THE CHRISTIAN COMPROMISE
The human spirit has not passed in historical times through a more
critical situation or a greater revulsion than that involved in
accepting Christianity. Was this event favourable to the life of Reason?
Was it a progress in competence, understanding, and happiness? Any
absolute answer would be misleading. Christianity did not come to
destroy; the ancient springs were dry already, and for two or three
centuries unmistakable signs of decadence had appeared in every sphere,
not least in that of religion and philosophy. Christianity was a
reconstruction out of ruins. In the new world competence could only be
indirect, understanding mythical, happiness surreptitious; but all three
subsisted, and it was Christianity that gave them their necessary
disguises.
[Sidenote: Suspense between hope and disillusion.]
The young West had failed in its first great experiment, for, though
classic virtue and beauty and a great classic state subsisted, the force
that had created them was spent. Was it possible to try again? Was it
necessary to sit down, like the Orient, in perpetual flux and eternal
apathy? This question was answered by Christianity in a way, under the
circumstances, extremely happy. The Gospel, on which Christianity was
founded, had drawn a very sharp contrast between this world and the
kingdom of heaven—a phrase admitting many interpretations. From the
Jewish millennium or a celestial paradise it could shift its sense to
mean the invisible Church, or even the inner life of each mystical
spirit. Platonic philosophy, to which patristic theology was allied, had
made a contrast not less extreme between sense and spirit, between life
in time and absorption in eternity. Armed with this double dualism,
Christianity could preach both renunciation and hope, both asceticism
and action, both the misery of life and the blessing of creation. It
even enshrined the two attitudes in its dogma, uniting the Jewish
doctrine of a divine Creator and Governor of this world with that of a
divine Redeemer to lead us into another. Persons were not lacking to
perceive the contradiction inherent in such an eclecticism; and it was
the Gnostic or neo-Platonic party, which denied creation and taught a
pure asceticism, that had the best of the argument. The West, however,
would not yield to their logic. It might, in an hour of trouble and
weakness, make concessions to quietism and accept the cross, but it
would not suffer the naturalistic note to die out altogether. It
preferred an inconsistency, which it hardly perceived, to a complete
surrender of its instincts. It settled down to the conviction that God
created the world _and_ redeemed it; that the soul is naturally good
_and_ needs salvation.
[Sidenote: Superficial solution.]
This contradiction can be explained exoterically by saying that time and
changed circumstances separate the two situations: having made the world
perfect, God redeems it after it has become corrupt; and whereas all
things are naturally good, they may by accident lose their excellence,
and need to have it restored. There is, however, an esoteric side to the
matter. A soul that may be redeemed, a will that may look forward to a
situation in which its action will not be vain or sinful, is one that in
truth has never sinned; it has merely been thwarted. Its ambition is
rational, and what its heart desires is essentially good and ideal. So
that the whole classic attitude, the faith in action, art, and
intellect, is preserved under this protecting cuticle of dogma; nothing
was needed but a little courage, and circumstances somewhat more
favourable, for the natural man to assert himself again. A people
believing in the resurrection of the flesh in heaven will not be averse
to a reawakening of the mind on earth.
[Sidenote: But from what shall we be redeemed?]
Another pitfall, however, opens here. These contrasted doctrines may
change rôles. So long as by redemption we understand, in the mystic way,
exaltation above finitude and existence, because all particularity is
sin, to be redeemed is to abandon the Life of Reason; but redemption
might mean extrication from untoward accidents, so that a rational life
might be led under right conditions. Instead of being like Buddha, the
redeemer might be like Prometheus. In that case, however, the creator
would become like Zeus—a tyrant will responsible for our conditions
rather than expressive of our ideal. The doctrine of creation would
become pantheism and that of redemption, formerly ascetic, would
represent struggling humanity.
[Sidenote: Typical attitude of St. Augustine.]
The seething of these potent and ambiguous elements can be studied
nowhere better than in Saint Augustine. He is a more genial and complete
representative of Christianity than any of the Greek Fathers, in whom
the Hebraic and Roman vitality was comparatively absent. Philosophy was
only one phase of Augustine’s genius; with him it was an instrument of
zeal and a stepping-stone to salvation. Scarcely had it been born out of
rhetoric when it was smothered in authority. Yet even in that precarious
and episodic form it acquired a wonderful sweep, depth, and technical
elaboration. He stands at the watershed of history, looking over either
land; his invectives teach us almost as much of paganism and heresy as
his exhortations do of Catholicism. To Greek subtlety he joins Hebrew
fervour and monkish intolerance; he has a Latin amplitude and (it must
be confessed) coarseness of feeling; but above all he is the illumined,
enraptured, forgiven saint. In him theology, however speculative,
remains a vehicle for living piety; and while he has, perhaps, done more
than any other man to materialise Christianity, no one was ever more
truly filled with its spirit.
[Sidenote: He achieves Platonism.]
Saint Augustine was a thorough Platonist, but to reach that position he
had to pass in his youth through severe mental struggles. The difficult
triumph over the sensuous imagination by which he attained the
conception of intelligible objects was won only after long discipline
and much reading of Platonising philosophers. Every reality seemed to
him at first an object of sense: God, if he existed, must be
perceptible, for to Saint Augustine’s mind also, at this early and
sensuous stage of its development, _esse_ was _percipi_. He might never
have worked himself loose from these limitations, with which his vivid
fancy and not too delicate eloquence might easily have been satisfied,
had it not been for his preoccupation with theology. God must somehow be
conceived; for no one in that age of religious need and of theological
passion felt both more intensely than Saint Augustine. If sensible
objects alone were real, God must be somewhere discoverable in space; he
must either have a body like the human, or be the body of the universe,
or some subtler body permeating and moving all the rest.
These conceptions all offered serious dialectical difficulties, and,
what was more to the point, they did not satisfy the religious and
idealistic instinct which the whole movement of Saint Augustine’s mind
obeyed. So he pressed his inquiries farther. At length meditation, and
more, perhaps, that experience of the flux and vanity of natural things
on which Plato himself had built his heaven of ideas, persuaded him that
reality and substantiality, in any eulogistic sense, must belong rather
to the imperceptible and eternal. Only that which is never an object of
sense or experience can be the root and principle of experience and
sense. Only the invisible and changeless can be the substance of a
moving show. God could now be apprehended and believed in precisely
because he was essentially invisible: had he anywhere appeared he could
not be the principle of all appearance; had he had a body and a _locus_
in the universe, he could not have been its spiritual creator. The
ultimate objects of human knowledge were accordingly ideas, not things;
principles reached by the intellect, not objects by any possibility
offered to sense. The methodological concepts of science, by which we
pass from fact to fact and from past perception to future, did not
attract Augustine’s attention. He admitted, it is true, that there was a
subordinate, and to him apparently uninteresting, region governed by
“_certissima ratione vel experientia_,” and he even wished science to be
allowed a free hand within that empirical and logical sphere. A mystic
and allegorical interpretation of Scripture was to be invoked to avoid
the puerilities into which any literal interpretation—of the creation
in six days, for instance—would be sure to run. Unbelievers would thus
not be scandalised by mythical dogmas “concerning things which they
might have actually experienced, or discovered by sure calculation.”
Science was to have its way in the field of calculable experience; that
region could be the more readily surrendered by Augustine because his
attention was henceforth held by those ideal objects which he had so
laboriously come to conceive. These were concepts of the contemplative
reason or imagination, which envisages natures and eternal essences
behind the variations of experience, essences which at first receive
names, becoming thus the centres of rational discourse, then acquire
values, becoming guides to action and measures of achievement, and
finally attract unconditional worship, being regarded as the first
causes and ultimate goals of all existence and aspiration.
[Sidenote: He identifies it with Christianity.]
This purely Platonic philosophy, however, was not to stand alone. Like
every phase of Saint Augustine’s speculation, it came, as we have said,
to buttress or express some religious belief. But it is a proof of his
depth and purity of soul that his searching philosophic intuition did
more to spiritualise the dogmas he accepted from others than these
dogmas could do to denaturalise his spontaneous philosophy. Platonic
ideas had by that time long lost their moral and representative value,
their Socratic significance. They had become ontological entities,
whereas originally they had represented the rational functions of life.
This hypostasis of the rational, by which the rational abdicates its
meaning in the effort to acquire a metaphysical existence, had already
been carried to its extreme by the Neo-Platonists. But Saint Augustine,
while helpless as a philosopher to resist that speculative realism, was
able as a Christian to infuse into those dead concepts some of the human
blood which had originally quickened them. Metaphysics had turned all
human interests into mythical beings, and now religion, without at all
condemning or understanding that transformation, was going to adopt
those mythical beings and turn them again into moral influences. In
Saint Augustine’s mind, fed as it was by the Psalmist, the Platonic
figments became the Christian God, the Christian Church, and the
Christian soul, and thus acquired an even subtler moral fragrance than
that which they had lost when they were uprooted by a visionary
philosophy from the soil of Greek culture.
[Sidenote: God the good.]
Saint Augustine’s way of conceiving God is an excellent illustration of
the power, inherent in his religious genius and sincerity, of giving
life and validity to ideas which he was obliged to borrow in part from a
fabulous tradition and in part from a petrified metaphysics. God, to
him, was simply the ideal eternal object of human thought and love. All
ideation on an intellectual plane was a vague perception of the divine
essence. “The rational soul understands God, for it understands what
exists always unchanged.” ... “God is happiness; and in him and from
him and through him all things are happy which are happy at all. God is
the good and the beautiful.” He was never tired of telling us that God
is not true but the truth _(i.e._, the ideal object of thought in any
sphere), not good but the good _(i.e._, the ideal object of will in all
its rational manifestations). In other words, whenever a man, reflecting
on his experience, conceived the better or the best, the perfect and the
eternal, he conceived God, inadequately, of course, yet essentially,
because God signified the comprehensive ideal of all the perfections
which the human spirit could behold in itself or in its objects. Of this
divine essence, accordingly, every interesting thing was a
manifestation; all virtue and beauty were parcels of it, tokens of its
superabundant grace. Hence the inexhaustible passion of Saint Augustine
toward his God; hence the sweetness of that endless colloquy in prayer
into which he was continually relapsing, a passion and a sweetness which
no one will understand to whom God is primarily a natural power and only
accidentally a moral ideal.
[Sidenote: Primary and secondary religion.]
Herein lies the chief difference between those in whom religion is
spontaneous and primary—a very few—those in whom it is imitative and
secondary. To the former, divine things are inward values, projected by
chance into images furnished by poetic tradition or by external nature,
while to the latter, divine things are in the first instance objective
factors of nature or of social tradition, although they have come,
perhaps, to possess some point of contact with the interests of the
inner life on account of the supposed physical influence which those
super-human entities have over human fortunes. In a word, theology, for
those whose religion is secondary, is simply a false physics, a doctrine
about eventual experience not founded on the experience of the past.
Such a false physics, however, is soon discredited by events; it does
not require much experience or much shrewdness to discover that
supernatural beings and laws are without the empirical efficacy which
was attributed to them. True physics and true history must always tend,
in enlightened minds, to supplant those misinterpreted religious
traditions. Therefore, those whose reflection or sentiment does not
furnish them with a key to the moral symbolism and poetic validity
underlying theological ideas, if they apply their intelligence to the
subject at all, and care to be sincere, will very soon come to regard
religion as a delusion. Where religion is primary, however, all that
worldly dread of fraud and illusion becomes irrelevant, as it is
irrelevant to an artist’s pleasure to be warned that the beauty he
expresses has no objective existence, or as it would be irrelevant to a
mathematician’s reasoning to suspect that Pythagoras was a myth and his
supposed philosophy an abracadabra. To the religious man religion is
inwardly justified. God has no need of natural or logical witnesses, but
speaks himself within the heart, being indeed that ineffable attraction
which dwells in whatever is good and beautiful, and that persuasive
visitation of the soul by the eternal and incorruptible by which she
feels herself purified, rescued from mortality, and given an inheritance
in the truth. This is precisely what Saint Augustine knew and felt with
remarkable clearness and persistence, and what he expressed unmistakably
by saying that every intellectual perception is knowledge of God or has
God’s nature for its object.
Proofs of the existence of God are therefore not needed, since his
existence is in one sense obvious and in another of no religious
interest. It is obvious in the sense that the ideal is a term of moral
experience, and that truth, goodness, and beauty are inevitably
envisaged by any one whose life has in some measure a rational quality.
It is of no religious interest in the sense that perhaps some physical
or dynamic absolute might be scientifically discoverable in the dark
entrails of nature or of mind. The great difference between religion and
metaphysics is that religion looks for God at the top of life and
metaphysics at the bottom; a fact which explains why metaphysics has
such difficulty in finding God, while religion has never lost him.
This brings us to the grand characteristic and contradiction of Saint
Augustine’s philosophy, a characteristic which can be best studied,
perhaps, in him, although it has been inherited by all Christian
theology and was already present in Stoic and Platonic speculation,
when the latter had lost its ethical moorings. This is the idea that the
same God who is the ideal of human aspiration is also the creator of the
universe and its only primary substance.
[Sidenote: Ambiguous efficacy of the good in Plato.]
If Plato, when he wrote that fine and profound passage in the sixth book
of the Republic, where he says that the good is the cause of all
intelligence in the mind and of all intelligibility in the object, and
indeed the principle of all essence and existence—if Plato could have
foreseen what his oracular hyperbole was to breed in the world, we may
well believe that he would have expunged it from his pages with the same
severity with which he banished the poets from his State. In the lips of
Socrates, and at that juncture in the argument of the Republic, those
sentences have a legitimate meaning. The good is the principle of
benefit, and the philosophers who are to rule the state will not be
alienated by their contemplations from practical wisdom, seeing that the
idea of the good—_i.e._, of the advantageous, profitable, and
beneficial—is the highest concept of the whole dialectic, that in
reference to which all other ideas have place and significance. If we
ventured to extend the interpretation of the passage, retaining its
spirit, into fields where we have more knowledge than Plato could have,
we might say that the principle of the good generates essence and
existence, in the sense that all natural organs have functions and
utilities by which they establish themselves in the world, and that the
system of these useful functions is the true essence or idea of any
living thing. But the Socratic origin and sense of such a passage as
this, and of others (in the Timæus, for instance) allied to it, was soon
lost in the headlong idolatry which took possession of the neo-Platonic
school; and it was through this medium that Saint Augustine received his
Platonic inspiration. The good no longer meant, as it did to Plato, the
principle of benefit everywhere, but it meant the good Being; and this,
for a Christian, could naturally be none other than God; so that the
idea that the good was the creator of all essence and existence now
assumed a marvellously Mosaic significance. Here was one of those bits
of primeval revelation which, it was explained, had survived in the
heathen world. The hypostasis of moral conceptions, then, and of the
idea of the good in particular, led up from the Platonic side to the
doctrine of creation.
[Sidenote: Ambiguous goodness of the creator in Job.]
The history of the conception among the Jews was entirely different, the
element of goodness in the creator being there adventitious and the
element of power original. Jehovah for Job was a universal force,
justified primarily by his omnipotence; but this physical authority
would in the end, he hoped, be partly rationalised and made to clash
less scandalously with the authority of justice. Among the Greeks, as
was to be expected, the idea of justice was more independent and
entire; but once named and enshrined, that divinity, too, tended to
absoluteness, and could be confused with the physical basis of
existence. In the Stoic philosophy the latter actually gained the upper
hand, and the problem of Job reappeared on the horizon. It did not rise
into painful prominence, however, until Christian times, when absolute
moral perfection and absolute physical efficacy were predicated of God
with equal emphasis, if not among the people who never have conceived
God as either perfectly good or entirely omnipotent, at least among the
theologians. If not all felt the contradiction with equal acuteness, the
reason doubtless was that a large part of their thought was perfunctory
and merely apologetic: they did not quite mean what they said when they
spoke of perfect goodness; and we shall see how Saint Augustine himself,
when reduced to extremities, surrendered his loyalty to the moral ideal
rather than reconsider his traditional premisses.
[Sidenote: The Manicheans.]
How tenaciously, however, he clung to the moral in the religious, we can
see by the difficulty he had in separating himself from the Manicheans.
The Manicheans admitted two absolutes, the essence of the one being
goodness and of the other badness. This system was logically weak,
because these absolutes were in the first place two, which is one
contradiction, and in the second place relative, which is another. But
in spite of the pitfalls into which the Manicheans were betrayed by
their pursuit of metaphysical absolutes, they were supported by a moral
intuition of great truth and importance. They saw that an essentially
good principle could not have essential evil for its effect. These moral
terms are, we may ourselves feel sure, relative to existence and to
actual impulse, and it may accordingly be always misleading to make them
the essence of metaphysical realities: good and bad may be not
existences but qualities which existences have only in relation to
demands in themselves or in one another. Yet if we once launch, as many
metaphysicians would have us do, into the hypostasis of qualities and
relations, it is certainly better and more honest to make contradictory
qualities into opposed entities, and not to render our metaphysical
world unmeaning as well as fictitious by peopling it with concepts in
which the most important categories of life are submerged and
invalidated. Evil may be no more a metaphysical existence than good is;
both are undoubtedly mere terms for vital utilities and impediments; but
if we are to indulge in mythology at all, it is better that our
mythology should do symbolic justice to experience and should represent
by contrasted figures the ineradicable practical difference between the
better and the worse, the beautiful and the ugly, the trustworthy and
the fallacious. To discriminate between these things in practice is
wisdom, and it should be the part of wisdom to discriminate between them
in theory.
The Manicheans accordingly attributed what is good in the world to one
power and what is bad to another. The fable is transparent enough, and
we, who have only just learned to smile at a personal devil, may affect
to wonder that any one should ever have taken it literally. But in an
age when the assertive imagination was unchecked by any critical sense,
such a device at least avoided the scandal of attributing all the evils
and sins of this world to a principle essentially inviolate and pure. By
avoiding what must have seemed a blasphemy to Saint Augustine, as to
every one whose speculation was still relevant to his conscience and to
his practical idealism, the Manicheans thus prevailed on many to
overlook the contradictions which their system developed so soon as its
figments were projected into the sphere of absolute existences.
[Sidenote: All things good by nature.]
The horror with which an idealistic youth at first views the truculence
of nature and the turpitude of worldly life is capable of being softened
by experience. Time subdues our initial preferences by showing us the
complexity of moral relations in this world, and by extending our
imaginative sympathy to forms of existence and passion at first
repulsive, which from new and ultra-personal points of view may have
their natural sweetness and value. In this way, Saint Augustine was
ultimately brought to appreciate the catholicity and scope of those
Greek sages who had taught that all being was to itself good, that evil
was but the impediment of natural function, and that therefore the
conception of anything totally or essentially evil was only a petulance
or exaggeration in moral judgment that took, as it were, the bit in its
teeth, and turned an incidental conflict of interests into a
metaphysical opposition of natures. All definite being is in itself
congruous with the true and the good, since its constitution is
intelligible and its operation is creative of values. Were it not for
the limitations of matter and the accidental crowding and conflict of
life, all existing natures might subsist and prosper in peace and
concord, just as their various ideas live without contradiction in the
realm of conceptual truth. We may say of all things, in the words of the
Gospel, that their angels see the face of God. Their ideals are no less
cases of the good, no less instances of perfection, than is the ideal
locked in our private bosom. It is the part of justice and charity to
recognise this situation, in view of which we may justly say that evil
is always relative and subordinate to some constituted nature in itself
a standard of worth, a point of departure for the moral valuation of
eventual changes and of surrounding things. Evil is accordingly
accidental and unnatural; it follows upon the maladaptation of actions
to natures and of natures to one another. It can be no just ground for
the condemnation of any of those natural essences which only give rise
to it by their imperfect realisation.
The Semitic idea of creation could now receive that philosophical
interpretation which it so sadly needed. Primordially, and in respect to
what was positive in them, all things might he expressions of the good;
in their essence and ideal state they might be said to be created by
God. For God was the supreme ideal, to which all other goods were
subordinate and instrumental; and if we agree to make a cosmogony out of
morals and to hypostasise the series of rational ideals, taken in the
inverse order, into a series of efficient causes, it is clear that the
highest good, which is at the end of the moral scale, will now figure as
a first cause at the beginning of the physical sequence. This operation
is what is recorded and demanded in the doctrine of creation: a doctrine
which would lose its dogmatic force if we allowed either the moral
ideality or the physical efficacy of the creator to drop out of sight.
If the moral ideality is sacrificed, we pass to an ordinary pantheism,
while if the physical efficacy is surrendered, we take refuge in a
naturalistic idealism of the Aristotelian type, where the good is a
function of things and neither their substance nor their cause.
[Sidenote: The doctrine of creation demands that of the fall.]
To accept the doctrine of creation, after it had become familiar, was
not very hard, because the contradiction it contains could then be set
down to our imperfect apprehension. The unintelligibility of matters of
fact does not lead us to deny them, but merely to study them; and when
the creation was accepted as a fact, its unintelligibility became
merely a theological problem and a religious mystery, such as no mortal
philosophy can be without. But for Saint Augustine the situation was
wholly different. A doctrine of the creation had to be constructed: the
disparate ideas had to be synthesised which posterity was afterward to
regard as the obvious, if not wholly reconcilable, attributes of the
deity. The mystery could not then be recognised; it had to be made. And
Saint Augustine, with his vital religion, with his spontaneous adoration
of God the ideal, could not attribute to that ideal unimpeded efficacy
in the world. To admit that all natures were essentially good might
dispel the Manichean fancy about an Evil Absolute engaged in single
combat with an Absolute Good; but insight into the meaning and the
natural conditions of evil could only make its presence more obvious and
its origin more intimately bound up with the general constitution of the
world. Evil is only imperfection; but everything is imperfect. Conflict
is only maladaptation, but there is maladaptation everywhere. If we
assume, then, what the doctrine of creation requires, that all things at
first proceeded out of the potency of the good—their matter and form,
their distribution and their energies, being wholly attributable to the
attraction of the ultimately best—it is clear that some calamity must
have immediately supervened by which the fountains of life were defiled,
the strength of the ideal principle in living things weakened, and the
mortal conflict instituted which not only condemns all existent things
ultimately to perish, but hardly allows them, even while they painfully
endure, to be truly and adequately themselves.
Original sin, with the fall of the angels and of man for its mythical
ground, thus enters into the inmost web of Augustinian philosophy. This
fact cannot be too much insisted upon, for only by the immediate
introduction of original sin into the history of the world could a man
to whom God was still a moral term believe at all in the natural and
fundamental efficacy of God in the cosmos. The doctrine of the fall made
it possible for Saint Augustine to accept the doctrine of the creation.
Both belonged to the same mythical region in which the moral values of
life were made to figure as metaphysical agents; but when once the
metaphysical agency of the highest good was admitted into a poetic
cosmogony, it became imperative to admit also the metaphysical agency of
sin into it; for otherwise the highest good would be deprived of its
ideal and moral character, would cease to be the entelechy of rational
life, and be degraded into a flat principle of description or synthesis
for experience and nature as they actually are. God would thus become a
natural agent, like the fire of Heraclitus, in which human piety could
take an interest only by force of traditional inertia and
unintelligence, while the continued muttering of the ritual prevented
men from awaking to the disappearance of the god. The essence of deity,
as Augustine was inwardly convinced, was correspondence to human
aspiration, moral perfection, and ideality. God, therefore, as the
Manicheans, with Plato and Aristotle before them, had taught, could be
the author of good only; or, to express the same thing in less
figurative and misleading language, it was only the good in things that
could contribute to our idea of divinity. What was evil must, therefore,
be carried up into another concept, must be referred, if you will, to
another mythical agent; and this mythical agent in Saint Augustine’s
theology was named sin.
[Sidenote: Original sin.]
Everything in the world which obscured the image of the creator or
rebelled against his commandments (everything, that is, which prevented
in things the expression of their natural ideals) was due to sin. Sin
was responsible for disease of mind and body, for all suffering, for
death, for ignorance, perversity, and dulness. Sin was responsible—so
truly _original_ was it—for what was painful and wrong even in the
animal kingdom, and sin—such was the paradoxical apex of this inverted
series of causes—sin was responsible for sin itself. The insoluble
problems of the origin of evil and of freedom, in a world produced in
its every fibre by omnipotent goodness, can never be understood until we
remember their origin. They are artificial problems, unknown to
philosophy before it betook itself to the literal justification of
fables in which the objects of rational endeavour were represented as
causes of natural existence. The former are internal products of life,
the latter its external conditions. When the two are confused we reach
the contradiction confronting Saint Augustine, and all who to this day
have followed in his steps. The cause of everything must have been the
cause of sin, yet the principle of good could not be the principle of
evil. Both propositions were obviously true, and they were contradictory
only after the mythical identification of the God which meant the ideal
of life with the God which meant the forces of nature.
[Sidenote: Forced abandonment of the ideal.]
It would help us little, in trying to understand these doctrines, to
work over the dialectic of them, and to express the contradiction in
somewhat veiled terms or according to new pictorial analogies. Good and
evil, in the context of life, undoubtedly have common causes; but that
system which involves both is for that very reason not an ideal system,
and to represent it as such is simply to ignore the conscience and the
upward effort of life. The contradiction can be avoided only by
renouncing the meaning of one of the terms; either, that is, by no
longer regarding the good as an absolute creator, but merely as a
partial result or tendency in a living world whose life naturally
involves values, or else by no longer conceiving God as the ideal term
in man’s own existence. The latter is the solution adopted by
metaphysicians generally, and by Saint Augustine himself when hard
pressed by the exigencies of his double allegiance. God, he tells us, is
just, although not just as man is, _nor as man should be_. In other
words, God is to be called just even when he is unjust in the only sense
in which the word justice has a meaning among men. We are forced, in
fact, to obscure our moral concepts and make them equivocal in order to
be able to apply them to the efficient forces and actual habits of this
world. The essence of divinity is no longer moral excellence, but
ontological and dynamic relations to the natural world, so that the love
of God would have to become, not an exercise of reason and conscience,
as it naturally was with Saint Augustine, but a mystical intoxication,
as it was with Spinoza.
The sad effects of this degradation of God into a physical power are not
hard to trace in Augustine’s own doctrine and feeling. He became a
champion of arbitrary grace and arbitrary predestination to perdition.
The eternal damnation of innocents gave him no qualms; and in this we
must admire the strength of his logic, since if it is right that there
should be wrong at all, there is no particular reason for stickling at
the quantity or the enormity of it. And yet there are sentences which
for their brutality and sycophancy cannot be read without
pain—sentences inspired by this misguided desire to apologise for the
crimes of the universe. “Why should God not create beings that he
foreknew were to sin, when indeed in their persons and by their fates
he could manifest both what punishment their guilt deserved and what
free gifts he might bestow on them by his favour?” “Thinking it more
lordly and better to do well even in the presence of evil than not to
allow evil to exist at all.” Here the pitiful maxim of doing evil that
good may come is robbed of the excuse it finds in human limitations and
is made the first principle of divine morality. Repellent and contorted
as these ultimate metaphysical theories may seem, we must not suppose
that they destroyed in Saint Augustine that practical and devotional
idealism which they contradicted: the region of Christian charity is
fortunately far wider and far nearer home than that of Christian
apologetics. The work of practical redemption went on, while the
dialectics about the perfection of the universe were forgotten; and
Saint Augustine never ceased, by a happy inconsistency, to bewail the
sins and to combat the heresies which his God was stealthily nursing, so
that in their melodramatic punishment his glory might be more
beautifully manifested.
[Sidenote: The problem among the protestants.]
It was Saint Augustine, as we know, who, in spite of his fervid
Catholicism, was the favourite master of both Luther and Calvin. They
emphasised, however, his more fanatical side, and this very
predestinarian and absolutist doctrine which he had prevailed on himself
to accept. Here was the pantheistic leaven doing its work; and
concentration of attention on the Old Testament, given the reformers’
controversial and metaphysical habit of thought, could only precipitate
the inevitable. While popular piety bubbled up into all sorts of
emotional and captious sects, each with its pathetic insistence on some
text or on some whimsey, but all inwardly inspired by an earnest
religious hunger, academic and cultivated Protestantism became every day
more pale and rationalistic. Mediocre natures continued to rehearse the
old platitudes and tread the slippery middle courses of one orthodoxy or
another; but distinguished minds could no longer treat such survivals as
more than allegories, historic or mythical illustrations of general
spiritual truths. So Lessing, Goethe, and the idealists in Germany, and
after them such lay prophets as Carlyle and Emerson, had for
Christianity only an inessential respect. They drank their genuine
inspiration directly from nature, from history, from the total personal
apprehension they might have of life. In them speculative theology
rediscovered its affinity to neo-Platonism; in other words, Christian
philosophy was washed clean of its legendary alloy to become a pure
cosmic speculation. It was Gnosticism come again in a very different age
to men in an opposite phase of culture, but with its logic unchanged.
The creation was the self-diremption of the infinite into finite
expression, the fall was the self-discovery of this finitude, the
incarnation was the awakening of the finite to its essential infinity;
and here, a sufficient number of pages having been engrossed, the
matter generally hastened to a conclusion; for the redemption with its
means of application, once the central point in Christianity, was less
pliable to the new pantheistic interpretation. Neo-Platonism had indeed
cultivated asceticism, ecstasies, and a hope of reabsorption into the
One; but these things a modern, and especially a Teutonic, temperament
could hardly relish; and though absolutism in a sense must
discountenance all finite interests and dissolve all experience, in
theory, into a neutral whole, yet this inevitable mysticism remained, as
with the Stoics, sternly optimistic, in order to respond to the vital
social forces which Protestantism embodied. The ethical part of
neo-Platonism and the corresponding Christian doctrine of salvation had
accordingly to be discarded; for mystical as the northern soul may
gladly be in speculation, to satisfy its sentimentality, it hardly can
be mystical in action, since it has to satisfy also its interest in
success and its fidelity to instinct.
[Sidenote: Pantheism accepted.]
An absolutism which thus encourages and sanctions the natural will is
Stoical and pantheistic; it does not, like Indian and Platonic
absolutism, seek to suspend the will in view of some supernatural
destiny. Pantheism subordinates morally what it finds to be dependent in
existence; its religion bids human reason and interest abdicate before
cosmic forces, instead of standing out, like Buddhism and Christianity,
for salvation, for spiritual extrication, from a world which they
regard as delusive and fallen. The world of German absolutism, like the
Stoic world, was not fallen. On the contrary, it was divinely inspired
and altogether authoritative; he alone who did not find his place and
function in it was unholy and perverse. This world-worship, despising
heartily every finite and rational ideal, gives to impulse and fact,
whatever they may be, liberty to flourish under a divine warrant. Were
the people accepting such a system corrupt, it would sanction their
corruption, and thereby, most probably, lead to its own abandonment, for
it would bring on an ascetic and supernaturalistic reaction by which its
convenient sycophancy would be repudiated. But reflection and piety,
even if their object be material and their worship idolatrous, exalt the
mind and raise it above vulgar impulse. If you fetch from contemplation
a theoretic license to be base, your contemplative habit itself will
have purified you more than your doctrine will have power to degrade you
afresh, for training affects instinct much more than opinion can.
Antinomian theory can flourish blamelessly in a puritan soil, for there
it instinctively remains theoretical. And the Teutonic pantheists are
for the most part uncontaminated souls, puritan by training, and only
interested in furthering the political and intellectual efficiency of
the society in which they live. Their pantheism under these
circumstances makes them the more energetic and turns them into
practical positivists, docile to their social medium and apologists for
all its conventions. So that, while they write books to disprove
naturalism in natural philosophy where it belongs, in morals where
naturalism is treason they are themselves naturalists of the most
uncritical description, forgetting that only the interests of the finite
soul introduce such a thing as good and evil into the world, and that
nature and society are so far from being authoritative and divine that
they have no value whatever save by the services they may render to each
spirit in its specific and genuine ambitions.
[Sidenote: Plainer scorn for the ideal.]
Indeed, this pantheistic subordination of conscience to what happens to
exist, this optimism annulling every human ideal, betrays its immoral
tendency very clearly so soon as it descends from theological seminaries
into the lay world. Poets at first begin to justify, on its authority,
their favourite passions and to sing the picturesqueness of a
blood-stained world. “Practical” men follow, deprecating any reflection
which may cast a doubt on the providential justification of their chosen
activities, and on the invisible value of the same, however sordid,
brutal, or inane they may visibly be. Finally, politicians learn to
invoke destiny and the movement of the age to save themselves the
trouble of discerning rational ends and to colour their secret
indifference to the world’s happiness. The follies thus sanctioned
theoretically, because they are involved in a perfect world, would
doubtless be perpetrated none the less by the same persons had they
absorbed in youth a different religion; for conduct is rooted in deep
instincts which affect opinion more than opinion can avail to affect
them in turn. Yet there is an added indignity in not preserving a clear
and honest mind, and in quitting the world without having in some
measure understood and appreciated it.
[Sidenote: The price of mythology is superstition.]
Pantheism is mythical and has, as we have just seen, all the subversive
powers of ordinary superstition. It turns the natural world, man’s
stamping-ground and system of opportunities, into a self-justifying and
sacred life; it endows the blameless giant with an inhuman soul and then
worships the monstrous divinity it has fabricated. It thereby encounters
the same dilemma that defeats all mythology when it forgets its merely
poetic office and trespasses upon moral ground. It must either interpret
the natural world faithfully, attributing to the mythical deity the sort
of life that dramatically suits its visible behaviour, or if it
idealises and moralises the spectacle it must renounce the material
reality and efficacy of its gods. Either the cosmic power must cover the
actual goodness and badness in nature impartially, when to worship it
would be idolatrous, or it must cover only the better side of nature,
those aspects of it which support and resemble human virtue. In the
latter case it is human virtue that mythology is formulating in a
dramatic fiction, a human ideal that is being illustrated by a poet,
who selects for the purpose certain phases of nature and experience. By
this idealisation the affinity which things often have to man’s
interests may be brought out in a striking manner; but their total and
real mechanism is no better represented than that of animals in Æsop’s
fables. To detect the divergence it suffices to open the eyes; and while
nature may be rationally admired and cherished for so supporting the
soul, it is her eventual ministry to man that makes her admirable, not
her independent magnitude or antiquity. To worship nature as she really
is, with all her innocent crimes made intentional by our mythology and
her unfathomable constitution turned into a caricature of barbarian
passions, is to subvert the order of values and to falsify natural
philosophy. Yet this dislocation of reason, both in its conceptions and
in its allegiance, is the natural outcome of thinking on mythical lines.
A myth, by turning phenomena into expressions of thought and passion,
teaches man to look for models and goals of action in that external
world where reason can find nothing but instruments and materials.