some things are really better than others. In the daily course of
affairs we are constantly in the presence of events which by turning
out one way or the other produce a real, an irrevocable, increase of
good or evil in the world. The complexities of life, struggling as it
does amidst irrational forces, may make the attainment of one good
the cause of the unattainableness of another; they cannot destroy
the essential desirability of both. The niggardliness of Nature
cannot sterilize the ideal; the odious circumstances which make the
attainment of many goods conditional on the perpetration of some evil,
and which punish every virtue by some incapacity or some abuse,--these
odious circumstances cannot rob any good of its natural sweetness, nor
all goods together of their conceptual harmony. To the heart that has
felt it and that is the true judge, every loss is irretrievable and
every joy indestructible. Eventual compensations may obliterate the
memory of these values but cannot destroy their reality. The future can
only furnish further applications of the principle by which they arose
and were justified.
Now, how utter this moral truth imaginatively, how clothe it in an
image that might render its absoluteness and its force? Could any
method be better than to say: Your eternal destiny is hanging in
the balance: the grace of God, the influences of others, and your
own will reacting upon both are shaping at every moment issues of
absolute importance. What happens here and now decides not merely
incidental pains and pleasures--which perhaps a brave and careless
spirit might alike despise--but helps to determine your eternal
destiny of joy or anguish, and the eternal destiny of your neighbour.
In place of the confused vistas of the empirical world, in which the
threads of benefit and injury might seem to be mingled and lost, the
imagination substituted the clear vision of Hell and Heaven; while
the determination of our destiny was made to depend upon obedience to
recognized duties.
Now these duties may often have been far from corresponding to those
which reason would impose; but the intention and the principle at least
were sound. It was felt that the actions and passions of this world
breed momentous values, values which being ideal are as infinite as
values can be in the estimation of reason--the values of truth, of
love, of rationality, of perfection--although both the length of the
experience in which they arise and the number of persons who share
that experience may be extremely limited. But the mechanical measure
of experience in length, intensity, or multiplication has nothing to
do with its moral significance in realizing truth or virtue. Therefore
the difference in dignity between the satisfactions of reason and
the satisfactions of sense is fittingly rendered by the infinite
disproportion between heavenly and earthly joys. In our imaginative
translation we are justified in saying that the alternative between
infinite happiness and infinite misery is yawning before us, because
the alternative between rational failure or success is actually
present. The decisions we make from moment to moment, on which the
ideal value of our life and character depends, actually constitute in a
few years a decision which is irrevocable.
The Christian doctrine of rewards and punishments is thus in harmony
with moral truths which a different doctrine might have obscured.
The good souls that wish to fancy that everybody will be ultimately
saved, subject a fable to standards appropriate to matters of fact,
and thereby deprive the fable of that moral significance which is its
excuse for being. If every one is ultimately saved, there is nothing
truly momentous about alternative events: all paths lead more or less
circuitously to the same end. The only ground which then remains
for discriminating the better from the worse is the pleasantness or
unpleasantness of the path to salvation. All moral meanings inhere,
then, in this life, and the other life is without significance. Heaven
comes to replace life empirically without fulfilling it ideally. We are
reduced for our moral standards to phenomenal values, to the worth of
life in transitory feeling. These values are quite real, but they are
not those which poetry and religion have for their object. They are
values present to sense, not to reason and imagination.
The ideal of a supervening general bliss presents indeed an abstract
desideratum, but not the ideal involved in the actual forces of life;
that end would have no rational relation to its primary factors; it
would not be built on our instinctive preferences but would abolish
them by a miraculous dream, following alike upon every species of
activity. Moral differences would have existed merely to be forgotten;
for if we say they were remembered, but transcended and put to rest,
we plunge into an even worse contradiction to the conscience and the
will. For if we say that the universal bliss consists in the assurance,
mystically received, that while individual experiences may differ in
value they all equally conduce to the perfection of the universe, we
deny not merely the momentousness but even the elementary validity of
moral distinctions. We assert that the best idea of God is that least
like the ideal of man, and that the nearer we come to the vision of
truth the farther we are from the feeling of preference. In our attempt
to extend the good we thus abolish its essence. Our religion consists
in denying the authority of the ideal, which is its only rational
foundation; and thus that religion, while gaining nothing in empirical
reality, comes to express a moral falsehood instead of a moral truth.
If we looked in religion for an account of facts, as most people do,
we should have to pass a very different judgment on these several
views. The mechanical world is a connected system and Nature seems
to be dynamically one; the intuitions on which mysticism feeds are
therefore true intuitions. The expectation of a millennium is on the
other hand quite visionary, because the evidence of history, while it
shows undeniable progress in many directions, shows that this progress
is essentially relative, partial, and transitory. As for the Christian
doctrine of the judgment, it is something wholly out of relation to
empirical facts, it assumes the existence of a supernatural sphere, and
is beyond the reach of scientific evidence of any kind. But if we look
on religion as on a kind of poetry, as we have decided here to do,--as
on a kind of poetry that expresses moral values and reacts beneficently
upon life,--we shall see that the Christian doctrine is alone
justified. For mysticism is not an imaginative construction at all but
a renunciation or confusion of our faculties; here a surrender of the
human ideal in the presence of a mechanical force that is felt, and
correctly felt, to tend to vaguer results or rather to tend to nothing
in particular. Mysticism is not a religion but a religious disease.
The idea of universal salvation, on the other hand, is the expression
of a feeble sentimentality, a pleasant reverie without structure or
significance. But the doctrine of eternal rewards and punishments
is, as we have tried to show, an expression of moral truth, a poetic
rendering of the fact that rational values are ideal, momentous, and
irreversible.
It would be easy to multiply examples and to exhibit the various parts
of Christianity as so many interpretations of human life in its ideal
aspects. But we are not attempting to narrate facts so much as to
advance an idea, and the illustrations given will perhaps suffice
to make our conception intelligible. There is, however, a possible
misunderstanding which we should be careful to avoid in this dangerous
field of philosophic interpretation. In saying that a given religion
was the poetic transformation of an experience, we must not imagine
that it was thought to be such--for it is evident that every sincere
Christian believed in the literal and empirical reality of all that the
Christian epic contained. Nor should we imagine that philosophic ideas,
or general reflections on life, were the origin of religion, and that
afterward certain useful myths, known to be such by their authors, were
mistaken for history and for literal prophecy. That sometimes happens,
when historians, poets, or philosophers are turned by the unintelligent
veneration of posterity into religious prophets. Such was the fate of
Plato, for instance, or of the writer of the "Song of Solomon"; but 110
great and living religion was ever founded in that way.
Had Christianity or any other religion had its basis in literary or
philosophical allegories, it would never have become a religion,
because the poetry of it would never have been interwoven with the
figures and events of real life. No tomb, no relic, no material
miracle, no personal derivation of authority, would have existed to
serve as the nucleus of devotion and the point of junction between
this world and the other. The origin of Christian dogma lay in historic
facts and in doctrines literally meant by their authors. It is one of
the greatest possible illusions in these matters to fancy that the
meaning which we see in parables and mysteries was the meaning they had
in the beginning, but which later misinterpretation had obscured. On
the contrary--as a glance at any incipient religious movement now going
on will show us--the authors of doctrines, however obvious it may be to
every one else that these doctrines have only a figurative validity,
are the first dupes to their own intuitions. This is no less true of
metaphysical theories than of spontaneous superstitions: did their
promulgator understand the character of their justification he would
give himself out for a simple poet, appeal only to cultivated minds,
and never turn his energies to stimulating private delusions, not to
speak of public fanaticisms. The best philosophers seldom perceive the
poetic merit of their systems.
So among the ancients it was not an abstract observation of Nature,
with conscious allegory supervening, that was the origin of mythology,
but the interpretation was spontaneous, the illusion was radical, a
consciousness of the god's presence was the first impression produced
by the phenomenon. Else, in this case too, poetry would never have
become superstition; what made it superstition was the initial
incapacity in people to discriminate the objects of imagination from
those of the understanding. The fancy thus attached its images, without
distinguishing their ideal locus, to the visible world, and men became
superstitious not because they had too much imagination, but because
they were not aware that they had any.
In what sense, then, are we justified in saying that religion expresses
moral ideals? In the sense that moral significance, while not the
source of religions, is the criterion of their value and the reason
why they may deserve to endure. Far as the conception of an allegory
may be from the minds of prophets, yet the prophecy can only take
root in the popular imagination if it recommends itself to some human
interest. There must be some correspondence between the doctrine
announced or the hopes set forth, and the natural demands of the
human spirit. Otherwise, although the new faith might be preached, it
would not be accepted. The significance of religious doctrines has
therefore been the condition of their spread, their maintenance, and
their development, although not the condition of their origin. In
Darwinian language, moral significance has been a spontaneous variation
of superstition, and this variation has insured its survival as a
religion. For religion differs from superstition not psychologically
but morally, not in its origin but in its worth. This worth, when
actually felt and appreciated, becomes of course a dynamic factor and
contributes like other psychological elements to the evolution of
events; but being a logical harmony, a rational beauty, this worth is
only appreciable by a few minds, and those the least primitive and the
least capable of guiding popular movements. Reason is powerless to
found religions, although it is alone competent to judge them. Good
religions are therefore the product of unconscious rationality, of
imaginative impulses fortunately moral.
Particularly does this appear in the early history of Christianity.
Every shade of heresy, every kind of mixture of Christian and other
elements was tried and found advocates; but after a greater or less
success they all disappeared, leaving only the Church standing. For the
Church had known how to combine those dogmas and practices in which
the imagination of the time, and to a great extent of all times, might
find fitting expression. Imaginative significance was the touchstone
of orthodoxy; tradition itself was tested by this standard. By this
standard the canon of Scripture was fixed, so as neither to exclude the
Old Testament, which the pure metaphysicians would have rejected, nor
to accept every gospel that circulated under the name of an apostle,
and which might please a wonder-loving and detail-loving piety. By
the same criterion the ritual was composed, the dogma developed, the
nature of Christ defined, the sacraments and discipline of the Church
regulated. The result was a comprehensive system where, under the
shadow of a great epic, which expanded and interpreted the history
of mankind from the Creation to the Day of Doom, a place was found
for as many religious instincts and as many religious traditions as
possible; while at the same time the dialectic proficiency of an age
that inherited the discipline of Greek philosophy, introduced into the
system a great consistency and a great metaphysical subtlety. Time
mellowed and expanded these dogmas, bringing them into relation with
the needs of a multiform piety; a justification was found both for
asceticism and for a virtuous naturalism, both for contemplation and
for action; and thus it became possible for the Church to insinuate her
sanctions and her spirit into the motives of men, and to embody the
religion of many nations during many ages.
The Church's successes, however, were not all legitimate; they were
not everywhere due to a real correspondence between her forms and the
ideal life of men. It was only the inhabitants of the Græco-Roman
world that were quite prepared to understand her. When the sword, or
the authority of a higher worldly civilization, carried her influence
beyond the borders of the Roman Empire we may observe that her
authority seldom proved stable. She was felt, by those peoples whose
imaginative traditions and whose moral experience she did not express,
to be something alien and artificial. The Teutonic races finally threw
off what they felt to be her yoke. If they reconstructed their religion
out of elements which she had furnished, that was only because religion
is bound to be traditional, and they had been Christians for many
hundred years. A wholly new philosophy or poetry could not have taken
immediate root in their minds; even the philosophy which Germany has
since produced, when the national spirit was reaching, so to speak, its
majority, hardly seems able to constitute an independent religion, but
takes shelter under some form of Christianity, however much the spirit
of that religion may be transformed.
At first, indeed, the new movement took the Bible for its
starting-point. So heterogeneous a book, which was already habitually
interpreted in so many fanciful ways, was indeed an admirable basis
for the imagination to build upon. The self-reliant and dreamy Teuton
could spin out of the Biblical chronicles and rhapsodies convictions
after his own heart; while his fixed persuasion that the Bible was the
word of God, was strengthened (not illegitimately) by his ability to
make it express his own moral ideals. The intensity of his religion was
proportionate to the degree in which he had made it the imaginative
rendering of his own character.
Protestantism in its vital elements was thus a perfectly new, a
perfectly spontaneous religion. The illusion that it was a return to
primitive Christianity was useful for controversial purposes and helped
to justify the iconoclastic passions of the time; but this illusion
did not touch the true essence of Protestantism, nor the secret of its
legitimacy and power as a religion. This was its new embodiment of
human ideals in imaginative forms, whereby those ideals became explicit
and found a remarkable expression in action. These ideals were quite
Teutonic and looked to inner spontaneity and outward prosperity; they
were more allied to those of the Hebrews than to those of the early
Christians, whose religion was all miracles, asceticism, and withdrawal
from the world. Indeed we may say that the typical Protestant was
himself his own church and made the selection and interpretation of
tradition according to the demands of his personal spirit. What the
Fathers did for the Church in the fourth century, the Reformers did for
themselves in the sixteenth, and have continued to do on the occasion
of their various appearances.
If we judge this interpretation by poetic standards, we cannot
resist the conclusion that the old version was infinitely superior.
The Protestant, with his personal resources, was reduced to making
grotesquely and partially that translation of moral life which the
Fathers had made comprehensively and beautifully, inspired as they
were by all the experience of antiquity and all the hopes of youthful
Christendom. Nevertheless, Protestantism has the unmistakable character
of a genuine religion, a character which tradition passively accepted
and dogma, regarded as so much external truth, may easily lose; it
is in correspondence with the actual ideals and instincts of the
believer; it is the self-assertion of a living soul. Its meagreness
and eccentricity are simply evidences of its personal basis. It is in
full harmony with the practical impulses it comes to sanction, and
accordingly it gains in efficiency all that it loses in dignity and
truth.
The principle by which the Christian system had developed, although
reapplied by the Protestants to their own inner life, was not
understood by them in its historical applications. They had little
sympathy with the spiritual needs and habits of that Pagan society in
which Christianity had grown up. That society had found in Christianity
a sort of last love, a rejuvenating supersensible hope, and had
bequeathed to the Gospel of Redemption, for its better embodiment and
ornament, all its own wealth of art, philosophy, and devotion. This
embodiment of Christianity represented a civilization through which
the Teutonic races had not passed and which they never could have
produced; it appealed to a kind of imagination and sentiment which
was foreign to them. This embodiment, accordingly, was the object of
their first and fiercest attack, really because it was unsympathetic
to their own temperament but ostensibly because they could not find
its basis in those Hebraic elements of Christianity which make up the
greater bulk of the Bible. They did not value the sublime aspiration
of Christianity to be not something Hebraic or Teutonic but something
Catholic and human; and they blamed everything which went beyond the
accidental limits of their own sympathies and the narrow scope of their
own experience.
Yet it was only by virtue of this complement inherited from Paganism,
or at least supplied by the instincts and traditions on which Paganism
had reposed, that Christianity could claim to approach a humane
universality or to achieve an imaginative adequacy. The problem was to
compose, in the form of a cosmic epic, with metaphysical justifications
and effectual starting-points for moral action, the spiritual
autobiography of man. The central idea of this composition was to be
the idea of a Redemption. Around this were to be gathered and moulded
together elements drawn from Hebrew tradition and scripture, others
furnished by Paganism, together with all that the living imagination
of the time could create. Nor was it right or fitting to make a merely
theoretical or ethical synthesis. Doctrine must find its sensible echo
in worship, in art, in the feasts and fasts of the year. Only when
thus permeating life and expressing itself to every sense and faculty
can a religion be said to have reached completion; only then has the
imagination exhausted its means of utterance.
The great success which Christianity achieved in this immense
undertaking makes it, after classic antiquity, the most important phase
in the history of mankind. It is clear, however, that this success was
not complete. That fallacy from which the Pagan religion alone has
been free, that [Greek: proton pseudos] of all fanaticism, the natural
but hopeless misunderstanding of imagining that poetry in order to
be religion, in order to be the inspiration of life, must first deny
that it is poetry and deceive us about the facts with which we have
to deal--this misunderstanding has marred the work of the Christian
imagination and condemned it, if we may trust appearances, to be
transitory. For by this misunderstanding Christian doctrine was brought
into conflict with reality, of which it pretends to prejudge the
character, and also into conflict with what might have been its own
elements, with all excluded religious instincts and imaginative ideals.
Human life is always essentially the same, and therefore a religion
which, like Christianity, seizes the essence of that life, ought to be
an eternal religion. But it may forfeit that privilege by entangling
itself with a particular account of matters of fact, matters irrelevant
to its ideal significance, and further by intrenching itself, by
virtue of that entanglement, in an inadequate regimen or a too narrow
imaginative development, thus putting its ideal authority in jeopardy
by opposing it to other intuitions and practices no less religious than
its own.
Can Christianity escape these perils? Can it reform its claims, or
can it overwhelm all opposition and take the human heart once more by
storm? The future alone can decide. The greatest calamity, however,
would be that which seems, alas! not unlikely to befall our immediate
posterity, namely, that while Christianity should be discredited no
other religion, more disillusioned and not less inspired, should come
to take its place. Until the imagination should have time to recover
and to reassert its legitimate and kindly power, the European races
would then be reduced to confessing that while they had mastered the
mechanical forces of Nature, both by science and by the arts, they had
become incapable of mastering or understanding themselves, and that,
bewildered like the beasts by the revolutions of the heavens and by
their own irrational passions, they could find no way of uttering the
ideal meaning of their life.
V
PLATONIC LOVE IN SOME ITALIAN POETS
When the fruits of philosophic reflection, condensed into some phrase,
pass into the common language of men, there does not and there cannot
accompany them any just appreciation of their meaning or of the long
experience and travail of soul from which they have arisen. Few
doctrines have suffered more by popularization than the intuitions
of Plato. The public sees in Platonic sayings little more than
phrases employed by unpractical minds to cloak the emptiness of their
yearnings. Finding these fragments of an obsolete speech put to bad
uses, we are apt to ignore and despise them, much as a modern peasant
might despise the fragment of a frieze or a metope which he found
built into his cottage wall. It is not only the works of plastic art
that moulder and disintegrate to furnish materials for the barbarous
masons of a later age: the great edifices of reason also crumble, their
plan is lost, and their fragments, picked where they happen to lie,
become the materials of a feebler thought. In common speech we find
such bits of ancient wisdom embedded; they prove the intelligence of
some ancestor of ours, but are no evidence of our own. When used in
ignorance of their meaning, they become misplaced flourishes, lapses
into mystery in the businesslike plainness of our thought.