which comprehends the heavens and the earth. Then, on the other hand, the eternal and other-worldly aim and object of every individual man must, in a direaer or an indirecter fashion, determine the aim and objea of every group into which he enters.
But as there must, of necessity, be conneaion between the various groups, and as all of them must be connected with the divinely ordered Universe, we come by the further notion of a divinely instituted Harmony which pervades the Universal Whole and every part thereof. To every Being is assigned its place in that whole, and to every link between Beings corresponds a divine decree. . . .
There is no need to suppose that everyone in the Middle Ages understood the theory, as Gierke describes it here,
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in all its architectural grandeur. Nevertheless, the theory is impliat in the feeling of simple men. It is the logical elaboration of the fundamental belief that the God who governs the world is no mere abstraaion made up of hazy nouns and a vague adoration, but that, as Henry Adams says, he is the feudal seigneur to whom Roland, when he was dying, could proffer "his right-hand glove” as a last act of homage, such as he might have made to Charle- magne, and could pray.
O God the Father who has never lied.
Who raised up Saint Lazarus from death,
And Daniel from the lions saved,
Save my soul from all the perils For the sins that in my life I did’
2. The Doctrine of the Keys
The theory of divine government has always presented some difficulties to human reason, as we can see even in St. Augustine, who never clearly made up his mind whether the City of God was the actual church presided over by the Bishop of Rome or whether it was an ideal and invisible congregation of the saved. But we may be sure that to plainer minds it was necessary to believe that God governs mankind through the agency of the visible church. The unsophisticated man may not be realistic, but he is literal; he would be quite incapable, we may be sure, of understanding what St. Thomas meant when he asked "why should not the same sacred letter . . . contain several senses founded on the literaP” He would accept all the senses but he would accept them all literally. And taking them literally he would have to believe that
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if God governs tlie world, he governs it, not in some ob- scure meaning of the term, but that he actually governs it, as a king who is mightier than Charlemagne, but not essentially imlike Charlemagne.
The disposition to believe in the rule of God depended, therefore, upon the capacity to believe in a visible church upon earth which holds its commission from God. In some form or another all simple people look to a priestly caste who make visible the divine power. Without some such actualization the human imagination falters and be- comes vagrant. The Catholic Church by its splendor and its power and its universality during the Middle Ages must have made easily credible the conception of God the Ruler. It was a government exercising jurisdiction over the known world, powerful enough to depose princes, and at its head was the Pope who could prove by the evidence of scripture that he was the successor to Peter and was the Vice-gerent of God. To ask whether this grandiose claim was in fact true is, from the point of view of this argu- ment, to miss the point. It was believed to be true in the Middle Ages, ^cause it was believed, the Church flourished. Because the Church flourished, it was ever so much 'easier to be certain that the claim was true. When men said that God ruled the world, they had evidence as convincing as we have when we say that the President is head of the United States Government; they were con- vinced because they came into daily contact with God’s appointees administering God’s laws.
It is this concrete sense of divme government which modem men have lost, and it may well be that this is where the Reformation has exercised its most revolution-
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ary effea. What Luther did was to destroy the preten- sions not only of the Roman Catholic Church, but of any church and of any priestly class to administer God's gov- ernment on earth. The Protestant reformers may not have intended to destroy as deeply as they did; the theocracies established by Calvin and Knox imply as much. But, nevertheless, when Luther succeeded in defying the Holy See by rejecting its claim that it was the exclusive agent* of God, he made it impossible for any other church to set up the same claim and sustain it for any length of time.
Now Christ says that not alone in the Church is there forgiveness of sms, but that where two or three are gath- ered together in His name, they ‘shall have the right and the liberty to proclaim and promise to each other comfort and the forgiveness of sins. . We are not only kings and the freest of all men, but also priests forever, a 'dignity far higher than kingship, because by that priesthood we are worthy to appear before God, to pray for others, and to teach one another mutually the thmgs which are of God.
This denial of the special funaion of the priesthood did not, of course, originate with Luther. Its historical ante- cedents go back to the primitive Christians; there is quot- able authority for it in St. Augustine. It was anticipated by Wyciif and Huss and by many of the mystics of the Middle Ages. But Luther, possibly because the times were ripe for it, translated the demal of die authority of the priesthood into a political revolution which divided Christendom. When the Reformation was an accom- plished faa, men looked out upon the world and no longer saw a single Catholic Apostolic Churdi as the vis- ible embodiment of God's government. A large part of
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mankind, and that an economically and politically power- ful part, no longer believed that Christ gave to Simon Peter and his successors at the Roman See the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven with the promise that "whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
3. The Logic of Toleration As a result of the great religious wars the governing classes were forced to reaii2e that unless they consented to the policy of toleration they would be ruined. There is no reason to suppose that except among a few idealists toleration has ever been much admired as a principle. It was originally, and in large measure it still is, nothing but a praaical necessity. For in its interior life no church can wholly admit that its rivals may provide an equally good vehicle of salvation.
Martin Luther certainly had none of the modern notion that one church is about as good as the next. To be sure he appealed to the right of private judgment, but he made it plain nevertheless that in his opinion "pagans or Turks or Jews or fake Christians” would "remain under eternal wrath and an everlasting damnation.” John Calvin let it be known in no uncertain tone that he did not wish any new seas in Geneva. Milton, writing his beautiful essay on liberty, drew the line at Papists. And in our own day the Catholic Encyclopedia says in the course of an elo- quent argument for praaical civic toleration that "as the true God can tolerate no strange gods, the true Church of Christ can tolerate no strange churches beside herself,
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or, what amounts to the same, she can recognize none as theoretically justified/’ This is the ancient dogma that outside the church there is no salvation — extra ecclesiam 77ulla salus. Like many another dogma of the Roman church, It is not even in theory absolutely unbending. Thus It appears from the allocution of Pope Pius IX, Singulari quadam (1854), that 'Those who are ignorant of the true religion, if their ignorance is invincible (which means, if they have never had a chance to know the true religion) are not, in this matter, guilty of any fault in the sight of God.”
As a consequence of the modern theory of religious freedom the churches find themselves m an anomalous position. Inwardly, to their communicants, they continue to assert that they possess the only complete version of the truth. But outwardly, in their civic relations with other churches and with the civil power, they preach and prac- tice toleration. The separation of church and state in- volves more than a mere logical difficulty for the church- man. It involves a deep psychological difficulty for the members of the congregation. As communicants they are expected to believe without reservation that their church IS the only true means of salvation; otherwise the multi- tude of separate sects would be meaningless. But as citi- zens they are expeaed to maintain a neutral indxiterence to the claims of all the sects, and to resist encroachments by any one sect upon the religious praaices of the others. This is the best compromise which human wisdom has as yet devised, but it has one inevitable consequence which the superficial advocates of toleration often overlook. It is difficult to remam warmly convmced that the authority
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of any one sea is dmne, when as a matter of daily ex- perience all sects have to be treated alike.
The human soul is not so divided in compartments that a man can be indifferent in one part of his soul and firmly believing in another. The existence of rival sects, the visible demonstration that none has a monopoly, the habit of neutrality, cannot but dispose men against an unques- tioning acceptance of the authority of one sect. So many faiths, so many loyalties, are offered to the modern man that at last none seems to him wholly inevitable and fixed in the order of the universe. The existence of many churches m one community weakens the foundation of all of them. And that is why every church in the heyday of its power proclaims itself to be catholic and intolerant.
But when there are many churches in the same com- munity, none can make wholly good the claim that it is catholic. None has that power to discipline the individual which a universal churcn exercises. For, as Dr. Figgis puts it, when many churches are tolerated, "excommum- cation has ceased to be tyrannical by becoming futile.”
4. A Working Compromise If the rival churches were not compelled to tolerate each other, they could not, consistently with their own teachmg, accept the prevailing theory of the public school. Under that theory the schools are silent about matters of faith, and teachers ate supposed to be neutral on the issues of history and science which bear upon religion. The churches pernut this because they cannot agree on the dogma they would wish to have taught. Tire Catholics would rather have no dogma in the schools than
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Protestant dogma; the fundamentalists would rather have none than have modernist. This situation is held to be a good one. But that is only because all the alternatives are so much worse. No church can sincerely subscribe to the theory that questions of faith do not enter into the education of children.
Wherever churches are rich enough to establish their own schools, or powerful enough to control the public school, they make short work of the 'godless*' school. Either they establish religious schools of their own, as the Catholics and Lutherans have done, or they impose their views on the public schools as the fundamentalists have done wherever they have the necessary voting strength. The last fight of Mr. Bryan s life was made on behalf of the theory tliat if a majority of voters in Ten- nessee were fundamentalists then they had the right to make public education in Tennessee fundamentalist too. One of the standing grievances of the Catholic Church in America is that Catholics are taxed to support schools to which they cannot conscientiously send their children.
As a matter of fact non-sectarianism is a useful political phrase rather than an accurate description of what goes on in the schools. If there is teaching of science, that teach- ing is by implication almost always agnostic. The funda- mentalists point this out, and they are quite right. The teaching of history, under a so-called non-sectarian policy, is usually, in this country, a rather diluted Protestant ver- sion of history. The Catholics* are quite right when they point this out. Occasionally, it may be, a teacher of science appears who has managed to assimilate his science to his theology; now and then a Catholic history teacher
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will depart from the standard textbooks to give the Cath- olic version of disputed events during the last few hundred years. But the diief effect of the non-sectarian policy is to weaken sectarian attacliment, to wean the child from the faith of his fathers by making him feel that patriotism somehow demands that he shall not press his conviaions too far, that commonsense and good fellowship mean that he must not be too absolute. The leaders of the churches are aware of this peril. Every once in a while they make an effort to combat it Committees composed of parsons, priests, and rabbis appear before the school boards and petition that a non-sectarian God be wor- shipped and the non-controversial passages of the Bible be read. They always agree that the present godless system of education diminishes the sanaions of morality and the attendance at their respeaive churches. But they disagree when they try to agree on the nature of a neutral God, and they have been known to dispute fiercely about a non-controversial text of the Ten Commandments. So, if the seas are evenly balanced, the practical sense of the commumty turns in the end against the reform.
5. The Effect of Patriotism Modem governments are not merely neutral as between rival churches. They draw to themselves much of the loyalty which once was given to the churches. In faa it has been said with some truth that patriotism has many of the charaaeristics of an authoritative religion. Cer- tainly it is true that during the last few hundred years there has been transferred to government a consider-
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able part of the devotion which once sustained the churches.
In the older world the priest was a divinely commis- sioned agent and the prince a divinely tolerated power. But by the Sixteenth Century Melanchthon, a friend of Luther’s, had demed that the church could make laws binding the conscience. Only the prince, he said, could do that. Out of this view developed the much misunder- stood but essentially modern doctrine of the divine right of kings. In its original historic setting this doctrine was a way of asserting that the civil authority, embodied in the king, derived its power not from the Pope, as God’s viceroy on earth, but by direa appointment from God himself. The divine right of kings was a declaration of independence as against the authority of the church. This heresy was challenged not only by the Pope, but by the Presbyterians as well. And it was to combat the Presbyterian preachers who insisted on trying to diaate to the government diat King James I wrote his True Law of Free Monarchy, asserting the whole doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings.
In the Religious Peace of Augsburg an even more de- structive blow was struck at the ancient claim of the church that it is a universal power. It was agreed that the citizen of a state must adopt the religion of his kmg. Cmus regio ejus religio. This was not religious liberty as we understand it, but it was a supreme assertion of the civil power. Where once the church had admimstered religion for the multitude, and had exercised the right to depose' an heretical king, it now became the prerogative
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of the king to determine the religious duties of his sub- jects. The way was open for the modern absolute state, a conception which would have been entirely incompre- hensible to men who lived in the ages of faith.
We must here avoid using words ambiguously. When I speak of the absolute state, I do not refer to the consti- tutional arrangement of powers within the state. It is of no importance in this conneaion whether the absolute power of the state is exercised by a king, a landed aris- tocracy, bankers and manufacturers, professional politi- cians, soldiers, or a random majority of voters. It does not matter whether the right to govern is hereditary or obtained with the consent of the governed. A state is
absolute in the sense which I have in mind when it claims
*
the right to a monopoly of all the force within the com- munity, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life, to tax, to establish and disestablish property, to define crime, to punish disobedience, to control education, to supervise the family, to regulate personal habits, and to censor opinions. The modern state claims all these powers, and in the matter of theory there is no real dif- ference in the size of the claim between communists, fascists, and democrats. There are lingering traces in the American constitutional system of the older theory that there are inalienable rights which government may not absorb. But these rights are really not inalienable because they cin be taken away by constitutional amendment. There is no theoretical limit upon the power of the ulti- mate majorities which create civil government. There are only practical limits. They are restrained by inertia, and by prudence, even by good will. But ultimately
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and theoretically they claim absolute authority as against all foreign states, as against all churches, associations, and persons within their jurisdiaion.
The viaory of the civil power was not achieved every- where at the same time. Spasmodically, with occasional setbacks, but in the long run irresistibly, the state -has attained supremacy. In the feudal age the monarch was at no time sovereign. The Pope was the universal law- giver, not only in what we should call matters of faith, but in matters of business and politics as well. As late as the beginning of the Seventeenth Cenmry, Pope Paul V insisted that the Doge of the Venetian Republic had no right to arrest a canon of the church on the charge of fla- grant immorality. When, nevertheless, the canon was arrested, the Pope laid Venice under an interdia and excommunicated the Doge and the Senate. But the Venetian Government answered that it was founded on Divine Right; its title to govern did not come from the church. In the end the Pope gave way, and "the reign of the Pope," says Dr. Figgis, “as King of Kings was over.”
It was as a result of the loss of its civil power that the Roman Church evolved the modern doarine of infalli- bility. This claim, as Dr. Figgis points out, is not the culmination but the (implicit) surrender of the notions embodied in the famous papal bull, JJnaTn Sanctam. The Pope could no longer claim the political sovereignty of the world; he then asserted supreme rights as the religious teacher of the Catholic communion. "The Pope, from being the Lord of Lords, has become the Doaor of Doc- tors. From being the mother of states, the Curia
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has become the authoritative organ of a reaching society.”
6. The Dissolution of a Sovereignty Thus there has gradually been dissolving the conception that the government of human affairs is a subordinate part of a divme government presided over by God the King. In place of one church which is sovereign over all men, there are now many rival churches, rival stares, voluntary associations, and detached individuals. God is no longer believed to be a universal king in the full meamng of the word king, and religious obedience is fio longer the central loyalty from which all other obligations are derived Reli- gion has become for most modern men one phase in a varied experience; it no longer regulates their civic duties, their economic aaivities, their family life, and their opin- ions. It has ceased to have universal dominion, and is now held to be supreme only within its own domam. But there is much uncertainty as to what that domain is. In actual affairs, the religious obligations of modern men are often weaker than their social interests and generally weaker than the fiercer claims of patriotism. The conduct of the churches and of churchmen during the "War demonstrated that fact overwhelmingly. They submitted willingly or unwillingly to the overwhelming force of the civil power. Against this force many men claim the right of revolution, or a«i least the right of passive resistance and conscientious objeaion. Sometimes they base their claims upon a reli- gious precept which they hold sacred. But even in their disobedience to Caesar they are forced to acknowledge that loyalty in the modern world is complex, that it has become
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divided and uncertain, and that the age of faith which was absolute is gone for them. However reverent they may be when they are m their churches, they no longer feel wholly assured when they listen to the teaching that these are the words of the mimsters of a heavenly kmg.
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CHAPTER VI
LOST PROVINCES
1. Bustness
In any scheme of things where the churches, as agents of God, assert the right to speak with authority about the condua of life they should be able to lay down rules about the way busmess shall be carried on. The churches once did just that. In some degree they still attempt to do it. But the attempts have grown feebler and feebler. In the last SIX hundred years the churches have fought a losing battle against the emancipation of business from religious control.
The early Christian writers looked upon business as a peril to the soul. Although the church was in itself, among other things, a large business corporation, they did not countenance business enterprise. Money-making they called avarice and money-lending usury, just as they spoke of lust when they meant sexual desire. They had sound reasons of their own for this attimde. They knew from observation, perhaps even from introspeaion, that the de- sire for riches is so strong a passion that men possessed by it will devote only their odd moments to God. The objec- tion to a business career was like the objection to fornica- tion; it diverted the energies of the soul.
There were, no doubt, worldly reasons as well which account for the long resistance of the medkeval Church
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to what we now regard as the highest form of capitalistic endeavor. The Church belonged to the feudal system. The Pope and his bishops were m fact great feudal lords. They thrived best in a social order where men lived upon the land. They had a premonition that the rise of capital- ism, with its large cities, its financiers, merchants, and pro- letarian workers, was bound to weaken the secular author- ity of the church and to dissolve the influence of religion in men’s lives. They failed in their resistance, but surely one can hardly say that their vision was not prophetic. The drastic legislation of the church against business was enacted in the early days of capitalism; it was inspired, like the English corn laws and many another agrarian measure, by a determination to preserve a landed order of society. Thus in discussing whether money might properly be loaned out at interest Pope Innocent IV ar- gued that if this were permitted '*men would not give thought to the cultivation of their land, except when they could do naught else . . . even if they could get land to cultivate, they would nor be able to get the beasts and im-* plements for cultivating it, since the poor themselves would not have them, and the ricli, both for the sake of profit and security, would put their money into usury rather than into smaller and more risky investments.” The argument is the same as that which the American farmer makes when he complains that the bankers in Wall Street prefer to lend money to business men and to speculators rather than to farmers.
But the solid reasons which once inspired the church’s opposition to business do not concern us here. The oppo- sition was unsuccessful, the reasons were forgotten, and
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the old pronouncements against usury were looked upon as quaint and unworldly. For the new economic order which displaced feudalism, the Catholic Church, at least, had no program. It did not adapt itself readily to the spirit of commercial enterprise which captured the active minds of Nortliern Europe. The Protestant churches did adapt themselves and contrived to preach a gospel which encouraged, where Roman Catholicism had discouraged, the enterprising business man. They preached the divine duty of labor. *'At the day of doom,*' said John Bunyan, ’’men shall be judged according to their fruits. It will not be said then, Did you Believe^ But, were you Doers, or Talkers only?’' As this preaching became more concrete, to be a doer meant to do work and make money. Baxter in his Christian Directory wrote that *hf God show you a way in which you may lawfully get mote than in another way (without wrong to your soul or to any other) , if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your calling, and you refuse to be God’s .steward.” Richard Steele in The Tradesman's Calling pointed out that the virtues enjoined on Christians — dili- gence, moderation, sobriety, and thrift — are the very qual- ities which are most needed for commercial success. For ”godly wisdom . . . comes in and puts due bounds” to his expenses, ”and teaches the tradesman to live rather somewhat below than at all above his income.”
However edifying such doarme may have been, it was clearly an abandonment of the right, once so eloquently* asserted by the church, that it had the authority to regu- late business in the interest of man’s spiritual welfare. That right is still sometimes asserted. Sermons are still
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preached about business ethics; there are programs of Christian socialism and Christian capitalism. Church- men still interest themselves, often very effectively, to re- form some flagrant industrial abuse like the sweating of women and children. But the modern efforts to moralize business and to subordinate profit-seeking to humane ends are radically different from those of the mediaeval church. They are admittedly experimental — that is to say, debat- able— since they do not derive their authority from reve- lation. And they are presented as an appeal to reason, to conscience, to generosity, not as the commandments of God. The Council of Vienna in 1312 declared that any ruler or magistrate who sanctioned usury and compelled debtors to observe usurious contracts would be excommu- nicated; all laws which sanctioned money-lending at inter- est were to be repealed within three months. The churches do not speak in that tone of voice to-day
Thus if an organization like the Federal Council of Churches of Christ is distressed by, let us say, the labor policy of a great corporation, it inquires courteously of the president's secretary whether it would not be possible for him to confer with a delegation about the matter. If the churchmen are granted an interview, which is never altogether certain, they have to argue with the busi- ness man on secular grounds. Were they to say that the eight-hour day was the will of God, he would conclude they were cranks, he would surreptitiously press the buz- zer under his desk, and m a few moments his secretary would appear summoning him to an important board meeting. They have to argue with him, if they are to ob- tain a hearing, about the effect on health, efficiency, turn-
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over, and other such matters which are worked up for them by economists. As churchmen they have kindly impulses, but there is no longer a body of doctrine in the churches which enables them to speak with authority.
The emancipation of business from religious control is perhaps even more threatening to the authority of the churches than the rivalry of seas or the rise of the civil power. Business is a daily occupation; government meets the eye of the ordinary men only now and then. That the main interest in the waking life of most people should be carried on wholly separated from the faith they profess means that the churches have lost one of the great prov- inces of the human soul. The sponsors of the Broadway Temple in New York Qty put the matter in a thoroughly modern, even if it was a rather coarse, way when they pro- claimed a campaign to sell bonds as "a five percent invest- ment in your Fellow Man’s Salvation — Broadway Temple is to be a combination of Church and Skyscraper, Religion and Revenue, Salvation and 5 Percent — ^and the 5 percent is based on ethical Christian grounds.” The five percent, they hastened to add, was also based on a gilt-edged real- estate mortgage; the salvation, however, was, we may suppose, a speculative profit.
2. The Family
The family is the inner citadel of religious authority and there the churches have taken their most determined stand. Long after they had abandoned politics to Caesar and business to Mammon, they continued to insist upon their authority to fix the ideal of sexual relations; But here, too, the dissolution of their authority has pro-
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ceeded inexorably. They have lost their exclusive right to preside over marriages. They have not been able to maintain the dogma that marriage is indissoluble They are not able to prevent the remarriage of divorced persons. Although in many jurisdictions fornication and adultery are still crimes, there is no longer any serious attempt to enforce the statutes. The churches have failed in their in- sistence that sexual intercourse by married persons is a sin unless It IS validated by the willingness to beget a child. Except to the poorest and most ignorant the means of pre- venting conception are available to all. There is no longer any compulsion to regard the sexual life as within the jurisdiction of the commissioners of the Lord.
Religious teachers knew long ago what modern psychol- ogists have somewhat excitedly rediscovered, that there is a very intimate connection between the sexual life and the religious life. Only men living m a time when religion has lost so much of its inward vitality could be shocked at this simple truth, for the churches, when their inspiration was fresh,, have always known it. That is why they have laid such tremendous emphasis upon the religious control of sexual experience, have extolled chastity, have preached continence after marriage except where parenthood was m view, have inveighed against tornication, adultery, divorce, and all unprocreative indulgence, have insisted that mar- riages be celebrated within the communion, have upheld the parental authority over children. They were not prud- ish That is a state of mind which marks the decay of vigorous determination to control the sexual life. The early teachers did not avert their eyes. They did not mince their words. For they knew what they were doing.
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Men like St. Paul and St. Augustine knew in the most direct way what sexual desire can do to distract the reli- gious life; how if it is not sternly regulated, and if it is allowed to run wild, it intoxicates the whole personality to the exclusion of spiritual interests. They knew, too, although perhaps not quite so explicitly, that these same passions, if they are repressed and redireaed, may come forth as an ecstasy of religious devotion. They were not reformers. They did not think of progress. They did nor suppose that the animal in man could somehow be refined until It was no longer animal. When Paul spoke of the law of his members warring against the law of his mind, and bringing him into captivity to the law of sin, he had made a realistic observation which any candid person can verify out of his own experience. There was no vague finical nonsense about this war of the members against the inward man seeking delight in the law of God.
If the sexual impulse were not deeply related to the reli- gious life, the preoccupation of churchmen with it through- out the ages would be absurd. They have not been pre- occupied in any comparable degree with the other physi- ological functions of the body. They have concerned themselves somewhat with eating and drinking, for glut- tony and drunkenness can also distract men from religion. But hunger and thirst are minor passions, far more easily satisfied than lust, and in no way so pervasive and imperi- ous. The world, the flesh, and the devil may usually be taken to mean sexual desire. Around it, then, the churches have built up a rimal, to dominate it lest they be domi- nated by it. Tenaciously and with good reason they have fought against surrendermg their authority.
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With equally great insight they have kept the closest possible association with family life especially during the childhood of the ojffspring. Here again they anticipated by many long ages the discoveries of modern psychologists. They have always known that it is in the earliest years, before puberty, that tradition is transmitted. Much is learned after puberty, but in childhood education is more than mere learning. There education is the growth of the disposition, the fixing of the prejudices to which all later experience is cumulative. In childhood men acquire the forms of their seeing, the prototypes of their feeling, the style of their charaaer. There presumably the very pat- tern of authority itself is implanted by habit, fitted to the model presented by the child’s parents. There the as- sumption is fixed that there are wiser and stronger beings whom, in the nature of things, one must obey. There the need to obey is fixed. There the whole drift of experience is such as to make credible the idea that above the child there is the father, above the father a king and the wise men, above them all ar heavenly Father and King.
It IS plain that any change which disturbs the consti- tution of the home will tend profoundly to alter the child’s sense of what he may expect the constitution of the universe to be. There are many disturbing changes of which none is more important surely than the emanci- pation of women. The God of popular religion has usually been an elderly male. There have been some fe- male divimties worshipped in different parts of the world as there have been matriarchal societies. But by and large the imagination of men has conceived God as a father. They have magnified to a cosmic scale what they
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had seen at home. It was the male who created the child. It was his seed that the mother cherished in her womb. It was the male who provided for the needs of the fam- ily, even if the woman did the hard work. It was the male who fended off enemies. It was the male who laid down the law. It was the name of the male parent which was preserved and passed on from generation to genera- tion. Everything conspired to fix the belief that the true order of life was a hierarchy with a man at the apex.
This general notion becomes less and less credible as women assert themselves. The child of the modern household is soon made to see that there are at least two persons who can give him orders, and that they do not always give him the same ones. This does not educate him to believe that there is one certain guide to condua in the universe. There are likely to be two guides to conduct in his universe, as women insist that they are in- dependent personalities with minds of their own. This insistence, moreover, tends rather to disarrange the notion that the father is the creator of the child. An observant youngster, especially in these days of frank talk about sex, soon becomes aware of the fact that the role of the male in procreation is a relatively minor one. But most disturb- ing of all is the very modern household in which the woman earns her own living. For here the child is de- prived of the opportunity, which is so conducive to belief in authority, of seeing daily that even his mother is de- pendent upon a greater person for the good things in life.
Although women, by and large, are by no means able to earn as much money as men, the fact which counts is that they can earn enough to support themselves. They
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may not actually support themselves. But the knowledge that they could, as it becomes an accepted idea in society, has revolutionary consequences. In former times the woman was dependent upon her husband for bed, board, shelter, ^ and clothing. Her whole existence was deter- mined by her mating, her sexual experience was an inte- gral part of her livelihood and her social position But once it had become established that a woman could live without a husband, the intimate conneaion between her sex and her career began to dissolve.
The invention of dependable methods of preventing conception has carried this dissolution much further. Birth control has separated the sexual act from the whole series of social consequences which were once probable if not inevitable. For with the discovery that children need be born only when they are wanted, the sexual ex- perience has become increasingly a personal and private affair. It was once an institutional affair — for the woman. For the man, from time immemorial, there have been two sorts of sexual experience — one which had no public con- sequences, and one which entailed the responsibilities of a family. The effect of the modern changes, particularly of woman's economic independence and of birth control, is to equalize the freedom and the obligations of men and women.
That the sexual life has become separated from parent- hood and that therefore it is no longer subject to external regulation, is evident. While the desires of men and women for each other were links in a chain which included the family and the household and children, authority, and by that token religious authority, could hope to fix the sex-
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ual ideal. When the chain broke, and love had no conse- quences which were not too subtle for the outsider to measure, the ideal of love was fixed not by the church in the name of God, but by prudence, convention, the prevailing rules of hygiene, by taste, circumstances, and personal sensibility.
3. An
(a) The Disappearance of Religious Painting To walk through a museum of Western European art is to behold a peculiarly vivid record of how the great themes of popular religion have ceased to inspire the imag- ination of modern men. One can visualize there the whole story of the dissolution of the ancestral order and of our present bewilderment. One can see how toward the close of the Fifteenth Century the great themes illustrating the reign of a heavenly king and of the drama of man’s sal- vation had ceased to be naively believed ; how at the close of the next century which witnessed the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the beginmngs of modern science, the growth of cities, and the rise of capitalism, religious pamting ceased to be the concern of the best painters; and finally how in the last hundred years painters have illustrated by feverish experimentation the modern man’s effort to find an adequate substitute for the organizing principle of the religion which he has lost.
It has been said by way of explanation that painters must sell their work, and they must, therefore, paint what the rich and powerful will buy. Thus it is pointed out that in the Middle Ages they worked under the patronage of the Church; in the Renaissance their patrons were pagan-
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ized princes and popes, and artists made piaures which, even when the theme was religious, were no longer Chris- tian m spirit. Later in the north of Europe the bourgeoisie •acquired money and station, and the Dutch painters did their portraits, and made faithful representations of their kitchens and their parlors. A little later French painters at the Court of Versailles made pictures for courtiers, and in our time John Sargent painted the wives of million- aires. To say all this is to say that the ruling classes in the modern world are no longer interested in piaures which illustrate or are inspired by the religion they profess.
This attempt at an explanation in terms of supply and demand may or may nor be sound for the ordinary run of painters. It leaves out of account, however, those very painters who are the most significant and interesting. It leaves out of account the painters who, by heroic refusal to supply the existing market, deserve universal respect, and in many cases have won an ultimate public vindica- tion. These men do not fit into the theory of supply and demand, for they endured poverty and derision in order to paint what they most wanted to paint. They are not of the tribe, which Mr. Walter Pach calls Ananias, who be- tray the truth that is in them. But for that trudi they did not draw upon the themes nor the sense of life which almost all of them must have been taught when they were children. They did not paint religious pictures. They painted landscapes, streets, interiors, still life, heads, per- sons, nudes. Whatever else they perceived and tried to express, they did not see their objeas m the perspective of human destiny and divine government. There is no reason, then, to say that religious painting, even in the
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broadest sense of the term, has disappeared because there is no effective demand for it Obviously it has dis- appeared because the will to produce it has disappeared.
(^) The Loss of a Heritage In setting the religious tradition aside as something with which they are not concerned when they are at work, artists are merely behaving like modern men. It is plain that the religious tradition has become progressively less relevant to anyone who as painter or sculptor is engaged in making images. This is a direct result of .that increasing sophistication of religious thought which was signalized in Europe by the iconoclasm of the Protestant reformers and the puritanism of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Before the acids of modernity had begun to dissolve the organic reality of the ancient faith, there was no difficulty about picturing God the Father as a patriarch and the Vir- gin Mary as a young blonde Tuscan motlier. There was no disposition to disbelieve, and so the imagination was at once nourished by a great heritage of ideas and yet free to elaborate it. But when the authority of the old beliefs was challenged, a great literature of controversy and definition was let loose upon the world. And from the point of view of the artist the chief effect of this effort to argue and to state exactly, to defend and to rebut, was to substitute concepts for pictorial ideas. When the nature of God became a matter of definition, it was obviously crude and illiterate to represent him as a benign old man, Thus the more the theologians refined the dogmas of their religion the more impossible they made it for painters to express its significance. No painter who ever lived could
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make a picture which expressed the religion of the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick. There is nothing there which the visual imagination can use.
Painters have, therefore, a rather better reason than most men for having turned dieir backs upon the religious tradition. They can say with a clear conscience that the contemporary churches have removed from that tradition those very qualities which once made it an inexhaustible source of artistic inspiration. They need only point to modern religious writing in their own support: at its best it has the qualities of an impassioned argument and more often it is intolerably flat and vague because in our intel- lectual climate skepticism dissolves the concreteness of the imagery and leaves behind sonorous adjectives and opaque nouns.
The full effects of this separation of the artist from the ancient traditions of Christendom have been felt only in the last two or three generations. It is no doubt true that the modern disbelief had its beginnings many generations ago, perhaps in the Fifteenth Century, but the momentum of the ancient faith was so great that it took a long time, even after corrosive doubt had started, before its influence came to an end. The artists of the Seventeenth and Eight- eenth Centuries may not have been devout, but they lived in a society in which the forms of die old order, the hier- archy of classes, the sense of authority, and the general fund of ideas about human destiny, still had vast prestige. But in the Nineteenth Century that old order was almost completely dissolved and the prestige of its ideas de- stroyed. The artist of the last two or three generations has confronted the world without any accepted understanding
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of human life. He has had to improvise his own under- standing of life. That is a new thing in the experience of arusts.
(c) The Artist Formerly
In 787 the Second Council of Nicasa laid down the rule which for nearly five hundred years was binding upon the artists of Christendom;
The substance of religious scenes is not left to the initia- tive of the artists, it derives from the principles laid down by the Catholic Church and religious tradition. . . . His art alone belongs to the painter, its organization and arrangement belong to the clergy.
This was a reasonable rule, since the Church and not the individual was held to be the guardian of those sacred truths upon which depended the salvation of souls and the safety of society. The notion had occurred to nobody that the artist was divinely inspired and knew more than the doctors of the church. Therefore, the artist was given careful specifications as to what he was to represent.
Thus when the Church of St. Urban of Troyes decided to order a set of tapestries illustrating the story of St. Valerian and of his wife, St. Cealia, a learned priest was deputed to draw up the contraa for the artist. In it he wrote among other specifications that: "there shall be por- trayed a place and a tabernacle in the manner of a beauti- ful room, in which there shall be St. Ceciha, humbly on her knees with her hands joined, praying to God. And beside her shall be Valerian expressing great admiration and watching an angel which, being above their heads, should be holding two crowns made of lilies and of roses,
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which he will be placing the one on the head of St. Cecilia and the other on the head of Valerian, her husband. . . .”
The rest, one might suppose, was left to the artist’s imagination. But it was not. Havmg been given his sub- jea matter and his theme, he was bound further by strict conventions as to how sacred subjeas were to be depiaed. Jesus on the Cross had to be shown with his mother on the right and St. John on the left. The centurion pierced his left side. His nimbus contained a cross, as the mark of divinity, whereas the samts had the nimbus without a cross. Only God, the angels, Jesus Christ, and the Apostles could be represented with bare feet; it was heretical to de- pia the Virgin or the Saints with bare feet. The purpose of these conventions was to help the speaator identify the figures in the picture. Thus St. Peter was given a short beard and a tonsure; St. Paul was bald and had a long beard. It is possible that these conventions, which were immensely intricate, were actually codified in manuals which were passed on from master to apprentice in the workshops.
As a general rule the ecclesiastics who drew up specifi- cations did not invent the themes. Thus the learned priest who drafted the contraa for the tapestry of St. Cecilia drew his material from the encyclopedia of Vmcent de Beau- vais. This was a compendium of universal Imowledge covering the whole of history from Creation to the Last Judgment. It was a source book to which any man could turn in order to find the truth he happened to need. It contained all of human knowledge and the answer to all human problems. By the Thirteenth Century there were a number of these encyclopedias, of which the greatest was
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the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas. From these books churchmen took the themes which they employed their artists to embellish. The artist himself had no concern as to what he would paint, nor even as to how he would paint It. Thar was given, and his energies could be employed without the travail of intellectual invention, upon the task of depressing a clear conception in well-established forms.
It must not be supposed, of course, that either doarines, lore, or symbolism were uniformly standardized and exactly enforced. In an age of faith, contradiaions and discrepancies are not evident; they are merely variations on the same theme. Thus, while it may be true that en- thusiastic mediasvalists like M. Male have exaggerated the order and symmetry of the mediaeval tradition, they are right, ■surely, on the mam point, which is that the or- ganic character of the popular religion provided a con- sensus of feeling about human destiny which, in conjunc- tion with the resources of the popular lore, sustained and organized the imagination of mediaeval artists. Because religious faith was simple and genuine, it could absorb and master almost anything. Thus the clergy ruled the artists with a relatively light hand, and they were not disturbed if, in illuminating the pages of a Book of Hours, the artist adorned the margins with a picture of Bacchus or the love of Pyramus and Thisbe.
It was only when the clergy had been made self-con- scious by the controversies which raged around the Refor- mation that they began in any strict and literally-minded modern sense to enforce the rule laid down at Nicsea in 787. At the Council of Trent in 1563 the great liberty of the artist within the Christian tradition came to an end:
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The Holy Council forbids the placing in a church of any image which calls to mind an erroneous dogma which might mislead the simple-minded. It desires that all impurity be avoided, that piovocative qualities be not given to images In order to insure respect for its decisions, the Holy Council forbids anyone to place or to have placed anywhere, and even m churches which are not open to the public, any unusual image unless the bishop has approved it
In theory this decree at Trent is not far removed from the decree at Nicsea nearly one thousand years earlier. But in fact it is a whole world removed from it. For the dogmas at Nicaea rested upon naive faith and the dogmas at Trent rested upon definition. The outcome showed the difference, for within a generation Catholic scholars made a critical survey of the lore which mediaeval art had em- ployed, and on grounds of taste, doctrine, and the like, condemned the greater part of it. After that, as M. Male says, there might still be artists who were Christians but there was no longer a Christian art.
(d) The Artist as Prophet
Whether the necessity of creating his own tradition is a good or a bad thing for the artist, there can be no doubt that it is a novel thing and a burdensome one. Artists have responded to it by proclaiming one of two theories: they have said that the artist, being a genius, was a prophet; when they did not say that, they said that reli- gion, morality, and philosophy were irrelevant, and that art should be practiced for art’s sake. Both tlieories are obviously attempts to find some personal substitute for those traditions upon which artists in all other ages have been dependent.
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The theory of the artist as prophet has this serious de- fea: there is praaically no evidence to support it. Why should there be? What connection is there between the capacity to make beautiful objects and the capacity to dis- cover truth? Surely experience sho^s that it is something of a marvel when a great artist appears who, like Leonardo or Goethe, is also an original and important thinker. In- deed, it is reasonable to ask whether the analysis and ab- straction which thinking involves are not radically difiter- ent psychological processes from the painter’s passionate appreciation of the appearance of things. Certainly to think as physicists think is to strip objects of all their sec- ondary characters, not alone of their emotional signifi- cance, but of their color, their texmre, their fragrance, and even of their superficial forms. The world as we know it through our senses has completely disappeared before the physicist begins to think about it. And in its place there is a colleaion of concepts which have no pictorial value whatsoever. These concepts are by definition incapable of being visualized, and when as a concession to human weakness, his own or his pupil’s, the scientist construas a mechanical model to illustrate an idea, this model is at best a crude analogy, and in no real sense the portrait of that idea.
Thus when Shelley made Earth say;
I spin beneath my pyramid of night.
Which points mto the heavens . . .
he borrowed an image from astronomy. But this image, which is, I think, superb poetry, radically alters the orig- inal scientific idea, for it introduces into a realm of purely
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physical relations the notion of a gigantic speaator with a vastly magnified human eye. There are, no doubt, many other concepts in science which, if poets knew more science, would lend themselves to translation into equally noble images. But these images would not state the scien- tific truth.
The current belief that artists are prophets is an inher- itance from the time when science had no critical method of its own, and poets, being reflective persons, had at least as good a chance as anyone else of stumbling upon truths which were subsequently verified. It is due in some measure also to the human tendency to remember the happy guesses of poets and to forget their unhappy ones, a tendency which has gone far to sustain the reputations of fortune-tellers, oracles, and stockbrokers. But above all, the reputation of the artist as one who must have wis- dom is sustained by a rather gemal fallacy: he finds ex- pression for the feelings of the speaator, and the speaator rather quickly assumes that the artist has found an expla- nation for the world.
Yet unless I am greatly mistaken the modern painter has ceased not only to depict any theory of destiny but has ceased to express any important human mood in the pres- ence of destiny. One goes to a museum and comes out feeling that one has beheld an odd assortment of nude bodies, copper kettles, oranges, tomatoes, and zinnias, babies, street corners, apple trees, bathmg beaches, bank- ers, and fashionable ladies. I do not say that this person or that may not find a picture immensely sigmficant to him. But the general impression for anyone, I think is of a chaos of anecdotes, perceptions, fantasies, and little
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commentaries, which may be all very well in their way, but are not sustaining and could readily be dispensed with.
The conclusive answer to the romantic theory of the artist as prophet is a visit to a collection of modern paintings.
(^) Art for Art^s Sake
This brings us to the other theory, which is that art has nothing to do with prophecy, wisdom, and the meaning of life, but has to do only with art. This theory must command an altogether different kind of respect than the sentimental theory of the artist as prophet. This indeed is the theory which most artists now hold. *1 am con- vinced,” says Mr. R. H. Wilenski in his book The Modern Movement in Artj ”that all the most intelligent artists of Western Europe in recent centuries have been tor- mented by this search for a justification of their work and a criterion of its value; and that almost all such artists have attempted to solve the problem by some consciously- held idea of art; or in other words that in place of art justified by service to a religion they have sought to evolve an art justified by service to an idea of art itself.”
The instma of artists in this matter is, I think, much sounder than the rationalizations which they have con- structed. As working artists they do not think of them- selves as seers, philosophers, or« moralists. They do not wish to be judged as thinkers, but as painters, and they are justifiably impatient with the Philistines who are inter- ested primarily in the subject matter and its human sig- nificance. The painter knows quite well that in the
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broadly human sense he has no special qualifications as story-teller or wise man. What he is driving at, there- fore, in his expression of contempt for the subject matter of art is the wish that he might again be in the position of the mediffival artist who did not have to concern himself as artist with the significance of his themes. The inmi- tion behind the theory of art for art’s sake is die artist’s wish to be free of a responsibility which he has never before had put upon him. The peculiar circumstances of modernity have thrust upon him, much against his will and regardless of his aptitudes, the intolerably heavy bur- den of doing for himself what in other ages was done for him by tradition and authority.
The philosophy which he has invented is an attempt to prove that no philosophy is necessary. Carried to its con- clusion, this theory eventuates m die belief that painting must become an arrangement of forms and colors which have no human connotation whatsoever for the artist or the spectator. These arrangements represent nothing in the real world. They signify nothing. They are an esthetic artifice in the same sense that the more esoteric geometries are logical artifices. This much can at least be said of them: they are a consistent effort to practice the arts in a world where there is no human tradition upon which the representative arts can draw.
This absolute estheticism is not, however, art without philosophy. Some sort of philosophy is implied in ad human activity. The artist who says that it is delightful above all other things to realize the pure form of objects, regardless of whether this object is a saint, a lovely woman, or a dish of fruit, has made a very important
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statement about life. He has said that the ordinary meanings which men attach to objects are of no conse- cjuence, that their order of moral values is ultimately a delusion, that all facts are equally good and equally bad, and that to contemplate anything, it does not matter what, under the aspect of its esthetic form, is to realize all that the artist can give.
This, too, is a philosophy and a very radical philosophy at that. It is in faa just the philosophy which men were bound to construct for themselves in an age when the traditional theory of the purpose of life had lost its mean- ing for them. For they are saying that experience has no meaning beyond that which each man can find in the intense realization of each passing moment. He must fail, they would feel, if he attempts to connea these pass- ing moments mto a coherent story of his whole experience, let alone the whole experience of the human race. For experience has no underlying sigmficance, man himself has no station in the universe, and the universe has no plan which is more than a drift of circumstances, illu- minated here and there by flashes of self-consciousness.
(/) The Burden of Originality As a matter of faa this doarine is merely the esthetic version of the rather crude mechanistic materialism which our grandfathers thought was the final conclusion of sci- ence. The conneaion is made evident in the , famous Conclusions to The Renaissance which Walter Pater wrote in 1868, and then omitted from the second edi- tion because "it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall.” In this
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essay there was the startling, though it is now hackneyed, assertion that "to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life," and that "of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.” What is never quoted, and is apparently forgotten, is the reasoning by which Pater arrived at the conclusion that momentary ecstasy is the end and aim of life. It is, if we turn back a few pages, that scientific analysis has reduced everything to a mere swarm of whirling atoms, upon which consaousness dis- cerns impressions that are "unstable, flickering, incon- sistent.” It was out of this misunderstanding of the nature of scientific concepts that Pater developed his theory of art for the moment’s sake.
I dwell upon this only in order to show that what appeared to be an estheticism divorced from all human concern was really a somewhat casual by-produa of a fashionable misunderstandmg at the time Pater was writ- ing. We should find that to-day equally far-reaching conclusions are arrived at by half-understood populariza- tions of Bergson or Freud. I venture to believe that any theory of art is inevitably implicated in some philosophy of life, and that the only question is whether the artist IS conscious or unconscious of the theory he is acting upon. For unless the amst deals with purely logical essences, provided he observes and perceives anything in the outer world, no matter how he represents it or symbolizes it or comments upon it, there must be implicit in it some atti-
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tude toward the meaning of existence. If his conclusion IS that human existence has no meaning, that, too, is an attitude toward the meaning of existence. The mediaeval artist worked on much less tangled premises. He painted pictures which illustrated the great hopes and fears of Christendom. But he did not himself attempt to formu- late those hopes and fears. He accepted them more or less ready made, understanding them and believing in them because, as a child of his age, they were his hopes and fears. But because they existed and were there for him to work upon, he could put his whole energy into realizing them passionately. The modern artist would like to have the same freedom from preoccupation, but he cannot have it. He has first to decide what it is that he shall passionately realize.
In effect the mediaeval artist was reproducing a story that had often been told before. But the modern artist has to undergo a whole preliminary labor of inventing, creating, formulating, for which there was almost no counterpart in the life of a mediaeval artist. The modern artist has to be origmal. That is to say, he has to seize experience, pick it over, and drag from it his theme. It is a very exhausting task, as anyone can testify who has tried it.
That surely is why we hear so much of the storm and stress in the soul of a modern artist. The craftsman does not go through agonies over the choice of words, images, and rhythms. The agony of the modern artist lies in the effort to give birth to the idea, to bring some intuition of order out of the chaos of experience, to create the idea with which his art can deal. We assume,
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quite falsely I think, that this act of 'creation’ is an inher- ent part of the artist’s task. But if we refrain from using words loosely, and reserve the word creation to mean the finding of the original intuition and idea, then creation is plainly not a necessary part of the artist’s equipment. Creation is an obligation which the artist has had thrust upon him as a result of the dissolution of the great accepted themes. He is compelled to be creative because his world is chaotic.
This labor of creation has no connection with his gifts as a painter. There is no more reason why a painter should be able to extemporize a satisfactory interpretation of life than that he should be able to govern a city or write a treatise on chemistry. Giotto surely was as pro- foundly original a painter as the world is likely to see; it has been said of him by Mr. Berenson, who has full title to speak, that he had "a thoroughgoing sense for the significant in the visible world ” But with ail his genius, what would have been Giotto’s plight if, in addition to exercising his sense of the significant, he had had to create for hiinseif all his standards of significance? For Giotto those standards existed in the Catholic Christianity of the Thirteenth Century, and it was by the measure of these standards, within the framework of a great accepted tradition, that he followed his own personal sense of the significant But the modern artist, though he had Giotto’s gifts, would not have Giotto’s freedom to use them. A very large part of his energies, consciously or uncon- sciously, would have to be spent in devising some sort of substitute for the traditional view of life which Giotto took for granted. For there is no longer an accepted view of
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life organized m stories which all men know and under- stand.
There is instead a profusion of creeds and philosophies, fads and intellectual experiments among which the mod- ern painter, like every other modern man, finds himself trying to choose a philosophy of life. Everybody is some- what dithered by these choices: the busmess of being a Shavian one year, a Nietzschean the next, a Bergsonian the third, then of being a patriot for the duration of the war, and after that a Freudian, is not conducive to the serene exercise of a painter’s talents. For these various philosophies which the artist picks up here and there, or by which he is oftener than not picked up and carried along, are immensely in dispute. They are not clear. They are rather personal and somewhat accidental visions of the world. They are essentially unpictorial because they originate in science and are incompleted, abstracted teachings for the meamng of things. As a result the art in which they are implicit is often uninteresting, and usually unintelligible, to those who do not happen to belong to the same cult.
The painter can hardly expect to invent for himself a view of life which will bring order out of the chaos of modernity. Yet he is compelled to try, for he is engaged in setting down a vision of the world, and every vision of the world implies some sort of philosophy. The effects of the modern emancipation are more clearly evident in the history of painting during the last hundred years than in almost any other activity, because in the galleries hang in frames the successive attempts of men, who are deeply immersed in the modern scene, to set down their
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statements about life. Mr. Wilenski, who is an astute and well-informed critic, has estimated that during the last hundred years in Pans a new movement in painting has been inaugurated every ten years. That would correspond fairly accurately to the birth and death of new philoso- phies in the advanced and most emancipated circles.
What was happening to painting is precisely what has happened to all the other separated activities of men. Each activity has its own ideal, indeed a succession of ideals, for with the dissolution of the supreme ideal of service to God, there is no ideal which unites them all, and sets them in order. Each ideal is supreme within a sphere of Its own. There is no point of reference outside which can determine the relative value of competing ideals. The modern man desires health, he desires money, he desires power, beauty, love, truth, but which he shall desire the most smce he cannot pursue them all to their logical conclusions, he no longer has any means of decid- ing. His impulses are no longer parts of one atatude toward life; his ideals are no longer in a hierarchy under one lordly ideal. They have become differentiated. They are free and they are incommensurable.
The religious synthesis has dissolved. The modern man no longer holds a belief about the universe which sustams a pervasive emotion about his destiny; he no longer believes genuinely in any idea which organizes his interests within the framework of a cosmic order.
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CHAPTER VII
THE DRAMA OF DESTINY
1. The Soul in the Modern World The effect of modernity, then, is to specialize and thus to intensify our separated aaivities. Once all things were phases of a single destiny: the church, the state, the fam- ily, the school were means to the same end; the rights and duties of the individual in society, the rules of moral- ity, the themes of art, and the teachings of science were all of them ways of revealing, of celebrating, of applymg the laws laid down in the divine constitution of the uni- verse. In the modern world institutions are more or less independent, each serving its own proximate purpose, and our culture is really a colleaion of separate interests each sovereign within its own realm. We do not put shrines in our workshops, and we think it unseemly to talk busi- ness in the vestibule of a church. We dislike politics in the pulpit and preachmg from politicians. We do not look upon our scholars as priests or upon our priests as learned men. We do not expea science to sustain theology, nor religion to dominate art. On the contrary we insist with much fervor on the separation of church and state, of religion and science, of politics and historical research, of morality and art, of business and love. This separation of activities has its counterpart in a separation of selves; the life of a modern man is not so much the
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history of a single soul; it is rather a play of many charac- ters within a single body.
That may be why the modern autobiographical novel usually runs to two volumes; the author requires more space to explain how his various personalities came to be what they were at each little crisis of adolescence and of middle age than St. Augustine, St. Thomas a Kempis, and St. Francis put together needed in order to describe their whole destiny in this world and the next. No doubt we are rather long-winded and tiresome about the com- plexities of our souls. But from the knowledge that we are complex there is no escape.
The modern man is unable any longer to think of him- self as a single personality, approaching an everlasting judgment. He is one man to-day and another to-morrow, one person here and another there. He does not feel he knows himself. He is sure that no one else knows him at all. His motives are intricate, and not wholly what they seem. He is moved by impulses which he feels but cannot describe. There are dark depths in his nature which no one has ever explored. There are splendors which are unreleased. He has become greatly interested in his moods. The precise nuances of his likes and dis- likes have become very important. There is no telling just what he is or what he may become, but there is a cenain breathless interest in having one of his selves watch and comment upon the mischief and the frustra- tions of his other selves. The problems of his character have become dissociated from any feeling that they involve his immortal destiny. They have become dissociated from the feeling that they deeply matter. From the feeling that
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they are deeply his own. From the feelmg that there is any personality to own them. There they are: his inferi- ority complex and mine, your sadistic impulse and Tom Jones’s, Anna’s father fixation, and little Willie’s pyromania.
The thoroughly modern man has really ceased to believe that there is an immortal essence presiding like a king over his appetites. The w’^ord 'soul’ has become a figure of speech, which he uses loosely, sometimes to mean his tenderer aspirations, sometimes to mean the whole collec- tion of his impulses, sometimes, when he is in a hurry, to mean nothing at all. It is certainly not the fashion any longer to think of the soul as a little lord ruling the turbulent rabble of his carnal passions; the constitutional form in popular psychology to-day is republican. Each impulse may invoke the Bill of Rights, and have its way if the others will let it. ‘ As Bertrand Russell has put it; "A single desire is no better and no worse, considered in isolation, than any odier; but a group of desires is better than another group if all of the first group can be satisfied, while in the second group some are inconsistent with others,” but since, unhappily as is usually the case, desires are extremely inconsistent, the uttermost that the modern man can say is that the victory must go to the strongest desires. Morality thus becomes a traffic code designed to keep as many desires as possible moving together with- out too many violent collisions. When men insist that morality is more than that, they are quickly denounced, in general correctly, as Med^esome Matties, as enemies of human liberty, or as schemers trying to get the better of their fellow men. Morality, conceived as a disapline
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to fit mai for heaven, is resented; morality, conceived as a discipline for happiness, is understood by very few. The objeaive moral certitudes have dissolved, and in the liberal philosophy there is nothmg to take their place.
2. The Great Scenario
The modem world is like a stage on whidi a stupendous play has just been presented. Many who were in the audience are sail spellbound, and as they pass out into the street, the scenario of the drama still seems to them the very clue and plan of life. In the prologue the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Then at the command of ‘God the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, its plants and its animals, then man, and after him woman, were created. And in the ^ilogue the blessed were living in the New Jerusalem, a city of pure gold like clear glass, with walls laid on foundations of precious stones. Between the darkness that preceded aeation and the glory of this heavenly city which had no need of the sun, a plot was unfolded which constitutes the history of mankind. In the beginning man was perfect. But the devil tempted him to eat the for- bidden fruit, and as a punishment God banished him from paradise, and laid upon him and his descendants the curse of labor and of death.
But in meting out this punishment, God in his mercy promised ultimately to redeem the children of Adam. From among them he chose one tribe who were to be the custodians of this promise. And then in due time he sent his Son, bom of a Virgin, to teach the gospel of salvation, and to expiate the sm of Adam upon a cross.
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Those who believed in this gospel and followed its com- mandments, would at the final day of reckoning enter into the heavenly Jerusalem; the rest would be consigned to the devil and his everlasting torments.
Into this marvelous story the whole of human history and of human knowledge could be fitted, and only in accordance with it could they be understood. This was the key to existence, the answer to doubt, the solace for pain, and the guarantee of happiness. But to many who were m tlie audience it is now evident that they have seen a play, a magnificent play, one of the most sublime ever created by the human imagination, but never- theless a pla/, and not a literal account of human destiny. They know it was a play. They have lingered long enough to see the scene shifters at work. The painted drop IS half rolled up; some of the turrets of the cetestial city can still be seen, and part of the choir of angels. But behind them, plainly visible, are the struts and gears which held in place what under a gentler light looked like the boundaries of the universe. They are only human fears and human hopes, and bits of antique science and half-forgotten history, and symbols here and there of experiences through which some in each generation pass.
Conceivably men might once again imagine another drama which was as great as the epic of the Christian Bible. But like Paradise Lost or Faust, it would remain a work of the imagination. While the intelleaual climate in which we live is what it is, while we continue to be as conscious as we are of how our own minds work, we could nor again accept naively such a gorgeous fable of our destiny. Yet only five hundred years ago the whole
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of Christendom believed that this story was literally and objeaively true. God was not another name for the evo- lutionary process, or for the sum total of the laws of nature, or for a compendium of all noble things, as he is in modernist accounts of him; he was the ruler of the universe, an omnipotent, magical King, who felt, who thought, who remembered and issued his commands. And because there was such a God, whose plan was clearly revealed in all its essentials, human life had a definite meaning, morality had a certain foundation, men felt themselves to be livmg within the framework of a universe which they called divine because it corresponded with their deepest desires.
If we ask ourselves why it is impossible for us to sum up the meaning of existence in a great personal drama, we have to begin by remembering that every great story of this kind must assume that the universe is governed by forces which are essentially of the same order as the promptings of the human heart. Otherwise it would not greatly interest us. A story, however plausible, about beings who had no human qualities, a plot which unfolded itself as utterly indiflferent to our own personal fate, would not serve as a substimte for the Christian epic. This is the trouble with the so-called religion of creative evolution: even if it is true, which is far from certain, it is so profoundly indifferent to our individual fate, that it leaves most men cold. For there are very few who are so mystical as to be able to sink diemselves wholly in the hidden purposes of an unconscious natural force. This, too, as the Catholic Church has always insisted, is the trouble with pantheistic religion, for if everything is
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divine, then nothing is peculiarly divine, and all the dis- tinctions of good and evil are* meaningless.
The story must not only assume that human ideals inspire the whole creation, but it must contain guarantees that this is so. There must be no doubt about it. Science must confirm the moral assumptions; the highest and most certain available knowledge must clinch the convic- tion that the story unfolded is the secret of life.
3. Earmarks of Truth
Religious teachers who were close to the people have always understood that they must perform wonders if they were to make their God convincing and their own title to speak for him valid. The writer of Exodus, for exam- ple, was quite clear in his mind about this;
And Moses answered and said, But, behold, they will not believe me, nor hearken unto my voice: for they will say, The Lord hath not appeared unto thee.
And the Lord said unto him, What is that in thine hand? And he said, A rod.
And he said, Cast it on the ground. And he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it.
And the Lord said unto Moses, Put forth thine hand, and take it by the tail. And he put forth his hand, and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand:
That they may believe that the Lord God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath appeared unto thee.
Even in the wildest flights of his fanqr the common man is almost always primarily interested m the prosaic consequences. If he ^lieves in fairies he is not likely
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to imagine them as spirits inhabiting a world apart, but as litde people who do things which affea his own affairs. The common man is an unconscious pragmatist: he believes because he is satisfied that his beliefs change the course of events. He would not be inspired to worship a god who merely contemplates the universe, or a god who created it once, and then rested, while its destiny unfolds itself inexorably. To the plain people religion is not disinterested speculation but a very practical matter. It is concerned with their well-being in this world and in an equally concrete world hereafter. They have wanted to know the will of God because they had to know it if they were to put themselves right with* the king of creation.
Those who professed to know God’s will had.to demon- strate that they knew it. This was the function of mira- cles. They were tangible evidence that the religious teacher had a true commission. 'Then those men, when they had seen the miracle (of the loaves and the fishes) that Jesus did, said, This is of a truth that prophet that should come into the world.” When Jesus raised the dead man at the gate of the city of Nain, "there came a fear on all: and they glorified God, saying. That a great prophet is risen up among us; and. That God hath visited his people.” The most authoritative Catfiohc theologians teach that miracles "are not wrought to show the internal truth of the doctrines, but only to give manifest reasons why we should accept the doarines.” They are "essen- tially an appeal to knowledge,” demonstrations, one might almost say divine experiments, by which men are enabled to know the glory and the providence of God.
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The Catholic apologists maintain that God can be known by the exercise of re^on, but the miracle helps, as it w'ere, to clinch the conviction. The persistent attach- ment of the Catholic Church to miracles is significant. It has a longer unbroken experience with human nature than any other institution in the western world. It has adapted itself to many circumstances, and under the pro- fession of an unalterable creed it has abandoned and Aen added much. But it has never ceased to insist upon the need of a physical manifestation of the divine power. For with an unerring instinct for realities, Catholic church- men have understood that there is a residuum of prosaic, matter-of-facmess, of a need to touch and to see, which verbal proofs can never quite satisfy. They have reso- lutely responded to that need. They have not preached God merely by praising him; they have brought God near to men by revealing him to the senses, as one who is great enough and good, enough and sufficiently inter- ested in them to heal the sick and to make the floods recede.
But to-day scientists are ever so much superior to church- men at this kind of demonstration. The miracles which are recounted from the pulpit were, after all, few and far between. There are even theologians who teach that miracles ceased with the death of the Apostles. But the miracles of science seem to be inexhaustible. It is not surprising, then, that men of science should have acquired much of the intellectual authority which churchmen once exercised. Scientists do not, of course, speak of their discoveries as miracles. But to the common man they have much the same charaaer as miracles. They are"
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wonderful, they are inexplicable, they are manifestations of a great power over the forces of nature
It cannot be said, I think, that the people at large, even the moderately educated minority, understand the difference between scientific method and revelation, or that they have decided upon refleaion to trust saence. There is at least as much mystery in science for the com- mon man as there ever was in religion; in a sense there is more mystery, for the logic of science is still altogether beyond his understanding, whereas the logic of revelation is the logic of his own feelings. But if men at large do not understand the method of science, they can appreciate some of its more tangible results. And theSe results are so impressive that scientific men are often embarrassed by the unbounded popular expectations which they have so unintentionally aroused.
Their authority in the realm of knowledge has become virtually irresistible. And so when scientists teach- one theory and the Bible another, the scientists invariably carry the greater conviaion.
4. On Reconciling Religion and Science The conflicts between scientists and churchmen are sometimes ascribed to a misunderstanding on both sides. But when we examine the proposals for peace, it is plain, I think, that they are in effea proposals for a truce. There is, for example, the suggestion first put out, I believe, in the Seventeenth Century that God made the umverse like a clock, and that having started it running he will let it alone till it runs down. By this ingenious metaphor, which can neither be proved nor disproved,
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It was possible to reconcile for a time the scientific notion of natural law with the older notion of God as creator and as judge. The religious conception was held to be true for the beginning of the world and for the end, the scientific conception was true in between. Later, when the theatre of the difficulty was transferred from physics and astronomy to biology and history, a variation was propounded. God, it was said, created the world and governs it; the way he creates and governs is the way described by scientists as 'evolution.’
Attempts at reconciliations like these are based on a theory that it is feasible somewhere in the field of knowl- edge to drav/ a lirie and say that on one side the methods of science shall prevail, on the other the methods of traditional religion. It is acknowledged that where experiment and observation are possible, the field belongs to the scientists; but it is argued that there is a vast field of great interest to mankind which is beyond the reach of practical scientific inquiry, and that here, touching questions like the ultimate destiny of man, the purpose of life, and immortality, the older method of revelation, inspired and verified by mtuition, is still reliable.
In any truce of this sort there is bound to be aggres- sion from both sides. For it is a working policy rather than an inwardly accepted conviction. Scientists cannot really believe that there are fields of possible knowledge which they can never enter. They are bound to enter all fields and to explore everything. And even if they fail, they cannot believe that other scientists must always fail. Their essays, moreover, create disturbance and doubt which orthodox churchmen are forced to resent. For in
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any division of authority, there must be some ultimate authority to settle questions of jurisdiaion. Shall sci- entists determine what belongs to science, or shall churchmen? The question is insoluble as long as both claim that they have the right to expound the nature of existence.
And so while the policy of toleration may be tem- porarily workable, it is inherently unstable. Therefore, among men who are at once devoted to the method of science and sensitive to the human need of religion, the hope has arisen that something better can be worked out than a purely diplomatic division of the mind into spheres of influence. Mr. Whitehead, for example, in his book called Science and the Modern argues '‘there are
wider truths and finer perspectives within which a recon- ciliation of a deeper religion and a more subtle science will be found.'' He illustrates what he means in this fashion. Galileo said the earth moves and the sun is fixed; the Inquisition said the earth is fixed and the sun moves; the Newtonian astronomers said that both the sun and the earth move. “But now we say that any one of these three statements is equally true, provided you have fixed your sense of 'rest' and 'motion' in the way