RELIGION AND LIFE: CONFLICT AND COMPROMISE
It is obvious that the ethical potency of religion depends largely
upon its ability to make its ideals effective in the world and yet
preserve a measure of detachment from those natural forces which
express themselves in human society and offer such stubborn resistance
to every spiritual and ethical ideal that no victory has yet been
gained over them in which the heel of the victor has not been
bruised. Ideal religion makes reverence for personality the end of
human action. Society has its various secular ends the attainment of
which necessitates the debasement of personality. Religion seeks to
persuade men to sacrifice immediate advantages for ultimate values;
the average man whose influence is dominant in all large social groups
is not easily persuaded to forego immediate and concrete advantages
for values which are too remote and too ephemeral to captivate his
imagination. There must therefore be a tension between the spiritual
ideal and all historic societies. The significance of Jesus for the
religious life of the Western world is due to his attainment and
incarnation of a spiritual and moral ideal of such absolute and
transcendent nature that none of his followers have been able to
compromise it by their practical adjustments to the social necessities
of their day. There is therefore a resource in the avowed loyalty of
Western civilization to his ideal which may yet become the basis of its
redemption. It is the peculiar characteristic of men and societies, and
an evidence of both their moral and immoral nature, that they reserve
their most unqualified devotion for those ideals and personalities
which they find difficult to realize or emulate. They pay tribute to
the ideal even while they are corrupting it and they reward those
who have accommodated it to their indifferent capacities with a more
qualified respect.
It was probably inevitable that the church should adjust the spiritual
ideal, which to propagate it ostensibly regards as its very raison
d’être, to the practical needs of the various ages and social orders
with which it came in contact. But it is necessary that it should be
shrewd enough to see the compromise involved in every adjustment and
be stubborn enough to make a new bid for victory after every partial
defeat. On the whole the Catholic church, which Protestants easily
assume to have been more amenable to the practical demands of an
unregenerate society than the churches of the Reformation, has really
been much shrewder than these in gauging the hazards to virtue in the
most natural social relationships. Some of the moral weaknesses in the
modern church may be traced directly to the naïvete of Protestantism in
dealing with the vagaries of human nature, and in failing to estimate
the overt and covert peril to its values in the ordinary ways of men.
Medieval Catholicism had various strategies in preserving and relaxing
the tension between the ideal of religion and the practical needs of
men and society. It made fewest demands upon the individual. He was
permitted to indulge almost all the natural appetites and ambitions
which characterize the life of the average man. For him the religion of
the church was a magic which guaranteed divine intervention in critical
moments and which offered a rather easy short-cut to the prizes of the
spirit which ought to be won only by virtuous achievement. Yet this
same church had an uncompromising attitude toward the various social
institutions which Protestantism has never equaled. It insisted on the
sacramental nature of the family union with such intransigeance that
it may fairly be accused of failing to make necessary accommodations
of its spiritual ideal to the imperfections of human nature. It dealt
with economic relations with less severity but enforced ethical ideals
upon them which must seem unusually exacting to an age which has become
accustomed to the connivance of Protestantism with laissez-faire
economics. The master of the medieval church, Thomas Aquinas, had
elaborated a theory of the just price for all commercial transactions,
which the church made every effort to apply and which it enforced
through the canonical law. The church did not organize the guilds but
it blessed them; and their efforts to regulate wages, fix fair profits,
insure high quality of merchandise and organize mutual aid among
their members were prompted by a religiously inspired moral idealism.
While it dealt less successfully with the ethical implications of the
relations between landowners and peasants, it impressed the owners
with a sense of their obligation toward those who were economically
dependent upon them which to this day gives the landed aristocracy
of European nations a certain moral superiority over the industrial
overlords who have been trained in more modern schools of thought. The
ambition of the medieval church to dominate the life of the nations
is well known but frequently misinterpreted. The contest between the
papacy and the empire was indeed in some of its aspects no more than
a conflict between two great political organizations lusting for the
power which easily becomes the sole end of the life of social and
political organisms. Yet there was a measure of ethical idealism in
the political aspirations of the popes to which Protestant thought
has given scant justice. In the two greatest exponents of the papacy
as an international political force, Gregory VII and Innocence III,
particularly in Gregory, the ethical ideal of a unified Christian
society which knows how to hold the capricious self-will of nations in
check and how to set bounds to their natural lust for power is of no
small moment in the development of papal policy. The very autocracy of
the papacy, which the modern world finds so little to its liking, was
elaborated by Gregory in order to save the church from international
anarchy and make it an instrument of international unification.
Incidentally Gregory was neither the first nor the last great statesman
who preferred autocracy to anarchy, and the preference is supported by
more than one lesson of history. Free coöperation between individuals
and groups is a high and rare political and moral achievement, and
where men’s capacities are unequal to it there are occasions when it
may be better to sacrifice freedom than to destroy social cohesion. At
any rate the medieval church revealed both political shrewdness and
spiritual idealism in its attempt to dominate the life of nations.
Naturally its efforts did not result in any ideal society. The ambition
of the Cæsar haunted the life of the popes and in many respects the
work of their hands approximated the dominion of an Augustus more
nearly than the kingdom of God of Christian dreams. The Christian ideal
of an ethical international society was thus corrupted by imperial
ambition in its very inception, and the historical realities which
sprang from it diverged even farther from any conceivable ideal. Yet
the whole political policy of the medieval church is in marked contrast
to the easy capitulation of historic Protestantism before the force
of economic and political groups. If Catholicism’s treatment of the
moral problems of the individual represents the relaxation of the
tension between religion and life, and its social and political policy
represents the compromise which follows inevitably upon the conflict of
the ideal with the moral inertia of life, its monasticism represents
the strategy of religion when it seeks to maintain an absolute tension
between its ideal and historic reality.
The various ascetic movements which prospered under the general
ægis of the medieval church represent so many different types of
religious idealism that no generalization about them will be accurate.
Protestantism reacted violently from the monastic ideal and therefore
has been able to see nothing in monasticism but a selfish flight
from life’s realities. Monasticism may be a retreat from life, but
at its best it was not a selfish retreat. Its development of the
arts, its emphasis on learning, its vast philanthropies and its
religious zeal for those outside of the monastic walls are not selfish
characteristics. It did sometimes degenerate into a very odious type
of spiritual selfishness and pride; but if we judge it by its typical
exemplars, we cannot accuse it of a lack of social passion. The
religious fervor of Catholic ascetics has been matched by Protestant
mystics, but their ethical insights have never been excelled. Their
superior moral shrewdness was revealed in their ability to detect
the perils to the ethical ideal which are covert in the natural and,
from any obvious perspective, virtuous social relationships. They saw
that the family, in itself the most virtuous of human groups, could
easily become the occasion for disloyalty to high fealties of the
soul. “Whoso loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of
me,” Jesus had said, and no one in the history of the church seems
to have understood the problem with which he dealt in those words as
well as Catholic ascetics. It must be said that the celibacy of the
monasteries was not prompted solely by the desire to avoid conflicting
loyalties; it sprang partly from a morbid evaluation of the sexual
relation. That was probably the weakest and least worthy characteristic
of medieval asceticism. Its understanding of the perils to the spirit
in the possessive instinct was perhaps its finest bit of insight. It
understood how easily the privilege and power which spring from the
possession of property may corrupt the soul with pride and destroy a
loving relationship between individuals. It therefore insisted upon the
vow of poverty. In all these problems the insight of asceticism was
superior to its strategy. It saw peril in ordinary human relationships
where most modern Christians are unable to detect them; but it knew of
no way to overcome the peril except by destroying the relationships
and building its unique fellowship of the spirit upon the basis of
celibacy, poverty and absolute obedience. In asceticism the flowers of
the spirit are cut from the roots by which they are supported and life
is destroyed in the process of its purification. Asceticism creates a
high type of ethical spirituality which cannot be universalized without
completely destroying society; and the virtue which it develops can
be maintained only in its own artificial media and therefore lacks
redemptive force. The great medieval ascetics have always claimed
Jesus as their authority though he was not an ascetic in their sense.
He disassociated himself from the asceticism of John the Baptist,
who had come “neither eating nor drinking,” and unlike the ascetics
he had no morbid fears of natural enjoyments. Protestantism has
therefore regarded asceticism as the result of a foolish literalism
which failed to allow for poetic latitude in the words of Jesus.
Nevertheless it must be admitted that both his words and his practice
have a closer affinity to medieval asceticism at its best than to
any modern spiritualized worldliness which tries vainly to unite the
largest number of spiritual graces with the greatest possible temporal
advantages. Francis of Assisi was surely more like the real Jesus than
Bruce Barton’s modernized caricature of the original. The strategy of
Jesus might be described as a leaning in the direction of asceticism,
as a hovering upon its brink. He is saved from its morbid temper by
the wholesome common sense which leavens all his attitudes. The virtue
of asceticism lies in its ability to detect the perils to a virtuous
life in the necessary and inevitable social relationships in which all
individual personality must develop; its limitation is its inclination
to destroy the relationships in order to overcome the peril. Religious
idealism, nurtured in the individualism of Protestantism, fails to
appreciate the virtue of asceticism, while it condemns its limitations
because it fails to realize how fundamentally all individual ethical
achievements are qualified by the society in which men live. Wherever
that fact is fully understood, every honest effort to maintain
the purity of the religious ideal will result in strategies which
will approximate asceticism at many points and which may excel it
only in the ability to avoid its depreciation, occasionally morbid
depreciation, of the ordinary functions of life.
Protestantism’s reactions to the problems of preserving a sense of
tension between religion and life have been a little more varied than
those of the medieval church because of the multifarious nature of its
historic forms. But varied as may be the strategies of the various
churches, they do not finally differ from the three which Catholicism
employed, i.e., capitulation without a struggle, compromise after a
struggle, and victory gained through the device of avoiding some of
the issues. The marked differences between the medieval and the modern
church lie in the areas of life where the struggle between religion
and human inertia was attempted, where the compromises were made and
where the victories were won. If Catholicism left the individual to his
own devices, the churches of the Reformation followed a similar course
in dealing with the moral problems of all human groups. The state was
completely secularized under Protestant influence. The Reformation was
in some of its aspects simply a simultaneous revolt of the various new
nations of Europe against the restraints of the international papacy.
In Germany, Scotland and finally in England, the nationalistic motive
was a decided force in destroying the prestige of the old religion.
Lutheranism capitulated much more easily to the secular state than
Calvinism, which tried in fact to maintain the ancient controls upon
political life. But once the Reformation had destroyed the old unity of
Western society and the prestige of the organization which maintained
it, secular nationalism became the universal characteristic of Western
civilization. Even Calvinism, which was ambitious to dominate the
policy of political states, hardly had the opportunity of affecting
international relations. Its influence barely went beyond domestic
policy, and there it was less interested in the morality of the state
than in the legal enforcement of individual moral ideals. The greed
and lust for power of national groups is not a unique characteristic
of the modern world; but our own era takes the moral autonomy of
the nation for granted more generally than did the Middle Ages. The
Protestant church did not create Machiavellian politics but it was more
impotent before unscrupulous nationalism than any other institution of
the religious ideal, and its impotence was partly due to its lack of
interest in social problems.
The emancipation of economic relations from all ethical restraint
was more or less concomitant with the Reformation movements, but it
is a question how much it was causally and how much coincidentally
related. Tawney[7] thinks that the growing complexity of commercial
transactions invalidated the old canonical laws designed to enforce
ethical standards in business, and thus made the secularization of
economics inevitable even before the Reformation. Luther and Calvin
were as anxious as the fathers of the medieval church to preserve moral
standards in business. But they were no more ingenious than these in
devising new and more flexible methods of control when the prohibition
of usury and the fixation of a just price were swept away by a growing
commerce which made money-lending an incident of commercial enterprise
rather than a philanthropic device, and which engulfed the standards by
which a just price was determined in a sea of economic relativities.
Luther was completely baffled by the intricacies of the new world and
could do little more than try vehemently but futilely to maintain the
old prohibition against usury and insinuate meanwhile that the recently
developed system of international banking was in some mysterious way
related to the evil conspiracies of the papacy. Calvinism, true to its
genius, was more ambitious in dealing with the problems of commerce; so
much so in fact that Beza’s thunderous denunciations of covetousness
prompted the Geneva Council to declare that he stirred up class hatred
against the wealthy. Yet it was Calvin who finally destroyed the last
vestige of medievalism in economics by justifying interest. Though his
action prompted the charge that “usury was the brat of heresy,” he
probably did no more than to recognize the logic inherent in the facts
of a new economic development. There was no more conscious desire to
emancipate commercial life from the sanctions of morality and religion
in Protestantism than in the ancient church; but the preoccupation of
the leaders of the Reformation with the problem of the inner life and
the general temper of individualism which characterized the Protestant
churches undeniably accelerated the processes of secularization. In
time Adam Smith rather than Thomas Aquinas became the moral authority
of the commercial world, and, whatever may have been the futile fury of
the early reformers, Protestantism did finally accept the economics of
laissez faire and habituated itself to a world in which vast areas or
life were withdrawn not only from the influence of religiously inspired
ethical ideals, but from every ethical sanction whatsoever. Thus was
the present world created in which “business is business” and “politics
is politics,” i.e., in which the non-moral character of two of the most
important social relationships of mankind is taken for granted.
If Protestantism made its easy capitulation before the larger social
groups of mankind and its premature peace with them, it developed
its most stubborn resistance to the natural appetites of men in
its influence upon the individual life. It was precisely in that
area of life in which the medieval church was least effective that
Protestantism displayed its highest ambition. At this point it becomes
impossible to speak in general terms of Protestantism, for the
strategies of Calvinism and Lutheranism in dealing with the problems
of the inner life differ widely, even more widely than their social
policies. The unique characteristics of either are frequently the
common characteristics of Protestantism when viewed from some external
perspective; but an intimate view may reveal them in the light of very
different religions. Calvinism is religion’s most energetic effort to
master the ethical life of the individual. In some of its historic
forms, in Geneva and Scotland and the American colonies for instance,
its social policy was ambitious enough to compare with that of Pope
Gregory, but its chief interest was not in the social institution as
such. It merely used the political power to reinforce an uncompromising
ethical rigor in the life of the individual. In Calvinism the religion
of the modern world makes its boldest bid for the ethical mastery of
life. Calvinism believed that life could be dominated by the spiritual
and ethical ideal if the individual could be persuaded to control
his appetites and to overcome his natural indolence. A temperate,
industrious, thrifty and honest individual was, in its esteem, the
perfect exemplar of the religious ideal and the stuff out of which a
new society could be built. It never faced the problem of the conflict
between the ideal in the soul of the individual and the intractable
forces in human society because its moral ideals were socially and
economically very useful and it could therefore indulge the illusion
that economic success, social well-being and obvious happiness are
the natural and inevitable fruits of the religious life. Hence it was
a religion admirably suited for the middle classes who rose to power
in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century, for it endowed
them with virtues which would insure their success and it doubled their
zeal by giving religious sanction to their secular enterprises. The
ancient and medieval world had given moral precedence to a life of
leisure and meditation, whether of aristocrat or philosopher, of monk
or priest. Calvinism was as contemptuous of luxury and leisure as of
the arts and amenities which flourished in them. Its sanctification
of the common task, of manual toil and of commercial enterprise was
in itself a valuable contribution to social progress. It was in a way
the spiritual foundation upon which the whole structure of modern
civilization has been built. It developed a high type of honesty
without which the intricate credit relationships of modern commerce
would have been impossible. It encouraged a diligence which was the
driving force in establishing the commercial classes in power over a
moribund aristocracy. Its religiously inspired habits of continence
and temperance gave the lower classes a sense of moral dignity and a
natural self-respect which they needed in challenging the pride and
complacency of the aristocratic world. These puritan virtues have
moreover given the whole north European world and America (which is
more puritan than any nation, because here the puritan life flourished
on virgin soil and remained unqualified by the vestiges of medievalism
which remain firmly imbedded in the culture of even the most modern
European nations) a robust vitality and moral urge which have had no
small part in developing their political hegemony in the modern world.
The conflict of puritan religion with the world has however resulted in
the inevitable compromise between the religious ideal and the world’s
primitive urges and desires. Its moral weakness lies in its naïve
confidence of victory over the world and its inability to discover
the relativities and qualifications which history has wrought upon
its absolute. If the spiritual idealism of Jesus is the norm for
Christians, the Calvinists and puritans diverged from it more seriously
than they knew in the very conception of their ideal. The love and
reverence for personality which is the basis of the ethics of Jesus
is totally lacking in Calvinism. It knows how to create self-respect
but lacks the imagination to inculcate a religious respect for others,
except possibly for the respectable. Its confidence in the obvious
rewards of virtue tempted it to abhor poverty and hold the poor
in contempt, though they might become the helpful occasion for the
exercise of that philanthropy without which the idea of Christian
stewardship could not be realized. While early Calvinism had an heroic
mood which would have scorned to make a concession to the selfishness
of man through the sanctification of prudential ethics, its ethical
theories did nevertheless lend themselves to easy appropriation by
moralists who were intent upon identifying the social good with a
decent selfishness. The uncompromising spirituality of the ethics of
Jesus is totally lacking in Calvinism. Its moral theories were in
fact derived from the Old rather than the New Testament; and there
is hardly a scintilla of evidence in Calvinistic thought that the
Sermon on the Mount is recorded in the scripture which it accepted as
revealed finality. Its very bibliolatry was partly responsible for its
non-Christian type of ethics, for through it the casual moral theories
of the early Hebrews achieved the dignity of absolute truth. Lack
of historical perspective in the use of the Old Testament further
aggravated this error, for the real worth of the prophets was never
appreciated and their high type of moral idealism could not serve
to qualify the less heroic morality of the law and the superficial
moralizing of the Wisdom literature. Incidentally it may be observed
that bibliolatry is one of the handicaps to moral progress in almost
all religions. Through it primitive cultures and moral customs which
happen to be enshrined in the canon become absolutely authoritative,
and the weight of their influence is set against new ventures in moral
life.
If Calvinistic and puritan idealism departed from its assumed norm in
its very conception, the moral realities which issued from it bore even
less resemblance to the absolute idealism of the ethics of Jesus. Its
unqualified confidence in the power of individual virtue to overcome
the world and change society contributed to the relaxation of moral
restraints upon social institutions and the secularization of society
to which reference has been made. Its sanctification of secular tasks
led inevitably to a sanctification of secular motives which it did not
desire but could not prevent. Men were to serve God by diligence in
their daily toil. But what was the end of industry which endowed it
with virtue? The puritan answer was to regard work as an end in itself,
an emphasis which it learned to make in its reaction to monastic
and aristocratic idleness. But that answer alone could not suffice.
Inevitably the material gains which were the rewards of industry were
given a special religious sanction. “If God show you a way in which
you may lawfully get more than in another way, without wrong to your
soul or to any other, if you refuse this and choose the less gainful,
you cross one of the ends of your Calling and refuse to be God’s
steward,” said Governor Bradford.[8] The ancient and medieval world
had been more or less scornful of the pursuit of wealth and abounded
in characters among both the nobility and the peasantry who thought
it beneath their dignity to increase their patrimony. The religious
sanction of material gain was a new thing in history and undoubtedly
helped to fashion the moral temper of modern society in which diligence
is the great virtue and greed the besetting vice.[9] It is the puritan
heritage of America which gives a clew to the paradox of our national
life. It explains how we can be at the same time the most religious and
the most materialistic of all modern nations.
If puritanism failed to see how easily the virtue of thrift might
be transmuted into the vice of avarice, it was even less careful to
guard the righteous soul against the perils to virtue which inhere
in the power which wealth supplies. There are few men who can wield
extraordinary power without making it the tool of their own desires
and without magnifying their limitations which might pass unnoticed
in less puissant individuals. Puritanism did indeed have a doctrine
of stewardship, but it was applied to the privilege which flowed from
economic power and not to the possession of power itself. There was
never enough imagination in puritanic religion to detect how nature
in the soul of man, frustrated by a discipline of the senses, comes
into its own through the sins of the mind. It knew how to redeem
human life from its vagrant passions, but it did not know how to
deal with those dominant desires, the lust for power and the greed
for gain, which express themselves more frequently in a disciplined
personality than in a chaotic one and which may be more detrimental
to the welfare of others than the consequences of undisciplined and
momentary passions. It was a spiritual discipline admirably suited to
lift the middle classes to a dominant position in society but hardly
designed to guide them in the use of the power once they had achieved
it. Even its abhorrence of luxury and prohibition of extravagance is
finally softened in a civilization which has profited all too well by
its virtues and is tempted to destroy them by the very advantages which
the virtues supplied. John Wesley, who revived puritan morality after
it had declined in its original form, saw this problem more clearly
than his predecessors, but he had no answer for it except to advocate
philanthropic generosity. He writes in his _Journal_: “Religion must
necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot
but produce riches. But as riches increase so will pride, anger and
love of the world in all its branches.... So although the form of
religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away. Is there no
way to prevent this—this continual decay of pure religion? We ought
not prevent people from being diligent and frugal; we must exhort all
Christians to gain all they can and save all they can; that is, in
effect, to grow rich. What way then can we take that our money may not
sink us in the nethermost hell? There is one way and there is no other
under heaven. If those who gain all they can and save all they can
will likewise give all they can, then the more they give the more will
they grow in grace and the more treasure will they lay in heaven.”[10]
Wesley, of course, could hardly be expected to appreciate that money
represents power even more than privilege in modern society, and that
philanthropy may become a method of satisfying the ego and displaying
power.
Many of the moral and religious limitations of modern civilization
may be attributed first to the partial victory and then to the
self-destruction of puritan religion in modern civilization. In
puritanism religion made one of its boldest advances upon the world;
and so confident was it of victory that it prepared no one for the
moral relativities which were the inevitable issue of its enterprise.
In dealing with the stubborn resistance of the material world it is
better to expect victory than to assume defeat before the battle is
begun. Yet an undue confidence may be as dangerous to the enterprise
as a timorous spirit. The medieval ascetics who regarded all human
relationships with a critical spirit, and rather expected the old
Adam to assert himself in seemingly the most innocent human concerns,
possessed spiritual insights which were totally lacking in the typical
puritan. He expected to build a society in which the scripture was
“really and materially to be fulfilled.”
It will have been noted that Calvinism and puritanism have been used
in this discussion as interchangeable terms. The fact is that, while
the two terms are not synonymous theologically, the moral temper of
Calvinism was so potent in the whole non-Lutheran Protestant world that
all of the various denominations were indoctrinated with its puritan
spirit. The various sects had their own theological peculiarities, but
in their puritan spirit they were essentially one. Only the Quakers
departed from it; for George Fox had discovered the ethics of Jesus,
and the religion of the Friends was ever after to express itself in
terms relevant to the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. Denominations
such as the Baptists and Methodists who evangelized Western America
gave a rebirth to the puritan spirit when it suffered decay in its more
native haunts. Their history is additional evidence for the thesis
that puritanism is a religious sublimation of the life of the middle
classes. For when the heroic spirit of puritanism declined in those
classes which it had lifted to power, it was reborn in the lower middle
classes of England and the Western pioneers of America. Methodism
is theologically as unrelated to Calvinism as can be imagined. Its
theological presuppositions are really more congenial to a dynamic
puritanism than those of Calvinism; for the moral vigor of Calvinism
was logically incompatible with its deterministic faith. Denominations
such as the Baptists and Methodists with their strong emphasis on
regeneration as the basis of church membership aggravated one weakness
of Protestantism, for all of their spiritual vigor. Their tests of what
constituted regeneration were drawn from religious experience rather
than from its moral fruits; yet they were bound to assume that a marked
moral contrast existed between the saved and the unsaved. Thus they
accentuated what Professor A. Whitehead has defined as the Protestant
oversimplification of ethics, i.e., a tendency to judge men, in spite
of the intricacy of their inner life and the complexity of their
social relations, as being either good or bad. This is simply another
aspect of Protestant individualism, but it is an aspect which emerges
more clearly in the free churches which have renounced all ambition
to have a membership coextensive with the citizenship of the state
than in those churches in which some vestige of the state-church idea
still remains. The superior spiritual vigor of churches which make
a religious experience the prerequisite of fellowship in the church
may well be conceded; but that does not change the fact that ethical
values in a complex civilization are frequently imperiled by the
oversimplification of moral issues, which is the inevitable by-product
of simple religious tests. Men are neither totally good nor totally bad
when they live in a society which may corrupt the virtuous intention of
the most robust idealist, or when their own inner life is so complex
that moral purpose may express itself in one of its areas and be
betrayed in another. There is a moral simplicity in Protestantism which
is closely related to its individualism and which is particularly
unfortunate, since it is the characteristic of a religion which orients
the ethical life of peoples who have tremendous responsibilities in the
complex life of Western civilization.
Calvinism has frequently been referred to as Protestant asceticism.[11]
Its robust moral energies are indeed commensurate with the strict
ethical discipline of medieval monasticism, but with this difference:
that one is developed within the world and the other outside of the
world of ordinary human relations. But it is precisely this difference
which makes Lutheranism more closely related to asceticism than
Calvinism; for Lutheranism is the Protestant way of despairing of
the world and of claiming victory for the religious ideal without
engaging the world in combat. Both are founded upon an ethical
dualism. The medieval ascetic flees from the world into the monastery
and there attempts realization of his religious ideal; the Lutheran
quietist flees from the world into the asylum of his inner life
where he comes into the emotional possession of the ideal without
risking its refinements in the world of cruel realities. The one has
a dualism which divides the monastic from ordinary men; the other
draws the line within the soul of each individual and expects him to
realize in his religious experience what he cannot reveal in ordinary
human relations. If Calvinism is _Weltfreundlich_, Lutheranism like
asceticism is _Weltfeindlich_. It has little hope that a kingdom of God
will be established upon earth, except perhaps through supernatural
intervention. It places all its emphasis upon the sentiment of Jesus:
“The kingdom of God is within you.” It must be admitted that Jesus’
conception of the kingdom of God is probably as much related to
quietistic religion as to puritan morality, though ascetic religion
seems closer to him than either. The modern church has dismissed the
eschatological element in Jesus’ teachings as the Semitic shell in
which Jesus developed his conception of the kingdom of God as a social
ideal; but it was more probably his way of expressing doubt that his
ideal could ever be realized in history except by a miracle of God.
Yet the apocalyptic element in the gospel was qualified by the idea
of the kingdom to be realized by evolutionary process. The kingdom
of God was also “like unto a mustard seed.” Jesus in short was both
pessimistic and optimistic in regard to the spiritual potentialities of
human society, and in his paradoxical rather than consistent position
he was able to maintain the tension between religion and life in a way
which has escaped both parties in the churches of the Reformation. Of
this more will be said later. The attitude of Lutheran piety toward the
world has the merit and the limitation characteristic of all pessimism.
It sharpens the ideal but despairs of its realization. Lutheran
doctrine was fashioned out of the religious experiences of a tumultuous
soul seeking peace and failing to find it in any of the institutions
which were meant to incarnate the religious ideal or in any of the
observance which were intended to express it. The institution shocked
him by their imperfections, and the observances and rituals had
undergone the inevitable process which reduces a necessary symbolism
to a kind of magic in which the symbol achieves potencies originally
ascribed only to the ineffable truth or reality for which it stands.
From all historic relativities of the institutions and superficialities
of religious rites Luther reacted and discovered his absolute in the
religious experience in which the soul appropriates the grace of God.
In that mystic communion all natural imperfections of the human spirit
are transcended and the soul is lifted out of the relativities of time
and circumstance. It is easy to see how inevitable is this emphasis in
the history of religion but also how perilous it may become to moral
values. It is inevitable because every sensitive conscience suffers at
times from a realization that “our reach is beyond our grasp,” that
moral capacities are not equal to the goals set by imagination and
hope. The apostle Paul, whose religious experience closely paralleled
those of Luther and whose theology therefore became authoritative for
him, complained: “... the good that I would, I do not; but the evil
which I would not, that I do.... For I delight in the law of God after
the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against
the law in my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin
that is in my members. O wretched man that I am. Who shall deliver
me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our
Lord.”[12] That is a classic statement of the dualism in life which
every religion is tempted to overcome by transcending it. Lutheranism
was in fact but a revival of Pauline Christianity and it was Pauline
Christianity which had built the Christian church. In it the tension
between religion and life which is maintained in the religious idealism
of Jesus is relaxed and the sensitive soul is given the assurance that
a merciful God will know how to complete what is so incomplete and
how to perfect our manifest imperfections. Thus the same Jesus who in
the gospels is a bold adventurer of the spirit who challenges his
disciples to be perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect becomes in
the epistles the symbol of the divine grace which knows how to accept
our intentions for our achievements. It may be unfair to speak of a
conflict between the religion of Jesus and the religion of Paul; for it
was a heavenly Father and not a jealous judge who was central in the
thought of Jesus, and his emphasis upon forgiveness shocked the strict
moralists of his day. But if there is no conflict at this point, there
is a marked change in emphasis. In the one the appropriation of divine
grace is a necessary part of the moral adventure; in the other it is
separated from the moral enterprise and easily becomes a substitute
for it. Paul had indeed disavowed all antinomian tendencies in his
doctrine of grace. “What shall we then say? Shall we continue to sin
that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we that are dead to sin,
live any longer therein?” Obviously the mystical experience in both
the Pauline and the Lutheran religion was not unrelated to the life of
moral purpose and was not consciously used to obviate the necessity
for moral enterprise. But what is to prevent men from making a
premature appropriation of the peace it guarantees, before and without
deserving it? In that lies a peril to morality in almost all religion
which Pauline and Lutheran theology did not create but which it may
accentuate. It is well to remember that some of the greatest perils to
morality in the life of religion arise out of its most cherished and
necessary characteristics. Religion is at once the necessary partner
and the potential foe of moral life.
The quietistic tendencies of religion, particularly as elaborated by
Pauline and Lutheran theology, are less dangerous in a simple society
than in a complex one. Ethical attitudes in simple social relations
flow almost automatically out of a religious experience, even though
the conscious interpretation of the experience is scornful of the
“righteousness of works.” But in the secondary and more complex
social relationships the moral urge which issues out of the religious
experience is easily frustrated by the intricacies and relativities
of historic realities and institutions. How shall the soul preserve
the sense of the absolute which it has gained in the religious
experience from contamination by the sins which are covert in all
social relations? It is in the varying answers of quietistic religion
to that question that its ethical limitations are vividly revealed.
One answer is to avoid conflict with political and social institutions
on the score that they are divinely ordained. “Let every soul be
subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God; the
powers that be are ordained of God,” said the apostle Paul. When it is
remembered that the reference is to the government of the Roman empire,
the social conservatism implicit in this logic is obvious. It was this
attitude of Paul which made it easy for Luther to bring his church
into such intimate union with the various governments of Germany and
to maintain an attitude bordering on subservience toward the German
princes. The political conservatism of Lutheranism has since been its
unvarying characteristic and has had its marked effects upon history,
in no period more so than in that of the World War. State churches of
any kind easily become the tools of the secular state, but Lutheran
state churches have usually been more compliant tools than the Anglican
church, for instance, which has never quite renounced the old Catholic
ambitions of partnership with the state.
Another method of which quietistic religion avails itself in dealing
with the world is to assume that its ideal will somehow achieve
automatic realization in the intricacies of economic and social life.
This method is hardly consistent with its pessimism, but it satisfies
the desire for practical results which is bound to assert itself in
even the most supra-moral religion. Thus Luther declares:[13] “There
can be no better instructions in ... all transactions in temporal
goods than that every man who is to deal with his neighbor present to
himself these commandments: ‘What you would that others should do
unto you, do ye also to them,’ and ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’ If
these were followed out, then everything would arrange and instruct
itself; all things would quietly and simply be set to rights, for
everyone’s heart and conscience would guide him.” It is a conceit of
religious people, by no means confined to Lutherans, that a vigorous
statement of the ideal ought to result in its realization. No one can
estimate how often the pulpit has insisted in these latter days that
war could be abolished if only the nations “would live according to
the law of Christ.” This characteristic frequently gives the church’s
pronouncements a curious air of futility; for ideals are neither
challenged nor applied if they are not finally embodied in concrete
proposals for specific situations. It is in such situations that the
ideal meets its real test and runs the peril of corruption. Frequently
the tendency of religion to be content with the statement of abstract
principles is due to a want of intellectual vigor which results easily
from religion’s mistrust of reason.
A method of dealing with the world which is more consistent with the
essential dualism of quietistic religion is its effort to give some
realization to the ideal by means of subjective religious emotion which
transcends the imperfections of society without attempting to change
them. Thus the ideal of brotherhood is to be realized by a religious
appreciation of all men as brothers, however much economic and social
facts may give the lie to the ideal. This was the apostle Paul’s
method of dealing with slavery and Luther emulated it in his attitude
toward the peasant’s revolt. Nothing gives a more illuminating clue
to the conservative implications of this type of religion than this
incident in the Reformation. The peasants, suffering in a state of
semi-slavery, saw in Luther’s statement of the gospel principles of
freedom, and in the religious ideal of the equal worth of all souls,
implicit in Christian teaching, a justification for their revolt
against the intolerable conditions of serfdom. They declared: “It has
been custom hitherto for men to hold us as their own property, which
is pitiable enough considering that Christ has delivered and redeemed
us all, the lowly as well as the great, by the shedding of his precious
blood. Accordingly it is consistent with scripture that we should be
free and should wish to be so. We therefore take it for granted that
you will release us from serfdom as true Christians, unless it should
be shown from the gospels that we are serfs.”[14] Luther violently
disavowed this practical application of his gospel. “This article
would make all men equal and so change the spiritual kingdom of Christ
into an external worldly one. Impossible. An earthly kingdom cannot
exist without inequality of persons. Some must be free, others serfs,
some rulers, others subjects. As St. Paul says, ‘In Christ there is
neither bond nor free.’” The violence of Luther’s reaction in this
instance was partly due to considerations of expediency; for he feared
to lose caste with the princes by having the Reformation identified
with radical political movements; yet it is fairly faithful to his
general conceptions of the nature and function of religion. Obviously
the dualism of Protestantism which separates the religious experience
of the individual from the social realities in which alone personality
can achieve significance has defects which are more perilous to social
values than the ethical dualism of medieval monasticism. If the ideal
is to be withdrawn from life to save it from corruption, it is better
that it be realized in some social medium, however artificial, than
that it be suspended in the thin air of religious sentiment and be
realized only in subjective experience.
An analysis of the various strategies of religion in establishing
contact with the historic situations and social realities in which it
must function reveals, in short, that it can pursue no course which
is altogether free of peril to its moral values. Capitulation without
conflict reduces religion to magic and secularizes life. A stubborn
conflict with the intractable forces of nature and history results in
some kind of compromise. Neither papal internationalism nor puritan
plutocracy are what the idealists who were responsible for them really
desired. And what they really desired fell short of their pretended
goals. Withdrawal from the world is equally dangerous. For it may
lead either to the morbid artificialities of asceticism or to the
sentimental subjectivism of quietistic religion. There are values in
each of the various strategies as well as perils. Perhaps those who
are too critical of their limitations can never create their values.
Religion must create its values in naïve faith and subject their
limitations to a critical intelligence. Of the various strategies
asceticism is probably nearest to the real genius of religion and most
adequate for the moral needs of our day. If a world is completely
astray the higher perspective from which it may be convicted of sin and
the greater dynamic which may function redemptively in its life both
depend upon some kind of detachment of religion from life.