I must rely, in these few pages, upon a brief summary of the
limitations within which I believe humanism must work, which I
published in the _Hound and Horn_, June, 1929. In that paper I stated
my belief that humanism is in the end futile without religion. Here I
wish to put forward briefly a view which seems to me equally important,
the counterpart of the other, and one which ought to be more welcome to
humanists. Having called attention to what I believe to be a danger,
I am bound to call attention to the danger of the other extreme: the
danger, a very real one, of _religion without humanism_.
I believe that the sceptic, even the pyrrhonist, but particularly the
humanist-sceptic, is a very useful ingredient in a world which is no
better than it is. In saying this I do not think that I am committing
myself to any theological heresy. The ideal world would be the ideal
Church. But very little knowledge of human nature is needed to convince
us that hierarchy is liable to corruption, and certainly to stupidity;
that religious belief, when unquestioned and uncriticised, is liable
to degeneration into superstition; that the human mind is much lazier
than the human body; and that the communion of saints in Tibet is of
a very low order. If we cannot rely, and it seems that we can never
rely, upon adequate criticism from within, it is better that there
should be criticism from without. But here I wish to make a capital
distinction: criticism, infidelity and agnosticism must, to be of
value, be _original_ and not inherited. Orthodoxy must be traditional,
heterodoxy must be original. The attitude of Voltaire has value,
because of its place in time; the attitude of Renan has value, in its
historical perspective; Anatole France I can only consider as a man who
came at the most unfortunate date for his own reputation--too late to
be a great sceptic, and too soon to be a great sceptic. There must be
more orthodoxy before there can be another Voltaire. And precisely I
fear lest humanism should make a tradition of dissent and agnosticism,
and so cut itself off from the sphere of influence in which it is most
needed.
For there is no doubt in my mind that contemporary religious
institutions are in danger from themselves; that they have with few
exceptions lost the “intellectual,” except that pernicious kind of
intellectual who adopts dogma merely because doubt is out of date.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in America. All the religious forms
which have some ancestry, and many which have none, flourish there;
but among persons whom I have known, there is hardly one who had any
connection (not to say any conviction) with any of them.
But America is not isolated in this respect; it merely shows us under
a magnifying glass what occurs everywhere. The two dangers to which
religion is exposed are apparent everywhere--and they are both cases
for which “humanism” or “culture” might be called in: _petrified
ecclesiasticism_, and _modernism_.
The great merit of the Catholic Church, from the worldly point of view,
is its catholicity. That is to say, it is obvious that every religion
is effectively limited by the racial characters of the people who
practise it, and that a strictly racial or national religion is certain
to hold many irrelevances and impurities, from lack of an outside
standard of criticism. When the Catholic Faith really is catholic, the
aberrations of one race will be corrected by those of another. But it
is obviously very difficult even for the Roman Church, nowadays, to
be truly catholic. The embarrassment of temporal powers, the virulence
of racial and national enthusiasms, are enormous centrifugal forces.
The great majority of English speaking people, or at least the vast
majority of persons of British descent; half of France, half of
Germany, the whole of Scandinavia, are outside of the Roman communion:
that is to say, the Roman Church has lost some organic parts of the
body of modern civilisation. It is a recognition of this fact which
makes some persons of British extraction hesitate to embrace the Roman
communion; and which makes them feel that those of their race who have
embraced it have done so only by the surrender of some essential part
of their inheritance and by cutting themselves off from their family.
But if one feels that the culture of the Roman Catholic Church to-day
is imperfect--and also in danger of splitting up into various local
and national bigotries and political factions which will retain only
the name and the observances of catholicism--one cannot get any
satisfaction from what happens outside of that church either. The Roman
Church in America has little contact with some of the most valuable
elements in American culture; it not only lacks humanism, but is in
danger of adding vulgarity. In England it is negligible. But both in
England and America, Protestantism is in still worse case. It can be,
and usually is, equally vulgar; it can be equally narrow and bigoted;
with the alternative that when it is not narrow and bigoted it is
liberal, sloppy, hypocritical and humanitarian. The Roman Church is
dangerous in one direction; the Protestant Churches are dangerous in
two directions.
I have already said what I think of humanism without religion; I
respect it, but believe it to be sterile. Religion without humanism
produces the vulgarities and the political compromises of Roman
Catholicism; the vulgarities and the fanaticism of Tennessee; it
produces Mrs. MacPherson; and it produces liberal uplift; and it
produces the Bishop of Birmingham. For it is the chief point of this
short paper, that religion without humanism produces the opposite
and conflicting types of religious bigotry (liberalism in religion
is a form of bigotry). We have Cardinal O’Connell; the late W. J.
Bryan; and we have the cultivated divines of the most radical wing
of Unitarianism. The sum of _disjecta membra_ is completed by the
humanists.
I have examined several popular theological works by Anglican
clergy of the liberal school.[36] It would I am sure be difficult
to convince any of these worthy people that they were humanitarian
without being humanist. Humanitarians (and among them we must include
anti-humanitarians like Dean Inge, a sentimentalist _à rebours_) are
often highly cultivated people who have read many books; some of them,
in England at least, can read Latin and Greek; the Bishop of Birmingham
took honours in mathematics. Yet in surrendering dogmatic faith they
are at the same time surrendering their humanism. It is from such
people that we hear most about “science and religion”; it is such
people who pay, and lead the flock to pay, that exaggerated devotion to
“science” which the true humanist deplores.
It is curious that whilst on the one hand the liberal theologian tends
to pay homage to an illusory divinity called “science” the advanced
scientist tends to pay homage to an equally vague “religion.” People
seem to suppose that by science yielding points to religion, and
religion yielding points to science, we shall quite soon arrive at a
position of comfortable equilibrium. What will be “real” will be the
technical progress of science, and the material organisation of the
churches: we shall still have professors of physics and we shall still
have clergy, and nobody will lose his job. Scientists and clergy alike
seem to speak nowadays as if they were in terror of the spectre of
unemployment: “I will not make exaggerated claims,” they both seem to
say, “lest I may be discovered to be superfluous.”
But this apparent approximation of science and religion, which we
discover in such theological works as those I have mentioned, and in
such popular scientific works as those of Whitehead and Eddington,
is a delusion. The meeting is a mere cancellation to zero. Nothing
positive is attained by reciprocal surrender. The theologian says “of
course dogma is not truth,” and the scientist says, “of course science
is not truth.” Every one is happy together; and possibly both parties
turn to _poetry_ (about which neither scientist nor theologian knows
anything) and say “_there_ is truth, in the inspiration of the poet.”
The poet himself, who perhaps knows more about his own inspiration than
a psycho-analyst does, is not allowed to reply that poetry is poetry,
and not science or religion--unless he or some of his mistaken friends
produce a theory that Poetry is Pure Poetry, Pure Poetry turning out to
be something else than poetry and thereby securing respect.
Both parties, the liberal theologian and the scientist, are deficient
in humanism. But what is more serious, to my mind, is that the humanist
is deficient in humanism too, and must take his responsibility with
the others. What happens, in the general confusion, is not only that
each party abdicates his proper part, but that he interferes with the
proper part of the others. The theologian is terrified of science, and
the scientist is becoming terrified of religion; whilst the humanist,
endeavouring to pay proper, but not excessive due to both, reels from
side to side. And the world reels with him.
On the following point I speak with diffidence, recognising my lack
of qualification where qualification is severe and exact. Humanism
has much to say of Discipline and Order and Control; and I have
parroted these terms myself. I found no discipline in humanism; only
a little intellectual discipline from a little study of philosophy.
But the difficult discipline is the discipline and training of
emotion; this the modern world has great need of; so great need that
it hardly understands what the word means; and this I have found is
only attainable through dogmatic religion. I do not say that dogmatic
religion is justified because it supplies this need--that is just the
psychologism and the anthropocentrism that I wish to avoid--but merely
state my belief that in no other way can the need be supplied. There
is much chatter about mysticism: for the modern world the word means
some spattering indulgence of emotion, instead of the most terrible
concentration and askesis. But it takes perhaps a lifetime merely to
realise that men like the forest sages, and the desert sages, and
finally the Victorines and John of the Cross and (in his fashion)
Ignatius really _mean what they say_. Only those have the right to talk
of discipline who have looked into the Abyss. The need of the modern
world is the discipline and training of the emotions; which neither
the intellectual training of philosophy or science, nor the wisdom of
humanism, nor the negative instruction of psychology can give.
In short, we can use the term Humanism in two ways. In the narrower
sense, which tends always under emphasis to become narrower still, it
is an important part in a larger whole; and humanists, by offering
this part as a substitute for the whole, are lessening, instead
of increasing, its importance; they offer an excuse to the modern
theologian and the modern scientist (only too ready to grasp it) for
_not_ being humanistic themselves, and for leaving humanism to its own
specialists. Humanism can offer neither the intellectual discipline
of philosophy or of science (two different disciplines), nor the
emotional discipline of religion. On the other hand, these other
activities depend upon humanism to preserve their sanity. Without it,
religion tends to become either a sentimental tune, or an emotional
debauch; or in theology, a skeleton dance of fleshless dogmas, or in
ecclesiasticism, a soulless political club. Without it, science can be
merely a process of technical research, bursting out from time to time,
and especially in our time, into sentimental monstrosities like the
Life Force, or Professor Whitehead’s God.
But in the full and complete sense of the word, Humanism is something
quite different from a part trying to pretend to be a whole, and
something quite different from a “parasite” of religion. It can
only be quite actual in the full realisation and balance of the
disciplined intellectual and emotional life of man. For, as I have
said, without humanism both religion and science tend to become other
than themselves, and without religion and science--without emotional
and intellectual discipline--humanism tends to shrink into an atrophied
caricature of itself. It is the spirit of humanism which has operated
to reconcile the mystic and the ecclesiastic in one church; having done
this in the past, humanism should not set itself up now as another
sect, but strive to continue and enlarge its task, labouring to
reconcile and unite all the parts into a whole. It is the humanist who
could point out to the theologian the absurdities of his repudiation,
acceptance, or exploitation of “science,” and to the scientist the
absurdities of his repudiation, acceptance, or exploitation of
religion. For when I say “reconcile,” I mean something very different
from the dangerous and essentially anti-humanistic adventures of the
Bishop of Birmingham or Professor Whitehead. And let us leave Einstein
alone, who has his own business to attend to.
As I believe I am writing chiefly for those who know or think they
know, what “humanism” means, I have not in this paper attempted any
definition of it. I take it that the reader thinks he knows what it
means, and that he will understand that I am putting before him the
difference between what I think he thinks it means and what I think I
think it means.
I have just one note to add, which is the preface to an extensive
sequel. I believe that at the present time the problem of the
unification of the world and the problem of the unification of the
individual, are in the end one and the same problem; and that the
solution of one is the solution of the other. Analytical psychology
(even if accepted far more enthusiastically than I can accept it) can
do little except produce monsters; for it is attempting to produce
unified individuals in a world without unity; the social, political,
and economic sciences can do little, for they are attempting to produce
the great society with an aggregation of human beings who are not units
but merely bundles of incoherent impulses and beliefs. The problem of
nationalism and the problem of dissociated personalities may turn out
to be the same. The relevance of this paragraph to what precedes it
will, I hope, appear upon examination.