PANTHEISM: THE SUICIDE OF RELIGION
In speaking of Deism, the theory which explicitly denies the Divine
immanence, we already had occasion to acknowledge that quality of
intelligibleness which makes this doctrine easy of assimilation, and
accounts, _e.g._, for the success of Islam, the deistic religion _par
excellence_, as a propagandist creed. There is, however, another
aspect of Deism, none the less real because it is not always recognised
at first sight, which perhaps an illustration will serve to bring home
to us. We all know what is likely to happen to an estate in the
owner's prolonged or permanent absence--it deteriorates; his active
interest and personal supervision are wanting, and the results are
visible everywhere. Sloth and mismanagement, which his presence would
check, go uncorrected, the daily duties are indifferently performed or
remain undone, and soon the property as a whole bears unmistakeable
traces of neglect. There is always the possibility of the master's
return some day, when he will exact an account from his servants; but
{42} the long interval which has elapsed since such a visit took place
has deprived that mere possibility of any wholesome terror which it
might inspire, so that matters drift steadily from bad to worse.
Now, from the deistic point of view, the world may not unfairly be
compared to such an estate. God is remote--He may look down upon the
terrestrial scene from His far-off heaven, but He does not actively
interfere, except by an occasional miracle, which is not the same as
direct hour-by-hour superintendence: is it any wonder that the ground
should bring forth weeds and brambles rather than flowers and fruit?
Is it a wonder that this God-less world should be a dismal place and
full of misery, and that human nature, left to itself, should have "no
health" in it? It would be matter for wonder if it were otherwise; and
thus Deism is well in accord with those gloomier forms of religious
thought which for a long time were the generally predominating ones.
The distance between this conception and that which flows from the
doctrine of Divine immanence can hardly be measured; it certainly
cannot be bridged. The soul to which, through whatever experience,
there has come the revelation that God is closer to us than breathing,
and nearer than hands or feet, looks out upon a new heaven and a new
earth. Once it is understood that God is really and truly in His
universe, that He is not infinitely far {43} and inaccessible but
infinitely nigh, an encompassing Presence, a fresh light falls upon
nature and human nature alike. Viewed in that light, and from the
standpoint of this illuminating truth, "the world's no blot for us, nor
blank," but the scene of Divine activity and unceasing revelation; for
all nature's forces are seen to be the expression of the Divine Energy,
and all nature's laws the manifestation of the Divine Will. If God
Himself is the Life that stirs within all life, the Reality underlying
all phenomena--if we live and move and have our being in Him, and His
Spirit dwelleth within us--the direct outcome of such a belief should
be a sacred optimism, an assurance that the cosmos "means intensely,
and means good."
There can, we think, be little doubt as to the beneficial effects which
have accompanied the re-affirmation of this idea in recent times. It
is only too true as yet, in the case of many, that "the past, which
still holds its ground in the back chambers of the brain, would
persuade us that 'tis a demon-haunted world, where not God but the
devil rules; we are not yet persuaded that this is a cheerful, homely,
well-meaning universe, whose powers, if strict in their working, are
nevertheless beneficent and not diabolic." Against these phantasmal
fears the doctrine of God's immanence, rightly understood, offers the
best of antidotes, and here lies its unquestionable value. At the same
time it has already become apparent {44} to us that the suddenness of
the stress laid upon that idea has brought new dangers in its train.
The temptation is ever to swing round from one extreme to its opposite;
and in the present case not a few have carried--or been carried by--the
reaction against the belief in God's remoteness so far as to forget, in
contemplating the truth that He is "through all and in all," the
complementary and equally necessary truth that He is also God over all.
Because something of His Mind and Will is expressed by the universe,
they not only, as we saw in the previous chapter, conclude that the
universe is identical with Him, but that He is no other than the
universe which reveals Him. "All is God, and God is All," they
exclaim, adding the doctrine of the Godness of all to that of the
allness of God; the universe, in their view, is the one Divine and
Eternal Being of which everything, including ourselves, is only a phase
or partial manifestation; as it is the Divine life which pulses through
us, so it is the Divine consciousness which our consciousness
expresses, the Divine nature which acts through ours. Here we are face
to face with Pantheism full-grown: let us see what is involved in its
assumptions, and why the Christian Church must resolutely refuse to
make terms with this teaching.
No one would deny that the pantheistic theory, which identifies God
with the universe and ourselves with God, has its fascination and {45}
glamour--a fascination which is not ignoble on the face of it. The
modern founder of Pantheism, Benedict Spinoza, was a man of pure and
saintly character, a gentle recluse from the world, lovable and
blameless. Nevertheless, we have no hesitation in avowing our belief
that the glamour of Pantheism is utterly deceptive; that those who set
foot on this inclined plane will find themselves unable--in direct
proportion to their mental integrity--to resist conclusions which mean
the practical dissolution of religion, in any intelligible sense of
that word; and that in the present transitional state of religious
opinion it is particularly necessary that the truth about Pantheism
should be clearly stated. The test of a theory is not whether it looks
symmetrical and self-consistent in the seclusion of the study, but
whether it works. If it fails in actual life, it fails altogether; and
the one fatal objection to this particular system is that it does not
work. Nothing could be more significant than the admission of so
representative an exponent of Pantheism as Mr. Allanson Picton, who
tells us that one, if not more, of Spinoza's fundamental conceptions
"have increasingly repelled rather than attracted religious people."
[1] It is the object of the present chapter to show why this must be
the case, wherever the implications of his teaching are understood.
{46} Pantheism declares--it practically begins and ends with the
declaration--that the universe is God, and that God is the totality of
being. Now, try as we will, such a conception can never take the place
of the thought of God as our Father, and that for the simple reason
that the universe is not even what we mean by personal. As
Schopenhauer shrewdly remarked, "To call the universe 'God' is not to
explain it, but merely to burden language with a superfluous synonym
for the word 'universe.' Whether one says 'the universe is God' or
'the universe is the universe' makes no difference." It is when people
no longer know what to do with a Deity, he continues, that they
transfer His part to the universe--"which is, properly speaking, only a
decent way of getting rid of Him." [2] A totality of being is not the
same as a personal God, but the very contrary. Nor is it any
consolation to be told that this totality, though not personal, is
"super-personal." Such a super-personal Absolute or Whole, to quote
Dr. Ballard's penetrating criticism, "is devoid of just those elements
which for human experience constitute personality. To our power of
vision it matters nothing whether we say that the ultra-violet rays of
the spectrum are super-visible or invisible. The pertinent truth is
that they are not visible. So, too, that which is not 'merely'
personal is not really personal. {47} If the Absolute of philosophy be
the super-personal, it is not, in plain truth, personal at all." [3]
Now, a God who is not what we mean by personal can be of no help to us
in our religious life. When a congregation of modern worshippers is
appealed to in these terms--"Do not, I beseech you, think of God any
more as a personal being like yourself, though immeasurably
greater"--they are really being asked to commit spiritual suicide. For
we cannot hold communion except with a person; we cannot pray to the
universe. We can neither give thanks to the universe, nor supplicate
it, nor confess to it, nor intercede with it. But a God to whom we
cannot pray, with whom we cannot enter into communion, is for all
practical purposes no God at all. The only God with whom we can stand
in personal, conscious, spiritual relationship must be one who is not
identical with the universe, but One in whom, on the contrary, the
universe has its being. It is the transcendent God with whom we have
to deal in religion; such a God Pantheism does not acknowledge.
But not only is the universe not personal; this god of Pantheism is not
ethical either. This "totality" is neither good nor bad, but made up
indifferently of all manner of components, and according to Pantheism
all of them--the evil as much as the good--are {48} necessary to the
perfection of the whole. Thus the pantheist's god has no moral
complexion, and such a god is of no use to us. So far as religion is
concerned, he--or it--might just as well be non-existent as non-moral.
The only Deity whom we can _worship_ is One who stands above the
world's confusion, its Moral Governor and Righteous Judge.
But Pantheism identifies not only God with the universe, but ourselves
with God. Now if this view is accepted, if there is no real dividing
line between man and God, then we can only once more point out that we
have no personality either; we are mere fragmentary expressions of
God's life, without selfhood or self-determination, no more responsible
for our acts than a violin for the tune that is played on it. Mr.
Picton, speaking with authority, tells us that "to the true pantheist"
man is "but a finite mode of infinite Being"; that human personality is
only "seeming" [4] and that, from the pantheistic standpoint, the self
must be "content to be nothing." That is to say that the consistent
pantheist must be a consistent determinist. Logical Pantheism rules
out the possibility of sin against man or God--"for who withstandeth
His will," seeing that He is the only real Existence? Let a further
quotation make this plain. "What," asks Mr. Picton, "are we to say of
bad men, the vile, the base, the liar, the murderer? Are they {49}
also in God and of God? . . . _Yes, they are_." [5] And this amazing
conclusion--amazing, though involved in his fundamental outlook--is
sought to be defended on the ground that we have "no adequate idea" "of
the part played by bad men in the Divine Whole"! In other words, the
pantheist god expresses himself in a St. Francis, but he also does so
in a King Leopold; he is manifested in General Booth and in Alexander
Borgia; Jesus Christ is a phase of his being, and so is Judas Iscariot.
A sentimental Pantheism may say that God is that in a hero which nerves
him to heroism, and that in a mother which prompts her self-sacrifice
for her children, for there is none else. But that is only one-half of
the truth; arguing from the same premises, we must also say that God is
that in the sinner which succumbs to sin, and in the wrong-doer that
which takes pleasure in wrong, for there is none else. Once we rub out
the distinction between God and man, we rub out all _moral_
distinctions as well. If we are not other than He is, how can we act
other than He wills? If we hold that the soul is only "a finite mode
of God's infinite attribute of thought," part of "the necessary
expression of the infinite attributes of eternal Being," the sense of
sin can be no more than an illusion.
Or shall we be told that, whatever a man's theoretical Determinism, in
practice he will {50} always be conscious of his freedom? The answer
is, Yes, perhaps, provided his moral instincts are sound; but the
average mortal, when he has to choose between the hard duty and the
easy indulgence, will be sorely tempted to find a reason for yielding
in his determinist philosophy. And is a doctrine likely to be true
which, the moment it is seriously applied, undermines the very
foundation of morality, and of which the best that can be said is that
people do not consistently apply it? M. Bourget's _Le Disciple_ is not
a book for everyone; but in it the distinguished author has drawn an
instructive picture of the effect of Determinism as a theory upon a
self-indulgent man's practice. As Mr. Baring-Gould aptly says, "Human
nature is ever prone to find an excuse for getting the shoulder from
under the yoke."
Pantheism, as a matter of fact, whichever way we travel, is ultimately
compelled to deny the qualitative distinction between good and evil,
declaring both to be equally necessary, and thus arrives once more at
its conception of a Deity who, though said to be "perfect"--presumably
in some "super-moral" sense--is not good, and hence cannot be a
possible object of worship for us. How little the pantheist's God can
mean to us will be understood when it is stated that, according to
Spinoza, man "cannot strive to have God's love to him." [6] Indeed,
how could the universe "love" one of {51} its mere passing phases? Is
it a wonder that this cheerless creed has "increasingly repelled rather
than attracted religious people" when once they have understood its
inwardness? We ask for bread and receive--a nebula; we call for our
Father, and are told to content ourselves with a totality of being!
And when Pantheism has thus despoiled us of our religious possessions
one by one, so far as this life is concerned, what is its message
concerning the future? This, that when we die there is an end even of
our seeming self-hood; we are once more immersed in the All, the
Whole--like a thimbleful of water drawn from the ocean and poured back
into the ocean again. This is what Mr. Picton calls "the peace of
absorption in the Infinite"; would it not be simpler to call it
annihilation, and have done with it? Dissolve a bronze statue and
merge it in a mass of molten metal, and it is gone as a statue;
dissolve a soul and merge it in the sum of being, and as a soul it is
no more. That is not immortality, but a final blotting out--a fit
conclusion from those pantheistic premises which, consistently worked
out, mean the end of religion, the end of morality, the end of
everything.
Pantheism goes about under a variety of aliases to-day, and therein
lies an additional danger; for whatever its assumed name or disguise,
its essence is always the same, and its very speciousness calls for all
our vigilance and {52} determination to fight it. We must not weary of
challenging its root-assumption, or of exposing its insidious
tendencies; we must not weary of reiterating the truth that God is not
identical with the universe, but to be worshipped as the One who is
over all; we must insist that His nearness to us and our likeness to
Him are not identity with Him--nay, that it is His otherness from us
which makes us capable of seeking and finding Him, of experiencing His
love, and loving Him in return. From the inhuman speculations of
Pantheism we turn with unspeakable gratitude to the revelation of the
personal God in the Person of Jesus Christ His Son, whom having seen,
we have beheld the Father, and whose are the words, not of
annihilation, but of eternal life.
[1] _Pantheism_, p. 15.
[2] Parerga, vol. ii., pp. 101-102.
[3] _The True God_, p. 118.
[4] _Op. cit._, p. 15.
[5] _Ibid_, p. 69.
[6] J. Allanson Picton, _Spinoza_, p. 213.
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