This catastrophe, when fully recognised, can point us to fresh hope
and faith. We may win afresh the old faith which goes hand in hand
with a certain disillusion, a certain kind of scepticism, foreign to
our current disillusionists. This faith, says Newman, “looks for no
essential improvements or permanent reformations in the dispensation
of those precious gifts which are ever pure in their origin, ever
corrupted in man’s use of them.”[33]
So far, the moral corruption of the twentieth century has not produced
the flagrancy of conduct that characterised a good many earlier ages.
“My _ideas_ of life have become so rotten,” thus a Pragmatised and
Behaviourised youngster confessed to me, “that I wonder my _life_ is
not rottener.” He looked startled when I told him to give his ideas
time. However, it appeared that, partly in spite of and partly by means
of his marked self-consciousness, he had attained to some veracity
of inward unhappiness. We may hope that his case is quite typical.
In other words, our self-conscious modern age has provided a wide
and unprecedented demonstration of the fact that the chief danger to
human happiness is immorality of _ideas_. Previous ages have done
lip-homage to high moral standards while grossly violating them in
practice. The modern age has proudly assumed that it has grown far
beyond such hypocrisy. Meanwhile it has developed the subtler hypocrisy
of cultivating depraved and specious ideas while shrinking from the
_full_ consequences of them in conduct. The result is that life looks
dully undramatic, culture and art degenerate, and thoughtful persons
who are harmless enough in their acts have a real misery in their
spirit. Surely, therefore, we have now a chance to learn afresh the
_inward_ relentlessness of the Moral Laws; particularly that “precious
gift” which we have so bitterly corrupted, the law of humility. We may
now perceive that the universal proverb “Pride goes before a fall” is
no less applicable to our age than to the old aristocratic ages; and
that, far from being merely a maxim of external prudence, it is the
folk-sign of an _inward_ region of cause and effect that we, with all
our self-consciousness, have scarcely penetrated.
We may find again the inward and yet superhuman rigour of the Laws. We
may learn that they are supernatural without being ever _un_natural;
always immanent in us and yet, in a mystery beyond the reach of our
science, always transcendent of us. Browning’s Paracelsus, embodying
the modern mixture of romance and science, complained in regard to his
own catastrophe that “God’s intimations fail in clearness rather than
in force.” Precisely so; but there is no use in whining about it. The
human task is to clarify and obey, as well as we can, Laws which we did
not invent; which no man, except when stupified by pride--either his
own pride or the pride of his teachers, relentlessly visited upon him
to the third and fourth generation--can conceive to be merely human
inventions.
Those Laws fail in human clearness, certainly, but not in force. They
came to send a sword into the earth, more than Peace. They have been
the cause of agony and misery for millions of innocent or ignorant
people; and no man has succeeded in making clear the full ground of
this. From the standpoint of human justice, those Laws are fearfully
general, vague, and incalculable. Yet our truest happiness, and indeed
our truest originality, depend on a constant effort to elucidate them
and apply them afresh to each new generation and individual. This task
is of course, in a worldly sense, an impossible one. New sins and
difficulties, or rather old sins and difficulties in inexhaustibly new
modes, appear at every step. Salvation for the individual never becomes
easier; and the social frame is so built, beneath our building, that
it cannot be saved. Old seers and new scientists are true to a deep
human instinct in prophesying that some day the world will be destroyed
by fire, collision, or decay; will “dissolve like an insubstantial
pageant faded.” Our surest Comfort, at the opposite pole from modern
comfortableness and not divisible from right conduct, is in knowing
that those Laws, while “ever corrupted by man’s use of them” are indeed
“precious gifts ever pure in their origin.” Clough, that fine religious
humanist who faced the modern situation without blinking, had a sound
humility when he wrote:
“I steadier step
When I recall
That though I slip
Thou dost not fall.”
The fresh humility that we need must be built up patiently by religion
and by humanism; each working in its own way and carefully respectful
of the other, even (perhaps _especially_) when these two approaches are
equally employed by one person.
Religion is normally theistic, and therewith mediatorial and
sacramental. Otherwise she is not catholic and, _in the long run_,
loses her right humility. This should be evident enough from the long
history of religion, Christian and non-Christian, past and present.
Theism decays continually, but by reason of its own sins rather than
the virtues of opposing doctrines. Pantheism, deism, and all the others
flourish in its decadencies, more or less parasitically, but cannot
take deep root in human humility. I do not mean that theism is true
because it works, but that it works because at its best it is our
truest mode of conceiving the Eternal One. Voltaire’s epigram, “God
created man in His own image and man promptly returned the compliment,”
is superb and lasting because the doctrine here parodied is lasting
and sublime. The parody is catholically critical because the doctrine
itself is deeply catholic. Modernism, when strictly criticising
catholic doctrine, is helpful; when frankly rejecting it, respectable;
when blandly attempting to reduce it to poetry, baneful--baneful in
its hidden pride--and, I trust, hopeless. Not similarly hopeless
is Latin Fundamentalism; by which I mean the attempt of Latinised
theology, no matter in what branch of the Christian church it appears,
to define religious mysteries with a literalism that is too precise
to be accurate. Most hopeful is the work of a small and quiet group
of theologians, belonging to various churches, who are resuming and
carrying forward the thwarted hope of the great Christian humanists
of the Renaissance. They are striving for a non-revolutionary, a firm
and organic, development of Christian doctrine; that is, for a real
catholicity. It is they, studious, ethical, open-eyed, and humble who
are rebuilding the foundations of the Temple.
Yet the Temple, or let us say “the church militant here upon earth,”
is at its best inadequate. The man of good sense has always found and
will always find it necessary to take the church with a grain of salt,
even though the salt loseth its savour without the church. Good sense
is a distinct foundation; and humanism is built upon it. Humanism
may be theistic or _non_-theistic; it is unsound when it is anything
between. When non-theistic, it falls short of the full truth that is
in the human imagination. The pre-eminent example of course is the
sublime religious humanism of the Buddha. However, if it be true that
the primitive Hindu pantheon had 330,000,000 gods, doubtless the Buddha
had several million good reasons for not being a theist. Theism at
its worst fosters, as nothing else can, the proud imaginations of the
human heart. Humanism, which in one of its most important functions is
a criticism of religion, is essential for sound religious humility.
Religion needs the humility derivable from the consideration that
happiness may be obtained without religion. Humanism is the study
and practice of the principles of human happiness _uncomplicated_ by
naturistic dogmas on the one side and religious dogmas on the other.
When religion, as at present, has degraded “God’s love” and abolished
“God’s anger,” humanism will insist that the former doctrine (though
at its best supreme) is no less _metaphorical_ than the latter, and
not less subject to unconscious superstition. When religion assists
irreligion in softening God’s laws, humanism will insist that a
rediscovery of their severity is essential for right humility and
happiness.
Just here I am forced to express the hope that those estimable critics,
Mr. T. S. Eliot and Mr. Walter Lippmann, will at one point counteract
each other’s influence upon the public. Mr. Eliot, aiming toward
humane religion, tends to reduce humanism to a mere balance of mind,
a ghost of the Arnoldian culture, subservient to anglo-catholicism.
Mr. Lippmann, aiming toward religious humanism, tends to reduce deity
to “an ideal of the human personality,”[34] a rather ghostly ally of
practical morals. Each is somewhat swayed by the modern desire for
immediate measures.
Providentially, however, a more catholic attitude has already been
erected by two older critics, Baron Friedrich von Hügel and Professor
Irving Babbitt--the two most potent and distinguished personalities,
though not the finest writers, that have so far appeared in English
literature of the twentieth century. The one, a devout Roman Catholic
of England, has indirectly done much for the best interests of
humanism. The other, a rigorous moral humanist of New England, has
indirectly done much for the best interests of religion. Their
extraordinary scholarship is guided by a sound humility of spirit. In
their writings, neither ventures further than his equipment warrants
into the other’s field, and they do not contradict each other in
fundamental points. They agree in the conviction that now, for the sake
of religion itself, the way of humanism must be clearly discriminated
from the way of religion. Mr. Babbitt has urged that religion at its
best is far above, and at its worst far below, a sound humanism. Baron
von Hügel has urged that Christians should face now, more frankly and
fully than they have ever faced before, the fact that the ethical or
humane way has a distinct and _divinely ordained_ validity of its own
for those who cannot honestly follow the religious way; and that the
full health of each way depends upon the health of the other.
This truly catholic attitude, which is essential for modern humility,
is not palatable to the pseudo-catholicity of the modern mind. We
have fancied, especially in America, that expert reason aided by
democratic tolerance could soon discover the underlying relationships
between the different ways of salvation, thus federating these in
a single “concern,” a sort of efficient successor and substitute
for the universal infallible church of the Middle Ages. Behind this
enterprise stands the overweening assumption of modern philosophy
that the universe itself is a single organism with a large variety
of inter-assimilable aspects, such as religion and science, love and
morals, good and evil, God and Nature. Tennyson would not have been so
shocked by his rediscovery of the perennial fact that God and Nature
are at strife if he had not been so infected by the modern notion that
they ought not to be,--that properly they belong in a universal banking
trust whose members, however they may quarrel on the surface, never
suffer a real severance of business relations. Nor would our current
disillusionists feel so badly about the inevitable dissolution of that
trust if their grandfathers had not credited it so heavily. Let us
now recognise pride as the grand sponsor of that trust--the pride of
unity and immediacy, or of universal “continuity” as the late T. E.
Hulme would say. Let us humbly admit that the universe is faulted,
geologically speaking, deeper and higher than our knowing. What of
ultimate plan and unity its strata may have, God only knows.
Our youths who have learned to smile with a weary superior air at
the traditional division of reality into God, Man, and Nature, would
breathe more freely and begin again to taste the vital zest of the
universal drama, if we would now teach them that this traditional
division is _less naïve_ than the theory of universal continuity; is
better grounded in universal human experience; and, above all, is more
truly accordant with the profound division which any thinking man
may find within himself to-day when he is sufficiently self-reliant
and experimental to plumb beneath the surfaces where our ephemeral
psycho-physicisms weave and flutter. Recently humanism, in its attempt
to fulfil and deepen the experimentality of the modern spirit, has
of necessity placed its chief emphasis upon that inward division. It
has insisted that the _opposition_ between the higher and lower wills
within us, whether they be called “divine” and “natural” or what not,
is essentially inexplicable by expert reason and is nevertheless, from
the present standpoint of human happiness, the most important feature
of the universe arrived at by free and full experimentation.
This humane _dualism_ strikes at the very heart of modern pride,
the pride of spiritual _monism_. It sets a true immediacy over
against a false immediacy. It assigns a central value to the paradox
established by the immediate experience of Everyman when he tries
(in the terminology of common sense) to be “at one with himself” by
keeping his “better self” above his “worser self.” It depreciates
the expert reasonings and romantic emotions which, overriding that
vital paradox of good sense, would leap immediately at spiritual
unity and continuity. Consequently the humane dualism, more than any
other doctrine of recent criticism, has met with angry rejection or
obfuscating comment. A good example of the latter is afforded by
a generous and intelligent reviewer who comments as follows upon
the dualistic humanism of Milton: “Milton, after all, had not read
Darwin; we have ... Milton’s energetic dualism was based on religious
conceptions which are genuinely outlived; the power behind his allegory
of the soul was his belief that the world was shaped and created for
mankind; and, conceiving of ourselves now so much more humbly than he
did, we cannot set our lives on such a stage.... We cannot invent an
opposition we do not feel.”[35]
The above, in a representative modern fashion, confuses modesty and
humility. The modern modest dogma that the world was not “shaped and
created for mankind” has shown itself, when all its implications are
considered, no less deficient in real humility than the conceited
belief that the world was created for human comfortableness. This
belief was far more radically repudiated by Milton than by us. Only
with the aid of modern pride can we be sure that his _basic_ religious
ideas have been “_genuinely_ outlived” and that we, having read Darwin,
conceive of ourselves “much more _humbly_ than he did.” He, to be
sure, was no adept either in Darwinian or in Emersonian modesty. As a
man among men he had strong intellectual and even personal pride. But
above it he had true spiritual humility; which may consist with, and
derive support from, that virtue too much obscured by modern modesty,
namely “self-esteem, founded on justice and right, well managed.”
This kind of self-reliance enabled Milton to assign full value to
the moral division he found within himself. His “energetic dualism,”
as the reviewer calls it, his dramatic sense of the _real_ opposition
between the nature of lust, pride, and Chaos and the nature of purity,
humility, and Peace, was not “based on” transient religious concepts.
It was “based on” the duality he found at the centre of himself as well
as at the centre of European experience, Christian and pagan. He would
have found it also at the centre of ancient Buddhism, if he had known
this as we know it to-day. But, says my reviewer, “we cannot invent an
opposition we do not feel.” Very true. Nevertheless, with the aid of
right self-esteem and humility, with a patient critical reverence for
what is best in ourselves and in accumulated tradition, European and
Oriental, we may not only “feel” but realise, in thought and conduct,
an opposition we did not invent.
Only thus can we proceed to a spiritual use of our scientific modesty.
Over against the self-flattery of religious superstition, science
has revealed the indifference of a vast physical universe. Here is
wholesome seed for a fresh humility. But so far its growth in the
modern spirit is blighted; blighted much less by the old superstitions
which the modern religionist enjoys attacking than by the new
superstition which he himself has fostered--the bastard ideal of love.
This ideal, religiously derived from an illegitimate mixture of two
fallibles, democracy and St. John, infects to-day the blood of many
who, rejecting St. John and perhaps also democracy, believe loudly in
Sex; or who, tired of Sex also, believe in nothing because it seems
the sole alternative to the spurious all-immanent divinity of modern
love. This love, though masquerading as powerful and strenuous, is
essentially soft. It has succeeded in masking the Cross, not only
the Christian but the universal Cross, in soft flummeries. The hard
universe of science disowns it. And so does the severity of the divine
Laws. If we learn again to revere these in their full severity as we
find it in history (especially recent history) and in ourselves, to bow
before their awful beauty with a love that fears to call itself worthy
of casting out fear, then the outward laws can again become real images
of the inward Laws.
Outward nature with her unfathomable self-subsistence, her rigorous
detachment from the egoistic delusions of the human heart, and her
firm satisfactions for those who seek only to know and follow her
laws, can again be seen as a real though very distant representation
of the Divine Nature itself. The dual nature of man, freed from the
intervolving vapours of old metaphysical dualisms and new metaphysical
monisms, guarded from insidious loves, and cultivated with renewed
moral vigour, can be seen again as the isthmus between Time and
Eternity: our firm and fruitful land between unfathomable, unmixing,
but not unkindly seas.