_The Idea of God as remote from the World._
But this Greek conception of divine immanence did not find favour with
the Latin-speaking world. There a very different notion prevailed,
the origin of which may be traced to the mental habits attending
the primitive ancestor-worship. Out of materials furnished by the
ghost-world a crude kind of monotheism could be reached by simply
carrying back the thought to a single ghost-deity as the original
ancestor of all the others. Some barbarous races have gone as far as
this, as for example the Zulus, who have developed the doctrine of
divine ancestors so far as to recognize a first ancestor, the Great
Father, Unkulunkulu, who created the world.[12] The kind of theism
reached by this process of thought differs essentially from the theism
reached through the medium of nature-worship. For whereas in the latter
case the god of the sky or the sea is regarded as a mysterious spirit
acting in and through the phenomena, in the former case the phenomena
are regarded as coerced into activity by some power existing outside
of them, and this power is conceived as manlike in the crudest sense,
having been originally thought of as the ghost of some man who once
lived upon the earth. In the monotheism which is reached by thinking
along these lines of inference, the universe is conceived as an inert
lifeless machine, impelled by blind forces which have been set acting
from without; and God is conceived as existing apart from the world in
solitary inaccessible majesty,--"an absentee God," as Carlyle says,
"sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his
universe, and 'seeing it go.'" This conception demands less of the
intellect than the conception of God as immanent in the universe.
It requires less grasp of mind and less width of experience, and it
has accordingly been much the more common conception. The idea of the
indwelling God is an attempt to reach out toward the reality, and as
such it taxes the powers of the finite mind. The idea of God external
to the universe is a symbol which in no wise approaches the reality,
and for that very reason it does not tax the mental powers; there is an
aspect of finality about it, in which the ordinary mind rests content
and complains of whatever seeks to disturb its repose.
I must not be understood as ignoring the fact that this lower species
of theism has been entertained by some of the loftiest minds of
our race, both in ancient and in modern times. When once such an
ever-present conception as the idea of God has become intertwined with
the whole body of the thoughts of mankind, it is very difficult for the
most powerful and subtle intelligence to change the form it has taken.
It has become so far organized into the texture of the mind that it
abides there unconsciously, like our fundamental axioms about number
and magnitude; it sways our thought hither and thither without our
knowing it. The two forms of theism here contrasted have slowly grown
up under the myriad unassignable influences that in antiquity caused
nature-worship to predominate among some people and ancestor-worship
among others; they have coloured all the philosophizing that has
been done for more than twenty centuries; and it is seldom that a
thinker educated under the one form ever comes to adopt the other
and habitually employ it, save under the mighty influence of modern
science, the tendency of which, as we shall presently see, is all in
one direction.
Among ancient thinkers the view of Deity as remote from the world
prevailed with the followers of Epikuros, who held that the immortal
gods could not be supposed to trouble themselves about the paltry
affairs of men, but lived a blessed life of their own, undisturbed
in the far-off empyrean. This left the world quite under the sway of
blind forces, and thus we find it depicted in the marvellous poem of
Lucretius, one of the loftiest monuments of Latin genius. It is to
all appearance an atheistic world, albeit the author was perhaps more
profoundly religious in spirit than any other Roman that ever lived,
save Augustine; yet to his immediate scientific purpose this atheism
was no drawback. When we are investigating natural phenomena, with
intent to explain them scientifically, our proper task is simply to
ascertain the physical conditions under which they occur, and the less
we meddle with metaphysics or theology the better. As Laplace said, the
mathematician, in solving his equations, does not need "the hypothesis
of God."[13] To the scientific investigator, as such, the forces of
nature are doubtless blind, like the _x_ and _y_ in algebra, but this
is only so long as he contents himself with describing their modes of
operation; when he undertakes to explain them philosophically, as we
shall see, he can in no wise dispense with his theistic hypothesis. The
Lucretian philosophy, therefore, admirable as a scientific coördination
of such facts about the physical universe as were then known, goes but
very little way as a philosophy. It is interesting to note that this
atheism followed directly from that species of theism which placed God
outside of his universe. We shall find the case of modern atheism to
be quite similar. As soon as this crude and misleading conception of
God is refuted, as the whole progress of scientific knowledge tends
to refute it, the modern atheist or positivist falls back upon his
universe of blind forces and contents himself with it, while zealously
shouting from the housetops that this is the whole story.
To one familiar with Christian ideas, the notion that Man is too
insignificant a creature to be worth the notice of Deity seems at
once pathetic and grotesque. In the view of Plato, by which all
Christendom has been powerfully influenced, there is profound pathos.
The wickedness and misery of the world wrought so strongly upon Plato's
keen sympathies and delicate moral sense that he came to conclusions
almost as gloomy as those of the Buddhist who regards existence as
an evil. In the Timaios he depicts the material world as essentially
vile; he is unable to think of the pure and holy Deity as manifested
in it, and he accordingly separates the Creator from his creation by
the whole breadth of infinitude. This view passed on to the Gnostics,
for whom the puzzling problem of philosophy was how to explain the
action of the spiritual God upon the material universe. Sometimes the
interval was bridged by mediating æons or emanations partly spiritual
and partly material; sometimes the world was held to be the work of
the devil, and in no sense divine.[14] The Greek fathers under the lead
of Clement, espousing the higher theism, kept clear of this torrent of
Gnostic thought; but upon Augustine it fell with full force, and he was
carried away with it. In his earlier writings Augustine showed himself
not incapable of comprehending the views of Clement and Athanasius; but
his intense feeling of man's wickedness dragged him irresistibly in
the opposite direction. In his doctrine of original sin, he represents
humanity as cut off from all relationship with God, who is depicted
as a crudely anthropomorphic Being far removed from the universe and
accessible only through the mediating offices of an organized church.
Compared with the thoughts of the Greek fathers this was a barbaric
conception, but it was suited alike to the lower grade of culture
in western Europe, and to the Latin political genius, which in the
decline of the Empire was already occupying itself with its great and
beneficent work of constructing an imperial Church. For these reasons
the Augustinian theology prevailed, and in the Dark Ages which followed
it became so deeply inwrought into the innermost fibres of Latin
Christianity that it remains dominant to-day alike in Catholic and
Protestant churches. With few exceptions every child born of Christian
parents in western Europe or in America grows up with an idea of God
the outlines of which were engraven upon men's minds by Augustine
fifteen centuries ago. Nay, more, it is hardly too much to say that
three fourths of the body of doctrine currently known as Christianity,
unwarranted by Scripture and never dreamed of by Christ or his
apostles, first took coherent shape in the writings of this mighty
Roman, who was separated from the apostolic age by an interval of time
like that which separates us from the invention of printing and the
discovery of America. The idea of God upon which all this Augustinian
doctrine is based is the idea of a Being actuated by human passions
and purposes, localizable in space and utterly remote from that
inert machine, the universe in which we live, and upon which He acts
intermittently through the suspension of what are called natural laws.
So deeply has this conception penetrated the thought of Christendom
that we continually find it at the bottom of the speculations and
arguments of men who would warmly repudiate it as thus stated in its
naked outlines. It dominates the reasonings alike of believers and
skeptics, of theists and atheists; it underlies at once the objections
raised by orthodoxy against each new step in science and the assaults
made by materialism upon every religious conception of the world; and
thus it is chiefly responsible for that complicated misunderstanding
which, by a lamentable confusion of thought, is commonly called "the
conflict between religion and science."