CHARITY
[Sidenote: Possible tyranny of reason.]
Those whom a genuine spirituality has freed from the foolish enchantment
of words and conventions and brought back to a natural ideal, have still
another illusion to vanquish, one into which the very concentration and
deepening of their life might lead them. This illusion is that they and
their chosen interests alone are important or have a legitimate place in
the moral world. Having discovered what is really good for themselves,
they assume that the like is good for everybody. Having made a tolerable
synthesis and purification of their own natures, they require every
other nature to be composed of the same elements similarly combined.
What they have vanquished in themselves they disregard in others; and
the consequence sometimes is that an impossibly simplified and
inconsiderate regimen is proposed to mankind, altogether
unrepresentative of their total interests. Spiritual men, in a word, may
fall into the aristocrat’s fallacy; they may forget the infinite animal
and vulgar life which remains quite disjointed, impulsive, and
short-winded, but which nevertheless palpitates with joys and sorrows,
and makes after all the bulk of moral values in this democratic world.
[Sidenote: Everything has its rights.]
After adopting an ideal it is necessary, therefore, without abandoning
it, to recognise its relativity. The right path is in such a matter
rather difficult to keep to. On the one hand lies fanatical insistence
on an ideal once arrived at, no matter how many instincts and interests
(the basis of all ideals) are thereby outraged in others and ultimately
also in one’s self. On the other hand lies mystical disintegration,
which leads men to feel so keenly the rights of everything in particular
and of the All in general, that they retain no hearty allegiance to any
human interest. Between these two abysses winds the narrow path of
charity and valour. The ultimate ideal is absolutely authoritative,
because if any ground were found to relax allegiance to it in any degree
or for any consideration, that ground would itself be the ideal, found
to be more nearly absolute and ultimate than the one, hastily so called,
which it corrected. The ultimate ideal, in order to maintain its
finality and preclude the possibility of an appeal which should dislodge
it from its place of authority, must have taken all interests into
consideration; it must be universally representative. Now, to take an
interest into consideration and represent it means to intend, as far as
possible, to secure the particular good which that particular interest
looks to, and never, whatever measures may be adopted, to cease to look
back on the elementary impulse as upon something which ought, if
possible, to have been satisfied, and which we should still go back and
satisfy now, if circumstances and the claims of rival interests
permitted.
Justice and charity are identical. To deny the initial right of any
impulse is not morality but fanaticism. However determined may be the
prohibition which reason opposes to some wild instinct, that prohibition
is never reckless; it is never inconsiderate of the very impulse which
it suppresses. It suppresses that impulse unwillingly, pitifully, under
stress of compulsion and _force majeure_; for reason, in representing
this impulse in the context of life and in relation to every other
impulse which, in its operation, it would affect mechanically, rejects
and condemns it; but it condemns it not by antecedent hate but by
supervening wisdom. The texture of the natural world, the conflict of
interests in the soul and in society, all of which cannot be satisfied
together, is accordingly the ground for moral restrictions and
compromises. Whatever the up-shot of the struggle may be, whatever the
verdict pronounced by reason, the parties to the suit must in justice
all be heard, and heard sympathetically.
[Sidenote: Primary and secondary morality.]
Herein lies the great difference between first-hand and second-hand
morality. The retailers of moral truth, the town-criers that go
shouting in the streets some sentence passed long ago in reason’s court
against some inadmissible desire, know nothing of justice or mercy or
reason—three principles essentially identical. They thunder conclusions
without remembering the premisses, and expose their precepts, daily, of
course, grown more thin and unrepresentative, to the aversion and
neglect of all who genuinely love what is good. The masters of life, on
the contrary, the first framers and discoverers of moral ideals, are
persons who disregard those worn conventions and their professional
interpreters: they are persons who have a fresh sense for the universal
need and cry of human souls, and reconstruct the world of duty to make
it fit better with the world of desire and of possible happiness.
Primary morality, inspired by love of something naturally good, is
accordingly charitable and ready to forgive; while secondary morality,
founded on prejudice, is fanatical and ruthless.
[Sidenote: Uncharitable pagan justice is not just.]
As virtue carries with it a pleasure which perfects it and without which
virtue would evidently be spurious and merely compulsory, so justice
carries with it a charity which is its highest expression, without which
justice remains only an organised wrong. Of justice without charity we
have a classic illustration in Plato’s Republic and in general in the
pagan world. An end is assumed, in this case an end which involves
radical injustice toward every interest not included in it; and then an
organism is developed or conceived that shall subserve that end, and
political justice is defined as the harmonious adjustment of powers and
functions within that organism. Reason and art suffice to discover the
right methods for reaching the chosen end, and the polity thus
established, with all its severities and sacrifices of personal will, is
rationally grounded. The chosen end, however, is arbitrary, and, in
fact, perverse; for to maintain a conventional city with stable
institutions and perpetual military efficiency would not secure human
happiness; nor (to pass to the individual virtue symbolised by such a
state) would the corresponding discipline of personal habits, in the
service of vested interests and bodily life, truly unfold the
potentialities of the human spirit.
Plato himself, in passing, acknowledges that his political ideal is
secondary and not ideal at all, since only luxury, corruption, and
physical accidents make a military state necessary; but his absorption
in current Greek questions made him neglect the initial question of all,
namely, how a non-military and non-competitive state might be
established, or rather how the remedial functions of the state might be
forestalled by natural justice and rendered unnecessary. The violence
which such a fallen ideal, with its iniquitous virtues, does to humanity
appeared only too clearly in the sequel, when Platonism took refuge in
the supernatural. The whole pagan world was convicted of injustice and
the cities for whose glory the greatest heroes had lived and died were
abandoned with horror. Only in a catacomb or a hermitage did there seem
to be any room for the soul. This revulsion, perverse in its own way,
expressed rightly enough the perversity of that unjust justice, those
worldly and arbitrary virtues, and that sad happiness which had enslaved
the world.
[Sidenote: The doom of ancient republics.]
Plato could never have answered the question whether his Republic had a
right to exist and to brush aside all other commonwealths; he could
never have justified the ways of man to the rest of creation nor (what
is more pertinent) to man’s more plastic and tenderer imagination. The
initial impulses on which his Republic is founded, which make war,
defensive and aggressive, the first business of the state, are not
irresistible impulses, they do not correspond to ultimate ends. Physical
life cannot justify itself; it cannot be made the purpose of those
rational faculties which it generates; these, on the contrary, are its
own end. The purpose of war must be peace; the purpose of competition a
more general prosperity; the purpose of personal life ideal
achievements. A polity which should not tend to abolish private lusts,
competition, and war would be an irrational polity. The organisation
which the ancients insisted on within each state, the sacrifices they
imposed on each class in the community for the general welfare, have to
be repeated in that greater commonwealth of which cities and nations are
citizens; for their own existence and prosperity depends on conciliating
inwardly all that may affect them and turning foreign forces, when
contact with them is inevitable, into friends. Duty and co-operation
must extend as far as do physical bonds, the function of reason being to
bring life into harmony with its conditions, so as to render it
self-perpetuating and free. This end can never be attained while the
scope of moral fellowship is narrower than that of physical interplay.
Ancient civilisation, brilliant in proportion to its inner integration,
was brief in proportion to its outer injustice. By defying the external
forces on which also a commonwealth depends, those commonwealths came to
premature extinction.
[Sidenote: Rational charity.]
There is accordingly a justice deeper and milder than that of pagan
states, a universal justice called charity, a kind of all-penetrating
courtesy, by which the limits of personal or corporate interests are
transgressed in imagination. Value is attributed to rival forms of life;
something of the intensity and narrowness inherent in the private will
is surrendered to admiration and solicitude for what is most alien and
hostile to one’s self. When this imaginative expansion ends in
neutralising the will altogether, we have mysticism; but when it serves
merely to co-ordinate felt interests with other actual interests
conceived sympathetically, and to make them converge, we have justice
and charity. Charity is nothing but a radical and imaginative justice.
So the Buddhist stretches his sympathy to all real beings and to many
imaginary monsters; so the Christian chooses for his love the diseased,
the sinful, the unlovely. His own salvation does not seem to either
complete unless every other creature also is redeemed and forgiven.
[Sidenote: Its limits.]
Such universal solicitude is rational, however, only when the beings to
which it extends are in practical efficient relations with the life that
would co-operate with theirs. In other words, charity extends only to
physical and discoverable creatures, whose destiny is interwoven
dynamically with our own. Absolute and irresponsible fancy can be the
basis of no duty. If not to take other real forces and interests into
account made classic states unstable and unjust, to take into
consideration purely imaginary forces yields a polity founded on
superstition, one unjust to those who live under it. A compromise made
with non-existent or irrelevant interests is a wrong to the real
interests on which that sacrifice is imposed gratuitously. All
sacrifices exacted by mere religion have accordingly been inhuman; at
best they have unintentionally made some amends by affording abstract
discipline or artistic forms of expression. The sacrifice must be
fruitful in the end and bring happiness to somebody: otherwise it
cannot long remain tender or beautiful.
[Sidenote: Its mythical supports.]
Charity is seldom found uncoloured by fables which illustrate it and
lend it a motive by which it can justify itself verbally.
Metempsychosis, heaven and hell, Christ’s suffering for every sinner,
are notions by which charity has often been guided and warmed. Like myth
everywhere, these notions express judgments which they do not originate,
although they may strengthen or distort them in giving them expression.
The same myths, in cruel hands, become goads to fanaticism. That natural
sensitiveness in which charity consists has many degrees and many
inequalities; the spirit bloweth where it listeth. Incidental
circumstances determine its phases and attachments in life. Christian
charity, for instance, has two chief parts: first, it hastens to relieve
the body; then, forgetting physical economy altogether, it proceeds to
redeem the soul. The bodily works of mercy which Christians perform with
so much tact and devotion are not such as philanthropy alone would
inspire; they are more and less than that. They are more, because they
are done with a certain disproportionate and absolute solicitude, quite
apart from ultimate benefit or a thought of the best distribution of
energies; they are also less, because they stop at healing, and cannot
pass beyond the remedial and incidental phase without ceasing to be
Christian. The poor, says Christian charity, we have always with us;
every man must be a sinner—else what obligation should he have to
repent?—and, in fine, this world is essentially the kingdom of Satan.
Charity comes only to relieve the most urgent bodily needs, and then to
wean the heart altogether from mortal interests. Thus Christianity
covers the world with hospitals and orphanages; but its only positive
labours go on in churches and convents, nor will it found schools, if
left to itself, to teach anything except religion. These offices may be
performed with more or less success, with more or less appeal to the
miraculous; but, with whatever mixture of magic and policy, Christian
charity has never aimed at anything but healing the body and saving the
soul.
[Sidenote: There is intelligence in charity.]
Christ himself, we may well feel, did not affect publicans and sinners,
ignorant people and children, in order to save them in the regimental
and prescriptive fashion adopted by the Church. He commanded those he
forgave to sin no more and those he healed to go, as custom would have
it, to the priest. He understood the bright good that each sinner was
following when he stumbled into the pit. For this insight he was loved.
To be rebuked in that sympathetic spirit was to be comforted; to be
punished by such a hand was to be made whole. The Magdalene was forgiven
because she had loved much; an absolution which rehabilitates the
primary longing that had driven her on, a longing not insulted but
comprehended in such an absolution, and purified by that comprehension.
It is a charitable salvation which enables the newly revealed deity to
be absolutely loved. Charity has this art of making men abandon their
errors without asking them to forget their ideals.
[Sidenote: Buddhist and Christian forms of it.]
In Buddhism the same charity wears a more speculative form. All beings
are to be redeemed from the illusion which is the fountain of their
troubles. None is to be compelled to assume irrationally an alien set of
duties or other functions than his own. Spirit is not to be incarcerated
perpetually in grotesque and accidental monsters, but to be freed from
all fatality and compulsion. The goal is not some more flattering
incarnation, but escape from incarnation altogether. Ignorance is to be
enlightened, passion calmed, mistaken destiny revoked; only what the
inmost being desiderates, only what can really quiet the longings
embodied in any particular will, is to occupy the redeemed mind. Here,
though creative reason is wholly wanting, charity is truly understood;
for it avails little to make of kindness a vicarious selfishness and to
use neighbourly offices to plunge our neighbour deeper into his
favourite follies. Such servile sympathy would make men one another’s
accomplices rather than friends. It would treat them with a weak
promiscuous favour, not with true mercy and justice. In charity there
can be nothing to repent of, as there so often is in natural love and in
partisan propaganda. Christians have sometimes interpreted charity as
zeal to bring men into their particular fold; or, at other times, when
enthusiasm for doctrine and institutes has cooled, they have interpreted
charity to be mere blind co-operation, no matter in what.
The Buddhists seem to have shown a finer sense in their ministry,
knowing how to combine universal sympathy with perfect spirituality.
There was no brow-beating in their call to conversion, no new tyranny
imposed of sanctioned by their promised deliverance. If they could not
rise to a positive conception of natural life, this inability but marks
the well-known limitations of Oriental fancy, which has never been able
to distinguish steadily that imagination which rests on and expresses
material life from that which, in its import, breaks loose from the
given conditions of life altogether, and is therefore monstrous and
dreamful. But at least Buddhism knew how to sound the heart and pierce
to the genuine principles of happiness and misery. If it did not venture
to interpret reason positively, it at least forbore to usurp its inward
and autonomous authority, and did not set up, in the name of salvation,
some new partiality, some new principle of distress and illusion. In
destroying worldliness this religion avoided imposture. The clearing it
made in the soul was soon overgrown again by the inexorable Indian
jungle; but had a virile intellect been at hand, it would have been free
to raise something solid and rational in the space so happily swept
clean of all accumulated rubbish.
[Sidenote: Apparent division of the spiritual and the natural.]
Against avarice, lust, and rancour, against cruel and vain national
ambitions, tenderer and more recollected minds have always sought some
asylum: but they have the seldom possessed enough knowledge of nature
and of human life to distinguish clearly the genuine and innocent goods
which they longed for, and their protest against “the world” has too
often taken on a mystical and irrational accent. Charity, for instance,
in its profounder deliverances, has become a protest against the
illusion of personality; whereby existence and action seem to be wholly
condemned after their principle has been identified with selfishness. An
artificial puzzle is thus created, the same concept, selfishness or an
irrational partiality and injustice in the will, being applied to two
principles of action, the one wrong and the other necessary. Every man
is necessarily the seat of his own desires, which, if truly fulfilled,
would bring him satisfaction; but the objects in which that satisfaction
may be found, and the forces that must co-operate to secure it, lie far
afield, and his life will remain cramped and self-destructive so long as
he does not envisage its whole basis and co-operate with all his
potential allies.
The rationality which would then be attained is so immensely exalted
above the microscopic vision and punctiform sensibility of those who
think themselves practical, that speculative natures seem to be
proclaiming another set of interests, another and quite miraculous life,
when they attempt to thaw out and vivify the vulgar mechanism; and the
sense of estrangement and contradiction often comes over the spiritually
minded themselves, making them confess sadly that the kingdom of heaven
is not of this world. As common morality itself falls easily into
mythical expressions and speaks of a fight between conscience and
nature, reason and the passions, as if these were independent in their
origin or could be divided in their operation, so spiritual life even
more readily opposes the ideal to the real, the revealed and heavenly
truth to the extant reality, as if the one could be anything but an
expression and fulfilment of the other. Being equal convinced that
spiritual life is authoritative and possible, and that it is opposed to
all that earthly experience has as yet supplied, the prophet almost
inevitably speaks of another world above the clouds and another
existence beyond the grave; he thus seeks to clothe in concrete and
imaginable form the ideal to which natural existence seems to him wholly
rebellious. Spiritual life comes to mean life abstracted from politics,
from art, from sense, even in the end from morality. Natural motives
and natural virtues are contrasted with those which are henceforth
called supernatural, and all the grounds and sanctions of right living
are transferred to another life. A doctrine of immortality thus becomes
the favourite expression of religion. By its variations and greater or
less transparency and ideality we can measure the degree of spiritual
insight which has been reached at any moment.