A PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS FOR AN ETHICAL RELIGION
The ethical problem of religion may be more important than the
metaphysical one, as previously observed, but it cannot be solved
without a reorientation of the present philosophical basis of religious
conviction. The Western world has had a slight advantage over the
East in the tentative dualism of Christianity, but this advantage
has been lost by the inevitable drift toward pantheism in Western
thought. Pantheistic tendencies are potential perils to moral values
in practically all religions. By identifying God and the natural world
they either persuade men to resign themselves to the inadequacies of
nature, under the illusion that divine sanctity has rendered them
immutable, or they blind the eye to the imperfections of nature and
thus destroy the moral sensitiveness of religion. The Orient has
usually derived a morally enervating pessimism from its pantheism,
while the Occident has chosen the other horn of the monistic dilemma
and fallen into a sentimental optimism. Both alternatives are as untrue
to the facts as they are inadequate to men’s moral needs.
In the Western world religious optimism has been gradually destroyed
by the advance of science which discredited the moral overestimate of
the cosmic order, implicit as one of two tendencies in pantheism. The
practical and tragic realities of its international and industrial life
have added to the disillusionment and made men as sceptical of human as
of cosmic virtue. Thus the cynicism of disillusioned intelligence is
added to the despair of an outraged conscience to unite in a pessimism
which questions both the rationality of the universe and the morality
of man. The despair of the West is even more devastating to moral
values than the pessimism of the East, for the Orient is prompted by
its religion to a serene resignation while the West spends itself in
blind fury or sensual excess. When all confidence in moral values is
destroyed, the strong express themselves by asserting their power or
resenting their seeming impotence, while the weak sink into an easy
indulgence of natural appetites. The real history of Western society
is being written by Nietzschian and Marxian cynics who have subdued
every scruple which might qualify their contest for power. Meanwhile
their conflict is lazily witnessed by vast hordes whose main purpose
in life is to gratify their senses and who give their sympathy to one
or the other side according as it offers least hindrance to their
enjoyments. In such a situation religion is easily relegated to the
position of restraining the petty and obscuring the major vices of the
small minority which still profess it. This is particularly true when
optimism and sentimentality, such as characterize modern religion,
make it incapable of a realistic evaluation of the forces which reveal
themselves in human society.
Albert Schweitzer[20] interprets the whole moral bankruptcy of Western
civilization as a pessimistic reaction to the extravagant optimism of
its traditional religions and philosophies. While other factors, such
as the complexity and the impersonal nature of industrial society,
have been contributory factors to the disillusionment of the age, it
is probably true that men are inclined to expect too little of the
world and of man mostly because too much has been claimed for them and
extravagant hopes have been disappointed. A regeneration of the ethical
life of Western society must depend, therefore, upon the revival of a
religion in which the Scylla of pantheism and the Charybdis of pure
naturalism are avoided. While the Orient has a serenity which will
contribute much to the art of living in a unified world civilization,
there is no health for our sickness in its religious philosophies.
Its pantheism cannot be maintained in the scientific atmosphere of
the West, and if it could, as it is in rare instances, it would only
present us with the impossible choice between the moral ennui of
pessimism and the sentimentality of an unqualified optimism. The
youthful exuberance of the Western mind invariably inclines it to
the least defensible of these two bad alternatives, the optimistic
one. When the West borrows religion from the East, as for instance
in theosophy and Christian Science, it is used to support optimistic
illusions so palpably absurd that they flourish only in those circles
of society in which life is extremely comfortable and not too
intelligent.
The only fruitful alternative to a monism and pantheism which
identifies God and the world, the real and the ideal, is a dualism
which maintains some kind of distinction between them and does not
lose one in the other. Dualistic solutions to the riddles of life
are not new in the history of religious thought. They are in fact as
numerous as pantheistic ones, but their metaphysical limitations have
usually outweighed their moral advantages and shortened their life. In
Zoroastrianism, the noblest of purely Aryan faiths, Ahirman the spirit
of evil exists independently of Ormuzd the good spirit. The influence
of this Persian dualism is seen in both Hebrew and Christian thought.
The satanology of the Old Testament is partly derived from it; and
Manichæism, through which Augustine passed before he embraced and
elaborated Catholic orthodoxy, is a compound of Persian and Christian
religion. Mythology is filled with efforts to do justice to the
conflicts which the world reveals as obviously as its unities, as for
instance in the myth of Prometheus and Zeus. Even Plato, from whom most
Western pantheism has been indirectly derived, held that God’s perfect
goodness was thwarted by the intractableness of the materials with
which he worked.
Early Hebrew religion was naïvely dualistic, and that is one reason
why it has been so potent in the history of religion. God was
indeed conceived of as omnipotent; that conception was the path
that led to monotheism. But the idea of omnipotence was elaborated
dramatically rather than philosophically. The heavens might declare
his glory and the firmament show his handiwork, but he was revealed
in national history and (according to the conception of the later
prophets) in personal experience more than in natural phenomena. Even
a very early prophet discovered that the still small voice rather
than the earthquake or the fire was the symbol of his presence.
The Genesis account of the fall solves the problem of evil upon an
essentially monistic basis by making human sin responsible for even
the inadequacies of nature and attributing everything from weeds to
mortality to the luckless error of the first man. Neither the goodness
nor the omnipotence of God is abridged in this naïve but sublime
conception in which the human conscience assumes responsibility for
more than its share of human ills in order to save the reputation of
divine virtue. The monism of this account is, however, qualified by the
injection of the tempting serpent, an element which is precursory of
the belief in the devil, which the Jews inherited from Babylonia and
Persia and which has fortunately qualified all monistic tendencies in
Jewish and Christian orthodoxy until this day. A profounder instinct
than reveals itself to the casual observer persuades fundamentalism
to defend the reality of the devil with such vehemence. It may be
metaphysically inconsistent to have two absolutes, one good and one
evil, but the conception provides at least for a dramatic portrayal of
the conflict which disturbs the harmonies and unities of the universe,
and therefore, it has a practical and ethical value. The idea of
attributing personality to evil may be scientifically absurd but it
rests upon a natural error. When the blind and impersonal forces of
nature come to life in man they are given the semblance of personality.
Professor Albert Schweitzer[21] ascribes the moral superiority of
prophetic Judaism and Christianity over other world religions to the
naïve dualism of the prophets and Jesus, who emphasized the moral
rather than the metaphysical attributes of God in such a way as to
develop a practical and morally potent distinction between God and the
universe, between the ideal of religious devotion and the disappointing
realities of life. The distinction between Oriental monism and the
practical dualism of Christianity in its unspoiled form is succinctly
stated by Professor Alfred Whitehead: “Christianity has always been
a religion seeking a metaphysics in contrast to Buddhism which is a
metaphysics generating a religion.... The defect of a metaphysical
system is the very fact that it is a neat little system which thereby
oversimplifies its expression of the world.... In respect to its
treatment of evil, Christianity is therefore less clear in its
metaphysical idea but more inclusive of the facts.”[22]
In the early Christian church the naïve dualism of Jesus was given
dramatic and dynamic force through his deification, so that he became,
in a sense, the God of the ideal, the symbol of the redemptive force
in life which is in conflict with evil. Since no clear distinction
was made between the spirit of the living Christ and the indwelling
Holy Ghost, the doctrine of the trinity was, in effect, a symbol of
an essential dualism. Orthodox Christianity did indeed renounce the
gnostic heresy which tried to give this implicit dualism explicit
character by its distinction between the God who was revealed in Jesus
and the God of creation. And history has justified the wisdom of its
course. The scientific precision necessary to save such theology
from essential polytheism was lacking and Christianity was intent
upon guarding its monotheism. Yet it preserved enough metaphysical
inconsistency to retain dualistic tendencies in its monistic orthodoxy.
Its symbols lacked philosophical precision but they did give vivid
and dramatic force to the idea of a conflict between evil and the
redemptive and creative force in life. Thus it could fulfill the two
great functions of religion in prompting men to repent of their sins,
and in encouraging them to hope for redemption from them. No mechanical
or magical explanations of the significance of the crucifixion have
ever permanently obscured the helpful spiritual symbolism of the
cross in which the conflict between good and evil is portrayed and
the possibility as well as the difficulty of the triumph of the good
over evil is dramatized. An absolute dualism either between God and
the universe or between man and nature, or spirit and matter, or good
and evil, is neither possible nor necessary. What is important is that
justice be done to the fact that creative purpose meets resistance in
the world and that the ideal which is implicit in every reality is also
in conflict with it. The reason why naïve religions are “more inclusive
of the facts” in portraying this struggle than highly elaborated
theologies is that the latter are always prompted by the rational need
of consistency to obscure some facts for the sake of developing an
intellectual plausible unity. Religions grow out of real experience in
which tragedy mingles with beauty and man learns that the moral values
which dignify his life are embattled in his own soul and imperiled
in the world. He is inclined neither to obscure the reality of the
struggle nor to sacrifice the hope of victory until too much reflection
persuades him to believe either that all partial evil is universal good
or that destiny makes his struggle futile and his defeat inevitable.
That is how morality dies with religion when an age has become too
sophisticated.
Naïve Christianity was unable to maintain itself in the Græco-Roman
world without making concessions to its intellectual scruples and
paying for its conquests by incorporating Hellenic philosophies in its
theology. The gospel was diluted with neo-Platonism to make it more
palatable for a cultured world. The naïvely and dramatically conceived
omnipotence of God was metaphysically elaborated and inevitably
betrayed the church into an essential pantheism, which “turns the
natural world, man’s stamping-ground and system of opportunities,
into a self-justifying and sacred life, endows the blameless giant
with an inhuman soul and worships the monstrous divinity it has
fabricated.”[23] The process of compounding the simplicities of the
gospel with the dialectic achievements of Greek philosophy culminated
in St. Augustine who laid the foundation for Christian orthodoxy and
made the simple Christian epic the basis of an elaborate theological
structure in which God becomes at the same time the guarantee of the
reality of the ideal and the actual cause of every concrete reality.
Christianity has always anathematized pantheism officially, but
probably—as Professor Santayana suggests—because it suspected that
it was a suppressed but not entirely quiescent half of its dogma.
Vital religion has a way of expressing itself outside the limits of
its rationally fixed concepts and the essential pantheism of orthodox
Christianity therefore did not destroy the moral vigor of even such
resolute determinists as Augustine or John Calvin. Yet in the end the
logic of a system of ideas becomes the pattern of human action. A
rigorous determinism as well as an unqualified pantheism destroys moral
vigor because it either makes the attainment of the ideal too certain
or idealizes the real beyond all evidence. If reality only thinly
veils the ideal implicit in it, or if the implicit ideal is certain to
become real in history, there is no occasion for moral adventure and
no reason for moral enthusiasm. In a sense pantheism is naturalism
with an unnatural light upon it. That is why the determinism implied in
pantheism may lead so easily to a reaction of naturalistic determinism.
Thus Karl Marx appropriated Hegel’s determinism and put it to his own
use. When the whole wealth of Hegel’s dialectical skill served no
better purpose than to deify the Prussian military state, as a kind
of ultimate revelation of the counsels of God, it was easy enough to
discredit its optimistic illusions without destroying its determinism.
The residual determinism became the basis of a new philosophy of
history in which natural instinct and economic necessity took the
place of divine will as man’s inexorable fate. The reaction from Hegel
to Marx is a perfect symbol of the whole course of Western thought
in the last hundred years with its change from a supernatural to a
naturalistic determinism.
Religion left to itself, even when it elaborates theologies, tries
to do some justice to the reality of moral conflict even though it
may confuse the issue by a faulty definition of divine omnipotence.
But its necessary coöperation with metaphysics drives it inevitably
into more and more consistent monisms in which moral enthusiasms are
destroyed. The monistic and pantheistic element in Western religion
was greatly increased by its intimate collaboration with philosophies
which dealt chiefly with the problem of knowledge. For the solution
of the epistemological problem the philosophical idealists thought it
necessary to posit an all-knowing intelligence. It was this all-knowing
absolute which became the support of religion’s faith in God against
the attacks of realists and empiricists, though there was little enough
affinity between the God of any healthy religious theism and the
impersonal absolute of monistic philosophers.
When religious apologists found it necessary to readjust the age-old
affirmations of faith to the evolutionary facts revealed by science
they usually sank even more deeply into the morass of pantheistic and
monistic philosophy. The old and naïve conceptions of a capricious
omnipotence working its will upon natural phenomena became manifestly
untenable and a way had to be found to relate divine purpose to and
discover the area of creativity in the natural and cosmic processes. It
was practically inevitable that such a task would be accomplished only
by an overemphasis on divine immanence and a consequent betrayal of
religion into a sentimental optimism. When defenders of religious faith
were borrowing from the quiver of their opponents they would have done
well to consult Thomas Huxley more and Herbert Spencer less; for Huxley
was morally much more realistic than Spencer. Spencerian doctrines lent
themselves more easily to the strategy of linking religious theism
with the faith of science in the dependability of the universe; but
there was something lacking in Spencerian optimism which is very vital
to religion, a sense of the tragic in life and an awareness of the
frustration which moral purpose and creative will must meet in nature
and in man. The sentimentality of modern religion is of course older
than the optimism which it derived from Spencer. Part of it is derived
from Rousseau and the romanticism of the eighteenth century. Here again
religion suffered the fate of snatching error while it was borrowing
truth from its opponents. Renouncing the idea of total depravity which
was central in medieval religion, and in orthodox Protestantism for
that matter, it evolved a sentimental overestimate of human virtue
which is no nearer the truth than the medieval conceptions of original
sin. It is a strange irony in history that to-day irreligion, in
the form of deterministic psychology, should elaborate doctrines
strangely akin to the derogatory estimates of human resources made by
medieval theologians. So modern churches are involved in an optimistic
overestimate of the virtue of both man and nature at the very time
when science tempts men to despair of discovering moral integrity in
the one and moral meaning in the other. Modern religion is, in short,
not sufficiently modern. In it eighteenth-century sentimentality and
nineteenth-century individualism are still claiming victory over the
ethical and religious prejudices of the Middle Ages. Meanwhile life
has moved on and the practical needs of modern society demand an ethic
which is not individualistic and a religion which is not unqualifiedly
optimistic.
The practical effects of this lack of contact of modern religion
with the real temper of modern life may be gauged by comparing the
observations of any average denominational journal of religion upon the
events of contemporary history with the realistic analyses of secular
journals. The brutalities of the economic conflict, the disillusioning
realities of international relations, the monstrous avarice of nations
and the arrogance of races, all these sins with which the life of
modern society is cursed are treated with an easy complacency by
religious observers which contrasts strangely with the frantic anxiety
of secular idealists. In a recent world conference of the churches
at Stockholm members of the German delegation objected to what they
regarded as an identification of the Kingdom of God with the League of
Nations made by a good bishop in the opening sermon. National prejudice
may have prompted this criticism but the superior perspective lent by
bitter experience gave it a measure of justification, and it would be
applicable to other sermonic interpretations of current history besides
those of the bishop.
The war itself was a disheartening revelation of the moral obfuscation
of modern religion when dealing with the tragedies of history. The
easy partnership of religious sentiment with patriotic fervor has been
previously ascribed to the natural relation between religion and any
devotion to an ethical ideal, however imperfect. There is, however,
yet another reason for the blindness of religious idealists to the
horrors of war. The monistic orientation of modern religion made it
necessary for the church to save religious faith by discovering the
saving virtues in the great evil. It was therefore unable to view the
realities in proper proportion. For a realistic interpretation of the
great tragedy modern society had to depend upon secular idealists who
did not feel called upon to save either God’s or man’s reputation.
Sentimentality is a poor weapon against cynicism, and idealistic
determinism has no way of defeating determinism of the naturalistic
type. Since both the latter represent reactions to the former, they
can be overcome only by bringing these into closer conformity with the
facts. The freedom and moral integrity of man is not an illusion but
it is a fact very seriously circumscribed. Transcendent purpose and
creative will in the universe may be scientifically validated but do
not thereby become the effective cause of every natural phenomenon.
What is needed is a philosophy and a religion which will do justice
both to the purpose and to the frustration which purpose meets in the
inertia of the concrete world, both to the ideal which fashions the
real and to the real which defeats the ideal, both to the essential
harmony and to the inevitable conflict in the cosmos and in the soul.
In a sense there is not a single dualism in life; rather there are
many of them. In his own life man may experience a conflict between
his moral will and the anarchic desires with which nature has endowed
him; or he may experience a conflict between his cherished values and
the caprices of nature which know nothing of the economy of values in
human life. In the cosmic order the conflict is between creativity and
the resistance which frustrates creative purpose. Whether the dualism
is defined as one of mind and matter, or thought and extension, or
force and inertia, or God and the devil, it approximates the real facts
of life. It may be impossible to do full justice to the two types of
facts by any set of symbols or definitions; but life gives the lie to
any attempt by which one is explained completely in terms of the other.
There is no more reason to-day to deny the reality of God than to
explain every casual phenomenon in terms of his omnipotent will.
Our interest is in the moral fruits of religious and philosophical
ideas rather than in their perfect consistency, but it may be noted in
passing that philosophically competent scientists and scientifically
competent philosophers arrive at conclusions to-day which are in
closer accord with a naïve theism than with the monism of absolute
idealism. They do not of course picture a God who is outside of the
world and at work upon it as a potter upon his clay; but they do
justice to both the purpose and the limitation of purpose in the
creative process. Professor Hobhouse writes: “The evolutionary process
can best be understood as the effect of a purpose slowly working
itself out under limiting conditions which it brings successively
under control.... This would mean not that reality is spiritual or the
creation of an unconditioned mind ... but that there is a spiritual
element integral to the structure and movement of reality and that
evolution is the process by which this principle makes itself master
of the residual conditions which at first dominate its life and thwart
its efforts.”[24] It may be a natural overbelief and an inevitable
anthropomorphism if religion attributes all the characteristics of
personality to the purpose, “the spiritual element integral to the
structure and movement of reality.” But if a place for freedom and
purpose in the cosmic order, however conditioned, is discovered the
essential affirmation of religious faith is metaphysically verified.
The values of personality are related to cosmic facts. Professor Alfred
Whitehead defines God as that in reality which is not concrete but the
principle of every concrete actuality. He makes the telling observation
that while a dynamic view of reality may dispense with God as the prime
mover it must substitute for Aristotle’s prime mover a principle of
limitation and concretion, since the dynamic nature of reality does
not account for the various forms in which it is made concrete.[25]
In other words the faith of religion in both the transcendence
and immanence of God is given a new metaphysical validation. His
unchangeableness is “his self-consistency in relation to all change”;
but this does not justify the deterministic conclusion of a “complete
self-consistency of the temporal world.” The reality of God and the
reality of evil as a positive force are thus both accepted.
There is, in short, no reason why religion should not hold to its
faith in God without either identifying him with or losing him in the
concrete world. The moral and spiritual values in which religion is
interested have a basis in concrete actuality. They are on the one hand
not a mere effervescence on the surface of the concrete, and on the
other hand they are not the only basis of historical realities. The
pluralism of William James, which has been criticized as scientifically
inaccurate and metaphysically inconsistent, seems to have both
scientific and metaphysical virtues. There is good reason to accept at
least a qualified dualism not only because it is morally more potent
than traditional monisms, but because it is metaphysically acceptable.
It is not to be expected that science will ever invest the concept
of God with the attributes which religious devotion assigns to it.
But there is no reason why religious and moral experience should not
build further upon the foundation laid by science. It is manifestly
necessary to have some metaphysical basis for religious conviction, for
there is no spiritual vigor in the conscious self-deception of purely
subjective religions. But it is not necessary to limit religion to
the bare concepts which science establishes. It is in fact better for
religion to forego perfect metaphysical consistency for the sake of
moral potency. In a sense religion is always forced to choose between
an adequate metaphysics and an adequate ethics. That is not to say that
the two interests are incompatible but that they are not identical.
When there is a conflict between them it is better to leave the
metaphysical problem with some loose ends than to develop a religion
which is inimical to moral values. The reason why naïve religions have
frequently been morally more potent than highly rationalized ones is
not because the faith which gave them moral fervor was necessarily
inconsistent with the facts, but because they based their affirmations
upon facts and experiences which were inconsistent with each other
or seemed to be but were equally true and equally necessary for the
maintenance of moral and spiritual energy.
The objection to religious dualism comes not only from those who
subordinate all advantages to that of rational consistency but also
from those who believe that it imperils purely religious values. It
robs God of omnipotence (so the argument runs) and the universe of
dependability. It gives no certain guarantee of the triumph of personal
and spiritual values. It may put a note of challenge in religion,
but it also destroys its comforting assurances. The answer to such
a criticism is that the moral virtues of dualism are derived from
precisely that characteristic. It is not easy to challenge to conflict
and to guarantee victory at one and the same time. By dignifying
personality religion runs the peril of obscuring the defects of human
nature; if it makes the triumph of righteousness certain, it may
incline men to take “moral holidays.” Too much emphasis upon the
harmonies of the universe may make evil seem unreal. If men are given
the opportunity, they will extract comfort from religion and forget the
challenge implied in its faith; which simply means that they will use
religion to sublimate rather than to qualify their will to live. They
will accept the assurance of faith that the frustrations of the natural
world are not permanent, but they will not accept the challenge of
faith to overcome the corruptions of nature in their own souls.
The perennial conflict between priest and prophet is given in the
double function of religion. The priest dispenses comfort and the
prophet makes the challenge of religion potent. The priest is more
numerous than the prophet because human selfishness is as determining
in religion as in other fields. Though the priest always defeats
the prophet in the end, the prophet is avenged because his original
experience is the reality which makes the priest’s assurance plausible.
There is no way of guaranteeing the reality of God if someone does
not make him real in experience, and there is no way of declaring
the victory of the ideal if someone does not defeat reality in the
name of the ideal in history. Religion validates itself in spiritual
experience and moral triumph. Speculation and deduction contribute to
religious certainty only after experience has laid the foundation for
faith. It is not possible to free religion altogether of its priestly
corruptions. But anything which will make it more difficult to accept
the comforts of faith without accepting its challenges will increase
the moral potency of religion and decrease the possibility of its
corruption by those who want to use it for the purpose of insuring the
dignity of human life without paying the price of moral effort for the
boon.
There is no reason why the comforting assurances of religion should be
sacrificed completely. Science is not inimical to the assumption of
religion that personal and moral values have a basis in the universe
itself which insures their permanence and their further refinement.
Though God works his will against the inertia of the concrete world
and the waywardness of man, neither science nor history justifies
the conclusion that his resources are not ultimately equal to the
creative task. The intractableness of the world makes the creative
and redemptive struggle real but not hopeless. Religion has as much
right to preach hope as it has to preach repentance. It fails in its
task if it does not save men from despair as well as from undue pride
and complacency. There is nothing in either science or history which
invalidates either function of religion. But science unites with
moral experience in insisting on the reality and the painfulness of
the creative process in man and in nature. If the resistance to moral
purpose in cosmic history is underestimated, it merely serves to
increase that resistance in the life of man by justifying his moral
inertia. The needs of a dynamic religion are consistent with scientific
fact, though not always compatible with a completely consistent
metaphysics. Science may well combine with religion in persuading man
that “if hopes are dupes, fear may be liars,” and that he must “work
out his salvation with fear and trembling.”