TRANSCENDING AND TRANSFORMING THE WORLD
The tendency of modern religion to make itself at home in the world and
to enter into intimate relations with civilization is not due solely to
the puritan confidence of victory over life. It is partly due to the
influences of a sentimental and optimistic evaluation of human nature
which came to the modern church through Rousseau and romanticism. It
is also a product of the evolutionary optimism which has characterized
religious thought since ethicists and religionists have learnt to
overcome the melancholy conclusions implicit in the Darwinian theory
and to see the bright side of evolution. Traditional religion is
other-worldly. The modern church prides itself on its bright and happy
worldliness. It is more interested in transforming the natural and
social environment of personality than in persuading the soul to
transcend all circumstances and find its happiness in inner peace. The
modern church regards this mundane interest as its social passion.
But it is also the mark of its slavery to society. Whenever religion
feels completely at home in the world, it is the salt which has lost
its savor. If it sacrifices the strategy of renouncing the world, it
has no strategy by which it may convict the world of sin. A movement
which detaches religion from life to give it perspective and power over
life must on the other hand run the risk of centering the interests
of men on other than social problems. Religion thus faces a dilemma
which is not easily solved. A religion of social amelioration easily
becomes a beautiful romance which obscures the unlovely realities of
life. A religion of detachment from the world may persuade the soul
to find both happiness and virtue in defiance of physical and social
circumstances and thus to regard all social problems as irrelevant to
its main purpose. This dilemma is not due to any specific or historic
weaknesses in types of religion but arises out of the nature and
constitution of religion as such.
Religion in its unspoiled form is always other-worldly and
disenchanted. Puritanism, romanticism and evolutionary optimism are
really but reflections and refractions of the general temper of Western
life, which has slowly gained the ascendancy over the religious
spirit. It is a temper of friendliness to, or at least fearlessness
before the world. In puritanism the tension between religion and life
is maintained, but the soul is persuaded that it can bring the whole
of life under the dominion of conscience. In romanticism there is a
frank identification of human virtue with a sentimentally idealized
natural world. Religious and ethical thought which has come under the
influence of evolutionary optimism maintains a sense of tension between
the soul and the natural world in rare instances; more frequently it
regards human history as but the last chapter in the beautiful story
of progress which all life has unfolded and which time and patience
will inevitably bring to a happy issue. The foundation for the Western
strategy of life was laid by the Greeks who, overcoming the awe and
reverence with which the Oriental brooded over nature’s mysteries,
thrust impious hands into her secrets and made shrewd guesses about
her varied phenomena. The Greeks learned to make only slight practical
application of their knowledge, and the rise of Christianity eclipsed
their scientific temper. It came into its own again at the close of the
Middle Ages and at the dawn of the modern era. The fact that science
developed in the West rather than the East is due to this attitude
toward the natural world. The Orient is not less curious than the
Occident, but it directs its mind to other problems. While it cradles
philosophies and religions the West gives birth to science.
Since the dawn of the industrial era scientific knowledge is used
increasingly for the purpose of transforming the natural circumstance
of human life. Nature is not transcended but transformed in the
interest of human happiness. Comforts are multiplied; power is
increased; time and distance are destroyed; hours of toil are reduced;
natural environment is changed; disease is eliminated and death
postponed; the hostilities of nature are overcome and her benevolence
multiplied for the sake of human welfare. Our birth may be “but a
sleep and a forgetting” but our life is undeniably lived in natural
conditions which profoundly affect not only physical well-being but
cultural and spiritual character. It is evident therefore that there
is profound wisdom in the scientific strategy which transforms the
natural world in the interest of the human spirit. Not only is the
Western world firmly committed to it, but there are indications that
the Orient will adopt it in spite of the opposition of religious
leaders such as Gandhi. Whatever perils to the spiritual life may lurk
in the preoccupation of the soul with its physical circumstances, it
is clear that human personality may be served by improving the natural
environment which conditions it. Wealth may lead to sensual excess but
it is also the basis of culture. Leisure may be secured by reducing
physical wants to a minimum, but there are cultural advantages in a
leisure which does not preclude the satisfaction of all reasonable
desires. Comforts may lead men to become obsessed with their external
circumstances, but they also reduce irrelevant distractions to life’s
main purpose. Physical health is not a necessary but a convenient
condition for moral and spiritual enterprise.
In spite of these advantages religion, except in a few contemporary
forms, has always been either hostile or indifferent to the business
of transforming nature in the interest of personal values. It has
counseled the soul to seek its happiness not in changing but in
becoming independent of circumstances. In Buddhism the highest
happiness is sought by throttling all desires. Jesus was more careful
to distinguish between the will to live and its physical expressions.
But he was critical of all physical desires and satisfactions. He had
the Orient’s profound indifference to the “business of earth.” If
our ears were not so habituated to his words that they fail to catch
their real significance, a modern congregation would be shocked by
the admonition: “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or
what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is
not life more than meat and the body more than raiment?” “Lay not up
for yourselves treasures upon earth where moth and rust doth corrupt
and where thieves break through and steal, for where your treasure
is, there will your heart be also.” “Fear not them which kill the
body but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear him which is
able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” The modern Christian is
inclined to destroy the force of the profound other-worldliness of such
sentiments by reflecting that they represent an Oriental cast which is
incidental and not essential to the gospel of Jesus. They are Oriental
no doubt, but precisely because they are religious; and to regard them
as incidental is to miss the whole meaning of the gospel. Though the
West is unable to accept them, it pays an unconscious tribute to the
truth involved in them. For the absolute moral values incarnated in the
personality of Jesus, which the West still reveres, are organically
related to this other-worldliness.
Whatever the limitations of this emphasis, it is evident that religion
cannot escape it. Concerned with the soul’s inner peace and perfect
virtue it is forced to lift it above the corruptions and irrelevancies
of temporal conditions. The whole course of modern history is ample
justification for Jesus’ warning: Where your treasure is, there will
your heart be also. The instruments of personality’s victory over
nature have become the chains for a new kind of thraldom. Western
civilization is enslaved to its machines and the things which the
machines produce. Spiritual forces are emancipated from the forces of
nature only to become the victims of a mechanized civilization. It is
a Pyrrhic victory. America, which has developed the Western strategy
with greater consistency than any other nation, is at once the envy and
the scorn of the world. The scorn may be a device for hiding the envy,
but there is moral justification for reproach. What the world regards
as our vulgarity is more than the awkwardness of youth; it is an undue
preoccupation with life’s instrumentality and an obsession of the soul
with the concrete world.
The Orient may be more cruel than the West, but our superior tenderness
is matched by our more expansive avarice. Having determined that
life consists in things a man possesses, the West sacrifices both
inner peace and social harmony in the mad scramble for the power and
privilege which the conquests of nature has supplied. Neither the
imperialism of nations nor the monstrous avarice of economic groups
is confined to Western life, but covetousness and greed have been
manifestly increased by the temper and strategy of the Occident. The
Biblical analysis which discovers covetousness as the root of conflict
is applicable to our own day: “Ye lust and have not; ye kill and
desire to have, and cannot obtain; ye fight and war, yet ye have not
because ye ask amiss.... Know ye not that the friendship of this world
is enmity with God?”[18] However necessary it may be to make a more
equitable distribution of the physical blessings of life, religion’s
true function is to develop an attitude of indifference toward the
very goods for the possession of which men contend so frantically.
When Jesus rebuked the young man who desired his aid in correcting the
inequitable division of an inheritance, his unwillingness to assume
a judicial function was manifestly dictated by the thought that the
whole inheritance ought to have been a matter of indifference to the
young man. It is easy to see that such an attitude may lend itself to
abuse and be used to perpetuate inequalities. If advocated by religious
groups which have profited by economic inequalities, it becomes the
tool of hypocrisy. Yet it is an emphasis which religion cannot disavow.
It is basic to its whole world view.
The peril to happiness as well as to virtue in reliance upon the
external fortunes of life justifies the counsel of religion that
happiness must be founded on internal rather than external resources.
The conquest of nature is really but a relative victory of personality
over circumstance. Though the caprice of nature’s forces has been
checked, fortune remains fickle. If men cannot learn “how to be
abased and how to abound,” there is no guarantee of happiness for
them. Poverty may be a curse, but voluntarily chosen or consented to
without sullenness it may become the way of the soul’s emancipation.
The elimination of disease is a boon to mankind, but there is little
likelihood that science will be able to overcome all ills to which the
human flesh is heir. No scientific advance will obviate the necessity
for the discovery of faith that “God’s strength is made perfect in
weakness,” that the infirmities of the flesh may become the occasion
for the cultivation of spiritual graces. Even at best science cannot
destroy nature’s final irrelevancy—death. There can therefore be
no real victory over nature except by the strategy of transcending
her fortunes. The more hostages taken from her the greater will be
the disappointment in the hour of her final victory. It is man’s
sublime and tragic fate that he must find happiness in the search for
infinitude amidst the flux of time and he can therefore never accept
the portion of mortality for himself with equanimity. Hence his final
comfort must come from the counsel of religion which teaches him how he
may identify himself with the eternal values of his devotion, so that
“though the outward man perish yet the inward man is renewed day by
day.”[19]
The temper of Western civilization has made the modern church quite
ashamed of the other-worldly character of traditional religion, and
intent upon discarding it as much as possible. Everything is done
to impress the generation with the mundane interests of religious
idealism and to secularize religion itself so that it may survive
in a secular age as a kind of harmless adornment of the moral life.
Yet its service to both human happiness and virtue are involved in
its other-worldliness. It is through that element that it gains the
power to raise morality above the utilitarian plane and to give human
happiness a firmer foundation than fickle fortune. If men can find no
basis for happiness except in their adjustment to external realities,
they will not suffer pain to realize a kingdom of righteousness. If
they are taught to identify physical well-being with their cherished
peace, they will not venture farther than such actions as a cool
prudence prompts. The cross was inspired by devotion to a “kingdom
which is not of this world”; but the cross was also the method by which
that kingdom was changed from an ethereal to a concrete reality. It
is the absolute ideal which has no basis in concrete reality which
moves men to defy the limitations of the concrete and overcome them. A
religion which is perfectly at home in the world has no counsel for it
which the world could not gain by an easier method.
Yet the reaction of modern religion to traditional other-worldliness is
natural enough and, in a way, necessary. While religion cannot afford
to discard its other-worldliness, the moral and social limitations
which issue from it are obvious enough. We have previously observed
the tendency of types of religion to withdraw the ideal from life
and to imagine that it has magic potencies over life’s realities,
or that subjective devotion to it may absolve them of the duty of
realizing it in history. All these defects are due to vagaries
which are not inevitable characteristics of religious life. But
the social limitations which result from the religious strategy of
transcending the fortunes of life are constitutional and central. They
therefore offer a very serious problem. If the soul is lifted above
circumstances, it easily loses interest in changing them to better
advantage. If its happiness is made independent of fortune, there
is less purpose in making fortune secure. If personality discovers
its highest satisfactions in defying environmental factors, it may
become indifferent to the necessary projects of creating a more
favorable environment for personal values. Human personality is an
historic product, determined by specific forces of natural and social
environment, and though it may attain its highest glory by transcending
all circumstances, it will fall short if it adopts that strategy at
the beginning and not at the end of its efforts. The Orient, which
produces more saints than the Occident, pays for them by the abject
misery of its multitudes. Its highest moral achievements are really
determined by a cruel law of survival. Only personalities of great
spiritual resource can overcome the general physical conditions of its
life which submerge the mass in hopeless poverty.
Some credit for the advantages of Western life must be given to the
moral superiority of Christianity over Buddhism, which represents the
quintessence of the Oriental spirit. Christianity is a life-affirming
and Buddhism a life-denying faith. The one does not destroy but
refines the energy of life. The other destroys energy in the process
of refinement. The Orient is pantheistic; and by deifying all of
life, offers no avenue of escape from its imperfections except by
annihilation of life itself. There is a difference between fleeing to
God from life’s unbearable realities and identifying these with the
divine will. At its worst the strategy of the Orient is a fatalistic
acceptance of life’s circumstances; at its best it is a stifling of
all desires so that the soul may be free of the world. Yet there is
a social peril even in the more wholesome strategy of Christianity
which affirms life but divorces it from its physical necessities. This
limitation is felt particularly when the conditions which invite change
are social rather than natural. Nature is inexorable and it is well to
learn that only they are able to escape her furies who also know how
to renounce her delights. But the world which man has created retains
its cruelties only by the sufferance of man. Anything which will
incline men to assume an attitude of indifference toward projects of
social reform and amelioration is therefore a potential peril to social
progress. When Jesus rebuked the young man for his anxiety about an
equitable division of his inheritance, he took a high spiritual ground
which easily lends itself to abuse in the disillusioning realities
of economic and social life. What if a sublime renunciation does not
soften the hearts of those who hold more than their just share of the
inheritance? And what if the welfare of others besides that of the
moral idealist is involved in the renunciation? Shall the Biblical
injunction to servants that they be obedient to their masters “not only
to the good and gentle but also to the froward” apply to political
tyrannies? Obviously an attitude which represents a high spiritual
achievement in the individual instance has its limitations when raised
to a general social policy. Social radicals who have been confronted
with the conservatism of religion have parodied the other-worldly
temper at the heart of this characteristic in the words: “Bye and
bye, there’ll be pie in the sky.” The sneer in this parody hardly
does justice to religious other-worldliness. The emphasis is not so
much upon a future life as distinguished from the present existence
as upon a type of life which can afford to regard “pie” with disdain
whether in this or any other world. Nevertheless, even the highest type
of other-worldliness may become the cause of indifference to social
conditions. The very sensitiveness of religion which persuades it to
regard human society in the same category with the world of nature as
“the world” may result in the completer secularization of society and
its abandonment to the unchecked forces of nature.
There is no easy formula for avoiding this social peril in the strategy
of religion. The elimination of pantheism is a material aid in its
solution. The superior energy of the West may be due to a tentative
dualism in its religion which has been qualified from time to time
by pantheistic and monistic thought but never completely destroyed.
Yet even the dualism of Christianity does not save it altogether
from positions which offer peril to social and moral values. Even an
observer who is entirely sympathetic to religion must come to the
conclusion that the West owes many of its advantages to the fact that
religion has had no easy time in Western life, and that in the past
centuries not only scientific thought but scientific life-strategy has
challenged religion at every turn. Some of the excellencies of Western
life are clearly the fruits of our science rather than our religion.
Of course, these advantages have been bought at a price. The empirical
instincts of science drive it to deny the continuities in reality and
to see everything only in its momentary and immediate situation. The
modern behavioristic destruction of the concept of personality is
therefore one of the natural results of scientific thought betrayed
into absurdity by its own consistency. But a consistent religion is
generally equally absurd. Regarding all reality, and personality
in particular, _sub specie æternitatis_, it fails to see how truly
personality is the product of specific social and natural forces and
neglects to change the material environment in the interest of human
welfare. Human personality can be understood neither in terms of its
environment alone nor in absolute terms which leave the material world
in which it develops out of account. The final victory of personality
must be gained by transcending concrete situations and material
circumstances; but it is a hollow victory if circumstances are not
previously used and amended to improve personal values. The soul is
at once the victim and the master of the material world. It gains
its highest triumph by renouncing the world, but the renunciation is
premature if a futile and yet not futile effort is not made to make the
natural world conform to the needs of human character.
While the Western world has much to learn from the East in its strategy
of life, there is no gain in substituting one strategy for the other;
for they are both defective. The plight of the West is due to the
complete bankruptcy of religious forces and the unchallenged dominion
of science; just as the plight of the East is due to the unchallenged
sway of religion. Applied science has created a civilization which may
be as destructive of personality for the meagerly endowed multitudes
as the natural poverty of Asia. But Western civilization may at least
boast of developing a middle class which enjoys physical and spiritual
advantages which no considerable class of the Orient possesses. Neither
the West nor the East has arrived at a perfect basis for happiness. The
Oriental soul is like a bird, freed of its cage, but with no wings to
fly. The Occidental soul has wings but is so fascinated by its gilded
cage that it does not care to fly.
The conclusion which emerges from such reflections will shock orthodox
religionists. It is that the values of religion are conditioned and not
absolute and that they attain their highest usefulness not when they
subdue all other values but when they are in perpetual conflict with
them, or it may be truer to say when they are coördinated with them.
Western life gained an advantage over the East by centuries of conflict
between the religious and scientific strategy of life. It is losing the
advantage by an excessive devotion to concrete interests and by the
capitulation of religion. The supreme tragedy of history would be the
not improbable armed conflict between West and East, with the Orient
in a frenzy of resentment against the greed of the Occident and the
Occident in a natural fear of the low living standards of Asia. Part of
the truth would be on either side and the conflict could result only
in exaggerating the limitations of the partial truth which each side
holds.
Meanwhile there is the possibility of coördinating the values of East
and West, of science and religion. Let the East learn to live in
time and the West to view its temporalities with indifference. The
coördination is not easy because men are not inclined to be at once
critical and appreciative of the values with which they must deal.
They always tend to increase the limitations of certain values by an
uncritical devotion, or to destroy the values in mad resentment against
their limitations. Since man is a citizen of two worlds, he cannot
afford to renounce his citizenship in either. He must work out his
destiny both as a child of nature and as a servant of the absolute.
The prospects for an exchange of values between the East and the West
are not particularly bright. The Orient is indeed being “Americanized,”
but partly through the policy of Western imperialism exploiting the
low living standards of Asia to the advantage of Western industry.
There is no powerful movement in the West to dissuade it from its
complete trust in physical power as the method of self-realization, and
in physical comfort as the way to happiness. Modern religion has not
been totally ineffective in qualifying racial arrogance and parochial
prejudices. But it has had practically no effect upon the instincts of
avarice which dominate Western life. The religious groups which are
still ambitious to defy civilization in the name of their faith have
a theology which cannot gain the respect of the thoughtful leaders of
modern life; and the sins of which they convict modern society are not
its real sins. The intellectually emancipated religious groups are too
thoroughly acclimatized to the atmosphere of Western life to have any
sensitiveness for its imperfections.
The greatest hope lies in the missionary enterprise, which through its
very effort toward the universalization of the Christian faith has
a tendency to strip it of its Occidental accretions, so that it may
become intrinsically worthy of its world expansion. The missionary
enterprise may thereby contribute as much toward the spiritualization
of Western life as toward the regeneration of the East. Its very
contact with the East gives it a perspective on the limitations of
Western life which churches at home do not possess. There is, of
course, the possibility that Western imperialism will so thoroughly
discredit the missionary enterprise before it can function in this
way that it will lose its whole prestige in the Eastern world. In
that case Japan will probably continue to unify and occidentalize
Asia in the hope of fighting fire with fire. A small minority of
thoughtful missionaries are making a desperate effort to disassociate
the missionary enterprise from the politics of Western imperialism in
the Orient. Considering the difficulty of their task, they have made
commendable progress. Yet if Christianity at home does not become
disassociated from and does not qualify the greed of which the Oriental
politics of Western nations is but one expression, the heroic efforts
of the missionaries may be vain. Men of prudence in the Orient may be
willing to concede that ideals have validity even if they are outraged
by those who ostensibly accept them. But the final test of ideals must
include their ability to qualify human action. If Christian idealism
is to be a force which will help to create a unified world culture,
capable of destroying the moral limitations of both the Oriental and
the Occidental strategy of life, it must detach itself more completely
from the temper of Western life even while it seeks to influence the
thought of the East.