THE DILEMMA OF THE
LIBERATED
_An Interpretation of Twentieth Century Humanism_
By GORHAM MUNSON
_“It is a commonplace of the schools
that man is a little world, in which
we may discern a body mingled
of earthly elements, and ethereal
breath, and the vegetable life of
plants, and the senses of lower animals,
and reason, and the intelligence
of angels, and a likeness to God.”_
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA.
PUBLISHED IN NEW YORK BY
_Coward-McCann, Inc._
IN THE YEAR 1930
Copyright, 1930, by
Coward-McCann, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the U. S. A.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION vii
I. THE BIRTH OF HUMANISM 3
II. A PORTRAIT OF OUR AGE 19
III. THE MAN OF POISE 39
IV. THE NEW BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 53
V. THE CLASSICAL REVIVAL ABROAD 79
VI. A CREATIVE CONCEPTION OF MAN 107
VII. THE DISCIPLINE OF HUMANISM 130
VIII. SCIENCE AND THE MODERN MAN 167
IX. EDUCATION AND LEADERSHIP 190
X. HUMANISM, ECONOMICS, POLITICS 208
XI. THE DILEMMA OF THE LIBERATED 252
XII. THE END OF THE TETHER 284
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 302
BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION
A LETTER OF DEDICATION TO SEWARD B. COLLINS, ESQ’RE.
My dear Seward:
For two years I have cherished the wish to offer you, out of gratitude
and friendship, some product of my pen. But I did not dream two years
ago, or even one year ago, that I should write a book on a subject
so near your heart as American Humanism. Lately, however, there has
been a great acceleration of events in our country’s intellectual
life; unexpectedly soon the moment has ripened for a full-length study
of the creative possibilities of the New Humanism. Now it is doubly
appropriate to dedicate this study to you: I gratify a private desire,
and I give a public recognition of the large part you yourself, as
editor of the _Bookman_, have performed in bringing the ideas of P. E.
More and Irving Babbitt and their colleagues before the eyes of the
general reading public.
This work of yours I say is a very important service to American
literature in its present condition. At no time myself an orthodox
Humanist, I nonetheless felt six or seven years ago, when I first read
the _Shelburne Essays_ and Professor Babbitt’s massive works, that here
was criticism our literary world could not ignore without grave loss,
and I set myself to do what I could to bring this criticism out of the
academic shadows to which it had been consigned by the main romantic
movement of post-war America and to advance it to the very center of
our literary stage. In this effort I was of course merely a symptom
of a change in temper and direction and ideals that was gradually
taking place in many young Americans who came to feel that there was
something disastrously ill-informed and disappointingly shallow in the
revolt-literature of the ’Twenties. At any rate, there has finally
occurred in literary criticism a reaction toward “style and order,”
not alone in letters but in life, and we can now say that the doctrine
of the New Humanists is decidedly under scrutiny by every one who
professes to be seriously interested in the welfare of our literature.
Let the literary battles over Humanism go on and may they wax
hotter! Strength of opposition is good for all parties concerned,
and the development in our literary world of a strong orthodox
classical party like the New Humanists is sure to call forth from our
naturalistic thinkers and artists greater efforts, and efforts on a
more difficult level of thought, than those they have felt inclined to
make in the last fifteen years. But--as you tell your readers in the
_Bookman_--American Humanism is not essentially or solely a literary
school. It offers a comprehensive critique of modern civilization: it
has studied our problems of education, politics, manners, morals, and
science, as well as literary tendencies: it is preëminently concerned
with the question, _how to live_, and it believes that it has the
commencement of a sound program for the intelligent conduct of life.
How to live? That undying question has always given rise to hornèd
problems. Walter Lippmann, not long ago, showed ably how the
traditional controls of our lives have been abolished or appear to
have been abolished; with the same ability he outlined the quandaries
of the modern man who has been born into the Kingdom of Whirl after
the joy of breaking images has gone out of the land and no new goal
for existence has shiningly presented itself. “What is there in the
back of our heads,” Lippmann asked, “which keeps telling us that
life as we find it is not what it ought to be?” This is his reply:
“It is a deep conviction that happiness is possible, and all inquiry
into the foundations of morals turns ultimately upon whether man can
achieve this happiness by pursuing his desires, or whether he must
first learn to desire the kind of happiness which is possible.” There
you have what may be termed the dilemma of the emancipated man. The
intelligent modern man feels liberated from petty social conventions,
narrow theological views, discredited authorities, the grosser popular
superstitions, but liberated for what? Only, it seems, to face a
darkened problem of choices, with many strong reasons for distrusting
every alternative offered. Shall he follow some most recent form of
naturalism such as D. H. Lawrence preached? He is impressed by its
passionateness, but it also has a fanatic sound to him; it appears
to delimit man, to deny too much in man’s constitution that seems
to promise more abundant life to him who develops it. Shall he, on
the other hand, seek out some surviving moral discipline or some
new asceticism? But which one and how well founded on science and
commonsense are these preserved or refurbished disciplines?
Well, the New Humanism has much to say on such a dilemma as this, much
to say on the great central moral question, how to live as a being
bearing the proud-sounding name of Man ought to live; and for this
reason it is proper to call contemporary Humanism a modern morality
and to say that it commends itself to persons who, besides reading for
pleasure or information, read to live.
It is such persons, men and women of the world who resort to books
with the real intention of clarifying their lives by reading, that I
wish to address. They are free from that malady to which the “literary
person” so frequently succumbs, namely, living for reading and writing.
This person’s mind then becomes merely a great heap of literary
associations, all very useful, if only he had obtained a few central
ideas, if only he had kept a grip on life as the foremost thing and
resolutely kept his reading in its proper place as “the great stimulus
to life.” The man of the world, on the other hand, has other faults,
but he is sensible in what he demands of books. He wants the essentials
of a doctrine and he wants them purged of special terminology: he wants
to see the doctrine’s practical implications lighted up: he wants to
see the cardinal teachings properly groomed to appear before the bar of
commonsense. That is why in the following pages I have avoided as much
as possible the debates and wrangles of scholarship and have tried for
compactness, clearness, simplicity, and practicality in the exposition
of the master-ideas of Babbitt and More.
Truly, they are pregnant ideas. My first aim in this book has been to
show their remarkable specific gravity and how they sink to the bottom
of one’s mind. There, it seems to me, they give birth to questions
of the utmost importance to the individual. They raise questions
relating to his world-view, to his psychology, and to his aspirations
in character. The mind is agitated in a new way and so led to take new
approaches to old problems: the experience of past mankind and our
contemporary experience operate on each other with profit in the way
of self-understanding and the understanding of modern society. Many of
the questions thus aroused are of a religious character, and my second
object has been to discuss them and in so doing naturally to pass from
the field of morals to the field of religion. Religion, “that deepest
voice of human experience,” according to Matthew Arnold--what has it to
say of the ideals of the New Humanism and the humanistic way of life?
What has religion even now to say to the skeptical modern man disposed
to give ear to new moral doctrines?
In what we would reply here, my respected dedicatee, I foresee a wide
divergence in our future paths. Possibly not however. But on that part
of the journey which we have traveled together I wish to say I have
known no other companion so gay in mind, so unswerving and unafraid in
practice, so ardent in understanding of the tenets of American Humanism
as you to whom this book is tendered.
In the language beloved by the Humanists of the Renascence,
_Sum ut semper, tui studiossimus_,
Gorham Munson.
_March 17, 1930,
New York, N.Y._
I
THE BIRTH OF HUMANISM
_“As is well known, the word humanist was applied, first in the
Italy of the fifteenth century, and later in other European
countries, to the type of scholar who was not only proficient in
Greek and Latin, but who at the same time inclined to prefer the
humanity of the great classical writers to what seemed to him the
excess of divinity in the mediævals. This contrast between humanity
and divinity was often conceived very superficially. However, the
best of the humanists were not content with opposing a somewhat
external imitation of the Ciceronian or Virgilian elegance to the
scholastic carelessness of form. They actually caught a glimpse
of the fine proportionateness of the ancients at their best. They
were thus encouraged to aim at a harmonious development of their
faculties in this world rather than at an otherworldly felicity.
Each faculty, they held, should be cultivated in due measure
without one-sidedness or over-emphasis, whether that of the ascetic
or that of the specialist.”_--Irving Babbitt in _Humanism and
America_.
It requires an unusual effort for us to admit that there was something
mysterious operating in the deeps of the Middle Ages, and again that
well below the surface of the Renascence there seem to have been
strange forces. We look with wonderment at the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries in Europe--at that uncompleted Cathedral of the Intellect
designed by St. Thomas Aquinas, at the ordering and altitude of emotion
in Dante, at that philosophy of action called Chivalry; but few of
us can refrain from ready interpretations. Very few can sit in the
Cathedral of Chartres and sincerely arrive at the conclusion which
Henry Adams reached after long saturation beneath its influences.
That conclusion, highly remarkable as coming from a modern man
and therefore worthy of italic print, was given by Adams all the
advantages of emphatic position. It was couched in the surprising final
clause of a lengthy sentence at the end of one of his chapters in
_Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_, his elaborate homage to the splendor
of mediæval times. I shall let Adams lead up to it.
“Sitting here any Sunday afternoon, while the voices of the children of
the maîtrise are chanting in the choir,--your mind held in the grasp
of the strong lines and shadows of the architecture; your eyes flooded
with the autumn tones of the glass; your ears drowned with the purity
of the voices; one sense reacting upon another until sensation reaches
the limit of its range,--you, or any other lost soul, could, if you
cared to look and listen, feel a sense beyond the human ready to reveal
a sense divine that would make that world once more intelligible, and
would bring the Virgin to life again, in all the depths of feeling
which she shows here,--in lines, vaults, chapels, colours, legends,
chants,--more eloquent than the prayer-book, and more beautiful than
the autumn sunlight; and any one willing to try could feel it like the
child, reading new thought without end into the art he has studied a
hundred times; _but what is still more convincing, he could, at will,
in an instant, shatter the whole art by calling into it a single motive
of his own_.”
But, as though in obedience to some undivined law, the marvellous
unity of the Middle Ages, sustained in Adams’s judgment by motives so
foreign and incomprehensible to us, began to crumble. The spirit began
to withdraw and the forms to change into formalism. There was less
inwardness. Corruption and decline set in, and then fairly suddenly the
disintegration of culture was arrested and a new growth took place to
make resplendent the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Renascence
was in part a great revolt against _decayed_ scholasticism and the
views of man and the world it upheld, and in part the fulfilment of
fresh impulses generated by the apostles of the New Learning, the study
of classical literature. This period too baffles us: we meet with so
many enigmatic figures! To take a famous instance, who has ever made a
plausible business of explaining the character of Francis Bacon? Enigma
he was and enigma he remains, a man whose range of motivation outspans
our most inspired conjectures.
But this strangeness is not all that defies our efforts at
understanding. We need to suspend judgment, but the difficulties of
remaining in suspended judgment are magnified in a way that has been
set forth by an English amateur of philosophy, the late T. E. Hulme,
whose reputation in America incidentally has never matched his deserts.
Authentically, Hulme was a young intellectual giant, and his death in
the Great War was a grievous casualty for contemporary philosophy. But
fragmentary as his writings are, one essay in his posthumous book,
_Speculations_, is said to have done more to clarify the mind of
his generation in England than any other essay in recent years. This
influential paper is called _Humanism and the Religious Attitude_, and
some of its striking ideas are very much to our present purpose. Hulme
opened by boldly declaring that the modern emancipated and instructed
man shrinks from the idea of discontinuities. Such a man, he said, is
wedded to the theory of evolution and the doctrine of progress, two
sisters, and so he abhors the notion of a gap, a real chasm, existing
in the scheme of life. In fine, the modern man takes a principle
of continuity to be, not just a convenience in certain fields of
thought, but an absolute fact. He therefore very frequently denies a
discontinuity between Nature and Man and invariably between Man and the
Absolute.
But the Middle Ages believed in a discontinuity between Man and
absolute values in religion and ethics. They believed, that is to say,
in Original Sin and in placing perfection far above the human plane.
That is what makes those ages so hard for us to comprehend. But in the
Renascence, according to Hulme, this discontinuity was denied: man was
declared not radically bad, but worthy, and things perfect were brought
down and mingled with things on the human plane. Where there had been
the mediæval religious spirit, now appeared the modern humanistic
temper--and the two were utterly different! In its later manifestations
we can understand the latter, but in the Renascence, in men like Manuel
Chrysoloras, Pico della Mirandola, and Leonardo da Vinci, we are
haunted by the enigmatic.
What secrets they had, we cannot probe after now, even if we had
fresh clues. What is incontrovertible is that we inherit that part of
the Renascence which was a revolt against mediævalism. The fifteenth
century founders of Humanism gave the Western World nothing less than
a new _weltanschauung_. What that world-view is and what the Romantic
world-conception is which has sprung up in the last one hundred and
fifty years to challenge it, I shall try to expose in the following
pages. Then in the concluding chapters, after discussing Romanticism
and Humanism, I wish to return to Religion and to consider the radical
difference Hulme alleged to exist between the humanistic temper and the
religious spirit.
* * * * *
When we have a single name to cover related but highly variegated
phenomena, we tend after a time to think of the phenomena as being
uniform because the one name covers them all. So today when an
editorial writer mentions the Humanists of the Renascence, he often
sounds as if he considered all of them to have been turned out on
very much the same pattern. There is some excuse then for a brief
collection of data showing that such was not the case any more than a
rigid uniformity characterizes the Humanists of the twentieth century.
Humanism now and formerly is essentially broad and flexible, and the
reader must divest himself of narrow preconceptions if he hopes to
encompass the subject. For dispelling a contemporary prejudice in favor
of uniformity, a mere glance at the variety of fifteenth and sixteenth
century Humanism will be enough, even though we take in only the best
known facts.
The earliest Humanists appeared in Italy, and principally in Florence
under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici. Scholars like Manuel
Chrysoloras and Poggio Bracciolini had delved into the treasures of
ancient Greece and Rome and had risen ecstatically. In 1453 the fall
of Constantinople released the old manuscripts in greater profusion:
the new springs of life welled up gloriously. Men in the most powerful
places like Pope Nicholas V became supporters of the new cult of
_literae humaniores_. But as the New Learning spread, its secular
spirit became more evident, and the Church found itself assaulted
by some Humanists, Lorenzo Valla, for example, who stood boldly for
paganism and asserted the chief good to be pleasure. Others--the
most celebrated is Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494)--sought to blend
Christianity with Platonism. Generally speaking, Italian Humanism
had a pronounced æsthetic character, but we must not therefore think
of these seminal figures in the dreamy fashion of Walter Pater. His
languid essay on Pico is the least fitted thing to do justice to this
man’s power of inspiring others to love the New Learning. You would
never guess from Pater that Pico della Mirandola was reputed to have
had such a powerful mind and memory that he retained perfectly on a
single reading the entire language and meaning of any text he read.
Pico was only thirty-one when he died on the day the French king,
Charles the Eighth, entered Florence, but he had done the work of a
giant. Enthusiasts had carried his influence throughout Europe: he had
fertilized an age.
In every country where it took root, Humanism assumed national
characteristics and applied itself to differing tasks. In Spain, in
France, in England and in Germany each movement was _sui generis_--a
point to remember today when we observe the classical revivals going
on in France, England and the United States. The Action Française,
the work of Belloc and Chesterton, American Humanism have all, in
spite of many important differences, a family resemblance which will
concern us later. But now glancing back at Spain in the Renascence,
it is Cardinal Ximenes (1436?-1517) whom most readers will recall and
his establishment of the University of Alcalá, that university from
which in 1514 was to come the first Greek text of the New Testament
ever printed. A little afterwards came the renowned Polyglot Bible,
made under the direction of the Cardinal and published at his personal
expense.
In France from the beginning Humanism was tinged with Catholic heresy.
There was Jacques Lefevre of Etaples (1455-1537), whose _Commentary on
the Epistles of St. Paul_ in 1512 is regarded as a distinct enunciation
of the doctrine of justification by faith alone. There was Guillaume
Budé (1467-1540), whose studies were almost entirely secular; he was
excelled by no one in his time for scholarship in Greek and Latin.
There was finally François Rabelais (1495?-1555?), the colossal
laughing incarnation of the French humanistic spirit.
In Germany and England the Humanists appear to have struck graver
notes and to have been more concerned with social reform. American
Humanism today bears at least this external resemblance to the
Humanism of William Grocyn, Thomas Linacre and Sir Thomas More:
namely, it is greatly concerned with public education. Perhaps
the most typical English Humanist was John Colet (1467?-1519) who
founded St. Paul’s School in London. And American Humanism has an
external resemblance to the Renascence form of Humanism in Germany in
that the contemporary form is likewise primarily a movement inside
the universities. The famous names in Germany are Johann Reuchlin
(1455-1522), Ulrich Von Hutten (1488-1523), and the artist Albrecht
Dürer (1471-1528). Reuchlin, around whom, provoked by his defence of
the Jews, a storm broke that swept him for trial to Rome itself, is
especially noteworthy, for he indicates by his study of Hebrew and
the _Kabbalah_ (a wonderful text to Pico, too) the variety of the
sources of inspiration the Humanists discovered. Ulrich Von Hutten,
militant pamphleteer, sided with the Protestant Reformation, whereas
as is well known many Humanists liked Calvin no better than they liked
obscurantist monks.
With that fact let us close what is clearly not intended to be a
comprehensive survey of Renascence Humanism or an evaluation of it,
but only the presentment of enough data to recall the great complexity
of the early Humanists. All that is designed is to direct attention to
their heterogeneity, to remember that some were against Aristotle and
others favored him, some were for paganism, others for Catholicism, and
others for the Reformation, some were of singular purity, others were
gay worldlings in personal morals. National traits altered the colors
of Humanism, and the places of emphasis, as we have seen, shifted
from country to country, here being found in the arts, there in
education, and there in religious reform. It is a warning to us--this
complexity in historical Humanism--not to expect a sameness, or an
exceedingly close approximation to each other, in the manifestations of
contemporary Humanists. Historically, the humanistic temper was broad:
we shall come to see the wide latitude of a similar temper today.
And yet historians are right in applying one name to all these diverse
men from Petrarch in Italy to Luis Vives in Spain, for all felt
powerfully the attraction of one leading idea. That idea the modern
world has agreed to call “the dignity of man,” and it is customary
to go to the _Oration on the Dignity of Man_ composed by Pico della
Mirandola for the most eloquent phrasing of it. “Then the Supreme Being
decreed that unto Man, on whom He could bestow nought singular, should
belong in common whatsoever had been given to His other creatures.
Therefore He took man, made in His own individual image, and having
placed him in the center of the world, spake to him thus: ‘Neither a
fixed abode, nor a form in thine own likeness, nor any gift peculiar to
thyself alone, have we given thee, O Adam, in order that what abode,
what likeness, what gifts thou shalt choose, may be thine to have and
to possess. The nature allotted to all other creatures, within laws
appointed by ourselves, restrains them. Thou, restrained by no narrow
bonds, according to thy own free will, in whose power I have placed
thee, shalt define thy nature for thyself. I have set thee midmost the
world, that thence thou mightest the more conveniently survey whatever
is in the world. Nor have we made thee, either heavenly or earthly,
mortal or immortal, to the end that thou, being, as it were, thy own
free maker and moulder, shouldst fashion thyself in what form may like
thee best. Thou shalt have power to decline unto the lower or brute
creatures. Thou shalt have power to be reborn unto the higher, or
divine, according to the sentence of thy intellect.’ Thus to Man, at
his birth, the Father gave seeds of all variety and germs of every form
of life.”
Closely observed, this passage yields the following statements. Man
is a being of extraordinary elasticity, for he subsumes the various
kingdoms of nature, animal, vegetable and inorganic. Man is not _given_
stability or a center within himself, but he may acquire them. He can
do so because he has will and potentialities to develop. His dignity
consists in the fact that whereas other creatures must obey their
destiny, he can have an active part in forming his. His way lies
between the brute and the divine: he can sink into the former or he can
be reborn into the latter. To be human is to be midmost. Pico has thus
written--it may be noted here--an epigraph for the New Humanism.
In passing, however, some questions should be raised. Do the New
Humanists, who proclaim afresh the dignity of man, distribute the
weight of their thought and emotion quite as evenly as did Pico? On the
idea of rebirth, for instance, and all that it implies of revolution
in personal psychology, do they not walk lightly or step carefully
away from it? “The higher, or divine”--did it not tend to drop out of
Renascence Humanism in its later stages, and today does it not fail
to attract the best thought or the most passionate endeavors of our
Humanists? Yet all, new and old, stand for man’s dignity and would
agree that Pico della Mirandola has given the _poetic_ formulation of
their faith.
How would their faith be phrased intellectually? Happily, we may
resort to T. E. Hulme for that. “It seems as if,” he says, “no sooner
had Copernicus shown that man was not the center of the universe,
than the philosophers commenced for the first time to prove that he
was. You get expressed explicitly, for the first time (in Pico della
Mirandola for example), this idea of the sufficiency of natural man,
and it has generally been assumed by all philosophers since. It may be
expressed in very different languages and with very different degrees
of profundity, but even Hegel and Condorcet are one from this point of
view.” The self-sufficiency of the natural man--there is a key idea
we must grasp. I object to a precise equating of Hulme’s phrase with
Pico’s eloquence on the dignity of man, but, leaving out the references
to divine order and rebirth, the phrase is fairly close to an
intellectual equivalent. Self-sufficiency is the central idea _we_ have
inherited from the Renascence, and for millions of men it has effaced
the mediæval idea of the insufficiency of the natural man and the need
for Grace to visit him as a basically bad creature. The dignity of man
understood as the self-sufficiency of the natural man, _and by natural
man is meant one not reborn_, is the foundation idea for all modern
Humanism.
In the foregoing sketch I did not mention the man who is inevitably
associated by every one with Renascence Humanism--Desiderius Erasmus.
That was because I wish the reader to observe him now in a particular
connection. Let us look briefly at the crisis in Christendom produced
by the emotional revolt of Martin Luther. Up to 1521 when Luther
shouted, “I should go to Worms were there as many devils there as tiles
upon the roofs,” Erasmus had held a commanding position in Europe.
Europe was then, intellectually and morally, a single community. Latin
was the common language binding together all intellectual contributions
and there was one Church for all the peoples. Erasmus had risen from
his illegitimate birth in Rotterdam, his convent education, and his
straitness of means, to be a friendly counsellor of King and Pope, a
master of Latin style, an illuminated traveler throughout Europe to
exchange light with its best minds. As every one knows, he addressed
himself to the emancipation of the individual, expecting that from the
increase of enlightened individuals would eventually issue religious as
well as social reform. The evil of the time he ascribed to ignorance:
he combated it with genial raillery and suave satire, making always an
appeal for truth, temperate procedure, and tolerance.
Now think of the man who was described by Erasmus in a letter “as a
necessary evil in the corruption of the Church; a medicine, bitter
and drastic, from which sounder health would follow.” Martin Luther’s
career is familiar to every one; how he was severely beaten at
home and at school during his childhood, how he sang for alms at
the University of Erfurt, how his friend was slain at his side by
lightning and the young student’s subsequent terrified flight into an
Augustine monastery, how there he was distinguished by zeal, how he was
disenchanted in his pilgrimage to Rome, how afterwards he was made a
professor of philosophy at the University of Wittenberg, how finally
he opposed Tetzel on the latter’s mission of selling indulgences
and dispensations and wrote out against such practices the famous
ninety-five propositions which led eventually to excommunication; all
these circumstances have been rehearsed hundreds of times in tones of
admiration or detestation for the man who experienced them. Certainly
in contrast to Erasmus’s, Luther’s life seems lurid. And undoubtedly
the conventional Protestant account of the Reformer can stand much
correction, but we need only note what unmistakably stands out in the
characters of the Reformer and the great Humanist.
Carlyle had excellent reason to call Luther the Christian Odin, the
right Thor: the man is impressive by his power in action, by his
great and often harsh energy, by the force and sometimes violence
of his feelings. He is _not_ impressive because of his mind. Let us
hear Luther himself denounce the reason which he grants is indeed of
utility in practical affairs but refuses to call good beyond that
realm. “Reason,” he thundered in his last sermon at Wittenberg near
the close of his life, “is the devil’s greatest whore; by nature and
manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the
devil’s appointed whore; a whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought
to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom.” And on
another occasion he said: “Reason is directly opposed to faith, and
one ought to let it be; in believers it should be killed and buried.”
This clearly is not the accent of the Renascence Humanist who objected
to pseudo-intellectualism but never to the idea that there is a right
employment of reason in the highest matters. Nor did the Humanist throw
his weight so vehemently upon the emotions and in particular upon
faith as did Luther. “We can say,” remarks Jacques Maritain, one of
the best Catholic philosophers today, “that Luther is the first great
Romantic”--and despite Luther’s strong religious disposition, Maritain
makes this remark seem plausible.
Erasmus is the antithesis to Luther. He was an active practical man,
but we never think of him as an exponent of energetics; he was mature
and full in his feelings, but not violent or overflowing in turbulence;
he was an able reasoner but not gone mad on metaphysical refinements.
What strikes us about Erasmus is not the greatness or intensity of any
one of his faculties, but the fair degree of harmony in the development
and operations of all of them. He is the typical Humanist because of
his proportionateness. He had the supreme humanist virtue, and that is
mellow commonsense.
The crisis came, and a large part of Europe followed the impassioned
Luther into the Reformation. Erasmus, observing the defects of Luther,
his lack of balance, his lack of reason in the best sense, could not
join his forces, nor could he fight blindly and hotly on the Catholic
side. Neither was the way of mellow commonsense, and he who had been
the prince of the European mind retired helplessly to Basle while the
struggle worked up its violence. He had his major defect too. Not a
weakling in feeling, he yet had not the tremendous force of emotion
required to play an effective part in the great proceedings of history.
He was even able to say in a letter to Archbishop Warham: “As for me, I
have no inclination to risk my life for truth. We have not all strength
for martyrdom; and if trouble come, I shall imitate St. Peter. Popes
and emperors must settle the creeds. If they settle them well, so much
the better; if ill, I shall keep on the safe side.” But no place was
safe for a champion of moderation. “Every goose,” he wrote from Basle,
“now hisses at Erasmus; and it is worse than being stoned, once for
all, like Stephen, or shot with arrows like Sebastian.”
Did Europe take the wrong turning when it ignored the pleas of
Erasmus,--then past sixty, suffering with the stone, grieving over the
execution of his friends, More and Fisher, a beclouded luminary,--and
plunged recklessly into the work of breaking up its moral and
intellectual unity? In retrospective wisdom Goethe thought so. Goethe
regretted that Erasmus and men like him could not have retained the
direction of the mind of Europe: he thought that Luther had thrown back
the intellectual progress of mankind for centuries by appealing to the
passions of the multitude to decide on subjects which ought to have
been left to the learned. That question we do not have to debate here.
Luther for worse or better is one of the makers of our modern world,
and our pressing question is, what is the rôle of mellow commonsense,
the great humanistic virtue, amid the confusions of our age? Should we,
the heirs of those who went with Luther, now turn for light and example
to Erasmus?
Fixing in our minds the several considerations dwelt on in this opening
up of our subject--the absolute distinction between Religion and
Humanism, the intricacy of historical Humanism, the conception of man
as self-sufficient for the unifying of himself, and ripened commonsense
as the prime virtue of Humanism--let us now leap to the present and
examine what sort of society we belong to and how we conceive of the
world and of ourselves.
II
A PORTRAIT OF OUR AGE
_“A highly unified age may offer examples of highly unified
personalities; but there is likely to exist in the individual of
today the same confused conflict of tendencies that we see in the
larger world.”_--Irving Babbitt in _Literature and the American
College_.
Some Humanist yet to be, inspired by the model of Erasmus’s _In Praise
of Folly_, will write successfully a rival piece on our follies for
the delectation of later ages. The future Erasmus will likely call his
genial dissolvent _In Praise of Modernity_: in it he will conjure up
the Spirit of Progress and constrain her to deliver a panegyric of all
our modern excesses. But the loquacious Spirit of Progress could never
accomplish that task in less space than a book, and a single chapter
is our limit for a broad sketch of our age. It is not for us then to
be indirect and ironical, but to find without loss of time some simple
clear mirror for the reflection of the plain facts of our period. Where
shall such a mirror be found? Nowhere better, it seems to me, than in
the outlook on life of the typical general reader, in the outlook of
such a person as G. R., whom I shall briefly describe.
G. R. in his forties is a respected and successful lawyer. In
his college days he wrote verse: in fact, he was Class Poet at
Commencement, but soon afterwards he lost interest in his courtship of
the Muse. He continued, however, to read rather widely and with the
object of keeping abreast of new developments in thought and art. You
will find his name among the subscribers to the Theatre Guild and on
the mailing lists of our best liberal weeklies.
As I have indicated, G. R. is successful. His comfortable duplex
apartment in the east Seventies of New York city bears witness to his
rise in the world, and out on Long Island he has acquired a remodelled
farmhouse for weekends and summertime. His three sons attend a private
school inspired by the educational ideas of John Dewey. Their father to
a casual acquaintance is not very different from some tens of thousands
of other substantial well-educated American men. Like them he gets a
little bored by the baiting tactics of H. L. Mencken: like them he
enjoys driving a car and playing golf regularly. He still awaits being
put into American fiction with the same distinctness that certain types
he despises, such as the George F. Babbitts, have been limned.
G. R., now that much of his youthful idealism has been found
inappropriate to the facts of his existence, has the strong impression
that we are all floundering about in the present era. And this
impression of his is certainly a generally diffused opinion. In a time
of floundering our first consideration must be to get at the plain
realities of our condition, and that is why I have recourse to G. R.,
on whose mind and feelings they seem most clearly imprinted. He is
susceptible to the main currents of modern life, but not being unduly
specialized, he does not show traces of these currents that are highly
peculiar to himself.
Singularity is the fault of many explanations that are being offered
of why we are floundering and how we may take arms against our sea
of troubles. These explanations come from economists, sociologists,
psychiatrists, political students and other specialists. They often
apply correctly to aspects of our confusion, but, coming from
specialists, they necessarily tend to be recondite. And what they seek
to explain and remedy, namely the easily recognized and very widespread
state of mind and feeling which G. R. epitomizes, is not recondite at
all. Why not then, as I have suggested, make a direct report, involving
no detailed knowledge of economics or social theory, of what G. R.
and the rest of us can all be aware of in terms of daily personal
experience? Surely it seems best when we are floundering to imitate the
Socratic example, to turn to the common mind, to trust in sound sense,
before we repeat as our own the views of some specialized pleader.
What gives us all, G. R. has often inquired, this persistent feeling
of blindly living along without a compass? The first part of the reply
is easy. Involuntarily, we have looked to Society for a compass and
it is patent that Society offers none. It has moulded us, directed
us, tossed us about in its channels: that we know, and we continue to
feel its multitudinous pressures every day. But Society does not show
us, nor has it shown us, any central ideal for its collective self and
for its individual members. Ideals there are in abundance, the ideals
of professions and institutions, but a master ideal ruling over them
there is not. There is competition of ideals, but no sovereign aim
subordinating all other aims in life to itself. “Whirl is king, having
driven out Zeus”--we need not wonder that this has become for us a
meaningful quotation.
If you are a lawyer like G. R., you live up to a code of legal ethics;
if you are a physician, you encounter a standard of good medical
practice; if you are a scientist, you know what the scientific ideal
is: yet you do not in those professions or in other occupations or in
the churches find an intelligent standard of living for all men to
which common assent is given. That implies a great deal more than most
people realize. It is saying that there is no central significance in
the lives we are living. Society tells us of none, and there is only
conflict and confusion on our most important concerns as human beings.
Let G. R. ask of Society: what is the meaning of my existence? what
is the true aim of my existence? Society can only reply: I am not
at present organized about any answers to these questions. You must
fulfil obligations to me, but I acknowledge no obligation to you as an
individual in the matter of spiritual guidance. That, my dear sir, is
your personal outlook. Take your choice, if you like, among a variety
of conflicting opinions, but none of them have my ultimate sanction.
Of course, as G. R. often fails to remember, such a state of affairs
has not always been. It was not so in ancient Palestine, not so in
ancient Egypt, not so in the Middle Ages in Europe. Many times in
history has Society returned to its members a full coherent reply,
right or wrong, to the prime question of the individual, what is the
significance and aim of my existence? It has, first of all, defined the
social duties of the individual, but afterwards it has admitted that
it in turn existed to further the primary aim of the individual. Not
today.
This, the complete failure of contemporary Society to declare Truth
and found itself on it, is clearly the first cause of our sense
of confusion. It is not that we are out of harmony with Society’s
declaration of Truth: it is that we know that Society is rather
helplessly established on Pilate’s question and certainly it washes its
hands of the business. Whether it is possible or desirable for Society
now to give a single answer to the question, why are we alive, is an
entirely different consideration. In bringing out the fact that our
Society does not hold up a standard of Truth, I would not wish to be
understood as meaning that Tibet is superior to America because it is
unified in a religious way we are not. Far from that! What is being
driven at now is simply the ineluctable fact that American Society
does not promote an authoritative conception of spiritual life, and
the result of this, be it good or bad, is competition and confusion of
ideals.
Bad it may be, for if man cannot have the real thing, it is notorious
he will take substitutes. We are held together not by a grand
ideal which is both social and individualistic, but by a number of
pseudo-ideals winning mass-acceptance. What are they? Study our
national behavior, and because it is obviously standardized you will
have no trouble discerning what our brazen images are.
G. R.’s mind, for example, is typical of most of us in that it is
soaked in the dogma of social progress. A very compact statement of
this dogma was once given in the process of criticizing it by Robert
Shafer, one of the New Humanists. “Social progress has become,” he
said, “a species of popular religion of which the chief articles of
belief are: that earthly life is in and for itself a good thing, that
terrestrial happiness is possible for all men, that applied science and
industry have given us the means for abundant enjoyment, and that it is
now the task of social science and government so to order our common
life that toil shall not rest heavily upon any of us and that the means
of enjoyment shall be equally open to all. It is, moreover, generally
believed not only that terrestrial happiness is possible for all men,
but that it is infallibly coming to pass--that is, that social science
and government are bound to succeed in their task.”
That this is really our credo, our actions as well as our words
testify. We say nowadays that we “accept life.” Why we accepted it and
for what we accept it, we do not clearly know; so we say that life in
itself is good. Our actions furthermore make us all out to be believers
in the attainment of widespread terrestrial happiness. Our forefathers
may have dreamed about laying up treasure in heaven, but not we. For we
can point with great faith to a means for abundant enjoyment here and
now: we point to applied science and industry. They are to reduce toil
for us, toil, we are quite sure, being a main cause of unhappiness.
With more leisure we shall be happier, for then we shall be able to
amuse ourselves, as we say, and to enjoy comfort.
But how external all this is! Precisely. For some reason we feel that
the way to improve man is to improve the environment by means of
applied science and the better organization of industry. This, we
think, will increase the sum of happiness. It does not matter whether
we are captains of industry or social rebels: we are both thinking in
terms of changing the environment, and neither of us has even a faint
perception of a simultaneous need to improve man directly by an inward
transformation. That is why I call the doctrine of social progress,
whether it is framed by a member of the Republican party or of the
Socialist, a pseudo-ideal, for it promises only more leisure, not a
use of leisure conducive to human happiness. It does not implant a new
motive in us but inspires the belief that our old motives will receive
fuller scope for action, and by so receiving this larger scope, we
shall be made happy.
So the environment is the focus of our energies. We aim to complete
our conquest of Nature, as we say. But in the process of subduing the
natural world, we have, many people believe, got ourselves organized
into an intolerable plutocracy. This scheme of social organization must
be revised or transformed to give better opportunities for material
enjoyment to all members of society. Then, and only then, so the
meliorists of environment and society assure us, will it be possible
for the individual to work directly at self-improvement.
It is worth repeating the question of the individual under any and
all conditions of human existence. I will do so in the words of
the late Stuart P. Sherman, who as a thoughtful young man went to
Society and books with the question that comes to all thoughtful
young men, “Is life worth living, and for what purpose?” He found,
as we all have found, no grandly framed answer by Society to this
question, no consensus of all intelligent men today, no reply that
appealed at the same time powerfully to the mind and the heart and
was furthermore associated with a practical way of life. Sherman then
gave up the question and, as if under hypnotic suggestion, put forth
another, “Assuming that life is worth living, what are its durable
satisfactions?” Under hypnotic suggestion, I said, for in truth our
relation as individuals to Society should not be described as a
reasonable one but as that of subject to hypnotist. An answer to the
first question, is life worth living, and for what purpose, is not to
be plucked down from our social atmosphere, but our air swarms with the
assumptions that life _is_ worth living, that it is good in and for
itself, that terrestrial happiness is possible. We have not to question
the basis of life but only to discover durable satisfactions.
But Society as hypnotist rules us in this search too. We all become
members, it appears, of the cult of distractions and comfort. No? Look
again at what we actually do, observe our national behavior. Sherman
did just this: he said, in pursuit of his second question, let us
see what Americans spend their money for, since we spend for what we
believe in, since our expenditure is an act of faith. Well, he found
that we as a nation spend heavily for plumbing, for bodily health, for
university education, for automobiles, for organized athletics, and for
advertising and publicity purposes. He put, it is true, an optimistic
and sentimental interpretation on these facts. What his list shows,
however, is that our center of gravity is in the practical life, and
that we are addicts to the pursuit of comfort and pastimes. “I can’t
think,” said Sherman, referring to college sports stadia-building,
“of any more significant architectural phenomenon since the cathedral
building of the Middle Ages”--nor can I, but I am thinking of the
differences in purpose, worship and appeal. We idolize baseball players
and boxers, not saints and artists and sages.
Are not these pithy words of Frank Jewett Mather true? “What is in
America our accepted vision of the good life? For upon it must rest our
art. What do we all agree to (saving always negligible minorities of
‘knockers’)? I fear it would come to these few articles of faith:--to
make a lot of money by fair means; to spend it generously; to be
friendly; to move fast; to die with one’s boots on. This is a credo
which has within its limitations positive merits, and it is by no
means lightly to be decried, but it palpably offers little spiritual
nourishment to the ‘art-artist,’ to quote a recent mayor of New York. A
certain kind of art it feeds admirably. And it naturally gets the art
it feeds--the immaculate bank clerk in campus clothes, the sylph-like
apparition in the porcelain tub, the beach party in the classy car--the
art of the advertisement generally. And this ideal also finds its
authentic expression in the cheap heroics and shallow idealisms of the
moving picture, and the potpourri of dubious music and eloquence over
the radio. These are our representative arts, as sculpture was the
representative art of Greece, or painting of Florence.”