RELIGION AND ETHICS
What was the exact relation between religion and morality in the past?
Does morality any longer need the sanctions and supernatural setting
which helped to support it in other days? These are questions of
primary importance whose discussion should throw light upon both
religion and human morality. Have human values become self-supporting
and self-justifying? Do the decencies of life find sufficient ground
in human nature for their continuance and increase? Or is the rescuing
hand of a supernatural grace necessary to prevent deterioration? Such
questions are peculiarly proper to-day when ethics is seeking to build
itself upon a broad study of human instincts. Let us try to penetrate
below the surface of the traditional contrasts between flesh and
spirit--contrasts which hindered rather than furthered clear
analysis--and note the actual basis of the spiritual life in man. In
order to do so, we must read human nature as it manifests itself in
organized society, sanely and calmly, expecting neither too much nor
too little, and not being intimidated by the assertions of men who have
built their lives around the traditional theological outlook. Those
who have learned to lean upon a crutch or who have cast their spiritual
experiences in a certain mold naturally feel at a loss when this is
threatened. This is to put it too {170} mildly, perhaps, for the
_odium theologicum_ has a reputation which cannot be all unearned.
Yet, comprehensible as the protest of the conservative is, it must be
viewed in the light of the psychological habits which it expresses. It
may well be that new times and new points of view will bring new habits
and new molds for spiritual experience. It may well be that the
traditional religious sanctions will gradually lose their meaning in
the new generation, born into a more social, humane and scientific
atmosphere. Let us see what indications there are for this prediction.
In early times, religion was mainly a community affair. The tribe or
state had its gods who protected it against its enemies in return for
homage and sacrifice. The tribal god was inseparable from his
worshipers. A god without a nation was almost as badly off as a nation
without a divine protector. As members of the community, the
individuals, separately and collectively, were required to perform
established ceremonies which were pleasing in the eyes of the gods, and
to refrain from acting in ways displeasing to them. Gods and men
formed, as it were, one society; and so customs and rituals always
received the fearful sanctions of these divine powers. How naturally
this outlook developed can readily be understood. And there can be
little doubt that the double sanction of social group and divine
witnesses was of advantage in those early days when man was more
impulsive and less rational than he is to-day. A crime was, at one and
the same time, a crime and a sin or act of impiety; and so close was
thought to be the responsible connection of the individual and the
group that the tribe was held to be in danger because of the deeds of
its members. {171} The gods were living agents quick to anger and
ready to punish in the direst ways. Warned by this knowledge of the
jealousy of the gods, the fellow tribesmen hastened to punish the
offender in order to ward off the divine anger. Thus the sanctions
enforcing the customs were both social and religious.
This situation had its bad side as well as its good. While it helped
to enforce the tribal laws by means of the awe of the divine witness
who could not be escaped, it tended to merge valuable with trivial
things. Society was quite irrational as yet, and was as likely to
punish the violation of accidental taboos as really serious attacks
upon society. It is a commonplace of history that religions have
stressed ritual observances more than vital phases of conduct. The
greater Hebrew prophets stand out just because of their emphasis upon
human morality, upon justice and righteousness and love. Amos and
Hosea are social reformers who conceive their national god as a god of
righteousness who will turn his face away from the doers of evil. They
threaten their compatriots with his wrath if they continue in their
evil ways. "Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the
Lord, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye say. Hate the evil
and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate." Thus the
setting of religion was used as the leverage for an attempted ethical
reformation, the exalted reformer conceiving himself as the mouthpiece
of his god. But the prophets were exceptions. The priestly class, the
class that has always held closely to traditional ways of thinking,
brought the usual multitude of non-moral acts under this impressive
sanction.
The struggle between priest and prophet, {172} traditionalist and
ethical reformer, took place within the religious view of the world,
but the conflict was, after all, a purely human process. The prophets
loved righteousness because they knew that it was good, because they
fell repelled by unmerited poverty and by careless wealth, because they
admired the decencies of life. They could not have given the
justification of their sentiments as well as a theorist of to-day, but
they had these sentiments as keenly as to-day's prophet has them. When
we read their wonderful discourses, we are thrilled by the depth and
intensity of their ethical life. But we are too apt to forget that the
social situation in Palestine was the stimulus to their denunciations.
They were noble enough to feel that conditions were intolerable, and it
was not a far step to believe that Yahweh would not tolerate them. A
noble man has always a noble god. That is the reason why the god of
Amos is noble. The theological view reverses the true causal relation.
Morality is always human morality, expressive of human nature and human
conditions. Man may assign his ideals to some superhuman source
because he is convinced that this source has selected him as its
interpreter; but the fact that he has thought and judged in this moral
way is indubitable, while his theory that Yahweh is speaking through
him is merely an expression of the religious view of the world common
to the time. When we stop a moment to think, we realize that Amos and
Hosea were certain to put their views under the sanction of their
national god. Not to have done so would have been far stranger
psychologically than the ideals which they championed.
Did the prophetic claim that social justice was {173} sanctioned by
Yahweh help its advance? Probably. I see no reason to doubt that it
did somewhat--how much it is impossible to say. So far as the claim
was accepted by the nation, it would assist the forces working for
reform. But religious sanctions are far more powerful when they are
explicit and detailed, as the history of Christianity has shown. And
we must remember that the prophetic claims were not always accepted.
Religion is usually conservative and more or less conventional. The
ritual element plays a considerable part in religious morality. It is
as hard to change the people's ideas of God as it is to change their
conceptions of justice and goodness. For this reason, I am not
convinced that the religious sanction was of much advantage in the
evolution of morality. The old has even more of the use of the
sanction than has the new. Moral forces need to be vigorously based
upon human nature and human relations if they are to dominate society
and control the ethical standards which public opinion demands. The
presence of religious sanctions simply beclouds the real factors at
work. Morality can never, in the long run, be something pressed upon
man from outside; it must express his life and its needs.
It cannot be denied that supernatural sanctions have often been very
effective for certain types of people in certain anarchic periods. The
robber baron of the Middle Ages, credulous and superstitious, was
restrained at times by his fear of the penalties threatened by Mother
Church. But so is a burglar by a pistol pointed at him, even if it is
not loaded. In the past, a code of morality much in advance of the
times has, no doubt, often been aided by religious sanctions. But
{174} it is foolish to base one's theories upon exceptional conditions.
We must remember that the situation confronted by the Christian
tradition after the breakdown of the political and social life of the
Roman Empire was abnormal. A turbulent mass of barbarians faced the
ethics and theology of an overthrown civilization. It cannot too often
be pointed out that this situation was unhealthy in many ways. It is
not good for a people to have codes of morality thrust upon it from
outside. Especially is it bad when the code is in many ways untrue to
human nature under normal conditions. Ascetic, other-worldly
Christianity distorted the impulses of mediaeval man. And it is certain
that religious sanctions, alone, enabled it to control society.
We have seen that religion and morality marched together as long as the
evolution of the society was healthy and natural. Often there was a
struggle over the ritual and mythical elements in religious morality;
but, as a rule, the civic type of morality gained the upper hand.
Religious sanctions were called in because of the faith in divine
powers interested in the welfare of the community, but these sanctions
soon ceased to be creative. While the gods remained, these sanctions
would necessarily remain; yet they tended to become benevolent and
secondary.
But Christianity, by reason of the forces at work at the time of its
origin, nourished vicious interpretations of morality. The despair of
human nature which we note in the writings of St. Paul tinged the
outlook of Christian ethics. Man is by nature evil; only the working
in his soul of a supernatural grace can lead him to value the things
which are pure and of good {175} repute. This pessimism cannot be too
sharply spurned. Man is neither angel nor devil; he is just man. And
the modern thinker is pretty well convinced that morality is a purely
human affair growing out of the instinctive tendencies which man has
inherited in the course of evolution as these find themselves in
various situations. Moral problems are meaningless apart from their
setting on this earth. Man is moral because he can pass judgments upon
courses of behavior and decide what best conduces to his welfare. He
is moral because he can build up standards of social and personal
conduct and adhere to them more or less completely. The assumption
that man is immoral is psychologically untrue. The asceticism and
pessimism of mediaeval Christianity was a reflection of false ideals and
of an unhealthy social system. There was an element of strain in the
demands held up before the individual. The spiritual life was a task
which he had to accomplish because it possessed a supernatural sanction.
But the inherent pessimism of much of Christianity was not its only
fault. It taught men to suppose that morality was not something which
paid for itself. So much did it stress the necessity of supernatural
sanctions that it led the majority to believe that no man would be good
unless he had to, unless he was afraid of the external consequences
which would be meted out to him at the bar of judgment. But how false
such a view is. We know to-day that morality pays here and now, in the
specie of a happy, healthy, well-developed life. Any other view makes
morality irrational and unnatural and, consequently, dependent upon
sanctions which rest upon the will of some agent apart from {176} this
concrete life of act and fact. To put this criticism in the technical
language of ethics, Christianity has tended to think of conduct in
terms of heteronomous ethics, _i.e._, in terms of precepts and laws
coming from outside of human life and pressed upon it by authority,
rather than in terms of autonomous ethics for which ideals and customs
are wise adjustments to the natural relations in which man finds
himself.
This assumption that morality is a hardship played into the hands of a
juridical notion of the sanctions of conduct, for which the conception
of immortality furnished the grandiose opportunity. The arm of society
is eluded at death, but death offers no escape for the wicked from the
outraged deity they have offended. It is the motive of fear which is
here employed. Human beings are to be scared into being good.
Morality is on the defensive because it has no real charm and natural
loveliness, because it does not grow out of a rational study of human
relations.
How tragically false this view was! Its existence can be explained
only as an expression of an ill-organized society in which impulsive
violence was not enough held in check. Supernatural sanctions could be
used to restrain malefactors of great power in less happy times.
Society has grown beyond this need. Courts of law and outraged public
opinion are quite able to deal with criminals. If the reason for
punishment is prevention, it is certainly true that punishment by
society is more likely to be effective than the postponed pains of an
hereafter, because of its immediacy and power of being repeated. But
it is very doubtful whether fear is a moral motive or whether it is a
very effective deterrent. Social thinkers are agreed that punishment
is a very {177} bungling method at the best. It does not show the
presence of a very constructive imagination.
Hell has always been a magnified torture chamber. It has been the
reflection on the gigantic background of the next world of the penal
ideas of the time. That is why it has always been more interesting
than heaven. Man feared to make a social utopia out of heaven because
he conceived it as a kingdom in which he was to play a very minor role,
while he was quite certain of his importance in hell. But the morbid
results of his imaginings were tragic in their effects when connected
with such damnable doctrines as infant damnation and eternal punishment
for lack of belief in a particular creed. What distorted ethical
notions, what mixture of horrible fear before a world-tyrant and
callous delight in the punishment of others are revealed in these
pictures of a place of eternal torment! Thank goodness, the civilized
world is outgrowing the whole savage set of ideas.
Before we leave these juridical religious sanctions, it may be well to
call attention to the fact that theories of punishment have radically
changed during the last century. The purpose of modern justice is less
to uphold the majesty of an outraged law than to protect the citizens
of a state and reform the character of the criminal. Crime is studied
genetically and its conditions determined so far as possible. It is
well known that criminals are products of biological and social
conditions over which they have little control. The modern ideal is
coming to be prevention by means of the betterment of social
organization and negative eugenics. Healthy and capable persons in a
decent society would be unlikely to turn out criminals. I do {178} not
see how we can escape the conclusion that the saner penology of the
present has completely undermined the whole juristic basis of the next
world. Human ethics and a supernatural ethics of an eschatological
sort cannot be dovetailed together. The scene and motives of a crime
cannot be laid in one world with that world's peculiar conditions, and
the punishment dispensed in another. And a final punishment is a
veritable absurdity. Is punishment an end in itself? Are the wicked
such hopeless creatures? Or does it simply mean that men have never
before thought of such things as indeterminate sentences and
reformation? Prisoners were hustled away and never seen afterwards.
Punishment and reward were easy matters in the old days when justice
was external and terroristic; we see to-day that they are the most
difficult of problems. Final judgments by omniscient judges strike us
as romantic and even melodramatic. Again, we doubt such facile
divisions of our mixed humanity as that between saints and sinners. We
have a keener and more democratic eye for the good in the most
unprepossessing of our fellow creatures. We know what he has been up
against from his babyhood days, what his chances, temptations, joys and
sorrows have been. And we have the deep conviction that ghostly
judgment after death would be absolutely meaningless.
In an earlier chapter, we pointed out that the belief in, and desire
for, immortality is stronger in periods of social disorganization than
in periods of marked social unity and happy creativeness. Christianity
arose in just such a time of pessimism and stifled social life. The
Roman Empire had become barren of joyous hopefulness and spirited
endeavor. The citizen was only a {179} unit in a dreary and monotonous
whole ruled from above. All through the Middle Ages, something of this
suspicion of the world, this longing for release from earthly things
tinged the interests and judgments of the more spiritually-minded men
and women. The inevitable ethical result was a disregard of genuine
human problems and a tense exaltation of attitudes of self-control and
negation. Disciplines became ends in themselves, which rejected all
relation to the life of every day. The direction of ethical life was
away from creative activity and concern with the more homely things,
and toward an abstract contemplation of ideals seldom put to the test
of positive application. The religious setting of life withdrew human
energies from their rightful and fruitful sphere of activity and
applied them to tasks of self-analysis and never-ceasing
self-criticism. Such an approach to life produced men who were saints,
men who were unselfish and admirable in almost every way; but this
saintliness grew at the expense of significant human achievement. It
was as though men forged splendid instruments and did not know how to
use them. The pity of it all is, that this mediaeval world-view
stimulated men to devotions of soul which looked away from the arena of
human life rather than into it.
But religion only revealed what human nature, itself, possessed. These
capacities for sympathy, love, persistent self-discipline, and devotion
to ideals were natural to man. The primary fault with Mediaevalism was
the inability to see the worth of human things and the hypnotic
fixation of the mind upon unreal relations and demands. The modern man
admires these cloistered saints and, at the same time, feels the
tragedy and {180} futility of this goodness which wearied itself out in
vigil and prayer. The human cost of this virtue was so high and its
objective use so small. It is only as an artist that I can enjoy
reading the _Prayers and Meditations_ of Thomas a Kempis. When this
mood is not upon me, I am repelled by the picture of this white-faced
monk in his cell, holding in restraint all his natural impulses by
means of the thought of a reward in paradise after death. Virtue was
the winning of a goal set by his Maker, for reasons which he did not
dream of questioning. "When I weary of the long night vigils, or of
the Lessons, longer perhaps than usual, give me grace to remember how
great are the rewards in heaven which I have now a chance of gaining.
When the days of abstinence from food and drink are many, give me the
power to fast, and good health to enable me to carry on my work; give
me pardon for the sins which I have committed, keep me from falling
into them again, relieve me from the punishment they have deserved, and
give me a good hope of everlasting happiness with the elect in the
Kingdom of God." We feel that this ethical energy should have been
used otherwise and in the service of human beings. Better Thomas a
Kempis than the man who is mad for wealth and the lusts of the flesh;
but far better than either is the sane worker for things of good
repute. His goodness is a social goodness which makes life happier and
fuller of activities and things worth while.
The traditional religion has not only been, frequently enough,
anti-social, but it has also been morally inefficient. Why? Because
it has made too much of tension and too little of intelligence.
Instead of pointing out that morality paid because it was only the
application {181} of intelligence to human needs, it set a standard of
moral discipline before people and then sought to drive them to its
attainment by sheer force of will and subjectively aroused emotion.
The modern ethical thinker is convinced that morality is but the
harmonious adjustment of an individual to his social group; it is the
sensible foresight which selects the active values which attract and
express man's nature.
This rather blind tension of traditional religion appears quite clearly
in the conception of sin. The setting of this idea has been monarchic
and terroristic. It has exhaled an atmosphere of sharp, mystic
contrasts which were as unreal as they were vicious. To set a goal too
high is almost as bad psychologically as to set it too low.
Christianity vaguely felt this flaw in its dramatic ethical scheme and
was led to bring the doctrine of God's saving grace to the front to
bridge the fearful gulf caused by the opposition of God's perfection to
man's imperfection. But the man of to-day who is sincere with himself
knows that this religious world-ethics is a meaningless fiction. He
can understand why it arose in the olden days, with its supernaturalism
and juridical ethics, yet he feels that this absolutism is a product of
monarchism and pre-evolutionary thinking. Goodness is a human ideal
whose content is always undergoing change, while it hovers just beyond
man's reach. I must confess, then, that I have little sympathy with
the gross exaggerations associated with this word sin. I know that I
often fall short of my better moral judgment and, at such moments of
moral insight, I experience a keen regret and try to strengthen those
tendencies and activities which will aid me to do better next time.
But I know too {182} much of personality on its biological,
psychological and social sides, too much of its complexity and its
foundations to retain the old notion of the self as an entity which,
having the ability to be godlike, chooses evil. Paul's God was an
oriental monarch; to the modern, he is a cad. Why, no sensible teacher
asks the impossible of his pupils! Yet this strange relation conceived
to exist between an omnipotent deity and his frail creatures, when
intensified by the horizon of another and eternal world, was bound to
develop the tensest and most paralyzing of attitudes. No novel has
been able to unfold a plot which has such psychological possibilities.
And the morbid and exalted religious imagination has done more than
justice to them. While I do not for a moment deny the strength and
leverage this ensemble of ideas possesses when faith is present, I do
contend that the whole creation is unhealthy and blinding and involves
inefficiency as regards the real and pressing problems of personal and
social development. The ecclesiastic seldom has a normal perspective.
Take Cardinal Newman, for instance. Can one deny that this subtle
personality, for all his gifts, brought distorting values into the
current of life? Such a man is certain to misread movements and
activities and to magnify the subjective at the expense of the social.
The individual who identifies himself with social projects, able to
elicit his energy and enthusiasm, is more apt to forget the pettier
interests of the moment in the broad sweep of creative endeavor than is
the person who morbidly catechizes his conscience. A formal morality
which looks inward and never outward is bound to be inefficient.
Tension is no fit substitute for intelligent insight.
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Many theologians assume that ethics has a choice only between reliance
upon some supernatural power for its sanctions, and a sort of harsh and
haughty stoicism, in which the individual stands alone and by sheer
force of will establishes and maintains ideals which are alien to his
nature. The fallacy in such an assumption is not hard to detect. By
his training in the ascetic traditions of Christianity with its
acquiescence in the doctrine of original sin, the theologian is
initiated into a distorted conception of human nature and of human
relations. While man is a complex being with many instincts and
possibilities to adjust and organize in an efficient and progressive
way, it is slanderous to assert that these instincts are evil or that
man, on the whole, does not relate them quite satisfactorily to a plan
of life. Human nature is a sweeter, saner thing than the ascetic
admits; man is capable of heroic idealisms and of far-reaching
sympathies which express themselves in the mold of society. As a
matter of fact, the haughty stoicism of which the religious writer
speaks with so much pity, as the only alternative to supernatural
relations and sanctions, is a product of times of social disruption
when the high-strung individual is thrown back upon himself. To-day,
people live and think in groups, with common hopes, standards and
plans. Their conscience is a social conscience which finds its
supporting echo in the deeds and sentiments of their companions and
fellow workers. It is the supernaturalist who is an egoist at heart.
Even Mr. Wells is so dominated by this anti-social point of view that
he falsifies both psychology and fact in his tirade upon the sane
worker for human values. No one who knew the elements of modern
ethical thought {184} based, as it is, upon an evolutionary social
psychology would subscribe to the following nonsense: "The benevolent
atheist stands alone upon his own good will, without a reference,
without a standard, trusting to his own impulse to goodness, relying
upon his own moral strength. A certain immodesty, a certain
self-righteousness, hangs like a precipice above him.... He has no one
to whom he can give himself. He has no source of strength beyond his
own amiable sentiments, his conscience speaks with an unsupported
voice, and no one watches while he sleeps. He cannot pray; he can but
ejaculate. He has no real and living link with other men of good
will." Of course, one can write such things if one wishes to. But the
social reformer knows that his problems are human problems whose
solution rests upon sentiments of sympathy, enlightened and directed by
intelligence. They who seek for the advent of a better day for
humanity band together as naturally and loyally as ever did the
believers in the second coming of Christ.
The remark is frequently made that the modern world is tending to
return to the Greek view of life. If by the Greek view of life is
meant the outlook characteristic of the Greeks of the classic
period--the era of Plato, Pericles, and Sophocles,--there is much truth
in the judgment. Human values are again coming uppermost in men's
minds. This life is not a sojourn in a vale of tears, but the scene of
the attempts of socially-minded, conscious organisms to achieve a
temperate and fairly happy existence. But the centuries intervening
have not been without their effect; man's moral horizon has been both
deepened and enlarged. Since those halcyon days, man has eaten of the
tree of good and {185} evil, he has fought with shadowy monsters and
wandered for years in the wilderness of helplessness and pessimism, he
has worshiped at the shrine of strange gods and prostrated himself
before the terrors of his own imagination. Slowly he has come to stand
erect and look about him and see the world and himself as they actually
are. Knowledge has become his most trusted instrument, and democratic
sympathy with human life his most cherished guide. With such a guide
and with such an instrument, he will before long set about to mold his
life in accordance with those mellower ideals which have grown in his
heart during his long pilgrimage. At last, man is becoming an adult
able to stand upon his feet and to look keenly around with a measuring
glance at things as they are. Will he not work for the sweet fruition
of those human values which are dear to his very soul--home, children,
kindly social intercourse, work which gives self-expression, art,
knowledge, contentment, all suffused with the vigor of healthy bodies
and the sleep of quiet nights? Man will surely come to desire greatly,
and achieve magnificently, and live courageously.
Now that the ethical degradation of the industrial revolution has been
stayed and society has turned its face from the clatter of
mass-production for its own sake, now that ethical reflection has been
united with reason and science in a sane realism, now that sympathy is
abroad in the land, now that democracy with its conception of human
brotherhood is astir throughout the world, ethics has secured a firm
foundation in the free aspirations of free men. If noble character and
rational conduct cannot maintain themselves in such a society, then the
theologian can rightly say that man is {186} by nature corrupt. But
the present is a time of growing loyalties to the common good and of
vigorous search for the efficient means to attain it in greater
measure. The great spiritual adventures of the future will surely be
human and humane.
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