THE ACIDS OF MODERNITY
1. _The Kingly Pattern_
What I have said thus far can be reduced to the statement that it is
difficult for modern men to conceive a God whom they can worship. Yet
it would be a crude misunderstanding of religious experience to assume
that it depends upon a clear conception of God. In truly religious
men the experience of God is much more intensely convincing than any
definition of his nature which they can put into words. They do not
insist on understanding that which they believe, for their belief
gives them a consciousness of divinity which transcends any conviction
they could reach by the understanding. They are not oppressed by the
conflict between reason and faith because the testimony of faith
is irresistible. It may become so irresistible that any attempt to
understand is finally held, as it was by John Chrysostom, to be an
impertinence.
St. Chrysostom, who is described by the _Catholic Encyclopedia_ as the
most prominent doctor of the Greek Church and the greatest preacher
ever heard in a Christian pulpit, is a striking example of how in
other ages a man who was both learned and devout was able to surmount
the intellectual difficulties which to-day cause so much trouble for
modernists and fundamentalists alike. Chrysostom was born at Antioch
in the middle of the Fourth Century and grew up in a time when the
intellectual [p052] foundations of Christianity were intensely
disputed. The Catholic theology had not yet emerged victoriously, and
Antioch was the theatre of fierce struggles between Pagans, Manichæans,
Gnostics, Arians, Jews, and others. These struggles turned in
considerable measure upon just such attempts to define and comprehend
God as now confuse the teaching of the Protestant Church. Among the
sectarians there were some who claimed that it was possible “to know
God exactly” and it was against them that Chrysostom preached that
“he insults God who seeks to apprehend His essential being.” For “the
difference between the being of God and the being of man is of such a
kind that no word can express it and no thought can appraise it.... He
dwells, says St. Paul, in an unapproachable light.” Even the angels in
heaven are stupefied by the glory and majesty of God: “Tell me,” he
says, “wherefore do they cover their faces and hide them with their
wings? Why but that they cannot endure the dazzling radiance and its
rays that pour from the Throne?”
Here in language so eloquent that the author became known as
Chrysostom, “the golden-mouthed,” we have the doctrine that “a
comprehended God is no God,” that “God is incomprehensible because He
is blessed and blessed because He is incomprehensible.” But if we look
more closely at what Chrysostom actually says, it is apparent that he
has a much clearer idea of God than he knows. He conceives of God as
the creator, the ruler, and the judge of the universe. When he says
that God is incomprehensible he means that it is impossible for a human
being to imagine what it would be like to be God. But [p053] that does
not prevent Chrysostom from knowing what it is like to be the creature
of the incomprehensible God. He is very definitely on his knees before
the throne of a divine king whose radiance is so dazzling that he
cannot look his Lord in the face.
There is thus a very solid intellectual conception embedded in the
faith of this great teacher who staked everything on the assertion that
it is impossible to conceive God. The conception is there but it has
not been isolated and realized. It is unconsciously assumed. We find
the same thing in Luther when he said: “I venture to put my trust in
the one God alone, the invisible and incomprehensible, who hath created
Heaven and Earth and is alone above all creatures.” For in spite of
the fact that Luther calls God incomprehensible, he is able to make a
number of extremely important statements about him. He is able to say
that God is the only God, that he created the earth, that there is a
heaven, that God created heaven, and that God alone is above all his
creatures. To know that much about God is to comprehend the function of
God if not his nature.
Now if we examine the religious difficulty of modern men, we find,
I think, that they do not lack the sense of mystery, of majesty, of
terror, and of wonder which overwhelm Chrysostom and Luther. The
emotional disposition is there. But it is somehow inhibited from
possessing them utterly. The will to believe is checked by something
in their experience which Chrysostom did not have. That something is
the sense that the testimony of faith is not wholly credible, that the
feeling of sanctity is no assurance of the existence of sacred powers,
that awe and [p054] wonder and terror in the breast of the believer
are not guarantees that there exist real objects that are awful and
wonderful. The modern man is not incapable of faith, but he has within
him a contrary passion, as instinctive and often as intense as faith,
which makes incredible the testimony of his faith.
It is that contrary passion, and not the thin argumentation of atheists
and agnostics, which lies, I think, at the root of what churchmen call
modern irreligion. It is that passion which they must understand if
they are ever to understand the modern religious difficulty. For just
as men could surmount any intellectual difficulty when their passion to
believe was whole-hearted, so to-day, when the passion to disbelieve
is so strong, they are unable to believe no matter how perfectly their
theological dilemmas are resolved.
We must ask ourselves, then, what there is in modern men which makes
the testimony of faith seem more or less incredible to them. We have
seen in the citations from Chrysostom and Luther that the testimony of
faith really contains a large number of unconscious statements of fact
about the universe and how it is governed. It is these statements of
fact which we are no longer able to assume unconsciously, and having
become conscious of them they are rather incredible. But why are they
no longer unconsciously assumed and why are they incredible? The answer
is, I think, that they have ceased to be consistent with our normal
experience in ordinary affairs.
The faith of Chrysostom and Luther is entangled with, and supported
upon, the assumption that the universe [p055] was created and is
governed by a father and king. They had projected upon the universe
an imaginary picture which reflected their own daily experience of
government among men. These pictures of how the universe is governed
change with men’s political experience. Thus it would not have been
easy for an Asiatic people to imagine the divine government in any
other way but as a despotism, and Yahveh, as he appears in many
famous portraits in the Old Testament, is very evidently an Oriental
monarch inclined to be somewhat moody and very vain. He governs as he
chooses, constrained by no law, and often without mercy, justice, or
righteousness. The God of mediæval Christianity, on the other hand,
is more like a great feudal lord, supreme and yet bound by covenants
to treat his vassals on earth according to a well-established system
of reciprocal rights and duties. The God of the Enlightenment in the
Eighteenth Century is a constitutional monarch who reigns but does not
govern. And the God of Modernism, who is variously pictured as the
_élan vital_ within the evolutionary process, or as the sum total of
the laws of nature, is really a kind of constitutionalism deified.
Provided that the picture is so consistent with experience that it
is taken utterly for granted, it will serve as a background for the
religious experience. But when daily experience for one reason or
another provides no credible analogy by which men can imagine that
the universe is governed by a supernatural king and father, then the
disposition to believe, however strong it may be at the roots, is like
a vine that reaches out and can find nothing solid upon which to grow.
It cannot support [p056] itself. If faith is to flourish, there must
be a conception of how the universe is governed to support it.
It is these supporting conceptions—the unconscious assumption that
we are related to God as creatures to creator, as vassals to a king,
as children to a father—that the acids of modernity have eaten away.
The modern man’s daily experience of modernity makes instinctively
incredible to him these unconscious ideas which are at the core of the
great traditional and popular religions. He does not wantonly reject
belief, as so many churchmen assert. His predicament is much more
serious. With the best will in the world, he finds himself not quite
believing.
In the last four hundred years many influences have conspired to make
incredible the idea that the universe is governed by a kingly person.
An account of all of these influences would be a history of the growth
of modern civilization. I am attempting nothing so comprehensive or
so ambitious. I should like merely to note certain aspects of that
revolutionary change which, as Lord Acton says, came “unheralded”
and “founded a new order of things ... sapping the ancient reign of
continuity.” For that new order of things has made it impossible for
us to believe, as plainly and literally as our forefathers did, that
the universe is a monarchy administered on this planet through divinely
commissioned, and, therefore, unimpeachably authoritative ministers.
2. _Landmarks_
In a famous passage at the beginning of _Heretics_, Mr. Chesterton
says that “nothing more strangely indicates the enormous and silent
evil of modern society than [p057] the extraordinary use which is
made nowadays of the word ‘orthodox.’ In former days the heretic was
proud of not being a heretic. It was the kingdom of the world and the
police and the judges who were heretics. He was orthodox. All the
tortures born out of forgotten hells could not make him admit that he
was heretical. But a few modern phrases have made him boast of it. He
says with a conscious laugh, ‘I suppose I am very heretical,’ and looks
around for applause. The word ‘heresy’ not only means no longer being
wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous.”
Mr. Chesterton goes on to explain that this change of attitude has come
about because “people care less for whether they are philosophically
right than they used to care.” It may be so. But if they cared as much
or more, it would not help them. To be orthodox is to believe in the
right doctrines and to follow the ancient rules of living deduced from
a divine revelation. The modern man finds that the doctrines do not fit
what he believes to be true, and that the rules do not show him how
to conduct his life. For he is confronted at every turn with radical
novelties about which his inherited dogma teaches him something which
is plainly unworkable, or, as is even more often the case, teaches him
nothing at all.
In the old world there were, of course, novelties, too. But the pace
of change was so slow that it did not seem to cause radical change.
There was ample time to make subtle and necessary revisions of the
fundamental assumptions of right and wrong without seeming to challenge
the distinction between right and wrong. Looking back at it in long
perspective we can see now that there was [p058] a constant evolution
of the Christian faith from the Apostles to the later councils of the
Church. But in relation to the life of any individual the change was so
slow that men could honestly believe that the Catholicism of Hildebrand
was identical with the Christianity of Paul. Men had few means of
reconstructing the past, and few ways of knowing how great was the
variety of belief at any one time within the frontiers of Christendom.
Within their horizon, change came too slowly to seem like change,
because only that seems to move which moves rather fast.
For that reason the large changes which took place were not vividly
realized. The small, quick changes, of which men were conscious, could
therefore easily be made to seem, especially since men were not too
exact and observant, as inevitable deductions from unchanging premises.
Even in the great arguments over the nature of Christ, the rights of
Church and Empire, the meaning of grace and transubstantiation, both
sides appealed in theory to the same premises. Each side asserted that
it was following the true revelation. And since ordinary men for the
most part never heard the other side, except from their own priests and
doctors, they had no reason for doubting that the side on which they
happened to find themselves was absolutely right. They did not have to
choose between competing creeds; they had merely to defend their creed,
which was the true one, against the enemies of God. And so if they were
disturbed by the quarrel, they were not disturbed much by doubt.
The grand adjustments were taken for granted, and within that framework
men could make the minor adjustments patiently and elaborately, letting
them become [p059] habitual and well-worn. This, perhaps, is the
secret of the charm that an old civilization has for us to-day. We
feel that here is a way of life which men have had time to refine and
to embellish. The modern man in a progressive community has neither
the time nor the energy for this delightful superficiality. He is
too busy solving fundamental problems. He is so free to question his
premises that he is no longer free to work out his conclusions. His
philosophy of life is like the skyscraper; it is nine-tenths structure.
So much effort has gone into constructing it, and making it fit to
bear the strains, it is so new and yet it will so soon be out of
date, that nobody is much interested in the character of it. But a
mediæval cathedral, like the mediæval philosophy, was built slowly over
generations and was to last forever; it is decorated inside and out,
where it can be seen and where it cannot be seen, from the crypt to the
roof.
The modern man is an emigrant who lives in a revolutionary society and
inherits a protestant tradition. He must be guided by his conscience.
But when he searches his conscience, he finds no fixed point outside of
it by which he can take his bearings. He does not really believe that
there is such a point, because he himself has moved about too fast to
fix any point long enough in his mind. For the sense of authority is
not established by argument. It is acquired by deep familiarity and
indurated association. The ancient authorities were blended with the
ancient landmarks, with fields and vineyards and patriarchal trees,
with ancient houses and chests full of heirlooms, with churchyards
near at hand and their ancestral graves, with old men who remembered
wise sayings they [p060] had heard from wise old men. In that kind of
setting it is natural to believe that the great truths are known and
the big questions settled, and to feel that the dead themselves are
still alive and are watching over the ancient faith.
But when creeds have to be proved to the doubting they are already
blighted; arguments are for the unbelievers and the wavering, for
those who have never had, and for those who have lost these primordial
attachments. Faith is not a formula which is agreed to if the weight
of evidence favors it. It is a posture of man’s whole being which
predisposes him to assimilate, not merely to believe, his creed.
When the posture is native to him, in tune with the rhythm of his
surroundings, his faith is not dependent upon intellectual assent. It
is a serene and whole-hearted absorption, like that of the infant to
its mother, in the great powers outside which govern his world. When
that union of feeling is no longer there, as it is not there for a
large part of our talkative fundamentalist sects, we may be sure that
corrosive doubting has begun. The unlovely quality of much modern
religiosity is due to these doubts. So much of its belief is synthetic.
It is forced, made, insisted upon, because it is no longer simple and
inevitable. The angry absurdities which the fundamentalists propound
against “evolution” are not often due to their confidence in the
inspiration of the Bible. They are due to lack of confidence, to doubt
resisted like an annoying tune which a man cannot shake out of his
head. For if the militant fundamentalists were utterly sure they are
right, they would exhibit some of that composure which the truly devout
display. Did they [p061] really trust their God, they would trust
laws, politicians, and policemen less. But because their whole field of
consciousness is trembling with uncertainties they are in a state of
fret and fuss; and their preaching is frousy, like the seductions of an
old coquette.
3. _Barren Ground_
The American people, more than any other people, is composed of
individuals who have lost association with their old landmarks. They
have crossed an ocean, they have spread themselves across a new
continent. The American who still lives in his grandfather’s house
feels almost as if he were living in a museum. There are few Americans
who have not moved at least once since their childhood, and even if
they have staid where they were born, the old landmarks themselves
have been carted away to make room for progress. That, perhaps, is one
reason why we have so much more Americanism than love of America. It
takes time to learn to love the new gas station which stands where the
wild honeysuckle grew. Moreover, the great majority of Americans have
risen in the world. They have moved out of their class, lifting the
old folks along with them perhaps, so that together they may sit by
the steam pipes, and listen to the crooning of the radio. But more and
more of them have moved not only out of their class, but out of their
culture; and then they leave the old folks behind, and the continuity
of life is broken. For faith grows well only as it is passed on from
parents to their children amidst surroundings that bear witness,
because nothing changes radically, to a deep permanence in the order of
the world. It is true, [p062] no doubt, that in this great physical
and psychic migration some of the old household gods are carefully
packed up and put with the rest of the luggage, and then unpacked and
set up on new altars in new places. But what can be taken along is at
best no more than the tree which is above the ground. The roots remain
in the soil where first they grew.
The sidewalks of a city would in any case be a stony soil in which to
transplant religion. Throughout history, as Spengler points out, the
large city has bred heresies, new cults, and irreligion. Now when we
speak of modern civilization we mean a civilization dominated by the
culture of the great metropolitan centers. Our own civilization in
America is perhaps the most completely urbanized of all. For even the
American farmers, though they live in the country, tend to be suburban
rather than rural. I am aware of how dominating a role the population
outside the great cities plays in American life. Yet it is in the
large cities that the tempo of our civilization is determined, and the
tendency of mechanical inventions as well as economic policy is to
create an irresistible suction of the country towards the city.
The deep and abiding traditions of religion belong to the countryside.
For it is there that man earns his daily bread by submitting to
superhuman forces whose behavior he can only partially control. There
is not much he can do when he has ploughed the ground and planted his
seed except to wait hopefully for sun and rain from the sky. He is
obviously part of a scheme that is greater than himself, subject to
elements that transcend his powers and surpass his understanding. The
city is an acid that dissolves [p063] this piety. How different it is
from an ancient vineyard where men cultivate what their fathers have
planted. In a modern city it is not easy to maintain that “reverent
attachment to the sources of his being and the steadying of his life by
that attachment.” It is not natural to form reverent attachments to an
apartment on a two-year lease, and an imitation mahogany desk on the
thirty-second floor of an office building. In such an environment piety
becomes absurd, a butt for the facetious, and the pious man looks like
a picturesque yokel or a stuffy fool.
Yet without piety, without a patriotism of family and place, without
an almost plant-like implication in unchangeable surroundings, there
can be no disposition to believe in an external order of things. The
omnipotence of God means something to men who submit daily to the
cycles of the weather and the mysterious power of nature. But the city
man puts his faith in furnaces to keep out the cold, is proudly aware
of what bad sewage his ancestors endured, and of how ignorantly they
believed that God, who made Adam at 9 A.M. on October 23 in the year
4004 B.C., was concerned with the behavior of Adam’s children.
4. _Sophisticated Violence_
Much effort goes into finding substitutes for this radical loss of
association. There is the Americanization movement, for example,
which in some of its public manifestations has as much resemblance to
patriotism as the rape of the Sabine women had to the love of Dante
for Beatrice. There is the vociferous nationalism of the [p064]
hundred percenters which is always most eloquent when it is about to
be most rowdy. There are the anxious outcries of the sectarians who
in their efforts to revive the religion of their fathers show the
utmost contempt for the aspirations of their sons. There is Mr. Henry
Ford hastily collecting American antiques before his cars destroy
the whole culture which produced them. There is Mr. Lothrop Stoddard
looking every man in the eye to see whether it is Nordic blue. There
are a thousand and one patently artificial, sometimes earnest, often
fantastic fundamentalist agitations. They are all attempts to impose
quickly by one kind of sophisticated violence or another a posture of
faith which can be genuine only when it belongs to the unquestioned
memories of the soul. They are a shrill insistence that men ought to
feel that which no man can feel who does not already feel it in the
marrow of his bones.
Novelties crowd the consciousness of modern men. The machinery of
intelligence, the press, the radio, the moving picture, have enormously
multiplied the number of unseen events and strange people and queer
doings with which he has to be concerned. They compel him to pay
attention to facts that are detached from their backgrounds, their
causes and their consequences, and are only half known because they are
not seen or touched or actually heard. These experiences come to him
having no beginning, no middle, and no end, mere flashes of publicity
playing fitfully upon a dark tangle of circumstances. I pick up a
newspaper at the start of the day and I am depressed and rejoiced to
learn that: anthracite miners have struck in Pennsylvania; that a price
boost [p065] plot is charged; that Mr. Ziegfeld has imported a blonde
from England who weighs 112 pounds and has pretty legs; that the Pope,
on the other hand, has refused to receive women in low-necked dress and
with their arms bare; that airplanes are flying to Hawaii; and that the
Mayor says that the would-be Mayor is a liar....
Now in an ordered universe there ought to be place for all human
experiences. But it is not strange that the modern newspaper reader
finds it increasingly difficult to believe that through it all there is
order, permanence, and connecting principle. Such experience as comes
to him from the outside is a dissonance composed of a thousand noises.
And amidst these noises he has for inner guidance only a conscience
which consists, as he half suspects, of the confused echoes of earlier
tunes.
5. _Rulers_
He cannot look to his betters for guidance. The American social system
is migratory, revolutionary, and protestant. It provides no recognized
leaders and no clear standards of conduct. No one is recognized as the
interpreter of morals and the arbiter of taste. There is no social
hierarchy, there is no acknowledged ruling class, no well-known system
of rights and duties, no code of manners. There are smart sets, first
families, and successful people, to whom a good deal of deference is
paid and a certain tribute of imitation. But these leaders have no real
authority in morals or in matters of taste because they themselves have
few standards that are not the fashions of a season. They exercise,
therefore, an almost autocratic power over deportment at the country
club. [p066] But what they believe about God, salvation, or the
destiny of America nobody knows, not even they themselves.
There have been perhaps three ruling classes in America, the Puritan
merchants, the Knickerbocker gentry, and the Cavalier planters of
the South. Each presided for a few generations over an ordered
civilization. But the New Englanders uprooted themselves and went west,
and those who have been left behind are marooned in a flood of aliens.
The Knickerbocker squirearchy dissolved in the commercial greatness of
New York, and the southern aristocracy was overthrown and ruined by a
social revolution which culminated in the Civil War. They have left no
successors, and unless and until American society becomes stabilized
once more somewhere for a few generations, they are not likely to have
any successors.
Our rulers to-day consist of random collections of successful men and
their wives. They are to be found in the inner circles of banks and
corporations, in the best clubs, in the dominant cliques of trade
unions, among the political churchmen, the higher manipulating bosses,
the leading professional Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Irish,
Germans, Jews, and the grand panjandrums of the secret societies.
They give orders. They have to be consulted. They can more or less
effectively speak for, and lead some part of, the population. But none
of them is seated on a certain throne, and all of them are forever
concerned as to how they may keep from being toppled off. They do not
know how they happen to be where they are, although they often explain
what are the secrets of success. They have been educated to achieve
success; few of them have been educated to exercise power. Nor [p067]
do they count with any confidence upon retaining their power, nor of
handing it on to their sons. They live, therefore, from day to day, and
they govern by ear. Their impromptu statements of policy may be obeyed,
but nobody seriously regards them as having authority.