EUROPE AND ASIA
Writers of books of criticism during the neo-classical period were fond
of refining on the idea of decorum; at times they developed this idea
on what one may term a continental scale and contrasted the decorous or
typical European with the decorous or typical Asiatic. Speculations of
this kind are not as fantastic as they at first sight appear. One may
not only become aware of some underlying divergence in the temper of
the Asiatic as compared with that of the European, but, to some extent,
formulate it. In speaking, however, of Asia it is even more important
than in speaking of Europe to make clear that one has in mind primarily
civilized Asia, and civilized Asia at the top of its achievement. The
hordes of barbaric or semi-barbaric Asia have not only menaced or
actually overrun Europe in the past (as they may very well do again
in the future), but have also been from remote times the scourge of
civilized Asia. In ancient Judæa the memory of these wild northern
riders lingered in the legends of Gog and Magog. The great Wall of
China is a sort of visible symbol of the separation between the two
Asias. On the one hand is the Asia of Attila and Tamerlane and Genghis
Khan; on the other, the Asia of Christ and Buddha and Confucius.
The mention of Christ and Buddha (of Confucius as a typical Asiatic
I shall have more to say presently) is hardly necessary to remind
us that it is the distinction of Asia as compared with Europe and
other parts of the world to have been the mother of religions; so
that if one were to work out a critical and experimental definition
of religion (and my method requires nothing less), one might be put
on the track of what is specifically Asiatic in the Asiatic attitude
towards life. Of course, historical Christianity is far from being
a purely Asiatic faith. It contains important elements drawn from
Greek philosophy--Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoical, Neoplatonic; also
a strong Roman element, especially what I have described as Roman
imperialistic organization, not to speak of sacramental magic and
elements drawn from the mystery cults, which are of mixed origin but
still largely Greek. What elements in Christianity may be referred back
to the Founder? We have Christ’s own authorization for dealing with
this question experimentally (“By their fruits ye shall know them”).
Now Bacon and the utilitarians have also preached a gospel of fruits,
but the fruits that Christ has in mind are plainly not of the Baconian
type. They are the fruits of the spirit, and what these fruits are,
Saint Paul has told us once for all: “Love, joy, peace, long-suffering,
kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control.” The equivalent
of this list in its total emphasis will not be found in any European
cult or philosophy that antedates Christianity. It is possible,
however, to find the equivalent in the older religious thought of Asia.
About the middle of the third century before Christ, the Buddhist
ruler of India, Asoka, had a very similar list of virtues carved in
stone at various points throughout his vast empire: “Compassion,
liberality, truth, purity, gentleness, peace, joyousness, saintliness,
self-control.”[61] Thus Buddhism and Christianity, which often seem to
be almost hopelessly at variance when approached from the point of view
of dogma, confirm one another in this striking fashion when studied
experimentally and in their fruits.
If we wish to define religion adequately, we need perhaps to take a
further step and inquire which of the various fruits of the spirit
enumerated by Saint Paul and Asoka is most central in the truly
religious life. This central virtue seems to have been overlooked
by Matthew Arnold in a definition of religion that has at least the
merit of being experimental: “Religion is,” he says, “morality touched
by emotion.” Though religion normally leads through morality and,
at least in its earlier stages, is very much mixed up with emotion,
the final emphasis, if we are to believe the great religious leaders
themselves, is elsewhere. “My peace I give unto you,” said Christ on
his final parting with his disciples. “Come unto me, all ye that labor
and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” Buddha conceives of
the fulfilment of religion in very similar fashion: “His thought is
quiet, quiet are his word and deed, when he has obtained freedom by
true wisdom, when he has thus become a quiet man.”[62] And what is
the pathway to this peace? Dante has caught the inmost spirit of
Christianity in his reply to this question: “In his will is our peace.”
This idea that man needs to submit his ordinary self to a higher or
divine will is essential not merely to Christianity, but to all genuine
religion. Mohammed is at one here with Buddha and Christ. The very word
Islam means submission.
In India, though the same preoccupation with the will has prevailed,
the will to which man subordinates his ordinary self is often
conceived, not as a divinity that transcends him, but as his own higher
self. Buddha eliminates many things that are accounted essential in
other faiths, including Christianity, but this opposition between man’s
higher or ethical will and his natural self or expansive desires he
does not eliminate. On the contrary, more than any other religious
teacher, he plants himself on the naked psychological fact of this
opposition; so that Buddhism, in its original form, is the most
critical, or, if one prefer, the least mythological of religions.
It is important to note that much of the doctrine that has flourished
in India has not been sharply dualistic like that of Buddha or any
other genuine religious teacher, but has had a more or less marked
pantheistic leaning. This leaning appears in a number of the Hindus
who are now professing to interpret India to the outside world. For
example, Rabindranath Tagore has enjoyed no small degree of credit
as an interpreter of India, not merely in the Occident, but in the
Orient itself. He has the merit of seeing the importance of the whole
question of East versus West, and in his criticism of the West often
shows on the negative side no small degree of perspicacity. The man of
the West, he says, has specialized in power and mechanical efficiency
and so has been enabled to make himself the bully of the planet; but
it is established in the nature of things that bullies shall come to
grief. This view of the Occident has not only found adherents in China
and Japan, but something very similar to it is being muttered at the
present time by Mohammedan mullahs from Delhi to Tangiers. The facts,
it is scarcely necessary to say, are not quite so simple. The success
of the English in maintaining a hold on India is not based entirely
on mechanical efficiency and still less on philanthropy or a supposed
eagerness to assume the white man’s burden. It has been due in part to
the division among the Hindus themselves; but it is also in no small
measure a triumph of character, of the sane moral realism that has made
of the English the best ruling race, perhaps, that the world has yet
seen.
A federation of the states of Europe, Tagore goes on to say, would,
under existing circumstances, be only a federation of steam-boilers.
The remedy is to get rid of the analysis that has built up this
nightmare of mechanical efficiency and put in its place the principle
of love.[63] It is here that the affinity of Tagore appears, not with
the ancient sages of his own land, as he would have us believe, but
with our Rousseauistic dreamers. One may oppose to the effeminacy of a
Tagore or a Bergson and to all those, in either East or West, who seek
to attain “vision” at the expense of analysis, the example of Buddha
who has claims to be regarded as the ultimate Oriental. For Buddha
supreme “vision” coincided with a supreme act of analysis.[64]
I have been trying to show that at the centre of the great religious
faiths of Asiatic origin is the idea of a higher will that is felt in
its relation to man’s ordinary will or expansive desires as a power of
vital control. The recognition of this will, however conceived--whether
one say with Christ, “Thy will be done,” or with Buddha, “Self is the
lord of self; who else can be the lord?”--is the source of awe and
humility. The submission to this higher will is in its consummation
peace.
At first sight Confucius seems very unlike other great Asiatic
teachers. His interests, as I have already said, are humanistic rather
than religious. The points of contact between his doctrine and that
of Aristotle, the most important Occidental humanist, are numerous
and striking. One is tempted to say, indeed, that, if there is such
a thing as the wisdom of the ages, a central core of normal human
experience, this wisdom is, on the religious level, found in Buddha and
Christ and, on the humanistic level, in Confucius and Aristotle. These
teachers may be regarded both in themselves and in their influence
as the four outstanding figures in the spiritual history of mankind.
Not only the experience of the world since their time, but much of
its previous experience may be properly associated with them.[65] One
may note as an interesting analogy that just as Saint Thomas Aquinas
sought to combine the wisdom of Aristotle with that of Christ in his
Sum of Theology, so about the same time Chu Hsi mingled Buddhist with
Confucian elements in his great commentary.
Though Aristotle and Confucius come together in their doctrine of the
mean, one should hasten to add that in their total attitude towards
life they reveal the characteristic difference between the European
and the Asiatic temper. The interests of Aristotle were far from being
exclusively humanistic. He is supposed to have spent the happiest years
of his life on the islands about the Ægean, observing the fish and
marine life and preparing the material for the biological treatises
that won the admiration of Darwin.[66] It is perhaps not easy to
combine such a far-ranging intellectual curiosity as that of Aristotle
with the humility so emphasized by Confucius and other Oriental
teachers. Aristotle has had an influence great almost beyond reckoning,
not merely on Christian, but on Jewish and Mohammedan religious
thought; and yet one would feel something subtly incongruous in a
temple to Aristotle. One does not need to be a Confucian to feel that
a temple to Confucius would not be similarly incongruous. He was not,
like Aristotle, a master of them that _know_, but a master of them that
_will_. He was strong at the point where every man knows in the secret
of his heart that he is weak. The decorum or principle of inner control
that he would impose upon the expansive desires is plainly a quality of
will. He is no obscurantist, yet the rôle of reason in its relation to
will is, as he views it, secondary and instrumental. If we turn from
Aristotle to Socrates, whose interests were, like those of Confucius,
almost exclusively ethical, a similar contrast between the Oriental
and Occidental temper appears. The Socratic conception of virtue
encourages a primary emphasis on mind. Moreover, the Occident, having
emancipated itself from the Oriental assertion of the primacy of will
in its Christian form, has been devoting itself more and more since the
Renaissance, not to the Socratic thesis that knowledge is virtue, but
to the Baconian thesis that knowledge is power.
Few would deny that humility has decreased with the decline of
traditional religion. The very word humility, as M. Faguet remarks, may
in a not distant future be relegated to the dictionary of archaisms.
The word, so far as it survives at all, is often used incorrectly.[67]
It is sometimes employed, for example, to describe the deference that
the man of science should display towards the mystery and infinitude
of nature, or again as a synonym for the modesty or even, it may be,
meanness of spirit that a man shows in comparing himself to other
men. It is well that one should not be puffed up in one’s dealings
with either nature or other men, but humility belongs to another and,
as Pascal insists, supernatural order. The assertion of Burke that
humility thus understood is the root of all the other virtues involves
first principles and so is not subject to mediation or compromise.
It must either be accepted as true or rejected as false. If any one
accepts the assertion as true (as I myself do), the question then
arises why humility has suffered such an eclipse in the Occident. The
obvious reply is that it has been associated in the past with certain
doctrines, notably the doctrine of the Fall and that of divine grace,
and that these doctrines have tended to be undermined by the growth of
the critical spirit. The individual has refused more and more to submit
to the outer authority, whether that of Revelation or of the Church,
from which these doctrines derived their ultimate sanction; and his
humility has declined, one is tempted to say, in almost exact ratio to
his growth in self-reliance. If any one wishes to be a true modern, if
he refuses in other words to submit to authority merely as such, he
is confronted with a serious problem: it is plainly not easy to be at
once humble and self-reliant. The very doctrine of self-reliance has,
from the point of view of humility, a singularly clouded record in the
Occident, and that from the time of the ancient Greeks to the present
day. No one would ever associate humility with the Cynics who were
among the first to proclaim self-reliance (_autarkeia_). The Stoics
again favored self-reliance. According to Pascal, they were guilty
of “diabolical pride” in their first assumptions. Even though this
phrase be too strong, especially as applied to certain Stoics, e.g.,
Marcus Aurelius, it is hardly possible to cite the Stoics in general as
examples of meekness and lowliness of spirit.
If one comes to modern apostles of self-reliance, one thinks first of
all perhaps of Rousseau and his defence of the doctrine in “Emile.” As
to the degree of his humility, one should be sufficiently enlightened
by the first page of the “Confessions.” Nor can it be maintained that
Emerson, the chief American champion of self-reliance, is conspicuously
humble.[68]
If we are to grasp the problem involved in the attempt to be at
once humble and self-reliant, we need to go back to the ancient
individualism that Rousseau and Emerson in some respects revive and
seek to get at the causes of its final failure. The Stoic bases his
optimism primarily, we soon discover, not, like Rousseau, on faith
in his instincts, but on faith in reason. To _know_ the right thing
is about tantamount to doing it. Reason and will thus tend to become
identical. The Stoics themselves conceived that in this matter they
were simply following in the footsteps of Socrates. The whole question
is, as a matter of fact, closely allied to the Platonic and Socratic
identification of knowledge and virtue; and this again brings up the
great point at issue between European and Asiatic as to the relation
of intellect and will. The chief religious teachers of Asia have, I
have already said, asserted in some form or other a higher will to
which man must submit in his natural self (and in Asiatic psychology
intellect belongs to the natural self), if he is to enter the pathway
of peace. A comparison between Plato and Buddha might help to elucidate
this contrast between East and West. Buddha like Plato sought to bring
together philosophy and religion; but even so he put far less emphasis
on the rôle of mind than Plato. The list of “unthinkables” he drew up
is almost equivalent to a denial that life can in any deep sense of the
word be _known_ at all. It cannot be maintained that the mind (_mano_)
of the Buddhist coincides exactly with the Platonic mind (_nous_).
It is, nevertheless, significant that “mind” is for the Buddhist an
organ of the flux, whereas Plato exalts “mind” to the first place. It
is a less grievous error, according to Buddha, to look on one’s body
as permanent than to harbor a similar conceit about one’s “mind.” A
Buddhist might regard as the underlying error of Occidental philosophy
the tendency that goes at least as far back as Parmenides to identify
thought with being.[69] Why should so chimerical a creature as man
identify either thought or any other part of himself with being? As
Pindar says, “What are we, what are we not? Man is but the dream of a
shadow.” Pindar apparently feared lest he might flatter unduly man’s
conceit of his own permanence if he had called him even the shadow of a
dream. To suppose that one can transcend the element of impermanence,
whether in oneself or the outer world, merely through reason in any
sense of the word, is to forget that “illusion is an integral part of
reality.” The person who confides unduly in “reason” is also prone to
set up some static “absolute”; while those who seek to get rid of the
absolute in favor of flux and relativity tend at the same time to get
rid of standards. Both absolutists and relativists are guilty of an
intellectual sophistication of the facts, inasmuch as in life as it is
actually experienced, unity and multiplicity are indissolubly blended.
The Buddhist (to return to our comparison of East and West) seems at
first sight to belong with the apostles of the flux. As a matter of
fact, comparisons have been made between Buddha and Bergson on the
ground that they are both “philosophers of becoming.” We are justified
on other grounds than that of their distance in time and space in
finding the collocation of these names startling. Bergson positively
revels in change and naturalistic expansiveness and avows explicitly,
as we have seen, that his philosophy of _élan vital_ leads straight
to imperialism. Buddha for his part is at least as much concerned as
Plato with escaping from the flux and, so far from being imperialistic,
is turned, to the exclusion of everything else, towards what in his
own phrase makes for “tranquillity, knowledge, supreme wisdom, and
Nirvana.” This combination of a philosophy of the flux with religious
peace and humility is unlike anything we have seen in the Occident and
should be a warning that in dealing with Buddha we need to proceed
with extreme circumspection. One may at least form some conjecture as
to the point at which Buddha diverges from philosophers in the Western
tradition. As a thoroughgoing individualist, he is forced to grapple
with the problem of the One and the Many; if there is no principle of
unity in things with which to measure the manifoldness and change, the
individual is left without standards and so falls necessarily into an
anarchical impressionism. Now Buddha like a true Asiatic discovers this
unifying principle, not in intellect, but in will. Though he assigns
an important rôle to intellect, since he is himself highly analytical,
this rôle is after all secondary and instrumental. Any attempt to deal
with life directly in terms of the intellect involves in some form the
attempt to put the ocean in a cup. Life reveals its secret, he seems
to say, only to the man who acts; and of all forms of action the most
difficult is inner action. The first step in understanding not merely
Buddha but Christ is to see that they were both primarily men of action
in the sense in which the Asiatic in his great moments has understood
action. Buddha is for reducing theory to a minimum. The least
speculative of our Western philosophers would probably have seemed to
him still far too speculative. He has succeeded in compressing the
wisdom of the ages into a sentence: “To refrain from all evil, to
achieve the good, to purify one’s own heart, this is the teaching of
the Awakened.”[70] The Buddhist commentary is interesting: When you
repeat the words, they seem to mean nothing, but when you try to put
them into practice, you find they mean everything.
Some of the difficulties inherent in any attempt to treat the problem
of the One and the Many primarily as a problem of knowledge appear in
the Platonic theory of ideas. It is a matter of positive perception
that there is an element of oneness in all the particular objects that
belong to some class. There is, for example, an element of oneness in
all particular horses; and this oneness is in Platonic parlance the
idea or heavenly archetype of the horse. Unfortunately, if one does
not get beyond this stage, the oneness remains a mere abstraction
and finally a mere word--and human nature craves the concrete. The
attempt to deal intellectually with the relation of the unity to the
manifoldness would seem to lead to difficulties of the kind Plato has
himself set forth in the second part of his “Parmenides.” This problem
as to how to escape from mere abstraction appears in the case of the
chief idea of all--that of the good or of God which also coincides
with what is most exalted in man. The word that stands for the idea
of the good is the word par excellence, the logos. One can follow to
some extent the process by which the Greek conception of the logos was
transmitted through intermediaries like Philo Judæus to the author of
the Fourth Gospel. The specifically Asiatic element in the Christian
solution of the problem of the logos is the subordination, either
implicit or explicit, of the divine reason to the divine will. By an
act of this will, the gap between a wisdom that is abstract and general
and the individual and particular is bridged over at last; the Word
is made flesh. The human craving for the concrete is satisfied at the
essential point. The truth of the incarnation, to put the matter on
purely psychological grounds, is one that we have all experienced in a
less superlative form: the final reply to all the doubts that torment
the human heart is not some theory of conduct, however perfect, but the
man of character. Pontius Pilate spoke as a European when he inquired,
“What is truth?” On another occasion Christ gave the Asiatic reply: “I
am the way, the truth, and the life.” In this emphasis on personality
Christianity is confirmed by the most positive observation. Wherein
Christianity transcends positive observation is in its tremendous
projection of personality, divine and human, into the region of the
infinite and the eternal.
I have of course in this whole discussion been simplifying a subject
of immense difficulty and complexity at the risk of doing injustice
to Plato and the other members of the Socratic group. I am not
unaware of the almost inexhaustible store of wisdom in Plato. He
must still be one of the chief aids of those who wish to achieve
religious insight without an undue sacrifice of the critical spirit.
Yet it is difficult not to have certain doubts about the Platonic and
Socratic identification of knowledge and virtue. This identification
is not superficial precisely--men like Plato and Socrates are never
superficial. Knowledge may conceivably become so perfect that to
act contrary to it would be like putting one’s hand into the fire.
Moreover, when one has struggled out of any maze of error, it will
always seem in the retrospect that the error was due even less to a
defect of will than to ignorance. Nevertheless, the Socratic thesis
runs counter in certain respects to universal experience. Not only do
people do what they know to be wrong, but they often take a perverse
satisfaction in doing it, as Ovid,[71] anticipating the _delectatio
morosa_ of the theologians, was one of the first to point out. Our
problem, let us remind ourselves, is to be at once self-reliant and
humble. But it will not be found easy to preserve humility and at the
same time to grant, after the fashion of Greek philosophy, the primacy
to mind. All other forms of pride are as nothing compared with the
pride of intellect; and the pride of intellect itself is most manifest
in the attempt to know good and evil. So much psychological truth is,
it would seem, to be found in the myth of the Fall.
Perhaps my meaning may be best elucidated by studying the Socratic
movement in its fruits (and in this movement I include the Platonic
and in no small degree the Aristotelian influence). Since Plato worked
primarily on the religious level, one would have expected the fruits
of religion to appear in the Platonic Academy. The Academy produced a
number of distinguished intellectuals who inclined on the whole towards
scepticism. It is, of course, possible to build up faith on a sceptical
basis as Socrates himself seems to have done; but it can scarcely
be maintained that the successors of Plato in the Academy achieved
either this or any other type of faith. In any case the contrast is
striking between the Academy and the Order founded by Buddha. Any one
who studies the old records can acquire the conviction that this Order
contained many men of faith, men who brought forth the very fruits of
the spirit that have been so admirably defined by Saint Paul, and so
deserve to be regarded as saints.
The truth is that the Greeks, on their emancipation from traditional
standards, slipped rather rapidly into mere rationalism, and mere
rationalism, whether in the Stoical or Epicurean form, showed its
usual inability to control the expansive lusts of the human heart.
Stoicism sought to achieve a principle of union among men that would
have universal validity; it sought, in other words, to do the work of a
religion. It saw this universal principle in reason, and proclaimed at
the same time that to live according to reason was to live according to
nature. Man’s reason, the Stoic assumed, could prevail unaided over his
outer impressions and expansive desires. That important aspects, not
merely of the Socratic, but of the Platonic and Aristotelian teaching,
tended to be obscured in later Græco-Roman thought is beyond question.
At the same time, in assuming that right will follows upon right
knowledge, the Stoic, as I have already said, conceived that he was a
true Socratic; if herein he missed the true Socratic spirit, one is
forced to conclude that this spirit was rather easy to miss.
Stoicism was in general a paradoxical movement; it affirmed that
the material order alone is real and then put supreme emphasis on a
“virtue” that the material order does not give. In other words it
sought to attain and to some extent actually did attain on monistic
postulates the fruits that are normally associated with a genuinely
dualistic philosophy. In spite of its many merits and partial
successes, Stoicism was on the whole a failure; and the same must be
said of the whole Greek attempt to deal critically with the problem of
conduct, to work out, in other words, a sound type of individualism.
This failure of Greek philosophy was due, I have suggested, to the fact
that it is not quite adequate in its treatment of the closely allied
problems of the imagination and the higher or ethical will. Any one who
believes that “illusion is an integral part of reality,” and who also
holds with the Asiatic that, if humility is to be secured, will must
take precedence of mind, is forced to conclude that the danger of Greek
philosophy was from the start a certain obstinate intellectualism.
Christianity supplied what was lacking in Greek philosophy. It set up
doctrines that humbled reason and at the same time it created symbols
that controlled man’s imagination and through the imagination his
will. On the basis supplied by this Oriental faith, it was possible to
reconstruct European civilization after the Græco-Roman collapse and
in the midst of the havoc of the barbarian invasions. But this work of
regeneration was accomplished in no small degree at the expense of the
critical spirit. It resulted in the triumph of an authority “anterior,
exterior, and superior” to the individual. If the Greek confidence in
reason proved in some respects fallacious, there are also, it must
be admitted, dangers and difficulties in the worship of will in all
its forms. On the danger of will-worship in its Nietzschean form it
is scarcely necessary to dilate. But even the Oriental cult of the
ethical will is beset with pitfalls. The Hindu ascetic who lies on a
bed of spikes or holds his arm in the air until it withers away is
exercising will in the Oriental sense, but he can scarcely be said to
be exercising it intelligently. When the higher will again is conceived
as a divine will that has been revealed once for all in words of
literal and plenary inspiration, one has the drawbacks and difficulties
that are most manifest, perhaps, in Mohammedanism. The effect is to
force human life into a rigid and definitive mould. It is not safe to
overlook the element of flux and relativity in favor of absolute will
any more than it is to overlook it in favor of absolute reason. The
Mohammedan has his own way of forgetting that illusion is an integral
part of reality. Moreover, when will is conceived as absolute and
irresponsible and at the same time as transcendent, the individual is
made humble, indeed, but he is so far from being made self-reliant that
he is prone to fall into the Oriental form of fatalism.
We need to consider in the interests of our present subject not merely
the difficulties of the Oriental worship of will in general, but of
this worship as practised by Christians in particular--above all, the
form that appears in the doctrine of grace. Saint Augustine, it is
scarcely necessary to say, did more than any other one man to develop
the Pauline teaching on this subject; and Saint Augustine was destined,
here as elsewhere, to exercise an influence great almost beyond
reckoning on mediæval and later Christianity. Now Saint Augustine is
considered with some truth the Christian Plato. The supreme contrast
for him as for Plato is that between _fluxa et caduca_, on the one
hand, and, on the other, _certa et æterna_. A further comparison of
the two men will, however, reveal a profound shifting of emphasis
as regards the relative importance of intellect and will. Saint
Augustine’s desire, as he tells us, is to know only two things--God and
the soul. (_Deum et animam scire cupio. Nihilne plus? nihil omnino._)
God is envisaged primarily, not as mind, but as will. The soul of man
is also reduced in its essential aspect to will (_nihil aliud habeo
quam voluntatem_). The human will is, however, hopelessly alienated
from the divine will by the Fall. The gap between the two can be
traversed only by a miracle of grace, a miracle that itself depends
on the miracle of the redemption. Man not only needs the mediation of
Christ if his will is to be brought into harmony with the divine will,
but also of the Church and the Sacraments and the elaborate priestly
hierarchy that is required to administer them. So far from right will
following upon right knowledge, as Plato thought, fallen man delights
in evil for its own sake. What was so delicious upon his tongue, says
Saint Augustine in speaking of the pears that he stole when a boy, was
not the flavor of the pears themselves, but of his sin. Moreover, this
perversity of will sprang originally from the intellect and its pride:
man wished to be as a God, _knowing_ good and evil. The intellect was
thus not only put in its proper subordinate place, but brought under
positive suspicion. The way was opened for obscurantism. Man was
humbled and his will regenerated, but more or less, as I have said,
at the expense of the critical spirit. The historical explanation
of this uncritical element in Christianity is no doubt that, more
than most other doctrines, it worked its way up from the bottom of
society towards the top. At all events, men were asked to believe a
thing because it was absurd,[72] and ignorance was declared to be the
mother of devotion. The Church was enabled to carry on all the more
effectively its work of regeneration, it might be argued, from the fact
that men had ceased to be self-reliant and above all had ceased like
the Socratic Greek to rely on the intellect. “Is righteousness, then,
the daughter of ignorance?” Rousseau inquires. “Are science and virtue
incompatible?” The history of the Occident, it must be confessed,
raises some doubt on this point. The so-called Dark Ages, says Lord
Acton with some exaggeration, were spiritually full of light.[73] On
the other hand, the intellectually “enlightened” eighteenth century
was, as Burke complains, spiritually full of darkness.
The beginnings of “Enlightenment” in the eighteenth-century sense
go back to the Middle Ages themselves--at least as far back as
the thirteenth century. A significant coincidence is that between
this incipient emancipation of intellect and the founding of the
Inquisition. The real emancipation of intellect got fairly under way
with the Renaissance. Men were becoming self-reliant again and in
almost the same measure were losing humility. They were inclining once
more, like the ancient Greeks, to look on life primarily as a problem
of knowledge. Only the knowledge that they sought increasingly was not
the ethical knowledge at which Socrates aimed, but knowledge of the
natural order. Ethical knowledge seemed to have become indissolubly
associated with incomprehensible dogmas. An acute conflict was
inevitable, often in the heart of the same individual, between the old
humility and the new spirit of intellectual inquiry. Let us consider
the case of Pascal, an eminent scientific investigator and also a
religious writer at once profound and poignant. He recommends a full
application of the critical and experimental spirit to the natural
order, but in all that transcends the natural order he would have
the critical spirit abdicate before a twofold outer authority--that
of Revelation and the Church.[74] Spiritual truth he identifies
with dogmas that are most repugnant to reason--for example, infant
damnation.[75] To be sure, all the nobility of man is in reason, but
this nobility is not in itself of much avail, inasmuch as reason is the
sport and plaything of the imagination. Here, I have already noted, is
a supreme clash between Christian psychology and that of the Stoic, who
holds that it is possible for reason to triumph over the imagination.
If reason is thus the plaything of the imagination, either the Stoical
or any other form of self-reliance is vain. Man’s only hope is in
arbitrary will in the form of divine grace. To the sudden illumination
of grace Pascal gives the name “heart.” “The heart has reasons of which
the reason knows nothing.” Will in the form of grace is thus at odds
with reason which is in turn at odds with imagination; whereas, if one
is to be a sound individualist, it may be that reason and imagination
need to coöperate in the service of the power in man that I have
defined as the ethical will.
It is not to be inferred from what I have said that Pascal has ceased
to have value for the individualist. Many of the arguments that he
urges in favor of humility and against the pride of intellect are
still valid for the simple reason that they are not dogmatic, but
keenly psychological. Why should man be proud, seeing that he is, as
Pascal shows, caught between two infinites, one of smallness and one of
magnitude, and is equally unable to grasp either, so that the essence
of things eludes him and must ever elude him. If at any time he thinks
he has found a firm foundation on which to rear a tower that will reach
even to the infinite, this foundation suddenly fails him and “the earth
yawns open even to the abyss.” Lacking some such firm foundation, man
has no assurance that his knowledge is real knowledge or anything more
than a dream within a dream. But there is something still more humbling
to man than his ignorance, and that is the inability of unaided reason
to control effectively his outer impressions and expansive desires.
Surely realistic observation is here on the side of Pascal rather than
of the Stoics. Man’s peculiar blindness arises from the fact that he
does not wish to be limited in his dominant desire, whatever that
desire may be. He wishes to be free to pursue his folly, as Erasmus
would say, and finally discovers the limits established in the nature
of things by the somewhat painful process of colliding with them. This
human proclivity is so universal, and yet the punishment visited upon
it is so harsh, that one’s final impression is that of a certain
treachery in life itself. Under the circumstances one does not need to
be a Jansenist, or even perhaps a Christian, to see certain merits in
the older plan of working out one’s salvation in fear and trembling as
compared with our modern plan of “living dangerously,” or, what amounts
to the same thing, of turning away from awe and humility in favor of an
endless reaching out of wonder and curiosity. Man’s expansive conceit,
as the Greek saw, produces insolent excess (_hybris_) and this begets
blindness (_atê_) which in turn brings on Nemesis. Expansive conceit
tempered by Nemesis--this is a definition of an essential aspect of
human nature that finds considerable support in the facts of history.
Man never rushes forward so confidently, it would sometimes seem, as
when he is on the very brink of the abyss. The malady of Europe on the
eve of the Great War was not so much ignorance as blindness in the
Greek sense. A clear perception of the workings of Nemesis is what
gives distinction to the great Greek poets, even to Euripides, the
least ethical of them:
Gold and Fair-fortune, with Power the victorious
Harnessed beside them, in folly vainglorious
Hurry man to his doom:
Law he outpaceth, and lawlessness lasheth
To speed; nor his heart doth incline
To take heed to the end--lo, his car sudden-crasheth
Shattered in gloom![76]
A consideration of man’s ignorance and blindness as they are revealed
on a vast scale in the facts of history gives a positive basis to
humility. One comes to feel that the great religious teachers may be
right after all in their insistence that man needs to subordinate
himself to some higher will; above all that it is needful that his
intellect should recognize some such control. The peril that results
from intellectual unrestraint (_libido sciendi_) is perhaps the most
fundamental of all. “What must be the face-to-face antagonist,”
asks Cardinal Newman, “by which to withstand and baffle ... the
all-corroding, all-dissolving energy of the intellect?” Cardinal Newman
has at all events asked the essential question, whatever one may think
of his own solution of it. Unfortunately, in getting rid of the pride
of intellect the Christian has often tended to get rid of the intellect
itself or at least to depreciate it unduly.[77] Hence the obscurantist
vein that I have already noted in Christianity. To use the intellect to
the utmost and at the same time to keep it in its proper subordinate
place is a task that seems thus far to have been beyond the capacity of
Occidental man. The warfare between a reason that presumes unduly and
a faith that has got itself more or less identified with credulity may
turn out to be the true disease of Western culture from the Greeks to
the present day. This strife between the head and the heart has left
its marks even on the forms of language. Thus, to take a few examples,
to be a person of “strong mind” (_esprit fort_) was about equivalent
in older French usage to being an atheist; to be “blessed,” on the
other hand, was to be a “blockhead” (_benêt_, from _benedictus_). An
“innocent,” again, is an idiot, in contradistinction, no doubt, to the
person who is said to be as “bright as the devil.” The English “silly”
is the same word etymologically as the German “holy” (_selig_).
When Rousseau said that his heart and his head did not seem to belong
to the same individual, he simply introduced a new and, as I shall try
to show presently, worse form of obscurantism. In its Rousseauistic
form the conflict between head and heart has continued to our own
day. Philosophers, who are under no suspicion of being Christians,
still assume that there is a more or less complete opposition between
intellect and intuition, so that to be vital in the Bergsonian sense is
about the same as being anti-intellectual.[78]
The more significant contrast, however, still remains that between the
partisan of grace and the man who, in some form or other, asserts the
primacy of mind. It can be shown that the doctrine of grace was the
keystone of the whole edifice of European society in its mediæval form.
It is not as clear as one might wish that European civilization can
survive the collapse of this doctrine. In any case the problem for the
individualist who believes that it is not enough to be self-reliant,
but that one should also be humble, is to discover some equivalent for
grace. It is here that we may find it profitable to take into account
the total experience of Asia. While no sensible person would claim for
the Far East a general ethical superiority over the West, the Far East
has at least enjoyed a comparative immunity from that great disease of
Occidental culture--the warfare between reason and faith. Buddha and
Confucius both managed to combine humility with self-reliance and a
cultivation of the critical spirit. They may, therefore, be of help to
those who wish to restore to their lives on modern lines the element
for which Asia has stood in the past, who believe that without some
such restoration the Occident is in danger of going mad with the lust
of speed and power. In describing the element of peace as the Asiatic
element, I do not mean to set up any geographic or other fatalism.
China, for example, may under pressure from the Occident have an
industrial revolution (Hankow is already taking on the aspect of an
Oriental Pittsburgh) and this revolution is likely to be accompanied
by a more or less rapid crumbling of her traditional ethos with the
attendant danger of a lapse into sheer moral chaos. The Occident, on
the other hand, may not only reaffirm the truths of the ethical will,
but may reaffirm these truths in some appropriately modern way and
with an emphasis distinctly different from anything that has been seen
in the Orient. In dealing with this topic we can best take our point
of departure from the fact that all who profess to be modern are, in
some sense or other of the word, liberals. If there has been any vital
omission in the passage from old to new, this omission is likely to be
most visible in one’s definition of liberty. Lord Acton was planning
to begin his “History of Liberty” with a hundred such definitions. It
is not certain that any one of the hundred would exactly have met our
present requirement, which is to secure in some thoroughly critical
fashion what I have termed the centripetal element in liberty. If one
fails in this task, one ceases to be a complete modern and becomes
a mere modernist. The modernist is wont to assume that the really
important conflict is that between liberals, on the one hand, and
reactionaries, on the other; a more important conflict, however, may
turn out to be that between true and false liberals.