NATURE AND CIVILIZATION AS FOES OF PERSONALITY
It would be extravagant to claim that the possibility of making the
resources of religion available for the solution of social problems
of modern civilization is absolutely determining for its future.
Religion would continue to maintain itself in modern society even if it
produced only the scarcest socio-ethical fruits. The problem of living
together is not the only problem which men face, and civilization is
not the only foe with which personality contends. At least two other
fundamental problems engage the interest of every normal individual,
that of developing the multifarious forces of his personality into some
kind of harmony and unity and that of asserting the dignity and worth
of human personality in defiance of nature’s indifference and contempt.
If religion can render the human spirit a tolerably effective service
in the solution of these two problems, its aid will not be scorned
though it fail him in his social problem. It will not maintain itself
with equal vitality in all strata of society, but it will continue some
kind of existence in all of them, and a fairly vigorous life in those
classes in which social problems are least urgent.
Psychiatry and the psychological sciences are encroaching upon one
service to the perplexed spirit of man which was once an almost
exclusive province of religion. They are offering him aid in the task
of integrating the heterogeneous forces, with which ages of human
and prehuman history have endowed him, into the unity of dependable
character; and there are those who think that this service will obviate
his need for religion in this field. Undoubtedly it will be to the
advantage of any moral or religious discipline of the individual
life to avail itself of a more precise knowledge of the intricacies
of human personality; yet only the most mechanistic and naturalistic
ethical theorist would maintain that the knowledge of self is the
only prerequisite of self-mastery, and that the eternal conflict
between the higher will and the immediate desires, about which the
religious of every age have testified, may be composed by nothing more
than a better understanding of the devious ways of human intelligence
and emotion. The psychological sciences have undoubtedly saved men
from some morbid fears and repressions, but the most modern school
of psychological mechanists and determinists seems more anxious to
destroy restraints which are the product of ages of moral experience
than to correct the defects which reveal themselves inevitably on the
fringe of every moral discipline. The reason mechanistic psychiatry and
psycho-analysis run easily into a justification of license is because
they labor under the illusion that the higher self (they would scorn
that term) is able to put all internal forces in their proper place, if
only it knows their previous history and actual direction. Under such
an illusion the clamant desires of man’s physical life are bound to
be closer to the center of character than any moral discipline would
allow. Modern determinism is too naturalistic to see or to be willing
to regard human personality as the incarnation of moral and spiritual
values which did not have their origin in any immediate necessity and
which no individual will maintain if his resolution is not strengthened
by something more than his momentary and obvious experience. This is
not to say that moral discipline in individual life can be maintained
by religion alone. A humanistic ethical idealism, which makes the
experience of the race the guide and inspiration of individual
conduct, will not fail to aid men toward some higher integration of
personality, though it will seldom go beyond the Greek ideal of a
balanced life which knows how to escape sublime enthusiasms as well as
crass excesses. The value of religion in composing the conflict with
which the inner life of man is torn is that it identifies man’s highest
values, about which he would center his life, with realities in the
universe itself, and teaches him how to bring his momentary impulses
under the dominion of his will by subjecting his will to the guidance
of an absolute will. “Make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be
free,” has ever been the prayer of religious people. “He who loses his
life for my sake shall find it,” said Jesus. In such paradoxes the
truth is revealed that the highest peace comes to men where their life
is centered not in what is best in them but in that beyond them which
is better than their best.
Obviously this function of religion in the life of the individual
has its social implications; but it is not to be assumed that the
integration of personality automatically solves man’s social problem.
That assumption, which religion invariably makes, is one of its very
defects in dealing with the social problem. A unified personality may
still be anti-social in its dominant desires and the very self-respect
which issues from its higher integration may become the screen for its
unsocial attitudes.
Just as important as the problem of bringing peace to the warring
factions within the soul of man is the task of giving human personality
a sense of worth in the face of nature’s indifference and contempt;
and of adjusting man’s highest values to nature’s sublimer moods. The
significance of the religious inclinations of country people lies just
here. The peasant is religious because man’s relation to the natural
world about him is still the agrarian’s great interest. His ethical
life is simple and develops in those primary or family relationships in
which problems are comparatively few and a disturbance of the religious
temper by unethical social facts rather infrequent. He is close enough
to nature to be prompted to awe and reverence by her beauties and
sublimities, to gratitude by her vast and perennial benevolences,
and to fear by her occasional cruel caprices. He expresses his awe
in worship, his gratitude in the spring and harvest festivals, which
are traditional in all religions, and when her momentary atrocities
overtake him he appeals from nature’s God to the God who is above
nature and seeks the intervention of a supernatural ally in behalf of
human personality. In a sense the religion of peasants remains the
constant spring of religious sentiment in every class of society, which
others may corrupt or refine but never quite destroy. Urban men suffer
from an atrophy of the religious sense because they lose, as they are
divorced from the soil, some of the reverence to which a view of the
serene majesties of nature prompts and some of the fear occasioned by
her elemental passions. Yet the most sophisticated and emancipated
city dweller cannot finally escape the problem of the relation of the
human spirit to the natural world in which it is at once child and
rebel. Even the refinements and artificialities of urban life will not
save man from facing nature’s last and most implacable servant—death,
nor free him of the necessity of making some kind of appeal against
the obvious victory which nature claims at the grave. The fight of
personality against nature is religion’s first battle, and that is one
reason why there is always a possibility that other struggles will
be neglected for it. Traditional religion fails in its social tasks
partly because men have suffered longer from the sins of nature than
from the sins of man; and religious forms and traditions are therefore
better adjusted to offer them comfort for these distresses than for
any other from which they suffer. Religion is not yet fully oriented
to the new perils to personality which are developed in civilization.
But it may fail to meet these and yet not be totally discredited; for
the new perils have not supplanted the old ones. At its best religion
is both a sublimation and a qualification of the will to live. Defeated
by nature the human spirit rises above nature through religious faith,
discovering and creating a universe in which divine personality is
the supreme power and human personality a cherished, protected and
deathless reality. But this religious sublimation of the will to live
must be balanced by a qualification of that will to live by which
men are persuaded to sacrifice themselves for each other, that they
may save themselves from each other and realize their highest self.
Love is a natural fruit of religion but not an inevitable one. A high
appreciation of personality ought to issue in a reverence for all
personalities and in a qualification of the tendency to self-assertion
for the sake of other personalities. But left to itself religion easily
becomes a force which sublimates but does not qualify man’s desire for
survival; in which case it may still function in simple societies but
will be less useful in those which are highly complex and in which the
problem of human relationships has become very important.
Next to the faith of agrarian classes the greatest stronghold of
religion is in the life of the middle classes of the city. This
phenomenon is due to several causes. Ideals of self-mastery and
personal rectitude are always strongest in those classes in which
physical resources are not so abundant as to tempt to sensual excesses
and not so scant as to lead to an obsession with life’s externalities.
For that reason the resources of religion for the solution of personal
moral problems are particularly coveted by the middle classes. On the
other hand the middle classes are also religious because they are
comparatively unconscious of their responsibility for society’s sins
and comparatively untouched by the evil consequences of an unethical
civilization. They may therefore indulge in a religion which creates
moral respectability, and reinforces self-respect, even though it does
not force them to share their sense of worth with all their fellows.
There is for this reason an element of hypocrisy in all middle-class
religion of which it never becomes clearly conscious but which helps to
create the corroding cynicism from which the lower classes of modern
society suffer.
Since ideals of personal righteousness flourish in the genteel
poverty of the countryside at least as well as in urban middle class
conditions, the religion of peasants and the city’s middle classes have
two characteristics in common: their preoccupation with problems of
the individual life and their concern for the adjustment of the soul
to nature’s realities. But while they share these elements the two
types of religion are by no means identical. The simple expedient of
claiming divine and supernatural intervention in the soul’s specific
cases of distress does not appeal to the sophisticated intelligence of
city people, particularly since higher learning has become so general
and science has become the burden of this learning. They are anxious to
correct the intellectual inadequacies of traditional religion; and if
they are conscious of any moral defects in it, they have the easy faith
that these will be eliminated with a proper adjustment of religious
affirmations to the world of scientific fact.
The conflict between orthodoxy and liberalism, between fundamentalism
and modernism, is essentially a conflict between city and countryside.
Though the Protestant Reformation was used by the rising cities
to assert the needs of the inner life against a too artificially
elaborated institutional religion and to express an ethic of
individualism against the traditional loyalties of the peasants
rather than to make a readjustment of religion to the growing demands
of intellectual life, the humanistic revival which preceded the
Reformation was clearly determined by this latter interest and it
contributed to the dissolution of the medieval religious structure.
In the recent theological controversies within Protestantism, between
Conservatism and Liberalism, the religious naïvete of the agrarian and
the intellectual sophistication of the city are more obvious influences
in the conflict.
The revision of ancient affirmations of faith in the light of modern
learning was of course necessary from the point of view of the general
needs of the age, and not required merely to satisfy the intellectual
scruples of a particular class in society which has a preponderant
influence in the Protestant church. It might be better to say therefore
that the commercial middle classes appropriated as much as they
prompted the revision of Protestant theology and religion.
By doing this they have indeed created a religion capable of
maintaining itself in urban civilization, but it develops little
power for the ethical reconstruction of industrial society. The same
religionists who pride themselves upon the reasonableness of their
faith generally use their very modern and revised religion to sanctify
a very unmodern and unrevised ethical orthodoxy, an individualistic
orthodoxy which makes much of self-realization and comparatively little
of the social needs of modern life.
The kind of liberal religion which thrives among the privileged
classes of the city gives them some guarantee of the worth of their
personalities against the threats of a seemingly impersonal universe
which science has revealed, but it does not help to make them aware
of the perils to personality in society itself. The final test of any
religion must be its ability to prompt ethical action upon the basis
of reverence for personality. To create a world view which justifies a
high appreciation of personality and fails to develop an ethic which
guarantees the worth of personality in society, is the great hypocrisy.
It is the hypocrisy which is corrupting almost all modern religion.
In a sense hypocrisy is the inevitable by-product of every religion.
Men are never as good as their ideals and never as conscious as the
impartial observer of their divergence from them. Every religious
person commits the error of solipsism in some form or other, the
sin of claiming for himself what he will not grant to his brothers.
The religion of modern men, particularly of the privileged classes,
seems to be more than ordinarily insincere, partly because the social
simplicity of another age obscured this inevitable hypocrisy and partly
because the privilege of the religious classes is so great and its
unethical basis in modern society, particularly from the perspective of
the lowly, so patent and so destructive, that it is no longer possible
to veil the immoral implications of a self-centered religion.
The question which we really face, therefore, is whether religion is
constitutionally but a sublimation of man’s will to live or whether
it can really qualify the will of the individual and restrain his
expansive desires for the sake of society. If it is only the former,
it will continue to be the peculiar possession either of those who
have no urgent social problems or of those who are the beneficiaries
and not the victims of social maladjustments. If religion is not
now functioning in the solution of social and ethical problems, its
impotence in this field may be due to constitutional weaknesses which
may be corrected, once they are understood, or it may be due to certain
specific historical influences of the past centuries of Western life
which further experience will change and qualify. If religion has
resources for the solution of social and ethical problems which have
not been made available for the uses of society, it is the duty of
modern teachers of religion and of all who still have confidence
in its social efficacy or who benefit by its comforts to work for
the elimination of its social limitations, whether they seem to be
incidental and casual or basic and constitutional. Even constitutional
limitations in the social task need not discredit religion as a social
force; for a valuable resource may be closely related to a social
limitation and a way may be discovered to detach the one from the
other. Men always tend to be either uncritical devotees or merciless
critics of the various values which emerge in human life. This is
particularly true in regard to the values of religion, the limitations
of which are always aggravated by its unreflective champions and
made the occasion of sweeping abuse by its critics. Religious people
have assumed too easily that a religious life must issue not only in
private rectitude but in perfect social attitudes. This overestimate
of its social usefulness easily creates a reaction of criticism which
denies that there is any useful counsel in religion for the problems of
society or any dynamic necessary for their solution.