For example. Some twelve years ago President Wilson announced on behalf
of the United States, or was quoted as announcing, that we were “too
proud to fight.” Soon afterwards we were fighting, not without martial
pride, in the greatest war of all time. The irony of this sequence was
too broad to escape notice. Yet the notice was comparatively slight.
And the whole matter has faded with ominous speed from the imagination
of a public debauched with the most adulterous mixture of pacific
and pugnacious prides that the world has ever known. The Wilsonian
remark was easily smiled into oblivion. The full dramatic irony of
the situation, and the tragedy behind it, cannot appear until that
proud utterance is recognised, not as the passing whimsy of a single
person or party or nation, but as a vivid symbol of the modern spirit
at large. It may fairly be regarded, indeed, as the verbal apex of
the whole bad pyramid of modern pride--the pride of quick and direct
solutions, the pride of immediacy.
The basis of that pyramid is religious. No doubt the superstructure
owes much to our triumphantly swift results in science, industry, and
humanitarian reform. But the pride of practical achievement, thoroughly
wholesome in its proper _locale_, would not have formed a modern
Babel unless assembled and underpinned by modern religion. And modern
religion, while denouncing more and more the various arrogancies of our
material civilisation, has not unearthed the deep foundation which it
itself has provided for them. As religion is properly the founder and
guardian of human humility, so religious pride is the prime evil. We
see this very easily in the past. We know that the most blinding and
hateful pride that grew among the ancient Greeks and Romans was not
the pride of city-state, of empire, of symmetric culture. It was the
arrogance of the religious philosophy of the Stoics, their assumption
of a pseudo-divine impassivity of spirit. Likewise the mediæval
glorification of chivalry, and even of ecclesiastic and theological
edifice, is as nothing to modern eyes in comparison with the spiritual
presumption that grew in mediæval asceticism. We see how vicious it was
for the Stoic to be proud of his pride, and for the monk to be proud
of his humility. We have not yet seen how vicious it is for the modern
citizen to be proud of being neither proud nor humble.
He is spiritually proud of having escaped from spiritual pride. He
believes he has left that historic vice far and forever behind.
In his leisure hours he has learned all about it, he thinks, from
interesting books, periodicals, preachers, lecturers, travels,
historical moving-pictures, and maybe survey courses in college. He
is amused and in better moments saddened at the tremendous dramatic
display of religious pride in old times,--unaware that this evil never
_displayed_ itself to the hearts it mastered, nor does to-day. What,
then, can he know of real humility? “Why,” I was recently asked by
a sincerely puzzled undergraduate whose psychological interests had
led him to scrutinise certain ancient documents, “why were the old
Christians always jawing about humility?” The modern man is conscious,
explicitly or implicitly, of possessing a new form of humility much
superior to the old. He is proud of his freedom from the fearful
self-abasement of his benighted ancestors. He is certain that his own
brand of humility, his kindly modesty in relation to nature and to
other men, is far more reasonable and real. Reality, indeed, is his
keynote. He believes he sees the facts of human nature with a plain
and full reality, or immediacy, that was impossible to men of old,
distracted as their vision was by the extremes of pride and humility.
He has done away with those two “mighty opposites.” His realism, his
direct contact with life, has antiquated their histrionic conflict.
He is superior to that primitive battle in the human breast. He has
emerged from that cave warfare into the light of immediate reality. He
is “too proud to fight.”
And this pride of immediacy, as I have called it, is at bottom
religious. It was founded by the Protestant Reformation. More broadly
speaking, it grows from that urgent religious revolution still going
on which was publicly begun by the Protestant revolt of the sixteenth
century. It goes on in Catholic and Protestant realms alike and has
many modes, ranging all the way from the glittering wit of French
Catholico-Modernism to the rash eloquence of the Protestant pulpits
of New York. Revolution it is with a vengeance, not re-formation.
And if it be true that the modern intelligence under the influence
of science is coming to see the natural need of ordered evolution,
instead of destructive revolution, in all human affairs, then we should
see this need primarily in religion. Here the cost of revolution is
heaviest. For the mischief of the revolutionary method--namely, that
it externalises the issue--is greatest in that sphere which should be
of all the most internal. The mental surfaces of religion are thrown
into false prominence as the insignia of controversy. Sacred rites and
dogmas, through the protective devotion of the loyalist and the pointed
hostility of the rebel, are externalised. The imaginative flexibility
properly belonging to them is congealed into a stiff surface that
hides their inmost meaning, human and divine. Instead of vital human
organisms, nourished in their growth and change by something of the
divine circulation, they become fixed mechanisms; to be maintained in
running order or else discarded altogether--windmills, pumping the
living water direct to the household of faith, or suddenly assaulted
into junk-heaps by quixotic insurgents.[25] Loyalists and rebels,
in reaction from each other, attribute to their own doctrines an
impossible immediacy of truth. Thus both parties foster the pride of
spiritual immediacy.
Obviously, however, it is not the conservative but the protestant or
modernist pride of immediacy that, for the time being at least, has won
the day. Indeed it has flourished like a weed in the very midst of our
best achievements. The great achievement of modern times is the general
realisation that life is of necessity experimental, that change is a
constant law for us, and that the human spirit is more important than
human customs and institutions however sacrosanct. Hence our pride of
freedom, freedom from the past. And this pride is proper and sound
in so far as it is a proud gratitude for the general dissemination
of a truth that the great saints and sages, under all dispensations,
knew--the experimentality of life. But our pride is rank and noxious
when we imagine we know this truth as well as the saints and sages knew
it, if not better. To be sure, we know it more widely in a certain
sense than they did, having discovered with the aid of science many
exterior illustrations of it which were unknown to them. We know it
with a wide and superficial immediacy. But they knew it with a profound
immediacy.
They knew the basal experimentality of life because they knew it was
basifixed. They knew the depth and height of change because they knew
the permanency below and above it. They knew the Permanency that does
the experimenting, the Changeless that enables us to know change. Of
this we have lost hold. And the main source of our modern spiritual
catastrophe, the cancerous growth that disguises itself and induces
the thronging diagnosticians to limit their attention to secondary
symptoms and remedies, is the ancient evil in modern form, blind
spiritual pride. The modern imagination has more and more lost hold of
the changing Permanency as the modern mind has more and more developed
its arrogance of change, its pride of immediacy. This very pride keeps
us from seeing the permanence of the law of pride and humility in
human nature. We patronise the wise men of old--confident writers on
“personal religion” in American magazines patronise them--assuming that
when they signalised spiritual pride as the _permanent_ root of human
ills, they were speaking only for an age and not for all time, at any
rate not for our time.
This pride means a false emphasis on “personal religion” over against
institutional religion. “Personal religion” now comprises a vast
variety of creeds. Many of these are asserted by their proponents,
sometimes angrily asserted, to be not religious at all, but they really
are religious in the broadest or lowest extension of this term. A few
years ago newspaper reporters discovered in a western state a not
insane man who claimed that the earth was flat. As to the long story
of geodesy, he said it meant little to him, for he had “a science of
my own.” Nowadays many a person has in the same way “a religion of
my own.” But this phenomenon, unlike the other, is too popular just
at present to have any comic news-value. It would start a public
laugh only in the thirteenth or, who knows, in the thirtieth century.
To-day many persons who religiously swallow the authority of science,
who religiously believe that Einsteinism is true and wish they could
understand what it means, reject all authority in religion.
They say that Jesus himself rejected it, and patronise Him as the first
of the moderns. They isolate Him from the religious organism to which
he was deeply attached; which shaped his principles no less than his
images; and through which indeed, during the long preceding centuries
of Hebrew history, his sublime nature itself had been (if this may be
said without irreverence) gradually “evolved.” Thus they affix to Him a
singularity no less miraculous, no less disruptive of the laws of human
nature and history, than that attributed to him by popular orthodoxy;
but far better calculated to debauch with blind pride the souls of his
worshippers or, as the case may be, his modern rivals or superseders.
They have learned from Him, not wisely but too well, that the Sabbath
was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. They hug the false
inference which he so sternly and constantly rejected, namely, that
man was made to disuse instead of to use the Sabbath, to win spiritual
maturity by discarding institutional religion. Jesus discarded
revolution. He continued and reformed a great religious tradition. He
made it capable of feeding itself--and us--upon the best of Greek as
well as Hebrew thought. He made it nobly catholic in the very process
of nourishing his individual soul upon it. He was crucified because
he was more deeply true to it than the modernists, as well as the
loyalists, of his day. Our modernists, however, deem that his hand was
raised and pierced to direct us to bite the hand that fed us.
The gnawing pride of religious individualism cloaks itself in the
assumption that the individual has transferred his reverence _entire_
from the traditional deity to “the present; God” as Emerson called
Him, or to the present Reality as successors of Emerson often prefer
to call It. But actually that transfer is never accomplished. The
reverence never arrives entire. Always some of it, often most of it,
leaks away unnoticed during the transshipment. Therefore this exchange
is never attempted by the greatest men of religion, nor advocated
by the truest realists or humanists. Jesus and Socrates both found
the “Father’s business” in the Temple, in the moral and imaginative
organism of orthodox religion, and never more so than when they were
doing their best to cleanse it of thieves. They were wrongly accused
of an intention for which some of our modern spiritual leaders have
been wrongly praised, the intention of destroying the Temple in order
to rebuild it on their own insights, as it were in three days. No
doubt all men of deepest insight are strongly tempted, in their first
maturity, by this pseudo-divine impatience with tradition. They yearn
to show immediately that the Power within them is more reliable than
the “pinnacle of the Temple.”[26] But they perceive the spiritual
pride of this yearning, its tempting of God, and they forthwith
school themselves to the divine patience. They recognise that the
Temple is essential for _their own_ fullest development. They do not
patronise it diplomatically for the public welfare while deprecating
it for themselves. They see that the fullest type of spiritual life
is attainable only through the unbroken “tension,”[27] the constant
critical interaction, between personal and institutional religion,
between individual inspiration and a rich tradition. They know that
their own humility, like that of the multitudes whom they influence,
must grow and bear fruit in the kind of temple that George Herbert saw,
the temple which is at once, and mysteriously, within and without. In
short, the greatest leaders of the spirit faced the pride of spiritual
immediacy and subdued it.
But Emerson did not. He only partly faced it, and he very considerably
succumbed to it.[28] He fell, and modern spirituality fell with him.
The greatness of this default in so great a man is admitted very
reluctantly by those of us who have loved him from youth. When they
were beginning life, he told them what a happy day it was for the youth
when he discovered that “the above” was the same as “the within.” He
did not tell them that “the within,” on the same happy day, begins to
leak down through an unseen pride to “the below.” He told them that “I
the imperfect adore my own Perfect.” He was not careful to explain to
them how very imperfect is this Perfect--or else, how scantily It is my
own.
Emerson’s effect on young men is most significant, I think, in the
case of Matthew Arnold. In Arnold’s Oxford days, Newman impressed
him with a sense of the laborious difficulty of spiritual truth. But
that sense was considerably soothed and weakened, I think, by the
cheery, confident voice that came to him from across the Atlantic;
throwing into contrast the melancholy beauty of Newman’s voice and
relegating its religious message to a past which, however alluring
in its beautiful melancholy, seemed now so utterly past. Arnold lost
Newman for religion while continuing to patronise him for beauty and
culture. He did not discern how greatly Newman, on account of his fresh
and profound humility, joined with a mind unsurpassed in the modern
age for analytic penetration, was needed by this age as a “friend and
aider of those who would live in the spirit.” Therefore Arnold left
the way open for T. H. Huxley to persuade the oncoming generation, in
the blundering pride of his naturalistic sophistry, that Newman’s way
with truth was in the main sophistic.[29] I am very far from wishing to
disparage Arnold, as I am accused of having done in previous papers.
It is just because he was so great and influential a critic, such a
fine stronghold of humanism in the midst of the nineteenth century,
that his deficiency in this matter is costly to-day. His tendency to a
certain superior ease, not free from presumption, in his treatment of
religious truth was doubtless due in good measure to the influence of
Emerson. Hence when Arnold came to America in the eighteen-eighties he
could tell us how matchless Emerson was as a modern “friend and aider
of those who would live in the spirit” without telling us how deficient
this friend was in the pertinent and prime requisite of spiritual
humility.
Just here, perhaps, some readers are priding themselves on never
having cared for Emerson, in other words on never having been young.
But maybe they have absorbed some jots and tittles of his toxin
by way of Arnold and the college professors, or of Huxley and the
scientific metaphysicians, or of Whitman and the current poets.
By de-personalising his individualism in a rare and not unspecious
fashion, Emerson could send it seeping through an extraordinary variety
of individuals. To-day wherever two or three, or two or three hundred,
are gathered together in the name of God (modern)--in the name of the
Over-Soul or the Under-Soul, of Reality, Nature, Humanity, Hinduism,
Good Will, Progress, World Peace, World Religion, Individual Freedom,
yes and even Enlightened Disillusion--there is Emerson in the midst
of them. To be sure it is but a shade, a distorted shade, of the
master. Yet it reminds us what a crooked, widening shadow is thrown
forward through the years by a hidden grain of pride in a master mind.
Emerson’s spiritual pride was veiled by his personal modesty, which
was the tolerant deference and flexibility of the modern spirit at its
brightest. His luminous nobility of nature and the underlying soundness
of his humanism[30] enabled him to give unexampled force and radiance
to the proud errors he inherited from the eighteenth-century naturists
and the great Romantic poets. It was he, above all, who made naturism
seem deeply natural and Romantic irresponsibility nigh divine.
He disclaimed responsibility for his words, yet spoke as one
having authority. He claimed the moody freedom of a Romantic poet
together with the plain weight of a prose prophet of common sense.
He consummated the noxious amalgam that his predecessors in prose
and verse had prepared: he _solidly_ confused poetic immediacy of
experience with the immediate presence of Truth. Admirers, half
perceiving his confusion, have wholly excused it on the ground of his
unique constitution--just as he did! If gold rust, what will iron do?
If Emerson could be vitally yet complacently muddled, what of the
Emersonians? If the modern outlook is now confused and unhappy, one
reason is that the chief modern sage was confused and at the same time
spiritually proud.
The balefulness of his confusion was concealed from him by the subtle
mingling of his pride into his modesty. He was too modest to believe
that his individual outlook could become a public tragedy, and too
proud to doubt that his individual inspirations were universally valid.
He attributed these too much to deity and not at all to Rousseau. He
disavowed all predecessors and all disciples. In his study or along the
woodpath he deemed he was alone with the Soul; never realising how much
the thoughts that arose in him were determined by the souls who had
influenced his soul and by the souls whom his soul wanted to influence.
His solitude of the Soul was thronged with unacknowledged souls. He
dislimned them all into deity. His religious predecessors had loudly
demolished one religious form after another to leave no barrier, so
they thought, between the soul and God. He, the last great Protestant,
serenely set fire to the limits of the soul itself. With suave and
awful presumption, he melted all souls into God. The outcome is a new
barrier between them and Him, a cool, unobtrusive glaze of pride.
The modern pride that Emerson helped so much to crystallise, wears a
lucent, modest air. It looks like a lens turned directly upon Reality.
But it has the opaqueness of a mirror and is turned upon ourselves--if
only by the grace of God we could see our reflections in it. Its
surface seems plain, undramatic, when compared with the ancient modes
of _hubris_,--until one perceives therein the swarming shapes and
conflicts of the modern tragedy.
Dramatic enough is the way this pride, during the past two hundred
years, has worked out cogently from its religious centre to its secular
circumference, in recent years with catastrophic speed. In religion
it has meant more and more a blind emphasis upon the _immediacy_ of
spiritual values--as though their close presence to Everyman were
the same, or almost the same, as his real possession of them. Modern
religionists have debased the great doctrine of the Immanence of God
and, therewith, the doctrines of divine love, the brotherhood of man,
the goodness of the human heart, and the “positiveness” of morality.
The results for Everyman are now glaring.
Deity, from Everyman’s modern viewpoint, is fast disappearing into
human nature; or into that mystic conglomerate of man and the universe
which is either called Nature or, as Mark Twain might say, is “the same
gentleman under another name.” New names are being invented for It
daily by pseudo-science. Advanced Protestant theology lies at the proud
foot of this conqueror. Forgetting that modern religion at the first
did help to wound herself, the more conservative type of theist blames
science for harming religion. The up-to-date theist blames religion
for not equalling the flight of science, unaware how terribly religion
has maimed her wing with pride. A common type of minister deprecates
the spread of atheism while confidently advocating the very doctrine
that fosters it. If he is shrewd enough to glimpse his dilemma, he
can justify himself with Emersonian blandness by pointing out that
the abuse of an excellent idea is not a good ground for the disuse
of it--the excellent idea being a conceited, facile, and slippery
sentiment of divine immanence.
This immanentism has proudly pawed down holy truths to the everyday
level of Everyman. And he, finding that when thus muddied they sour
the daily bread of his happiness, is now rejecting them wholesale;
thereby exhibiting the destructive aspect of that divine justice, that
relentless Love of Perfection, which his pastors have hidden behind
a gross version of the divine love for men. Our religious leaders,
announcing promiscuously the perfect love that casteth out fear--a
doctrine which the holiest saints approached with awe--have succeeded
in casting out the true fear that belongs with our imperfect love. They
have speciously disparaged “negative” in favour of “positive” morality.
With Emersonian impatience they have shrugged at the _definite_ moral
precepts of the ages, as trite and rather forbidding antiquities, while
advocating an _indefinite_ moral sentiment, as the prime discovery and
panacea of the modern age. They have slurred the divine negation, the
“Everlasting No,” which, acting down through the poor human conscience,
constitutes the great _unadulterable_ factor of positive morals and, in
the end, the most positive provision against positive unhappiness.
This proud religious blindness has opened the highway for blind secular
naturism. The one has played into the hands of the other; the blind
has led the blind toward the pit of spiritual anarchy. Consider, for
example, the quick succession and interplay of these three phases of
the modern spiritual drama: first, the Protestant notion of immediate
justification by faith in Christ; second, the humanitarian notion of
justification by faith in mankind; and third, the cynical notion of
justification by faith in nothing--except primitive desire. In the
third act of the tragedy, as in the other two, the leading motive is a
specious emotional immediacy fed by subconscious pride. For the Nothing
that modern sceptics are devoted to (its finest dramatic representation
is in the works of Thomas Hardy) includes a concupiscent Something
by the exercise of which, so they feel, we may be saved--or at least
vitally damned. Hence our very disillusion to-day is flown with pride.
Our current disillusionists, not humbled by the fact that the modern
rejection of moral severity is eventuating in a febrile weakness of
the vital human appetites, continue to disparage that severity and to
advocate, as our only hope, a romantic resurgence of those appetites.
They yearn for a flood-tide between rotten banks; fancying, apparently,
that “sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains,”
immediately. They hymn a spurious Primitive as their Protestant
forbears hymned a spurious Christ.[31]
Consider, too, the dramatic inevitability with which the “psychists”
and the “legislationists,” so to call them, have come swarming more
and more into the breaches that modern religion has made in the human
conscience. The psychists are proudly animated with the old Sophist
hope of reducing that mysterious citadel and of rearranging the
whole soul on modern rational lines. They are teaching the oncoming
generation to _think_ in a fashion indicated in the following remark
made to me by a thoughtful youth: “When a fellow tries to do the right
thing, he has a satisfaction that seems at the time very real; but of
course, as soon as he _thinks_, he sees that this satisfaction isn’t
real at all.” At a recent American congress of thinkers, one of them
explained how religion and morality are being taken over and saved, in
so far as worth saving, by psychology. He was confident of tucking the
setting sun, quite immediately, into his grandstand.
The legislationists, on the other hand, would save the fading rays
by immediate public measures, national and international. In a world
dim with unprecedented bloodshed, misty with subtle suspicion and
self-seeking, and darkening ever more with impiety and lust, they would
produce by political or social machinery the lights of peace, good
will, purity, and temperance. They are busily wiring a twilight world
for incandescent goodness. They would arrest and soften with electric
legislation the awful working-out of divine laws. The leader in this
project is an ideal figure of Columbia. But under grave scrutiny the
radiant figure reveals a good many lineaments of her who was the leader
of the seven deadly sins. One recalls with something of a shiver the
queenly “progress” of Lucifera in her pleasant twilight--oblivious of
the dead men’s bones thick under foot and the “foggy mist” all along
the way.[32]
Columbia, the progressive modern spirit, is too proud to face the
fearful carnage of human values and the foggy confusion of principles
brought about by the modern _heart_. Kindly persons after criticising
various modern ills, take comfort by concluding that, after all, the
modern age is sound and right at heart. But here, precisely, is the
source of all those ills. The modern heart has gone wrong. The chief
leaders of imagination during the past two centuries assumed that
modernity meant a real change of heart, a change for the better; that
owing to the long schooling of the past and the new lights of the
present, the human heart could now afford to relax its old combat
with itself. This assumption is parroted to-day, with varying degrees
of subtlety, by preachers, philosophers, educators, youngsters,
legislationists, artists, Rotarians, and disillusionists. At the same
time they are demonstrating conclusively that the old human heart,
unregenerate, is still with us. They are showing its ancient and
amazing capacity for inventing new ways of disguising old Duty,--the
kind of duty that means a daily, painful, but not inglorious battle
within the heart itself. They are showing us how inglorious human
thought and art can become, how shallow, cheap, and in the end
intolerable, when the human _heart_ has become “too proud to fight.”