force work by inter-action and coördinately. The abandonment or reform
of some device that has proved evil or inadequate, and the substitution
of something better, changes to that extent the environment of the
individual and so enables him more perfectly to develop his inherent
possibilities in character and capacity, while every advance in this
direction reacts on the machinery of life and makes its improvement more
possible. With a real sense of my own personal presumption, but with an
equally real sense of the responsibility that rests on every man at the
present crisis, I shall venture certain suggestions as to possible
changes that may well be effected in the material forms of contemporary
society as well as in its methods of thought, in order that the
spiritual energies of the individual may be raised to a higher level
through the amelioration of a hampering environment, and, with even
greater diffidence, others that may bear more directly on the
character-development of the individual. In following out this line of
thought I shall, in the remaining seven lectures, speak successively on:
A Working Philosophy; The Social Organism; The Industrial and Economic
Problem; The Political Organization of Society; The Function of
Education and Art; The Problem of Organic Religion; and Personal
Responsibility.
I am only too conscious of the fact that the division of my subject
under these categorical heads, and the necessities of special argument,
if not indeed of special pleading, have forced me to such particular
stress on each subject as may very likely give an impression of undue
emphasis. If each lecture were to be taken by itself, such an impression
would, I fear, be unescapable; I ask therefore for the courtesy of a
suspension of judgment until the series is completed, for it is only
when taken as a whole, one paper reacting upon and modifying another,
that whatever merit the course possesses can be made apparent.
II
A WORKING PHILOSOPHY[*]
[*This lecture has been very considerably re-written
since it was delivered, and much of the matter it then contained
has been cut out, and is now printed in the Appendix. These
excisions were purely speculative, and while they have a certain
bearing on the arguments and conclusions in the other lectures,
might very well be prejudicial to them, and for this reason it
has seemed better to remove them from the general sequence and
give them a supplementary place by themselves.]
The first reaction of the World War was a great interrogation, and the
technical "Peace" that has followed brings only reiteration. Why did
these things come, and how? The answers are as manifold as the
clamourous tongues that ask, but none carries conviction and the problem
is still unsolved. According to all rational probabilities we had no
right to expect the war that befell; according to all the human
indications as we saw them revealed amongst the Allies we had a right to
expect a better peace; according to our abiding and abounding faith we
had a right to expect a great bettering of life after the war, and even
in spite of the peace. It is all a _non sequitur,_ and still we ask the
reason and the meaning of it all.
It may be very long before the full answer is given, yet if we are
searching the way towards "The Great Peace" we must establish some
working theory, if only that we may redeem our grave errors and avoid
like perils in the future. The explanation I assume for myself, and on
which I must work, is that, in spite of our intentions (which were of
the best) we were led into the development, acceptance and application
of a false philosophy of life which was not only untenable in itself but
was vitiated and made noxious through its severance from vital religion.
In close alliance with this declension of philosophy upon a basis that
had been abandoned by the Christian world for a thousand years, perhaps
as the ultimate reason for its occurrence, was the tendency to void
religion of its vital power, to cut it out of intimate contact with
life, and, in the end, to abandon it altogether as an energizing force
interpenetrating all existence and controlling it in certain definite
directions and after certain definite methods.
The rather complete failure of our many modern and ingenious
institutions, the failure of institutionalism altogether, is due far
less to wrong theories underlying them, or to radical defects in their
technique, than it is to this false philosophy and this progressive
abandonment of religion. The wrong theories were there, and the
mechanical defects, for the machines were conditioned by the principle
that lay behind them, but effort at correction and betterment will make
small progress unless we first regain the right religion and a right
philosophy. I said this to Henri Bergson last year in Paris and his
reply was significant as coming from a philosopher. "Yes," he said, "you
are right; and of the two, the religion is the more important."
If we had this back, and in full measure; if society were infused by it,
through and through, and men lived its life, and in its life, philosophy
would take care of itself and the nature of our institutions would not
matter. On the other hand, without it, no institution can be counted
safe, or will prove efficacious, while no philosophy, however lofty and
magisterial, can take its place, or even play its own part in the life
of man or society. I must in these lectures say much about institutions
themselves, but first I shall try to indicate what seem to me the more
serious errors in current philosophy, leaving until after a study of the
material forms which are so largely conditioned by the philosophical
attitude, the consideration of that religion, both organic and personal,
which I believe can alone verify the philosophy, give the institutions
life and render them reliable agencies for good.
For a working definition of philosophy, in the sense in which I use it
here, I will take two sayings, one out of the thirteenth century, one
from the twentieth. "They are called wise who put things in their right
order and control them well," says St. Thomas Aquinas. "Philosophy is
the science of the totality of things," says Cardinal Mercier, his
greatest contemporary commentator, and he continues, "Philosophy is the
sum-total of reality." Philosophy is the body of _human_ wisdom,
verified and irradiated by divine wisdom. "The science of the totality
of things": not the isolation of individual phenomena, or even of groups
of phenomena, as is the method of the natural sciences, but the setting
of all in their varied relationships and values, the antithesis of that
narrowness and concentration of vision that follow intensive
specialization and have issue in infinite delusions and unrealities,
"Philosophy regards the sum-total of reality" and it achieves this
consciousness of reality, first by establishing right relations between
phenomena, and then, abandoning the explicit intellectual process, by
falling back on divine illumination which enables it to see through
those well-ordered phenomena the Divine Actuality that lies behind,
informing them with its own finality and using them both as types and as
media of transmission and communication. So men are enabled by
philosophy "to put things in their right order" and by religion "to
control them well," thus becoming indeed worthy to be "called wise."
Now, from the beginnings of conscious life, man has found himself
surrounded and besieged by un-calculable phenomena. Beaten upon by
forces he could not estimate or predict or control, he has sought to
solve their sphynx-like riddle, to establish some plausible relation
between them, to erect a logical scheme of things. Primitive man, as
Worringer demonstrates in his "Form Problems of the Gothic," strove to
achieve something of certitude and fixity through the crude but definite
lines and forms of neolithic art. Classical man brought into play the
vigour and subtlety and ingenuity of intellect in its primal and most
dynamic form, expressed through static propositions of almost
mathematical exactness. The peoples of the East rejected the
intellectual-mathematical method and solution and sought a way out
through the mysterious operation of the inner sense that manifests
itself in the form of emotion. With the revelation of Christianity came
also, and of course, enlightenment, which was not definite and closed at
some given moment, but progressive and cumulative. At once, speaking
philosophically, the intellectual method of the West and the intuitive
method of the East came together and fused in a new thing, each element
limiting, and at the same time fortifying the other, while the opposed
obscurities of the past were irradiated by the revealing and creative
spirit of Christ. So came the beginnings of that definitive Christian
philosophy which was to proceed from Syria, Anatolia and Constantinople,
through Alexandria to St. Augustine, and was to find its fullest
expression during the Middle Ages and by means of Duns Scotus, Albertus
Magnus, Hugh of St. Victor and St. Thomas Aquinas.
It is an interesting fact, though apart from my present consideration,
that this philosophical fusion was paralleled in the same places and at
the same time, by an aesthetic fusion that brought into existence the
first great and consistent art of Christianity. This question is
admirably dealt with in Lisle March Phillipps' "Form and Colour."
This great Christian philosophy which lay behind all the civilization of
the Middle Ages, was positive, comprehensive and new. It demonstrated
divine purpose working consciously through all things with a result in
perfect coherency; it gave history a new meaning as revealing reality
and as a thing forever present and never past, and above all it
elucidated the nature of both matter and spirit and made clear their
operation through the doctrine of sacramentalism.
In the century that saw the consummation of this great philosophical
system--as well as that of the civilization which was its expositor in
material form--there came a separation and a divergence. The balanced
unity was broken, and on the one hand the tendency was increasingly
towards the exaggerated mysticism that had characterized the Eastern
moiety of the synthesis, on the other towards an exaggerated
intellectualism the seeds of which are inherent even in St. Thomas
himself. The new mysticism withdrew further and further from the common
life, finding refuge in hidden sanctuaries in Spain, Italy, the
Rhineland; the old intellectualism became more and more dominant in the
minds of man and the affairs of the world, and with the Renaissance it
became supreme, as did the other qualities of paganism in art as well as
in every other field of human activity.
The first fruit of the new intellectualism was the philosophy of Dr.
John Calvin--if we can call it such,--Augustinian philosophy, misread,
distorted and made noxious by its reliance on the intellectual process
cut off from spiritual energy as the sufficient corrective of
philosophical thought. It is this false philosophy, allied with an
equally false theology, that misled for so many centuries those who
accepted the new versions of Christianity that issued out of the
Reformation. The second was the mechanistic system, or systems, the
protagonist of which was Descartes. If, as I believe, Calvinism was
un-Christian, the materialistic philosophies that have gone on from the
year 1637, were anti-Christian. As the power of Christianity declined
through the centuries that have followed the Reformation, Calvinism
played a less and less important part, while the new philosophies of
mechanism and rationalism correspondingly increased. During the
nineteenth century their control was absolute, and what we are today we
have become through this dominance, coupled with the general
devitalizing or abandonment of religion.
And yet are we not left comfortless. Even in the evolutionary philosophy
engendered by Darwin and formulated by Herbert Spencer and the Germans,
with all its mistaken assumptions and dubious methods, already there is
visible a tendency to get away from the old Pagan static system reborn
with the Renaissance. We can never forget that Bergson has avowed that
"the mind of man, by its very nature, is incapable of apprehending
reality." After this the return towards the scholastic philosophy of the
Middle Ages is not so difficult, nor even its recovery. If we associate
with this process on the part of formal philosophy the very evident, if
sometimes abnormal and exaggerated, progress towards a new mysticism, we
are far from finding ourselves abandoned to despair as to the whole
future of philosophy.
Now this return and this recovery are, I believe, necessary as one of
the first steps towards establishing a sound basis for the building up
of a new and a better civilization, and one that is in fact as well as
in name a Christian civilization. I do not mean that, with this
restoration of Christian philosophy, there we should rest. Both
revelation and enlightenment are progressive, and once the nexus of our
broken life were restored, philosophical development would be
continuous, and we should go on beyond the scholastics even as they
proceeded beyond Patristic theology and philosophy. I think a break of
continuity was effected in the sixteenth century, with disastrous
effects, and until this break is healed we are cut off from what is in a
sense the Apostolical succession of philosophical verity.
Before going further I would guard against two possible misconceptions;
of one of them I have already spoken, that is, the error so frequent in
the past as well as today, that would make of philosophy, however sound,
however consonant with the finalities of revealed religion, a substitute
in any degree for religion itself. Philosophy is the reaction of the
intellect, of man to the stimuli of life, but religion _is_ life and is
therefore in many ways a flat contradiction of the concepts of the
intellect, which is only a small portion of life, therefore limited,
partial, and (because of this) sometimes entirely wrong in its
conclusions independently arrived at along these necessarily
circumscribed lines.
The second possible error is that philosophy is the affair of a small
group of students and specialists, quite outside the purview of the
great mass of men, and that it owes its existence to this same class of
delving scholars, few in number, impractical in their aims, and sharply
differentiated from their fellows. On the contrary it is a vital
consideration for all those who desire to "see life and see it whole" in
order that they may establish a true scale of comparative values and a
right relationship between those things that come from the outside and,
meeting those that come from within, establish that plexus of
interacting force we call life. As for the source of philosophic truth,
Friar Bacon put it well when he said "All the wisdom of philosophy is
created by God and given to the philosophers, and it is Himself that
illumines the minds of men in all wisdom." It is a whimsical
juxtaposition, but the first pastor of the Puritans in America, the Rev.
John Robinson, testifies to the same effect. "All truth," he says, "is
of God ... Wherefore it followeth that nothing true in right reason and
sound philosophy can be false in divinity.... I add, though the truth be
uttered by the devil himself, yet it is originally of God." There are
not two sources of truth, that of Divine Revelation on the one hand,
that of science and philosophy and all the intellectual works of man on
the other. Truth is one, and the Source is one; the channels of
communication alone are different. But truth in its finality, the
Absolute, the _noumenon_ that is the substance of phenomena, is in
itself not a thing that can be directly apprehended by man; it lies
within the "ultra-violet" rays of his intellectual spectrum. "The
trammels of the body prevent man from knowing God in Himself" says
Philo, "He is known only in the Divine forces in which He manifests
Himself." And St. Thomas: "In the present state of life in which the
soul is united to a passable body, it is impossible for the intellect to
understand anything actually except by turning to the phantasm."
Religion confesses this, philosophy constantly tends to forget it,
therefore true religion speaks always through the symbol, rejecting,
because it transcends, the intellectual criterion, while philosophy is
on safe ground only when it unites itself with religion, testing its own
conclusions by a higher reality, and existing not as a rival but as a
coadjutor.
It is St. Paul who declares that "God has never left Himself without a
witness" and the "witness" was explicit, however clouded, in the
philosophies of paganism. Plato and Aristotle knew the limitations of
man's mind, and the corrective of over-weaning intellectuality in
religion, but thereafter the wisdom faded and pride ousted humility,
with the result that philosophy became not light but darkness. Let me
quote from the great twelfth century philosopher, Hugh of St. Victor,
who deserves a better fate than sepulture in the ponderous tomes of
Migne:
"There was a certain wisdom that seemed such to them that knew not the
true wisdom. The world found it and began to be puffed up, thinking
itself great in this. Confiding in its wisdom it became presumptuous and
boasted it would attain the highest wisdom. And it made itself a ladder
of the face of creation.... Then those things which were seen were known
and there were other things which were not known; and through those
which were manifest they expected to reach those that were hidden. And
they stumbled and fell into the falsehoods of their own imagining.... So
God made foolish the wisdom of this world; and He pointed out another
wisdom, which seemed foolishness and was not. For it preached Christ
crucified, in order that truth might be sought in humility. But the
world despised it, wishing to contemplate the works of God, which He had
made a source of wonder, and it did not wish to venerate what He had set
for imitation, neither did it look to its own disease, seeking medicine
in piety; but presuming on a false health, it gave itself over with vain
curiosity to the study of alien things."
Precisely: and this is the destiny that has overtaken not only the pagan
philosophy of which Hugh of St. Victor was speaking, but also that which
followed after St. Thomas Aquinas, from Descartes to Hobbes and Kant and
Comte and Herbert Spencer and William James. The jealously intellectual
philosophies of the nineteenth century, the materialistic and
mechanistic substitutes that were offered and accepted with such
enthusiasm after the great cleavage between religion and life, are but
"the falsehoods of their own imaginings" of which Hugh of St. Victor
speaks, for they were cut off from the stream of spiritual verity, and
are losing themselves in the desert they have made.
Meanwhile they have played their part in shaping the destinies of the
world, and it was an ill part, if we may judge from the results that
showed themselves in the events that have been recorded between the year
1800 and the present moment. Just what this influence was in determining
the nature of society, of industrial civilization and of the political
organism I shall try to indicate in some of the following lectures, but
apart from these concrete happenings, this influence was, I am
persuaded, most disastrous in its bearing on human character. Neither
wealth nor power, neither education nor environment, not even the
inherent tendencies of race--the most powerful of all--can avail against
the degenerative force of a life without religion, or, what is worse,
that maintains only a desiccated formula; and the post-Renaissance
philosophies are one and all definitely anti-religious and
self-proclaimed substitutes for religion. As such they were offered and
accepted, and as such they must take their share of the responsibility
for what has happened.
I believe we must and can retrace our steps to that point in time when a
right philosophy was abandoned, and begin again. There is no
impossibility or even difficulty here. History is not a dead thing, a
thing of the past; it is eternally present to man, and this is one of
the sharp differentiations between man and beast. The material monuments
of man crumble and disappear, but the spirit that built the Parthenon or
Reims Cathedral, that inspired St. Paul on Mars' hill or forged Magna
Charta or the Constitution of the United States is, _because of our
quality as men,_ just as present and operative with us today, if we
will, as that which sent the youth of ten nations into a righteous war
five years ago, or spoke yesterday through some noble action that you or
I may have witnessed. It is as easy for us to accept and practice the
philosophy of St. Thomas or the divine humanism of St. Francis as it is
to accept the philosophy of Mr. Wells or the theories of Sir Oliver
Lodge. No spiritual thing dies, or even grows old, nor does it drift
backward in the dwindling perspective of ancient history, and the
foolishest saying of man is that "you cannot turn back the hands of the
clock."
It is simply a question of will, and will is simply a question of desire
and of faith.
Manifestly I cannot be expected to recreate in a few words this
philosophy to which I believe we must have recourse in our hour of need.
I have no ability to do this in any case. It begins with St. Paul, is
continued through St. Augustine, and finds its culmination in the great
Mediaeval group of Duns Scotus, Albertus Magnus, Hugh of St. Victor and
St. Thomas Aquinas. I do not know of any single book that epitomizes it
all in vital form, though Cardinal Mercier and Dr. De Wulf have written
much that is stimulating and helpful. I cannot help thinking that the
great demand today is for a compact volume that synthesizes the whole
magnificent system in terms not of history and scientific exegesis, but
in terms of life. Plato and Aristotle are so preserved to man, and the
philosophers of modernism also; it is only the magisterial and dynamic
philosophy of Christianity that is diffused through many works, some of
them still untranslated and all quite without coordination, save St.
Thomas Aquinas alone, the magnitude of whose product staggers the human
mind and in its profuseness defeats its own ends. We need no more
histories of philosophy, but we need an epitome of Christian philosophy,
not for students but for men.
Such an epitome I am not fitted to offer, but there are certain rather
fundamental conceptions and postulates that run counter both to pagan
and to modern philosophy, the loss of which out of life has, I maintain,
much to do with our present estate, and that must be regained before we
can go forward with any reasonable hope of betterment. These I will try
to indicate as well as I can.
Christian philosophy teaches, in so far as it deals with the
relationship between man and these divine forces that are forever
building, unbuilding and rebuilding the fabric of life, somewhat as
follows:
The world as we know it, man, life itself as it works through all
creation, is the union of matter and spirit; and matter is not spirit,
nor spirit matter, nor is one a mode of the other, but they are two
different creatures. Apart from this union of matter and spirit there is
no life, in the sense in which we know it, and severance is death. "The
body" says St. Thomas, "is not of the essence of the soul; but the soul,
by the nature of its essence, can be united to the body, so that,
properly speaking, the soul alone is not the species, but the
composite", and Duns Scotus makes clear the nature and origin of this
common "essence" when he says there is "on the one hand God as Infinite
Actuality, on the other spiritual and corporeal substances possessing an
homogeneous common element." That is to say; matter and spirit are both
the result of the divine creative act, and though separate, and in a
sense opposed, find their point of origin in the Divine Actuality.
The created world is the concrete manifestation of matter, through
which, for its transformation and redemption, spirit is active in a
constant process of interpenetration whereby matter itself is being
eternally redeemed. What then is matter and what is spirit? The question
is of sufficient magnitude to absorb all the time assigned to these
lectures, with the strong possibility that even then we should be
scarcely wiser than before. For my own purposes, however, I am content
to accept the definition of matter formulated by Duns Scotus, which
takes over the earlier definition of Plotinus, purges it of its elements
of pagan error, and redeems it by Christian insight.
"Materia Primo Prima" says the great Franciscan, "is the indeterminate
element of contingent things. This does not exist in Nature, but it has
reality in so far as it constitutes the term of God's creative activity.
By its union with a substantial form it becomes endowed with the
attributes of quantity, and becomes Secundo Prima. Subject to the
substantial changes of Nature, it becomes matter as we see it."