myself an agnostic; that, if I am not a Christian I am an infidel; and
that I ought to call myself by that name of "unpleasant significance."
Well, I do not care much what I am called by other people, and if I had
at my side all those who, since the Christian era, have been called
infidels by other folks, I could not desire better company. If these are
my ancestors, I prefer, with the old Frank to be with them wherever they
are. But there are several points in Dr. Wace's contention which must be
elucidated before I can even think of undertaking to carry out his
wishes. I must, for instance, know what a Christian is. Now what is a
Christian? By whose authority is the signification of that term defined?
Is there any doubt that the immediate followers of Jesus, the "sect of
the Nazarenes," were strictly orthodox Jews differing from other Jews
not more than the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Essenes differed
from one another, in fact, only in the belief that the Messiah, for whom
the rest of their nation waited, had come? Was not their chief, "James,
the brother of the Lord," reverenced alike by Sadducee, Pharisee, and
Nazarene? At the famous conference which, according to the Acts, took
place at Jerusalem, does not James declare that "myriads" of Jews, who
by that time, had become Nazarenes, were "all zealous for the Law"? Was
not the name of "Christian" first used to denote the converts to the
doctrine promulgated by Paul and Barnabas at Antioch? Does the
subsequent history of Christianity leave any doubt that, from this time
forth, the "little rift within the lute" caused by the new teaching,
developed, if not inaugurated, at Antioch, grew wider and wider, until
the two types of doctrine irreconcilably diverged? Did not the primitive
Nazarenism, or Ebionism, develop into the Nazarenism, and Ebionism, and
Elkasaitism of later ages, and finally die out in obscurity and
condemnation, as damnable heresy; while the younger doctrine throve and
pushed out its shoots into that endless variety of sects, of which the
three strongest survivors are the Roman and Greek Churches and modern
Protestantism?
Singular state of things! If I were to profess the doctrine which was
held by "James, the brother of the Lord," and by every one of the
"myriads" of his followers and co-religionists in Jerusalem up to twenty
or thirty years after the Crucifixion (and one knows not how much later
at Pella), I should be condemned with unanimity, as an ebionising
heretic by the Roman, Greek, and Protestant Churches! And, probably,
this hearty and unanimous condemnation of the creed, held by those who
were in the closest personal relation with their Lord, is almost the
only point upon which they would be cordially of one mind. On the other
hand, though I hardly dare imagine such a thing, I very much fear that
the "pillars" of the primitive Hierosolymitan Church would have
considered Dr. Wace an infidel. No one can read the famous second
chapter of Galatians and the book of Revelation without seeing how
narrow was even Paul's escape from a similar fate. And, if
ecclesiastical history is to be trusted, the thirty-nine articles, be
they right or wrong, diverge from the primitive doctrine of the
Nazarenes vastly more than even Pauline Christianity did.
But, further than this, I have great difficulty in assuring myself that
even James, "the brother of the Lord," and his "myriads" of Nazarenes,
properly represented the doctrines of their Master. For it is constantly
asserted by our modern "pillars" that one of the chief features of the
work of Jesus was the instauration of Religion by the abolition of what
our sticklers for articles and liturgies, with unconscious humour, call
the narrow restrictions of the Law. Yet, if James knew this, how could
the bitter controversy with Paul have arisen; and why did not one or the
other side quote any of the various sayings of Jesus, recorded in the
Gospels, which directly bear on the question--sometimes, apparently, in
opposite directions.
So, if I am asked to call myself an "infidel," I reply: To what doctrine
do you ask me to be faithful? Is it that contained in the Nicene and the
Athanasian Creeds? My firm belief is that the Nazarenes, say of the year
40, headed by James, would have stopped their ears and thought worthy of
stoning the audacious man who propounded it to them. Is it contained in
the so-called Apostles' Creed! I am pretty sure that even that would
have created a recalcitrant commotion at Pella in the year 70, among the
Nazarenes of Jerusalem, who had fled from the soldiers of Titus. And
yet, if the unadulterated tradition of the teachings of "the Nazarene"
were to be found anywhere, it surely should have been amidst those not
very aged disciples who may have heard them as they were delivered.
Therefore, however sorry I may be to be unable to demonstrate that, if
necessary, I should not be afraid to call myself an "infidel," I cannot
do it. "Infidel" is a term of reproach, which Christians and
Mahommedans, in their modesty, agree to apply to those who differ from
them. If he had only thought of it, Dr. Wace might have used the term
"miscreant," which, with the same etymological signification, has the
advantage of being still more "unpleasant" to the persons to whom it is
applied. But why should a man be expected to call himself a "miscreant"
or an "infidel"? That St. Patrick "had two birthdays because he was a
twin" is a reasonable and intelligible utterance beside that of the man
who should declare himself to be an infidel, on the ground of denying
his own belief. It may be logically, if not ethically, defensible that a
Christian should call a Mahommedan an infidel and _vice versa_; but, on
Dr. Wace's principles, both ought to call themselves infidels, because
each applies the term to the other.
Now I am afraid that all the Mahommedan world would agree in
reciprocating that appellation to Dr. Wace himself. I once visited the
Hazar Mosque, the great University of Mahommedanism, in Cairo, in
ignorance of the fact that I was unprovided with proper authority. A
swarm of angry under-graduates, as I suppose I ought to call them, came
buzzing about me and my guide; and if I had known Arabic, I suspect that
"dog of an infidel" would have been by no means the most "unpleasant" of
the epithets showered upon me, before I could explain and apologise for
the mistake. If I had had the pleasure of Dr. Wace's company on that
occasion, the undiscriminative followers of the Prophet would, I am
afraid, have made no difference between us; not even if they had known
that he was the head of an orthodox Christian seminary. And I have not
the smallest doubt that even one of the learned mollahs, if his grave
courtesy would have permitted him to say anything offensive to men of
another mode of belief, would have told us that he wondered we did not
find it "very unpleasant" to disbelieve in the Prophet of Islam.
From what precedes, I think it becomes sufficiently clear that Dr.
Wace's account of the origin of the name of "Agnostic" is quite wrong.
Indeed, I am bound to add that very slight effort to discover the truth
would have convinced him that, as a matter of fact, the term arose
otherwise. I am loath to go over an old story once more; but more than
one object which I have in view will be served by telling it a little
more fully than it has yet been told.
Looking back nearly fifty years, I see myself as a boy, whose education
has been interrupted, and who intellectually was left, for some years,
altogether to his own devices. At that time I was a voracious and
omnivorous reader; a dreamer and speculator of the first water, well
endowed with that splendid courage in attacking any and every subject,
which is the blessed compensation of youth and inexperience. Among the
books and essays, on all sorts of topics from metaphysics to heraldry,
which I read at this time, two left indelible impressions on my mind.
One was Guizot's "History of Civilisation, the other was Sir William
Hamilton's essay "On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned," which I came
upon, by chance, in an odd volume of the _Edinburgh Review_. The latter
was certainly strange reading for a boy, and I could not possibly have
understood a great deal of it;[37] nevertheless I devoured it with
avidity, and it stamped upon my mind the strong conviction that, on even
the most solemn and important of questions, men are apt to take cunning
phrases for answers; and that the limitation of our faculties, in a
great number of cases, renders real answers to such questions, not
merely actually impossible, but theoretically inconceivable.
Philosophy and history having laid hold of me in this eccentric fashion,
have never loosened their grip. I have no pretension to be an expert in
either subject; but the turn for philosophical and historical reading,
which rendered Hamilton and Guizot attractive to me, has not only filled
many lawful leisure hours, and still more sleepless ones, with the
repose of changed mental occupation, but has not unfrequently disputed
my proper work-time with my liege lady, Natural Science. In this way I
have found it possible to cover a good deal of ground in the territory
of philosophy; and all the more easily that I have never cared much
about A's or B's opinions, but have rather sought to know what answer he
had to give to the questions I had to put to him--that of the limitation
of possible knowledge the chief. The ordinary examiner, his "State the
views of So-and-so," would have floored me at any time. If he had said
what do _you_ think about any given problem, I might have got on fairly
well.
The reader who has had the patience to follow the enforced, but
unwilling, egotism of this veritable history (especially if his studies
have led him in the same direction), will now see why my mind steadily
gravitated towards the conclusions of Hume and Kant, so well stated by
the latter in a sentence, which I have quoted elsewhere.
"The greatest and perhaps the sole use of all philosophy of pure reason
is, after all, merely negative, since it serves not as an organon for
the enlargement [of knowledge], but as a discipline for its
delimitation; and, instead of discovering truth, has only the modest
merit of preventing error." [38]
When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I
was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist;
a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and
reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the
conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these
denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these
good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them.
They were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis,"--had, more or
less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite
sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was
insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself
presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion. Like Dante,
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
but, unlike Dante, I cannot add,
Che la diritta via era smarrita.
On the contrary, I had, and have, the firmest conviction that I never
left the "verace via"--the straight road; and that this road led nowhere
else but into the dark depths of a wild and tangled forest. And though I
have found leopards and lions in the path; though I have made abundant
acquaintance with the hungry wolf, that "with privy paw devours apace
and nothing said," as another great poet says of the ravening beast; and
though no friendly spectre has even yet offered his guidance, I was, and
am, minded to go straight on, until I either come out on the other side
of the wood, or find there is no other side to it, at least, none
attainable by me.
This was my situation when I had the good fortune to find a place among
the members of that remarkable confraternity of antagonists, long since
deceased, but of green and pious memory, the Metaphysical Society. Every
variety of philosophical and theological opinion was represented there,
and expressed itself with entire openness; most of my colleagues were
_-ists_ of one sort or another; and, however kind and friendly they
might be, I, the man without a rag of a label to cover himself with,
could not fail to have some of the uneasy feelings which must have beset
the historical fox when, after leaving the trap in which his tail
remained, he presented himself to his normally elongated companions. So
I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate
title of "agnostic." It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to
the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the
very things of which I was ignorant; and I took the earliest opportunity
of parading it at our Society, to show that I, too, had a tail, like the
other foxes. To my great satisfaction, the term took; and when the
_Spectator_ had stood godfather to it, any suspicion in the minds of
respectable people that a knowledge of its parentage might have awakened
was, of course, completely lulled.
That is the history of the origin of the terms "agnostic" and
"agnosticism"; and it will be observed that it does not quite agree with
the confident assertion of the reverend Principal of King's College,
that "the adoption of the term agnostic is only an attempt to shift the
issue, and that it involves a mere evasion" in relation to the Church
and Christianity.[39]
* * * * *
The last objection (I rejoice as much as my readers must do, that it is
the last) which I have to take to Dr. Wace's deliverance before the
Church Congress arises, I am sorry to say, on a question of morality.
"It is, and it ought to be," authoritatively declares this official
representative of Christian ethics, "an unpleasant thing for a man to
have to say plainly that he does not believe in Jesus Christ" (_l.c._ p.
254).
Whether it is so depends, I imagine, a good deal on whether the man was
brought up in a Christian household or not. I do not see why it should
be "unpleasant" for a Mahommedan or Buddhist to say so. But that "it
ought to be" unpleasant for any man to say anything which he sincerely,
and after due deliberation, believes, is, to my mind, a proposition of
the most profoundly immoral character. I verily believe that the great
good which has been effected in the world by Christianity has been
largely counteracted by the pestilent doctrine on which all the Churches
have insisted, that honest disbelief in their more or less astonishing
creeds is a moral offence, indeed a sin of the deepest dye, deserving
and involving the same future retribution as murder and robbery. If we
could only see, in one view, the torrents of hypocrisy and cruelty, the
lies, the slaughter, the violations of every obligation of humanity,
which have flowed from this source along the course of the history of
Christian nations, our worst imaginations of Hell would pale beside the
vision.
A thousand times, no! It ought _not_ to be unpleasant to say that which
one honestly believes or disbelieves. That it so constantly is painful
to do so, is quite enough obstacle to the progress of mankind in that
most valuable of all qualities, honesty of word or of deed, without
erecting a sad concomitant of human weakness into something to be
admired and cherished. The bravest of soldiers often, and very
naturally, "feel it unpleasant" to go into action; but a court-martial
which did its duty would make short work of the officer who promulgated
the doctrine that his men _ought_ to feel their duty unpleasant.
I am very well aware, as I suppose most thoughtful people are in these
times, that the process of breaking away from old beliefs is extremely
unpleasant; and I am much disposed to think that the encouragement, the
consolation, and the peace afforded to earnest believers in even the
worst forms of Christianity are of great practical advantage to them.
What deductions must be made from this gain on this score of the harm
done to the citizen by the ascetic other-worldliness of logical
Christianity; to the ruler, by the hatred, malice, and all
uncharitableness of sectarian bigotry; to the legislator, by the spirit
of exclusiveness and domination of those that count themselves pillars
of orthodoxy; to the philosopher, by the restraints on the freedom of
learning and teaching which every Church exercises, when it is strong
enough; to the conscientious soul, by the introspective hunting after
sins of the mint and cummin type, the fear of theological error, and the
overpowering terror of possible damnation, which have accompanied the
Churches like their shadow, I need not now consider; but they are
assuredly not small. If agnostics lose heavily on the one side, they
gain a good deal on the other. People who talk about the comforts of
belief appear to forget its discomforts; they ignore the fact that the
Christianity of the Churches is something more than faith in the ideal
personality of Jesus, which they create for themselves, _plus_ so much
as can be carried into practice, without disorganising civil society, of
the maxims of the Sermon on the Mount. Trip in morals or in doctrine
(especially in doctrine), without due repentance or retractation, or
fail to get properly baptized before you die, and a _plébiscite_ of the
Christians of Europe, if they were true to their creeds, would affirm
your everlasting damnation by an immense majority.
Preachers, orthodox and heterodox, din into our ears that the world
cannot get on without faith of some sort. There is a sense in which that
is as eminently as obviously true; there is another, in which, in my
judgment, it is as eminently as obviously false, and it seems to me that
the hortatory, or pulpit, mind is apt to oscillate between the false and
the true meanings, without being aware of the fact.
It is quite true that the ground of every one of our actions, and the
validity of all our reasonings, rest upon the great act of faith, which
leads us to take the experience of the past as a safe guide in our
dealings with the present and the future. From the nature of
ratiocination, it is obvious that the axioms, on which it is based,
cannot be demonstrated by ratiocination. It is also a trite observation
that, in the business of life, we constantly take the most serious
action upon evidence of an utterly insufficient character. But it is
surely plain that faith is not necessarily entitled to dispense with
ratiocination because ratiocination cannot dispense with faith as a
starting-point; and that because we are often obliged, by the pressure
of events, to act on very bad evidence, it does not follow that it is
proper to act on such evidence when the pressure is absent.
The writer of the epistle to the Hebrews tells us that "faith is the
assurance of things hoped for, the proving of things not seen." In the
authorised version, "substance" stands for "assurance," and "evidence"
for "proving." The question of the exact meaning of the two words,
[Greek: hypostasis] and [Greek: elenchos], affords a fine field of
discussion for the scholar and the metaphysician. But I fancy we shall
be not far from the mark if we take the writer to have had in his mind
the profound psychological truth, that men constantly feel certain about
things for which they strongly hope, but have no evidence, in the legal
or logical sense of the word; and he calls this feeling "faith." I may
have the most absolute faith that a friend has not committed the crime
of which he is accused. In the early days of English history, if my
friend could have obtained a few more compurgators of a like robust
faith, he would have been acquitted. At the present day, if I tendered
myself as a witness on that score, the judge would tell me to stand
down, and the youngest barrister would smile at my simplicity. Miserable
indeed is the man who has not such faith in some of his fellow-men--only
less miserable than the man who allows himself to forget that such faith
is not, strictly speaking, evidence; and when his faith is disappointed,
as will happen now and again, turns Timon and blames the universe for
his own blunders. And so, if a man can find a friend, the hypostasis of
all his hopes, the mirror of his ethical ideal, in the Jesus of any, or
all, of the Gospels, let him live by faith in that ideal. Who shall or
can forbid him? But let him not delude himself with the notion that his
faith is evidence of the objective reality of that in which he trusts.
Such evidence is to be obtained only by the use of the methods of
science, as applied to history and to literature, and it amounts at
present to very little.
THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION IN RELATION TO JUDAIC CHRISTIANITY
[FROM "AGNOSTICISM: A REJOINDER," 1889]
The most constant reproach which is launched against persons of my way
of thinking is that it is all very well for us to talk about the
deductions of scientific thought, but what are the poor and the
uneducated to do? Has it ever occurred to those who talk in this
fashion, that their creeds and the articles of their several
confessions, their determination of the exact nature and extent of the
teachings of Jesus, their expositions of the real meaning of that which
is written in the Epistles (to leave aside all questions concerning the
Old Testament), are nothing more than deductions which, at any rate,
profess to be the result of strictly scientific thinking, and which are
not worth attending to unless they really possess that character? If it
is not historically true that such and such things happened in Palestine
eighteen centuries ago, what becomes of Christianity? And what is
historical truth but that of which the evidence bears strict scientific
investigation? I do not call to mind any problem of natural science
which has come under my notice which is more difficult, or more
curiously interesting as a mere problem, than that of the origin of the
Synoptic Gospels and that of the historical value of the narratives
which they contain. The Christianity of the Churches stands or falls by
the results of the purely scientific investigation of these questions.
They were first taken up, in a purely scientific spirit, about a century
ago; they have been studied over and over again by men of vast knowledge
and critical acumen; but he would be a rash man who should assert that
any solution of these problems, as yet formulated, is exhaustive. The
most that can be said is that certain prevalent solutions are certainly
false, while others are more or less probably true.
If I am doing my best to rouse any countrymen out of their dogmatic
slumbers, it is not that they may be amused by seeing who gets the best
of it in a contest between a "scientist" and a theologian. The serious
question is whether theological men of science, or theological special
pleaders, are to have the confidence of the general public; it is the
question whether a country in which it is possible for a body of
excellent clerical and lay gentlemen to discuss in public meeting
assembled, how much it is desirable to let the congregations of the
faithful know of the results of biblical criticism, is likely to wake up
with anything short of the grasp of a rough lay hand upon its shoulder;
it is the question whether the New Testament books, being as I believe
they were, written and compiled by people who, according to their
lights, were perfectly sincere, will not, when properly studied as
ordinary historical documents, afford us the means of self-criticism.
And it must be remembered that the New Testament books are not
responsible for the doctrine invented by the Churches that they are
anything but ordinary historical documents. The author of the third
gospel tells us, as straightforwardly as a man can, that he has no claim
to any other character than that of an ordinary compiler and editor, who
had before him the works of many and variously qualified predecessors.
In my former papers, according to Dr. Wace, I have evaded giving an
answer to his main proposition, which he states as follows--
Apart from all disputed points of criticism, no one practically
doubts that our Lord lived, and that He died on the cross, in the
most intense sense of filial relation to His Father in Heaven, and
that He bore testimony to that Father's providence, love, and grace
towards mankind. The Lord's Prayer affords a sufficient evidence on
these points. If the Sermon on the Mount alone be added, the whole
unseen world, of which the Agnostic refuses to know anything,
stands unveiled before us.... If Jesus Christ preached that
Sermon, made those promises, and taught that prayer, then any one
who says that we know nothing of God, or of a future life, or of an
unseen world, says that he does not believe Jesus Christ (pp.
354-355).
Again--