Religion is not in a robust state of health
in modern civilization. Vast multitudes, particularly
in industrial and urban centers, live
without seeking its sanctions for their actions
and die without claiming its comforts in their
extremities. While its influence is still considerable
among agrarians and the middle
classes of the city, an ever-increasing number
of the privileged classes are indifferent to its
values. Spiritual and moral forces have always
been in a perennial state of decay in those
circles of society in which physical ease and
cultural advantages combine to make intellectual
scruples more pressing than moral
ones. But modern scientific education has
greatly multiplied the intellectual difficulties
of religion and the increasing opulence of
Western life has rendered its moral problems
more perplexing. Industrial workers, in as
far as they are socially self-conscious, are
almost universally inimical to religion, and
their opposition represents a type of anti-religious
sentiment which is entirely new in
history.
Since the dawn of the modern era the tides
of faith have ebbed and flowed so that it is not
easy to chart their general course; but it is
difficult to escape the conclusion that each new
tide has barely exceeded the mark left by a
previous ebb. The stream of religious life has
been deepened at times, as in the Protestant
Reformation, but the impartial observer will
note that it has been narrowed as well. A
psychology of defeat, of which both fundamentalism
and modernism are symptoms, has
gripped the forces of religion. Extreme
orthodoxy betrays by its very frenzy that the
poison of scepticism has entered the soul of the
church; for men insist most vehemently upon
their certainties when their hold upon them has
been shaken. Frantic orthodoxy is a method
for obscuring doubt. Liberalism tries vainly
to give each new strategic retreat the semblance
of a victorious engagement. To retreat from
untenable positions is no doubt a necessary
step in preparation for new advances; but this
necessary strategy has not been accompanied
by the kind of spiritual vigor which would
promise ultimate victory. The general tendencies
toward the secularization of life have
been consistent enough to prompt its foes to
predict religion’s ultimate extinction as a
major interest of mankind and to tempt even
friendly observers to regard its future with
grave apprehension. There are indeed many
forms of religion which are clearly vestigial
remnants of another day with other interests.
They have no vital influence upon the life of
modern man, and their continued existence
only proves that history, like nature, is slow to
destroy what it has found useless, and even
slower to inter what it has destroyed. Scattered
among the living forms of each civilization are
the whitened bones of what was once flesh and
blood.
The sickness of faith in our day may be the
senility which precedes death; on the other
hand, it may be a specific malady which time
and thought can cure. If history is slow to
destroy what has become useless, it may be as
patient and persistent in reviving what is useful
but seems dead. Five hundred years are
but a short span in history, and a constant tendency
over such a period may lead to premature
conclusions. If religion contains indispensable
resources for the life of man, its
revival waits only upon the elimination of
those maladjustments which have hindered it
from making its resources available for the
citizen of the modern era. Whatever may be
said of specific religions and religious forms, it
is difficult to imagine man without religion;
for religion is the champion of personality in a
seemingly impersonal world. It prompts man
to organize his various impulses, inherited and
acquired, into a moral unity; it persuades him,
when its vitality is unimpaired, to regard his
fellows with an appreciation commensurate
with his own self-respect; and it finally discovers
and creates a universe in which the
human spirit is guaranteed security against the
forces of nature which always seem to reduce
it to a mere effervescence unable to outlast the
collocation of forces which produced it. The
plight of religion in our own day is due to the
fact that it has been more than ordinarily
pressed by foes on the two lines on which it
defends the dignity and value of personality.
The sciences have greatly complicated the
problem of maintaining the plausibility of
the personalization of the universe by which
religion guarantees the worth of human personality;
and science applied to the world’s
work has created a type of society in which
human personality is easily debased. The pure
sciences have revealed a world of nature much
more impersonal and, seemingly, much less
amenable to a divine will and to human needs
than had been traditionally assumed; and the
applied sciences have created an impersonal
civilization in which human relations are so
complex, its groups and units so large, its
processes so impersonal, the production of
things so important, and ethical action so difficult,
that personality is both dwarfed and outraged
in it.
Personality is that type of reality which is
self-conscious and self-determining. The concept
of personality is valid only in a universe
in which creative freedom is developed and
maintained in individual life as well as in the
universe. Religion therefore needs the support
of both metaphysics and ethics. It tries to
prompt man to ethical action by the sublime
assumption that the universe is itself ethical
in its ultimate nature whatever data to the
contrary the immediate and obvious scene may
reveal; and through the cultivation of the
ethical life in man it seeks to make such a
personalization of the universe both necessary
and plausible. It teaches men to find God by
loving their brothers, and to love their brothers
because they have found God. It inspires a
mystical reverence for human personality,
prompted by the discovery and creation of a
universe in which personality is the supreme
power and value; and it persuades men to
discover personal values in the universe because
they have first come upon clues to the transcendent
value of personality in the lives of their
fellows. Its ethics is dependent upon its metaphysics
and its metaphysics is rooted in its
ethics. Religion is thus obviously placed in a
desperate plight when its metaphysics and its
ethics are imperiled at the same time. It must
face and do battle with two hosts of enemies,
those who do not believe in men because they
do not believe in God, and those who do not
believe in God because modern civilization has
robbed them of their faith in the moral
integrity of men.
Since it is difficult to fight on two fronts at
the same time, the forces of religion have been
forced to choose one of the two fronts for
their major defensive effort. Perhaps it was
inevitable that they should choose the easier
task. It is easier to challenge the idea of an
impersonal universe than to change the fact
of an impersonal civilization. That is what the
modern church has done and is doing. It is
spending all its energy in discounting the
excessive claims of a deterministic science. It
has exhausted its ingenuity in retreating from
the untenable positions of an orthodoxy which
overstated the freedom and the virtue in the
physical universe and therefore aggravated the
very determinism by which it was defeated.
Outraged truth has a way of avenging itself.
The idea of a capricious God working his will
in the universe without the restraint of law or
the hindrance of any circumstance helped to
create the concept of a mechanistic world in
which all freedom is an illusion and therefore
all morality a sham. Thus the strategic
retreats of religion in the field of metaphysics
have been the necessary prelude to any new
religious advance. Religion may in fact be
forced to make some concessions which even
modern liberalism seems still unwilling to
make. Modern religionists, particularly popular
apologists are inclined to add the word
creative to the word evolution, and assume that
their problem is solved. The modern church
has very generally borrowed its apologetic
strategy from John Fiske and Henry Drummond,
and has tried to visualize a God who
differed from older conception only in this—that
he took more time to gain his ends than
had once been assumed. The important fact
which has escaped many modern defenders of
the faith is that the patience of the creative
will is a necessary characteristic rather than
a self-imposed restraint. There is a stubborn
inertia in every type of reality which offers
resistance to each new step in creation, so that
an emerging type of reality is always in some
sense a compromise between the creative will
and the established facts of the concrete world.
Whether we view the inorganic world, organic
life or the world of personal and moral values,
each new type of reality represents in some
sense a defeat of God as well as a revelation
of him. Religious apologetics will probably
be forced to concede this fact more generously
than has been its wont before it can bring
religious affirmations into harmony with
scientific facts. Modern liberalism is steeped
in a religious optimism which is true to the
facts of neither the world of nature nor the
world of history. The ultimate worth of
human personality in the universe may not be
guaranteed as immediately nor as obviously as
liberal religion seems inclined to assume.
Liberal religion may be forced to discard its
metaphysical and theological monisms, which
have been its support even more than orthodoxy’s,
and concede that freedom and
creativity in both man and the cosmic order
are more seriously circumscribed than religion
had assumed. But after that concession is
made it is not likely that the idea of freedom,
and the dignity of personality which is associated
with it, will ever be completely discredited,
whatever may be the deterministic
obsessions of modern science. The various
sciences can momentarily afford to indulge in
their various determinisms because the prestige
of metaphysics as a coördinator of the sciences
has been destroyed for the time being. Each
science is therefore able to disavow the authority
of metaphysics and work upon the basis
of its own metaphysical assumptions, which
are usually unreflective and generally deterministic.
But the bulk of new knowledge
which has momentarily destroyed the authority
of any unifying perspective must in time be
mastered by philosophical thought; and absolute
determinism is bound to be discredited in
such a development.[1]
There can be no question but that the
development of the physical sciences has permanently
increased the difficulty of justifying
the personalization of the universe upon which
all religious affirmations are based. Every
new form of reality is so closely linked to every
preceding form out of which it emerges that
it is not easy to discern the place where free
creativity functions. Yet no total view of
reality can ever be permanently mechanistic,
for new types of reality do emerge and science
is able to explain only the process and not the
cause of their emergence.
Important, then, as the metaphysical problem
of religion is, it is not the only problem
which it faces. Though it is a real task to
reinterpret religious truth in the light of
modern science, it is by no means a hopeless
one; and though it is necessary, it is not the
only necessary task. In the light of modern
philosophical inquiries it is justifiable to
assume that the most needed hypotheses of
religion are metaphysically defensible. In the
present situation of religion in civilization, it
is more necessary to inquire if and how the
peculiar attitudes and the unique life which
proceeds from a religious interpretation of the
universe may be made to serve the needs of
men in modern civilization. The fact is that
more men in our modern era are irreligious
because religion has failed to make civilization
ethical than because it has failed to maintain
its intellectual respectability. For every person
who disavows religion because some ancient
and unrevised dogma outrages his intelligence,
several become irreligious because the social
impotence of religion outrages their conscience.
Religion never lacks moral fruits so long as it
has any vitality. It has been placed in such a
sorry plight in fulfilling its ethical task in
modern civilization because the mechanization
of society has made an ethical life for the
individual at once more necessary and
more difficult, and failure more obvious,
than in any previous civilization. If we
are not less ethical than our fathers, our
happiness is certainly more dependent than
that of our fathers upon the ethical character
of our society. Rapid means of commerce and
communication have brought us into terms of
intimacy with all the world without increasing
the spiritual dynamic and ethical intelligence
which makes such close contact sufferable. We
have multiplied the tools of destruction which
a confused conscience may wield and have thus
armed the world of nature which lives in the
soul of man by the same science by which we
imagined ourselves to have conquered nature.
We have developed so complex a society that
it cannot be made ethical by moral goodwill
alone, if moral purpose is not astutely guided.
Lacking social intelligence, modern civilization
has thus robbed man of confidence in his own
and his neighbor’s moral integrity even when
ethical motives were not totally lacking.
Civilization with its impersonal and mechanized
relationships tends on the one hand to make
society less ethical, and on the other to reveal
its immoralities more vividly than in any previous
age. Religion has a relation to both
cause and effect to the moral life. Both its
friends and its foes are inclined to judge it by
its moral fruits, regarding it as primarily the
root, fancied or real, of morality. Yet morality
is as much the root as the fruit of religion;
for religious sentiment develops out of moral
experience and religious convictions are the
logic by which moral life justifies itself. In a
civilization in which the dominant motives and
basic relationships are unethical, religion is
therefore doubly affected. The immoralities
which bring the reproach of impotence upon it
are also the reason for the impotence. Thus
modern civilization creates a temper of scorn
for a religion which fails to challenge recognized
social iniquities, and at the same time it
destroys the vitality which religion needs to
issue such a challenge. The defection of the
industrial workers from religious life and
institutions, one of the most significant phenomena
of our time, has this double significance.
The industrial worker is indifferent to
religion, partly because he is enmeshed in
relations which are so impersonal and fundamentally
so unethical that his religious sense
atrophies in him. On the other hand he is
hostile to religion because he observes the
ethical impotence of the religion of the privileged
classes, particularly in its failure to
effect improvement in economic and social
attitudes. The industrial worker raises a
general characteristic of modern urban man to
a unique degree. His own experiences help him
to see the moral limitations of modern civilization
more clearly than do the more privileged
classes; but what is true of him is generally
true of all members of a complex society in
which human relations are impersonal and
complicated. If religion is senescent in modern
civilization, its social impotence is as
responsible for its decline as is its metaphysical
maladjustment.
The restoration of its vitality must wait
upon the adjustment of its tenets and the
reorganization of its life to meet the problems
which both the pure and the applied sciences,
which both the depersonalization of the universe
and the depersonalization of civilization,
have created. The metaphysical problem of
religion cannot be depreciated. In the long
run religion must be able to impress the mind
of modern man with the essential plausibility
and scientific respectability of its fundamental
affirmations. But the scientific respectability
of religious affirmations will not avail if the life
which issues from them will not help to solve
man’s urgent social problems. If modern
churches continue to prefer their intellectual
to their ethical problems, they will merely
succeed in maintaining a vestige of religion in
those classes which are not sensitive enough to
feel and not unfortunate enough to suffer from
the moral limitations of modern society. An
unethical civilization will inevitably destroy the
vitality of the religion of the victims and the
sincerity and moral prestige of the religion of
the beneficiaries of its unethical inequalities.
The future of religion and the future of
civilization are thus hung in the same balance.
Both as a means to a moral end and as an end
in itself, for which the moral life is the means,
the future of religion is involved in the ethical
reconstruction of modern society. Social and
economic problems are not the only problems
which fret the mind and engage the interest of
modern men. But they are proportionately
more important in an advanced than in a
primitive society. Modern men face no problem
that is greater than that of their aggregate
existence. How can they live in some kind
of decent harmony with their fellow men when
the size and intricacy of their social machinery
tends continually to aggravate the vices which
make human life inhuman? How shall they
gain mastery over the instruments by which
they have mastered nature so that these will
not become the means of projecting nature’s
vices into human history? How shall they
bring the life of great social and political
groups under the dominion of conscience and
moral law? These are the problems upon
which hangs the future of civilization. Such
social problems are fundamentally ethical and
the intimate relation between religion and
morality bring them inevitably into the province
of religion. Can it help to solve them?
Will their solution give religious idealism new
vitality? Is the present social impotence of
religion due to innate defects? Or is it due to
specific and historical limitations which the
years may change at least as quickly as they
produced them? To such questions we must
address ourselves.
CHAPTER II NATURE AND CIVILIZATION AS FOES OF PERSONALITY
It would be extravagant to claim that the
possibility of making the resources of religion
available for the solution of social problems
of modern civilization is absolutely determining
for its future. Religion would continue to
maintain itself in modern society even if it
produced only the scarcest socio-ethical fruits.
The problem of living together is not the only
problem which men face, and civilization is not
the only foe with which personality contends.
At least two other fundamental problems
engage the interest of every normal individual,
that of developing the multifarious forces of
his personality into some kind of harmony and
unity and that of asserting the dignity and
worth of human personality in defiance of
nature’s indifference and contempt. If religion
can render the human spirit a tolerably effective
service in the solution of these two problems,
its aid will not be scorned though it fail
him in his social problem. It will not maintain
itself with equal vitality in all strata of society,
but it will continue some kind of existence in
all of them, and a fairly vigorous life in those
classes in which social problems are least
urgent.
Psychiatry and the psychological sciences
are encroaching upon one service to the perplexed
spirit of man which was once an almost
exclusive province of religion. They are
offering him aid in the task of integrating
the heterogeneous forces, with which ages of
human and prehuman history have endowed
him, into the unity of dependable character;
and there are those who think that this service
will obviate his need for religion in this field.
Undoubtedly it will be to the advantage of any
moral or religious discipline of the individual
life to avail itself of a more precise knowledge
of the intricacies of human personality; yet
only the most mechanistic and naturalistic
ethical theorist would maintain that the knowledge
of self is the only prerequisite of self-mastery,
and that the eternal conflict between
the higher will and the immediate desires, about
which the religious of every age have testified,
may be composed by nothing more than a
better understanding of the devious ways of
human intelligence and emotion. The psychological
sciences have undoubtedly saved
men from some morbid fears and repressions,
but the most modern school of psychological
mechanists and determinists seems more
anxious to destroy restraints which are the
product of ages of moral experience than to
correct the defects which reveal themselves
inevitably on the fringe of every moral discipline.
The reason mechanistic psychiatry and
psycho-analysis run easily into a justification
of license is because they labor under the
illusion that the higher self (they would scorn
that term) is able to put all internal forces in
their proper place, if only it knows their previous
history and actual direction. Under
such an illusion the clamant desires of man’s
physical life are bound to be closer to the center
of character than any moral discipline would
allow. Modern determinism is too naturalistic
to see or to be willing to regard human personality
as the incarnation of moral and
spiritual values which did not have their origin
in any immediate necessity and which no
individual will maintain if his resolution is not
strengthened by something more than his
momentary and obvious experience. This is
not to say that moral discipline in individual
life can be maintained by religion alone. A
humanistic ethical idealism, which makes the
experience of the race the guide and inspiration
of individual conduct, will not fail to aid
men toward some higher integration of personality,
though it will seldom go beyond the
Greek ideal of a balanced life which knows
how to escape sublime enthusiasms as well as
crass excesses. The value of religion in composing
the conflict with which the inner life of
man is torn is that it identifies man’s highest
values, about which he would center his life,
with realities in the universe itself, and teaches
him how to bring his momentary impulses
under the dominion of his will by subjecting
his will to the guidance of an absolute will.
“Make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be
free,” has ever been the prayer of religious
people. “He who loses his life for my sake
shall find it,” said Jesus. In such paradoxes
the truth is revealed that the highest peace
comes to men where their life is centered not
in what is best in them but in that beyond them
which is better than their best.
Obviously this function of religion in the
life of the individual has its social implications;
but it is not to be assumed that the integration
of personality automatically solves man’s social
problem. That assumption, which religion
invariably makes, is one of its very defects in
dealing with the social problem. A unified
personality may still be anti-social in its
dominant desires and the very self-respect
which issues from its higher integration may
become the screen for its unsocial attitudes.
Just as important as the problem of bringing
peace to the warring factions within the soul of
man is the task of giving human personality a
sense of worth in the face of nature’s indifference
and contempt; and of adjusting man’s
highest values to nature’s sublimer moods.
The significance of the religious inclinations of
country people lies just here. The peasant is
religious because man’s relation to the natural
world about him is still the agrarian’s great
interest. His ethical life is simple and
develops in those primary or family relationships
in which problems are comparatively few
and a disturbance of the religious temper by
unethical social facts rather infrequent. He is
close enough to nature to be prompted to awe
and reverence by her beauties and sublimities,
to gratitude by her vast and perennial benevolences,
and to fear by her occasional cruel
caprices. He expresses his awe in worship,
his gratitude in the spring and harvest festivals,
which are traditional in all religions, and
when her momentary atrocities overtake him
he appeals from nature’s God to the God who
is above nature and seeks the intervention of a
supernatural ally in behalf of human personality.
In a sense the religion of peasants
remains the constant spring of religious sentiment
in every class of society, which others
may corrupt or refine but never quite destroy.
Urban men suffer from an atrophy of the
religious sense because they lose, as they are
divorced from the soil, some of the reverence
to which a view of the serene majesties of
nature prompts and some of the fear occasioned
by her elemental passions. Yet the most
sophisticated and emancipated city dweller
cannot finally escape the problem of the relation
of the human spirit to the natural world
in which it is at once child and rebel. Even
the refinements and artificialities of urban life
will not save man from facing nature’s last and
most implacable servant—death, nor free him
of the necessity of making some kind of appeal
against the obvious victory which nature
claims at the grave. The fight of personality
against nature is religion’s first battle, and that
is one reason why there is always a possibility
that other struggles will be neglected for it.
Traditional religion fails in its social tasks
partly because men have suffered longer from
the sins of nature than from the sins of man;
and religious forms and traditions are therefore
better adjusted to offer them comfort for
these distresses than for any other from which
they suffer. Religion is not yet fully oriented
to the new perils to personality which are
developed in civilization. But it may fail to
meet these and yet not be totally discredited;
for the new perils have not supplanted the old
ones. At its best religion is both a sublimation
and a qualification of the will to live. Defeated
by nature the human spirit rises above nature
through religious faith, discovering and creating
a universe in which divine personality is
the supreme power and human personality a
cherished, protected and deathless reality.
But this religious sublimation of the will to
live must be balanced by a qualification of that
will to live by which men are persuaded to
sacrifice themselves for each other, that they
may save themselves from each other and
realize their highest self. Love is a natural
fruit of religion but not an inevitable one. A
high appreciation of personality ought to issue
in a reverence for all personalities and in a
qualification of the tendency to self-assertion
for the sake of other personalities. But left
to itself religion easily becomes a force which
sublimates but does not qualify man’s desire
for survival; in which case it may still function
in simple societies but will be less useful in
those which are highly complex and in which
the problem of human relationships has become
very important.
Next to the faith of agrarian classes the
greatest stronghold of religion is in the life of
the middle classes of the city. This phenomenon
is due to several causes. Ideals of self-mastery
and personal rectitude are always
strongest in those classes in which physical
resources are not so abundant as to tempt to
sensual excesses and not so scant as to lead to
an obsession with life’s externalities. For that
reason the resources of religion for the solution
of personal moral problems are particularly
coveted by the middle classes. On the other
hand the middle classes are also religious
because they are comparatively unconscious of
their responsibility for society’s sins and comparatively
untouched by the evil consequences
of an unethical civilization. They may therefore
indulge in a religion which creates moral
respectability, and reinforces self-respect, even
though it does not force them to share their
sense of worth with all their fellows. There is
for this reason an element of hypocrisy in all
middle-class religion of which it never becomes
clearly conscious but which helps to create
the corroding cynicism from which the lower
classes of modern society suffer.
Since ideals of personal righteousness flourish
in the genteel poverty of the countryside at
least as well as in urban middle class conditions,
the religion of peasants and the city’s
middle classes have two characteristics in common:
their preoccupation with problems of the
individual life and their concern for the adjustment
of the soul to nature’s realities. But
while they share these elements the two types
of religion are by no means identical. The
simple expedient of claiming divine and supernatural
intervention in the soul’s specific cases
of distress does not appeal to the sophisticated
intelligence of city people, particularly since
higher learning has become so general and
science has become the burden of this learning.
They are anxious to correct the intellectual
inadequacies of traditional religion; and if they
are conscious of any moral defects in it, they
have the easy faith that these will be eliminated
with a proper adjustment of religious
affirmations to the world of scientific fact.
The conflict between orthodoxy and liberalism,
between fundamentalism and modernism,
is essentially a conflict between city and
countryside. Though the Protestant Reformation
was used by the rising cities to assert the
needs of the inner life against a too artificially
elaborated institutional religion and to express
an ethic of individualism against the traditional
loyalties of the peasants rather than to
make a readjustment of religion to the growing
demands of intellectual life, the humanistic
revival which preceded the Reformation was
clearly determined by this latter interest and it
contributed to the dissolution of the medieval
religious structure. In the recent theological
controversies within Protestantism, between
Conservatism and Liberalism, the religious
naïvete of the agrarian and the intellectual
sophistication of the city are more obvious
influences in the conflict.
The revision of ancient affirmations of faith
in the light of modern learning was of course
necessary from the point of view of the general
needs of the age, and not required merely to
satisfy the intellectual scruples of a particular
class in society which has a preponderant influence
in the Protestant church. It might be
better to say therefore that the commercial
middle classes appropriated as much as they
prompted the revision of Protestant theology
and religion.
By doing this they have indeed created a
religion capable of maintaining itself in urban
civilization, but it develops little power for the
ethical reconstruction of industrial society.
The same religionists who pride themselves
upon the reasonableness of their faith generally
use their very modern and revised religion to
sanctify a very unmodern and unrevised
ethical orthodoxy, an individualistic orthodoxy
which makes much of self-realization and comparatively
little of the social needs of modern
life.
The kind of liberal religion which thrives
among the privileged classes of the city gives
them some guarantee of the worth of their
personalities against the threats of a seemingly
impersonal universe which science has revealed,
but it does not help to make them aware of
the perils to personality in society itself. The
final test of any religion must be its ability to
prompt ethical action upon the basis of reverence
for personality. To create a world view
which justifies a high appreciation of personality
and fails to develop an ethic which guarantees
the worth of personality in society, is the
great hypocrisy. It is the hypocrisy which is
corrupting almost all modern religion. In a
sense hypocrisy is the inevitable by-product of
every religion. Men are never as good as their
ideals and never as conscious as the impartial
observer of their divergence from them. Every
religious person commits the error of solipsism
in some form or other, the sin of claiming for
himself what he will not grant to his brothers.
The religion of modern men, particularly of
the privileged classes, seems to be more than
ordinarily insincere, partly because the social
simplicity of another age obscured this
inevitable hypocrisy and partly because the
privilege of the religious classes is so great and
its unethical basis in modern society, particularly
from the perspective of the lowly, so
patent and so destructive, that it is no longer
possible to veil the immoral implications of a
self-centered religion.
The question which we really face, therefore,
is whether religion is constitutionally but
a sublimation of man’s will to live or whether it
can really qualify the will of the individual and
restrain his expansive desires for the sake of
society. If it is only the former, it will continue
to be the peculiar possession either of
those who have no urgent social problems or of
those who are the beneficiaries and not the victims
of social maladjustments. If religion is
not now functioning in the solution of social
and ethical problems, its impotence in this field
may be due to constitutional weaknesses which
may be corrected, once they are understood, or
it may be due to certain specific historical
influences of the past centuries of Western life
which further experience will change and
qualify. If religion has resources for the
solution of social and ethical problems which
have not been made available for the uses of
society, it is the duty of modern teachers of
religion and of all who still have confidence in
its social efficacy or who benefit by its comforts
to work for the elimination of its social limitations,
whether they seem to be incidental and
casual or basic and constitutional. Even constitutional
limitations in the social task need
not discredit religion as a social force; for a
valuable resource may be closely related to a
social limitation and a way may be discovered
to detach the one from the other. Men always
tend to be either uncritical devotees or merciless
critics of the various values which emerge
in human life. This is particularly true in
regard to the values of religion, the limitations
of which are always aggravated by its unreflective
champions and made the occasion of
sweeping abuse by its critics. Religious people
have assumed too easily that a religious life
must issue not only in private rectitude but in
perfect social attitudes. This overestimate of
its social usefulness easily creates a reaction of
criticism which denies that there is any useful
counsel in religion for the problems of society
or any dynamic necessary for their solution.
CHAPTER III THE SOCIAL RESOURCES OF RELIGION
The task of analyzing and isolating the
ethical limitations and the social deficiencies
of religion is to no purpose if there is not in
religion itself, at its best, some resources which
civilization and society need for the solution
of their problems. Some critics of religion
discount it entirely as a social force, or at least
as a force of social progress. Bertrand Russell’s
prejudices on this subject are too violent
to make his testimony against religion particularly
weighty. Yet he speaks for a large
number of ethically sensitive individuals who
share his critical attitude, if not his vehemence,
when he declares: “Since the thirteenth century
the church has consistently encouraged men’s
blood lust and avarice and discouraged every
approach to human and kindly feeling....
Emancipation from the churches is still an
essential condition of improvement, particularly
in America where the churches have more
influence than in Europe.... Of all requisites
for the regeneration of society the decay
of religion seems to me to have the best chance
of being realized.”[2] The number of people
among the middle and higher classes who
would subscribe to such a denunciation of
organized religion is probably not very large.
But there are very many who ignore the
church as a force for social amelioration; and
in the class of industrial workers a temper
against the church exceeding even Mr. Russell’s
violence is very general.
Whatever may be the facts in regard to
contemporary religion and to other specific
types of organized religious life, it is relevant
to ask whether religion as such, freed from its
specific limitations, contains indispensable
resources for the ethical reconstruction of
society.
The first resource which would seem to be of
social value is the social imagination which
religion, at its best, develops upon the basis of
its high evaluation of personality. A spiritual
interpretation of the universe may not issue
automatically in a high appreciation of human
personality, but religion is never quite able to
deny this ethical implication of its faith, and
in occasional moments of high insight it revels
in it. It persuades men to regard their fellows
as their brothers because they are all children
of God. It insists, in other words, that temporal
circumstance and obvious differences are
dwarfed before the spiritual affinities which
men have through their common relation to a
divine creator. Thus Jesus could deal sympathetically
with the harlot of the street, the
publican at the gate, the Samaritan woman at
the well and the blinded fanatics and their
dupes who crucified him. The apostle Paul,
though he did not always understand the
genius of his master, was nevertheless able to
apprehend this central dogma at the heart of
religion and declare: “In Christ there is
neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free.”
Celsus, the critic of the Christian church in the
first century, derides the church for its failure
to distinguish between outcasts and respectable
citizens. The fervor and consistency with
which the church has espoused the ideal of the
equal worth of all personalities has not always
equaled that of the early church; many
compromises with the brute facts of history
have been made; yet the church has never been
able to betray this faith altogether. The
missionary enterprise with all its weaknesses
is still a revelation of this power in religion.
Oceans are bridged and varying circumstances
of race and environment are ignored in order
that the soul inspired by God may claim kinship
with other souls of every race and every
clime.
The physical characteristics and outward
circumstances in which men differ are sometimes
not so great as they seem to the superficial
observer; wherefore education may do as
much as religion to cultivate and discover those
profounder unities which made all men
brothers. There are hatreds which are due
merely to misunderstanding. They spring
from the parochialism of the average mind,
which knows no better than to regard with contempt
what differs from the standards and
values to which it has become habituated.
Education and culture may emancipate men
from such hatreds. Other misunderstandings
which are caused by a superficial analysis of
men’s action may be dissipated by a profounder
appreciation of the complex life of every individual
out of which each action emerges. Yet
understanding alone does not solve all the
problems of living together. We do not hate
only those whom we do not know or understand.
Sometimes we hate those most whom
we know best. Love does not flow inevitably
out of intimacy. Intimacy may merely accentuate
previous attitudes, whether they be
benevolent or malevolent. Anthropologists are
easily obsessed with the inequalities which men
reveal in their natural state, and the very
abundance of their knowledge prompts them
to an ethically enervating determinism when
they attempt to gauge the potentialities of
so-called primitive peoples. The modern
psychologists are more inclined to accept the
dogma of the total depravity of man than the
ancient theologians were, and they prove
thereby that a profound knowledge of human
nature need not incline men to regard human
beings with reverence and affection. Mr.
H. L. Mencken may not speak for the scientists,
but he is somewhat typical of the cynicism
which follows in the wake of intellectualism.
His estimate of human beings is: “Man is a
sick fly taking a dizzy ride on a gigantic
flywheel.... He is lazy, improvident, unclean....
Life is a combat between jackals and
jackasses.” Love is always slightly irrational
and requires an irrational urge for its support.
It is at least as irrational as hatred and the
same intelligence which mitigates the one may
enervate the other. A highly sophisticated
intelligence is generally unable to survey the
human scene with any higher attitude than that
of pity for human beings, and pity is a form
of contempt under a thin disguise of sympathy.
The facts of human nature are sufficiently
complex to validate almost any hypothesis
which may be projected into them. Therefore
the assumptions upon which we essay our social
contacts are all important. One reason why
the social sciences can never attain the scientific
prestige of the physical sciences to which they
aspire is that the importance of hypotheses
increases with the complexity and variability
of the data into which they are projected.
Every assumption is an hypothesis, and human
nature is so complex that it justifies almost
every assumption and prejudice with which
either a scientific investigation or an ordinary
human contact is initiated. A vital religion
not only prompts men to venture the assumption
that human beings are essentially trustworthy
and lovable, but it endows them with
the courage and inclination to maintain their
hypothesis when immediate facts contradict it
until fuller facts are brought in to verify it.
Mere sentiment is easily defeated by life’s disappointing
realities. Anatole France observed
that if one started with the supposition that
men are naturally good and virtuous, one
inevitably ends by wishing to kill them all.
Human nature is neither lovable nor trustworthy
in its undisciplined state and a sentimental
overestimate of its virtue may well
result in the reaction to which Anatole France
alludes. Yet its undeveloped resources are
always greater than either a superficial or critical
intelligence is able to fathom. There must
be an element of faith in love if it is to be
creative. “Love,” said Paul, “believes all
things”; and it may be added that it saves its
faith from absurdity by creating some of the
evidence which justifies its assumptions. It
“hopes till hope creates from its own wreck the
thing it contemplates.” Nothing less than
a religious appreciation of personality, supported
by a spiritual interpretation of the universe
itself in terms of moral goodwill, will
make love robust enough to overcome momentary
disappointments and gain its final victory.
The injunction of Jesus to his disciples to forgive
not seven times, but seventy times seven,
represents the natural social strategy of a
robust and vital religious idealism, which subdues
evil by its unswerving confidence in the
good.
While it is true that religion does not issue
automatically in an attitude of reverence and
goodwill toward all human personalities, it
nevertheless remains a fact that a religious
world view does incline men to regard their
fellow men from a perspective which obscures
differences and imperfections and reveals affinities
and potential virtue. Even if intelligence
became imaginative enough to discover the
affinities, it could not be courageous enough to
challenge the evil in men in the name of their
better selves. The art of forgiveness can be
learned only in the school of religion. And it
is an art which men must learn increasingly as
a complex society makes human associations
more and more intimate. Whatever improvement
a growing social science may establish
in the technique of social intercourse, men will
never escape the necessity of overcoming the
evil, which they inflict upon each other, by
creative patience and courageous trust. A
higher intelligence may mitigate our fears and
an exacter justice may restrain the inclination
to wreak vengeance upon the wrongdoer; but
only the stubborn forces of religion will turn
fear into trust and hatred into love. Sometimes
mutual fear and hatred reduce themselves
to such an absurdity (as in the late
World War) that even a superficial intelligence
can recognize it; but their absurdity does
not become patent until they have issued in
mutual annihilation. Even then the person
with an ordinary commonsense view of life can
do no better than to substitute partial trust for
fear and partial understanding for hatred. So
one war breeds the next. All men are potentially
at once our foes and our friends. An
unreflective social life assumes that they are
enemies and helps to make them so. A higher
social intelligence establishes a nicely balanced
compromise between trust and mistrust so that
the one cannot be very creative and the other
not too destructive. Only the foolishness of
faith knows how to assume the brotherhood of
man and to create it by the help of the assumption.
A religious ideal is always a little absurd
because it insists on the truth of what ought to
be true but is only partly true; it is however
the ultimate wisdom, because reality slowly
approaches the ideals which are implicit in its
life. A merely realistic analysis of any given
set of facts is therefore as dangerous as it is
helpful. The creative and redemptive force is
a faith which defies the real in the name of the
ideal, and subdues it.
Love is, in short, a religious attitude. There
are circumstances in which it may prosper
without the inspiration of religion. In the
family relation and in other intimate circles
proximity and consanguinity may prompt men
to regard human beings as essentially good,
and direct experience validate their faith.
That is why Jesus discounted love in the
family as a religious achievement. “If ye love
those who love you, what thanks have ye?” In
the secondary relations, which are no longer
secondary in the matter of importance to
human welfare, the matter is not so simple.
In these only a sublime assumption will persuade
men to embark upon the adventure of
brotherhood, and only a robust and constantly
replenished faith will inure them against
inevitable disappointments. The religious
interpretation of the world is essentially an
insistence that the ideal is real and that the real
can be understood only in the light of the ideal.
Since the family relation is the most ethical
relation men know, religious faith interprets
all life in terms of that relation. In view of
many of the facts of history which seem to
reveal the world of man as but a projection of
the world of nature in which animal fights with
animal and herd with herd, this kind of interpretation
is superficially too absurd to persuade
a highly sophisticated intelligence. It is
the truth which is withheld from the wise and
revealed to babes. Yet it is the truth without
which men will not be able to build a peaceful
society. It is the truth which even the physical
facts of a highly complex civilization, in which
space and time are being annihilated, are conspiring
to make true. The races and groups
of mankind are obviously not living as a
family; but they ought to. And as the necessity
becomes more urgent the truth of the ideal
becomes more real.
It would be foolish to insist that goodwill
alone will create conscience and that to detect
the ethical core at the heart of man’s being is
all that is required to make him ethical. It is
a task to persuade human beings to trust their
fellows; but is equally important to prompt
their fellows to trustworthy action. If human
nature is left unchallenged and undeveloped,
it hardly qualifies the brute struggle for survival
sufficiently to validate any religion or
ethic of trust. Men’s actions are not as free as
we have imagined. The social, economic and
psychological sciences have restricted the concept
of freedom in the soul of man as the
physical sciences have restricted it in the universe.
Man is not only less free than he had
once imagined, but he is not as free as he once
was. If science has discredited the idea of
freedom, civilization has circumscribed the fact.
It is easier for man to act as an ethical individual
in a comparatively simple social group,
such as the family, than in a very large and
complex social group when even the most
robust ethical purpose must meet the resistance
and the corruption of the primitive and
untamed desires of the group. If man is
capable of sacrificing immediate advantages
for ultimate ones and his own advantages for
the sake of society, this capacity is an achievement
which he gains only after much effort and
preserves from corruption only at the price of
eternal vigilance. The first requisite of an
ethical life in modern civilization is a realization
of the difficulties which face the human
conscience in maintaining itself against the
pressure of immediate desires to which the
whole emotional life of man is wedded. It is
not easy to sacrifice meat for beauty, pleasure
for some seemingly ephemeral value, self-interest
for the sake of the family, the interest
of the family for the sake of society, the
interest of our generation for the society of
to-morrow. Yet only by such sacrifices can
man prove the reality and potency of his creative
will. If such sacrifices are not actually
made, all so-called morality becomes in fact a
device for obscuring the bestiality of man
without overcoming it.
The fact that, in spite of the pressure of the
struggle for survival, man has created a kingdom
of values in which truth, beauty and goodness
have been made real, is proof that he is
more free and more moral than the modern
cynic is willing to concede. But his kingdom
of values is never as uncorrupted as he
imagines. The task therefore of binding men
to spiritual values, and of prompting them to
sacrifice immediate pleasures and physical
satisfactions for them, is difficult almost to the
point of desperation. Religion makes its contribution
to it by giving man the assurance
that the world of values really has a relevant
place in the universe and that values are permanent
and will be conserved. He is challenged
to sacrifice in a universe in which love
is a basic law. He is asked to prefer personal
values to property values in a world in which
personality is the highest reality. He is
prompted to exercise his conscience under the
scrutiny and with the sympathy of a higher
conscience. Religion in its purest form does
not guarantee man an immediate reward for
every ethical achievement; indeed it may offer
him no reward at all except the reward which
inheres in the act itself. But it does give him
the final satisfaction of guaranteeing the
reality of a universe which is not blind to the
values for which he must pay such a high price,
and which is not indifferent or hostile to his
struggle. It asks him to respect human personality
because the universe itself, in spite of
some obvious evidence to the contrary, knows
how to conserve personality; and to create
values in a world in which values are not an
effervescence but a reality. Religion is in
short the courageous logic which makes the
ethical struggle consistent with world facts.
In its most vital form religion validates its
sublime assumptions in immediate experience
and gives man an unshakable certainty. It
thus becomes the dynamic of moral action as
well as the logic which makes the action
reasonable.
The force of its faith operates not only to
preserve moral vigor but to sensitize moral
judgments. The God of religious devotion is
not only revealed in the moral values of the
universe outside of man, but he is revealed in
the aspirations of man which are beyond his
achievements. God insures not only the preservation
of values but their perfection. All
moral achievement is qualified by the relativities
of time and circumstance. The worship of
a holy God saves the soul from taking premature
satisfaction in its partial achievement. It
subjects every moral value to comparison with
a more perfect moral ideal. Of course the
absolute perfection of God is itself conditioned
by the imperfect human insight which conceives
it. A cruel age may picture God more cruel
than itself, and to a generation lusting for
power God may be the supreme tyrant. Thus
religion may become the sanctification of
human imperfections. Yet in its highest form
religion does inculcate a wholesome spirit of
humility which gives the soul no peace in any
virtue while higher virtue is attainable.
The force of religion in moral action and
the necessity of religious assurance for the
highest type of social life may be gauged by
an analysis of possible alternatives to a social
life which is oriented by a religious world view.
There are two real alternatives to such a life.
The one is based upon an ethical but unreligious
world view, and the other scorns both
ethics and religion in its absolute determinism.
An ethical life which claims no support from
religion may on occasion develop a very high
type of social idealism, particularly since it
escapes the ethical defects of religion even
while it sacrifices religious resources. Stoicism
is in many respects superior to pantheistic
religions; for there are moral advantages in
underestimating rather than overestimating
the virtue of the universe. It is better to create
a sense of tension between the conscience of
man and a morally indifferent nature than to
obscure the moral defects of nature by a deification
of the natural order. But if men disavow
all faith in a power not their own which
makes for righteousness, they cannot finally
save themselves from either arrogance or
despair. Religion may destroy man’s self-reliance
by an undue sense of humility, but
even that limitation is no more destructive of
moral values than a self-reliance which prompts
the human spirit to strut for a while on this
narrow world in the consciousness of unique
virtue before capitulating to a world which is
too blind to know what it has destroyed.
Thomas Huxley thought he would as soon
worship “a wilderness of monkeys” as to give
himself to the worship of humanity after the
fashion of Comte. To insist too strenuously
upon the uniqueness of human life in the cosmic
order must inevitably issue in the pride which
such a worship implies. Since the Renaissance
there has been a marked decay of the spirit of
humility in Western civilization which is closely
associated with the secularization of its ethical
idealism. The difference between the pride of
secular idealism and the humility implicit in
genuine religion may be gauged, as Professor
Irving Babbitt suggests, by comparing Confucius
with Buddha and Marcus Aurelius
with Jesus. Pascal thought the stoics were
guilty of “diabolical pride.” The judgment
may be too severe, but it must be confessed
that a purely secular idealism has difficulty in
escaping a morally destructive arrogance from
which true religion is saved because it subjects
all values and achievements to measurement,
with its absolutes as the criteria. “Why callest
thou me good?” said Jesus: “no one is good
save God.” In the religion of Jesus the perfection
of God is consistently defined as an
absolute love by comparison with which all
altruistic achievements fall short. “I say unto
you, love your enemies; bless them that curse
you; do good to them that despitefully use you
and persecute you; that ye may be children of
your Father in heaven; for he maketh his sun
to rise on the evil and the good and sendeth
rain upon the just and on the unjust. For if
ye love them which love you, what reward have
ye? Do not even the publicans the same?...
Be ye therefore perfect even as your
Father in heaven is perfect.”[3] Here the value
of an absolute standard to save from undue
pride in partial ethical achievements is particularly
apparent. Prudential morality can
hardly go beyond the encouragement of altruism
within the social group, i.e. loving those
“which love you.” That is precisely what
Stoicism did. It is just this pride in partial
achievement which complicates the moral problem
of modern life; for our ethical difficulties
are created by the very tendency of reasonable
ethics to make life within groups moral and
never to aspire to the moral redemption of
inter-group relations. Humility is therefore a
spiritual grace which has value not only for
its own sake but for its influence upon social
problems. Traditional religions, which live off
of original inspirations and experiences without
recreating them, easily fall into a pride of their
own, the pride which comes from identifying
the absolute standards of their inspired source
with their partial achievements and inevitable
compromises. But religion in its purest and
most unspoiled form is always productive of a
spirit of humility which regards every moral
achievement as but a vantage point from which
new ventures of faith and life are to be initiated
toward the alluring perfection which is in God.
An ethical idealism unsupported by religion
is almost as certain to issue in final despair as
in unjustified pride. A few choice spirits are
sometimes able to imagine themselves in
rebellion against the universe without finally
succumbing to a temper of sullenness; but the
dreadful logic of insisting upon conscience in a
conscienceless world inevitably leaves its mark
upon the multitude. Oswald Spengler, in his
morphology of civilizations,[4] presents “religion
without God” as the unvarying symptom of a
dying civilization, too sophisticated to believe
in the cosmic worth of its moral values but not
quite ready to abandon them. The enervating
effect of a moral idealism which has sacrificed
its hopes with its illusions always becomes
apparent in the long run, but frequently it
reveals itself quite immediately in the very lives
of its most robust champions.
Mr. Russell may think that the “firm
foundation of unyielding despair” is an adequate
basis for an ethical life, but his own
growing bitterness betrays how such a
philosophy corrupts moral idealism with a
sense of frustration. The idealist is put into
the position of sacrificing everything for values
which have no guaranteed reality in the cosmic
order. Even his faith in mankind is finally
destroyed; for however precious personal
values may seem in a given moment, his
philosophy denies him the right to attribute
any lasting worth to them. True religion
gives man a sense of both humility and security
before the holiness which is at once the source
and the goal of his virtue; and thus it saves
him at the same time from premature complacency
and ultimate despair. The choice
between irreligious and religious idealism is
the choice between pride which issues in
despondency and humility which becomes the
basis of self-respect. There is an irrational
element in either alternative; but the irreligious
idealist is in error when he imagines that he
has chosen the more reasonable alternative;
his choice is no more reasonable and morally
much less potent.
The absolute determinists who have as little
confidence in the moral integrity of human
nature as in any moral meaning in cosmic facts
are more consistent than the Stoics, but they
are involved in worse absurdities. Their
cynicism robs them of both an adequate motive
and an adequate method for social reconstruction.
Discounting moral idealism even while
they exhibit it in their social passion, they
ostensibly desire social reconstruction only in
the interest of the class to which they belong.
But their personal interests are not frequently
identical with those of the oppressed classes
and they are moved as much by sympathy for
the plight of the victims of our present society
as by any selfish considerations. They profess
to be prompted by the reflection that individual
action has become useless in a capitalistic
age and that it is possible to advance the interests
of an individual only by making common
cause with other individuals in a similar predicament.
Meanwhile there is hardly an economic
determinist, even among those who are
actually members of the class of the oppressed,
who could not gain higher advantages for himself
by disassociating himself from his class
than by making common cause with it. This
is certainly true of those who are intelligent
enough to evolve or elaborate the theory of
absolute determinism.
Absolute determinism, when developed consistently,
must disavow all other methods of
social reconstruction but that of ruthless conflict.
If nothing qualifies the self-interest of
men, a conflict of interests becomes inevitable.
This defect in method is even more important
than the defect in its motive. A ruthless
struggle can result in an ordered society only
if the victors are able to annihilate their foes.
But even in that event the interests of the
members of any class engaged in a social or
political struggle will cease to be identical as
soon as its foes are eliminated. Thus a new
and equally ruthless struggle must result
between the comparatively strong and comparatively
weak, the comparatively privileged
and the comparatively underprivileged victors.
Ultimately men cannot escape the necessity
of building a stable society by the mutual
compromise and the mutual sacrifice of conflicting
rights. The determinists have made
an important contribution to the modern
social problem by revealing the brutal nature
of much of man’s social life. Even if the
human conscience could be sensitized to a much
greater degree than now seems probable, it
will not be possible to eliminate conflict
between various social and economic groups.[5]
Good men do not easily realize how selfish they
are if someone does not resist their selfishness;
and they are not inclined to abridge their
power if someone does not challenge their right
to hold it. Religious and moral idealism cannot
be expected to eliminate, but it can be
expected to mitigate social warfare. The conscience
of man must finally be the force which
builds a new society; and a man with a conscience
must be the end for which such a society
is built. If there is no virtue in man which lifts
him above the brute struggle for survival,
there is no value in him to justify the effort of
building a new and more perfect society—and
he is not the stuff out of which such a society
can be built. It is difficult to escape the conclusion
that the reverence for personality
which is implicit in religion is necessary to
establish an adequate motive and an adequate
method of social reconstruction. Reverence
for personality qualifies the individual’s will to
power so that his life can be integrated with
other lives with a minimum of conflict; and it
saves society from sacrificing the individual to
the needs of the group. In the religion of
Jesus both a social and an individualistic
emphasis issues from a spiritual appreciation
of human personality. The individual is given
a place and prestige which he never before possessed
in society. Western civilization owes
much to the high evaluation of the individual
which Jesus introduced into the thought of the
world. On the other hand this emphasis is
saved from mere individualism by an ethic
which helps the individual to realize his highest
self by sacrificing personal advantages for
social values.
The contribution of religion to the task of
an ethical reconstruction of society is its reverence
for human personality and its aid in creating
the type of personality which deserves
reverence. Men cannot create a society if they
do not believe in each other. They cannot
believe in each other if they cannot see the
potential in the real facts of human nature.
And they cannot have the faith which discovers
potentialities if they cannot interpret human
nature in the light of a universe which is perfecting
and not destroying personal values.
CHAPTER IV THE SOCIAL CONSERVATISM OF MODERN RELIGION
The charge against religion most frequently
made by critics who are interested in social
reconstruction is that it is a conservative force
which impedes social progress. If it has
resources which are indispensable for the life
of society, social idealists will not appreciate
them if its contemporary forms are invariably
aligned with the social forces most intent upon
preserving the status quo. Contemporary liberal
Christianity refutes the charge of social
conservatism by appealing to the social
radicalism of Jesus which it alleges to have
appropriated. By this appeal liberal Christianity
exhibits one of the very tendencies of
religion which subjects it to the criticism of
social liberals. Religion is easily tempted to
make devotion to the ideal a substitute for its
realization and to become oblivious to the
inevitable compromise between its ideal and the
brute facts of life. The absolute nature of the
ethics of Jesus and the perfect harmony
between his religion and his ethics may be the
guarantee of the perennial spiritual and
ethical renewal of the Christian religion; but
it is also occasion for the self-deception of many
professed disciples. Many streams of thought
have contributed to the current of modern
liberal Christianity and it contains alluvial
deposits from all Western civilizations. Yet
it imagines that it represents a simple return
to radical and dynamic ethics of the religion of
Jesus. By this deception it easily becomes the
façade behind which the brutal facts of modern
industrial civilization may be obscured rather
than a force by which they might be eliminated.
The Protestant Reformation suffered from the
same deception. It thought of itself as a
return to the original ideal when it was, as a
matter of fact, a new type of compromise.
Catholicism was a compound of early Christianity
and the thought and life of Græco-Roman
civilization. The medieval church was
a kind of ghostly aftermath of the Roman
empire and the popes were inspired by the
genius of Cæsar as much as by the spirit of
Christ. The north European peoples first
accepted this latinized Christianity, partly
because they were attracted by those universal
elements in it which have made their appeal to
all peoples, and particularly those of the
Western world, and partly because it was for
them the symbol of the ordered civilization of
Rome which they first envied, then destroyed,
and finally tried to rebuild. In time they
reacted against the ecclesiastical, international
and feudal solidarities of this whole politico-religious
world, prompted no doubt by the
untamed spirit of liberty which characterized
the northern peoples and which resented the
tyranny by which the middle ages achieved
their high measure of social cohesion. Thus
Protestantism became the handmaiden of a
budding nationalism which was impatient of
the restraints of an international papacy, as
it has since been impatient of every other type
of international control. In time it also came
to be the peculiar spiritual possession of those
classes among the northern peoples who developed
modern commerce and industry. The
affinity between its sanctification of the principle
of liberty and the necessary individualism
of classes which were intent upon destroying
the traditional restraints of the ancient world
for the sake of giving unhampered play to a
growing commercial and industrial life, has
been so perfect that it is hardly possible to
decide which of the two is cause and which
effect. Max Weber[6] has made an interesting
analysis of commercial and industrial superiority
of Protestant nations. It may be that the
aptitude for commercial and industrial pursuits
and an inclination to the Protestant form of
the Christian faith are concomitant characteristics
of north European peoples rather
than casually related phenomena. Yet they
have become so intimately related in history
that the most typical commercial classes and
nations are most generally Protestant, and
most uniquely Protestant. In England the
nonconformist sects are almost identical with
the commercial middle classes, while the established
church with its semi-Catholic genius has
spiritual affinities both with the old Tories and
the new world of the industrial worker. In
Germany there is a similar alignment with
Catholic and agrarian Bavaria on the one hand
and the highly industrialized and Protestant
Prussia on the other. The contrast between
Protestant and industrial Ulster and Catholic
and agrarian south Ireland is equally significant.
Everywhere in Western civilization, and
nowhere more than in America, Protestantism
with its individualism became a kind of
spiritual sanctification of the peculiar interests
and prejudices of the races and classes which
dominate the industrial and commercial expansion
of Western civilization.
Since liberal Christianity is the product of
an adjustment of the main tenets of orthodox
Protestantism to the sophistication of the cities
and the growing intelligence of the privileged
and therefore educated classes, its whole moral
atmosphere is much more determined by the
special interests of these classes than it is willing
to admit. The authority of Jesus, to which
it appeals, has indeed been given a new
emphasis, but this has been done because liberal
Christianity valued the theological simplicity
rather than the moral austerity of his gospel.
In the same way many liberal Jews have
appealed from the law to the prophets, not
because they had a great passion for the ethical
rigors of an Amos or Isaiah but because they
found obedience to the minute exactions of the
law too onerous in a sophisticated age. Jesus
is valuable to the modern Christian because he
offers an escape from the theological absurdities
of the ancient creeds; meanwhile his
ethical and religious idealism will not leave the
lives of those who profess to follow him unaffected.
In time it may become the instrument
of the regeneration of Western society; but
this will not be possible if the liberal church
does not overcome its self-deception and realizes
that its religious and moral life is a composite
into which have entered the imperialism
of Rome, the sophistication of the Greeks, the
fierce tribalism and individualism of the
Nordics and the prudential ethics of an
industrial civilization.
Religion can be healthy and vital only if a
certain tension is maintained between it and
the civilization in which it functions. In time
this tension is inevitably resolved into some
kind of compromise. The tendency of religion
to become a conservative social force is partly
derived from its ambition to defend the
resultant compromise in the name of its original
ideal. Thus all partial values, determined
by geographic, economic, social and political
forces, are given a pseudo-absolute character
by the religious elements which entered into the
compromise; and their defects are sufficiently
obscured and sanctified to make them comparatively
impregnable to the attacks of the critics
of the status quo. The Russian moujik was
more than ordinarily docile under the tyranny
of the czars and more than ordinarily patient
with the imperfections of his society, because
his obedience was claimed not by Russia but
by “holy Russia,” the historic incarnation of
his religion. In the same way the medieval
church became organically involved with feudalism
and forced the critics of feudal society to
undermine its influence before they could hope
to change the feudal social order. Orthodox
Protestantism is intimately related to this day
with Nordicism, with the racial arrogance of
north European peoples. The Ku Klux Klan,
which thrives in the hinterlands of America,
maintains its influence over simple minds by
screening racial prejudice against Slavic,
Latin and Semitic peoples behind a devotion
to the spiritual treasures of Protestantism and
their defense against the fancied peril of
allegedly inferior religions. In Ireland the
racial pride of Ulstermen expresses itself in a
passionate espousal of the Presbyterian
religion and a contemptuous attitude toward
the Catholicism of the Irish. In modern prewar
Germany there was a curious partnership
between “Thron und Altar,” the interests of
the nationalist German state, as integrated by
the Prussian royal house, with the interests of
Protestantism. To this day the fanatic
monarchists of Germany are also Protestant
extremists who imagine that the monarchy was
undermined by religiously motivated conspiracies
of Jews and Catholics. Incidentally
the Lutheran type of Protestantism which
flourishes in Germany has always been less
intimately aligned with the commercial classes
than the Calvinistic sects of other Western
nations. While the German socialists include
the Lutheran church among the forces of reaction
with which they must contend, the church’s
real strength is among the peasants and junkers,
who are also the strongest support of
monarchist opinion and who abhor the democratic
liberalism of commercial and industrial
Germany as much as they despise socialist
radicalism; and they imagine both to be
inspired by Semitic designs upon their national
integrity. The real inspiration of this liberalism
with its emphasis on international conciliation
and coöperation is born out of the
economic and political necessities of an industrial
and commercial state which cannot afford
to indulge in the fanatic nationalism to
which peasants and agrarian aristocrats are
prone.
Liberal Christianity as it has developed in
the urban centers of the Western world grew
out of the intellectual and religious needs of
the privileged classes and bears the marks of
its social environment just as much as the other
types of religion which have preceded it and
with which it is historically related. It is in the
same danger of becoming a spiritual sublimation
of the peculiar interests and prejudices of
these classes while it imagines itself the bearer
of an unconditioned message to its day. It has
preserved the same individualistic ethics which
has characterized orthodox Protestantism and
which is so dear to the hearts of the commercial
classes, and so unequal to the moral problems
of a complex civilization in which the needs of
interdependence outweigh the values of personal
liberty. The supposed devotion of the
privileged classes to a religion in which the
sacrifice rather than the stubborn preservation
of individual rights is enjoined and in which
the prudential and utilitarian root of morality
is completely plucked out is one of the incongruities
which frequently occur when a civilization
harks back to the spiritual visions of its
childhood in order to obscure the sober and
disenchanted practicality of its maturity.
If the modern church is really to become an
instrument of social redemption, it must learn
how to divorce itself from the moral temper of
its age even while it tries to accommodate itself
to the intellectual needs of the generation.
The religion of Jesus is free of theological
absurdities. Its very simplicity saves it from
undue entanglements with discredited cosmologies.
But those who espouse it chiefly for
this reason easily miss its real genius. Its
essential assumptions may not outrage the
mind, but neither are they readily accepted by
an age which has sanctified cool and careful,
moral prudence. Its solemn injunction, “Take
no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or
what ye shall drink ... but seek ye first the
kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all
these things shall be added unto you,” is
strangely anachronistic in a day which worships
obvious and tangible success and appreciates
virtue only as it insures those advantages of
health and prosperity which are its highest
desiderata. Prudential morality has its own
uses. Few men have either the imagination or
the courage to pursue an ideal if it does not
justify itself by some fairly immediate advantage.
Society is not altogether the loser if men
discover that “Godliness is profitable unto all
things,” and espouse an ideal because they have
their eye upon the concrete and obvious advantages
which flow from it. But a prudential
morality has its limitations and these will prove
less detrimental to society if they are not
sanctified by religion. It is better therefore to
seek no other basis for utilitarian ethics than
the social experience from which it is really
derived. Honesty will prove itself the best
policy without the authority of religion. The
function of religion is to nerve men for an
ethical achievement when it promises no
immediate returns. From the perspective of
an impartial observer there is an element of
hypocrisy in all prudential morality. The cool
intelligence which computes selfish advantage
which may flow from moral action is not
imaginative enough to include all persons who
are affected by an action and not dynamic
enough to balance the drive of self-interest
which influences it.
In modern industrial society those who are
in position of power and privilege are most
inclined to espouse an ethical ideal because it
tends to stabilize social life and thus insures
the perpetuation of privilege. They are also
most easily tempted to restrict ethical action so
that it will prompt to no sacrifices which are
not consistent with a wise self-interest. Since
they are also the classes which have, for reasons
previously discussed, maintained their loyalty
to religion, the church can avoid connivance
with their prudential morality only by a continual
regeneration of its religious life. Failing
to maintain a distinction between utilitarian
ethics and a religiously inspired moral life, the
church cannot escape the fate of becoming a
useful adjunct of the forces of privilege in the
social and economic conflict in which modern
society is engaged. It may be good business
to pay high wages, but social good may demand
an increase in the wages of workers beyond the
point where economic advantage is derived
from an enlightened wage policy. It may be
wise to share some privileges so that all of them
will not be lost, but sensitive ethical insight will
detect the selfishness and insincerity in such a
course. A religion which sanctifies such social
prudence is ultimately a hindrance to the
ethical reconstruction of modern society. A
religion which discovers and amends the limitations
of prudential morality by the elements
of its reverence for personality and its quest
for the absolute is a necessary factor in social
reconstruction.
The question which faces the modern church
is whether it will help to hide or to discover the
limitations in the ethical orientation of modern
life. Its devotion to the gospel of Jesus may
serve either purpose. The contempt for ethical
opportunism implied in the whole idealism of
Jesus and its scorn for immediate advantages
are the very ethical values which the generation
needs, but they are also the values which have
given the Christian religion its great moral
authority and prestige which the church can
so easily misuse. If the authority of Jesus
prompts men to a courage and imagination
which escapes the defects of contemporary
morality, its influence will be redemptive; if it
is used merely to hide the defects, the critics
of the church will be justified in regarding it
as detriment to social progress. The religion
which is socially most useful is one which can
maintain a stubborn indifference to immediate
ends and thus give the ethical life of man that
touch of the absolute without which all
morality is finally reduced to a decorous but
essentially unqualified self-assertiveness. The
paradox of religion is that it serves the world
best when it maintains its high disdain for the
world’s values. Its social usefulness is dependent
upon its ability to maintain devotion to
absolute moral and spiritual values without
too much concern for their practical, even for
their social usefulness. The church is in a very
favorable position to make a necessary contribution
to social life, for it reveres as Lord
one whose life incarnates the strategy which
saves morality from insincerity. But its assets
easily became moral liabilities when it compounds
the pure idealism of Jesus with the calculated
practicalities of the age and attempts
to give the resultant compromise the prestige
of absolute authority.
CHAPTER V 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.
CHAPTER VI SOCIAL COMPLEXITY AND ETHICAL IMPOTENCE
While there is good reason to regret the
individualism of Protestantism in a civilization
which has increased the intimacy of all human
relations and made social and economic interdependence
a basic fact, yet it alone cannot be
held responsible for the unethical nature of
modern society. This is attributable as much
to the greater difficulties which the human conscience
faces in modern life as to any weakness
in the moral and religious idealism by which
it is informed. A much more adequate type of
religious idealism might have been unequal to
the task of preserving ethical values in modern
life.
The gradual secularization of economics
through the growing complexity of commercial
relations has been a previous interest of our
study. When it became inconvenient and difficult
to make simple moral standards, expressed
in prohibitions of usury and maintenance of a
“just price,” fit the new intricacies of international
commerce and industrial production,
we have seen how men turned naturally and
inevitably to the consoling reflection that “in
the providence of God life is so arranged that
each man seeking his own shall serve the common
weal.” The doctrine of laissez faire was
in other words as much an admission of defeat
on the part of the moral forces of society as it
was a conscious effort toward secularization.
Other factors beside a growing complexity of
social life helped however to secularize modern
society. Modern commerce and industry tend
to increase the extent of coöperative effort
while they diminish personal contacts. World
commerce and large-scale production make
human beings interdependent without offering
them the opportunity of entering upon personal
associations. There is a natural sympathy
in the soul which saves men from actions which
are very obviously detrimental to their fellows.
But if they are unable to survey the consequences
of their actions or to gauge the reactions
to their attitudes in the lives of others,
their temptation to unethical conduct is materially
increased. The master of a manufacturing
unit in the old handcraft period of industry
thus found it much easier to maintain moral
relations to his workers than a modern, frequently
absentee, owner of a large factory. If
in addition ownership becomes collective, with
the resulting division of responsibility, while
the number of workers increases until individuals
lose their significance in the mass, the
problem of making industrial relations ethical
is further complicated. Ethical conduct is, in
its last analysis, based upon reverence for personality;
and personality fails to make its
appeal to the conscience when considered in the
mass and when regarded at too long range. In
such circumstances a degree of intelligence and
imagination, which mankind has not yet
achieved, is required to gauge the effect of
industrial and commercial policy upon the individuals
who are involved in it. The unethical
nature of modern civilization with its destruction
of confidence in the moral integrity of
human nature and with its deterministic obsessions
is largely due to its mechanical perfections
which have increased the extent of social
coöperation while they have decreased personal
contacts.
The same means of commerce and communication
which have increased the size of industrial
groups and extended the range of commercial
transactions have also enlarged the
political units and increased interdependence
between them. We are living in a world in
which a financial depression in America results
in a panic upon the silk exchange of Tokio; in
which a boycott upon cotton goods initiated by
a Gandhi in India throws thousands of cotton
spinners in Manchester into unemployment;
and in which Western industrialism may
exploit Chinese labor in the seaports of China
without one beneficiary of this industrialism
out of a million being able to make a mental
picture of the social consequences of the commercial
policies from which he benefits. The
difficulty of these long-range relationships is
further complicated by the fact that the participants
are separated not only by great distances
but by the barriers of race and nationality.
All social decencies in the past have
developed within the bounds of the group, and
men have not yet learned to treat individuals
in other groups with confidence, respect and
honesty. Attitudes of tenderness, sympathy
and affection have been confined very largely
to the family group. From this intimate group
they were finally sluiced out to effect social
relations in larger groups, but they have not
changed inter-group relations. Civilization
has increased the size of groups in which human
relations have an ethical basis, but it has not
moralized the action of the group nor taught
individuals in one social group to treat individuals
in other groups with the respect and
confidence which a wholesome social life
requires. The connotation of contempt which
the Jews placed in the word “gentile” and the
Greeks in the word “barbarian” may be matched
in the terminology of practically every people.
When groups are geographically separated, as
in the case of political states, fear and misunderstanding
are multiplied by the ignorance
which results from a lack of contacts. But
contacts alone do not remove them; for the
relations of political, social and racial groups
within the boundaries of the same state are only
slightly more ethical, as for instance the relation
between white and colored people in the
United States or of the Scotch and Irish in
Ulster. Human imagination and intelligence
have not been equal to the task of extending
ethical attitudes beyond the boundaries of the
group.
The ethical problem of group relations is
made still more difficult by the expansive
desires and unethical attitudes which develop
naturally within the group as a corporate
entity. That is, groups as such find it even
more difficult to maintain moral attitudes
toward other groups than do the individuals
within it toward individuals in other racial or
political unities. All human groups tend to be
more predatory than the individuals which
compose them. The most tender emotions may
characterize the relations of members of a
family to each other; but the family as such is
easily tempted to gain its advantages at the
expense of other families. The tendency of
family loyalty to accentuate covetousness has
been frequently noted by social observers who
have seen the family instinct as the very basis
of the sanctity which civilization has given
private property. Religious organizations are
not free of the imperial ambitions which come
naturally to social groups of every kind. One
fruitful cause of the dilution of religious idealism
is the desire of religious groups to gain
power and prestige among larger numbers.
They therefore soften the rigor of their ideal
that it may captivate the morally mediocre
majority. Both employers and employees frequently
find agreement in specific cases of conflict
difficult because the policies of both are
determined by considerations of loyalty to their
respective groups. Of all human groups the
political state is probably most inclined to
unethical conduct. It was a dictum of George
Washington’s that a nation was not to be
trusted beyond its interests, and history supports
the justice of his observation. After
shrewdly observing the statesmen of England
equivocate on the attitude of their nation
toward the southern rebellion until they could
determine their policy by considerations of
expediency, Henry Adams came to the melancholy
conclusion that masses of men were
always moved by interest and never by conscience
and that morality is a private and a
costly luxury.[15] One reason why the relations
of nations to each other are still characterized
by primitive fears and excessive caution is
because their actions have not, as a matter of
fact, been morally dependable. The problem
of making nations and other groups conform
to ethical standards of any kind is particularly
difficult because the ethical attitude of the individual
toward his group easily obscures the
unethical nature of the group’s desires. The
patriot identifies his tender emotions toward
his nation with the attitude of the nation itself
until he becomes incapable of a critical
appraisal of its policy; or he frankly condones
the selfishness of the nation because he recognizes
no ethical values beyond those implicit in
group loyalty. The father of a family may
feel moral pride in essentially selfish pursuits
because he means to secure advantages by them
not for himself but for his family. Loyalty to
“the firm” may give the business man a consciousness
of virtue even though it forces him
to connive in predatory practices of his concern.
The class-conscious worker may be willing
to disrupt society in the interest of his class
because all his moral needs are satisfied by his
devotion to what he regards as the most significant
social group. While this ethical paradox
of patriotism is obviously not confined to
political groups, the nation is most seriously
tempted to unethical conduct because it is not
a voluntary association, its group is conveniently
isolated from others and loyalty to
it is least qualified by other conflicting loyalties.
It may be set down as a truth of almost
axiomatic finality, that groups tend to be
unethical in proportion to the degree of
unqualified loyalty which they are able to
claim or exact of their members. In this connection
it may be noted that democracy has
increased rather than diminished the imperialism
of nations, for it has given patriotism a
higher moral sanction and thus reduced the
moral scruples which might qualify the loyalty
of their citizens. The arrogance of nations and
their insistence on moral autonomy has developed
simultaneously with the extension of
democracy. It is this ethical paradox of
patriotism which invalidates the contention
that the root of all imperialism is the imperialism
of the individual. It is true of course that
group loyalty may become a device for delegating
our vices to the group and imagining
ourselves virtuous. Some types of political
arrogance and race prejudice are obviously
methods of compensating individuals for their
lack of opportunity to bully their immediate
neighbors. Yet on the whole the unethical
character of group action is determined as
much by the partial virtues as by the vices of
individuals.
The problem of bringing groups under some
kind of ethical control is not new in history.
It has become unusually difficult in the modern
world not only because of the consolidation of
the authority of the state but also because rapid
means of communication have increased the
size of social, political and economic units and
made relations between them more intricate.
The larger the unit the more unqualified seems
to be the moral sanction which loyalty to it may
claim. To an average citizen, immersed in his
parochial interests, the nation appears in the
light of a universal community in contrast
to the smaller and voluntary communities
within the nation. Yet this same nation is one
of many human groups, most of which betray
imperial desires reminiscent of Rome but
which aspire in vain after the universal
dominion which gave Roman imperialism a
measure of moral worth. Treitschke, whose
philosophy of history was the object of so
much opprobrium during the World War that
its faithfulness to the general prejudices of
Western life would hardly be surmised, presented
the nation as the ultimate community
because all smaller societies are too petty to
deserve and all larger ones too vague and
abstract to claim the unqualified allegiance of
men.
The intricacies and propinquities of an
industrial civilization tend at some points to
increase the imperial desires of nations and at
others to make their ordinary lusts more
deadly. The feud between Germany and
France is a very ancient one, but the need of
French industry for German coal and of German
industry for French iron explains some
aspects of their present difficulties which are
not derived from ancient animosities. Modern
industry needs a unified world and, lacking it,
each nation is inclined to seek the completion
of its industrial establishment by the forcible
appropriation of territory, rich in needed
resources. The economic imperialism of
industrially advanced nations is a product of
the high productivity of modern industry
which produces more than one national unit
can consume and which needs more raw
materials than the same nation can produce.
Covetous eyes are consequently turned upon
undeveloped portions of the globe, rich in raw
materials and hungry for the products of
modern industry. In one sense the European
war was incubated in Africa. Rapid means
of communication also extend the reach of the
grasping nations. China is attempting to
throw off the shackles of a Western imperialism
which could never have gained the position
it holds on Chinese soil but for the new contiguity
which has destroyed the boundaries
between East and West. Moreover, the intricacies
of international commerce and finance
offer opportunities for a new kind of economic
imperialism which hardly needs, though it does
not always avoid, the use of political force.
The economic forces of one nation simply
penetrate the economic life of another and, if
there is a great disparity in economic power,
the weaker nation is brought under the
dominion of the stronger without the citizens
of either being aware of the process by which
this has been accomplished. This is the type
of imperialism which America is most fitted
and inclined to develop. In South America
political pressure does accompany economic
penetration, but in Europe American power
increases under a policy of political isolation.
The isolationism of America, which has
become a firmly established foreign policy
since the war, is prompted partly by the sense
of power which America feels as the richest
nation of the world, and partly by a political
infantilism which tempts us both to pharisaism
and to fear when dealing with the supposedly
more astute political bargainers of Europe.
The relation of America to the rest of the
world is a perfect example of the moral peril
in the new intricacies of modern civilization.
The citizen of the state is as ignorant of the
actual character of his nation’s relation to other
nations as of other peoples’ reactions to the
real policy of his own government. Probably
not one American in a thousand is able to comprehend
a single reason why Europe should
fear or hate America and not more than one
in a hundred is actually aware of the existence
of such hatreds and fears. There is therefore
an unconscious hypocrisy in the moral pretensions
of the citizens of every nation, a more or
less conscious hypocrisy in the attitudes of the
governments which do not share but yet exploit
the political ignorance of the people, and an
inevitable reaction of cynicism on the part of
those who know the real facts and suffer from
the moral limitations of the nation’s policy.
Group relations, particularly those which are
intricate, are thus persistently unethical
because part of the modern world is too
ignorant to make them ethical and the other
part is so worldly-wise that it has lost confidence
in the possibility of ethical relations.
Frequently hypocrisy and cynicism are united
in the same person who knows how to discount
the moral pretensions of other groups but
lacks the perspective from which he might
arrive at a critical evaluation of the real character
of his own group. This curious combination
of insincerity and cynicism is obvious in
the relation of both economic and national
groups, but it is particularly noticeable in international
difficulties. In the struggle between
economic groups there is a growing inclination
to make no moral pretensions on either
side. Sometimes the group in power makes
them but in that case its insincerity is usually
conscious rather than ignorant. In international
affairs the same patriots who ignorantly
persecute every person who seeks to qualify
national loyalty or to make a dispassionate
appraisal of national policies frequently sink
into moral despair and disillusionment when
history unfolds the inevitable consequences of
the anarchy of conflicting national lusts.
The task of making complex group relations
ethical belongs primarily to religion and education
because statecraft cannot rise above the
universal limitations of human imagination
and intelligence. A robust ethical idealism, an
extraordinary spiritual insight and a high
degree of intelligence are equally necessary for
such a social task. The difficulties of the problem
are enhanced by the fact that the religious
imagination and astute intelligence which are
equally necessary for its solution are incompatible
with each other. Religion is naturally
jealous of any partner in a redemptive enterprise;
and the same intelligence which is needed
to guide moral purpose in a complex situation
easily lames the moral will and dulls the
spiritual insight. It is possible that this difficulty
may permanently destroy every vestige
of morality in the group relations of modern
society. The necessary partnership and the
inevitable conflict between the religio-moral
and the rational forces is obvious in both the
political and the economic problems of the
present age.
The unqualified authority and the boundless
lusts of a modern state need first of all to be
brought under the scrutiny of clear minds who
understand the implications and can gauge the
consequences of its pretensions. Patriotism is
a form of altruism and as such represents the
victory of ultra-rational sanctions over the selfish
inclinations of individuals which seem quite
reasonable to the average man. The emotional
attitude and ethical achievement in patriotism
endows the patriot with a kind of madness and
pride which make him as scornful of more
rational types of altruism as of the prudent
and cautious selfishness with which he has his
primary conflict. It is because patriotism represents
a victory of an ethical ideal that religion
so easily becomes its uncritical partner. When
many hearts are cold anything that warms
them will seem religious to the undiscriminating
champion of religious values. The defects
of patriotic altruism are thus left to the correction
of rationalistic idealists who know how
to discover the absurdities into which an
uncritical devotion to partial values may issue
and how to envisage the larger community of
mankind of which the nation is a part. During
the last war moral idealists of rationalistic persuasion,
such as Bertrand Russell, Romain
Rolland, Henri Barbusse and Bernard Shaw,
were more detached in their perspective and
freer of war hysterias than any religious leaders
of equal standing. To envisage the larger
community of mankind which lacks the physical
symbols of the state and to dispel the
parochial prejudices which are harbored in
mediocre minds and which make hatred of
others the inevitable commitant of love for
one’s own is clearly a task to which a discriminating
intelligence must contribute.
However the problem of group relations, as
has been previously noted, is created not only
by the parochialism of individuals but by the
lust and greed of the group itself. The task
of persuading the group to sacrifice some of its
advantages for the sake of the whole of human
society is so difficult that it almost leads to
despair. If it will ever be accomplished religio-moral
forces, whatever their present impotence,
must come to the aid of reason. Prudence
alone may prompt nations to a measure of self-sacrificing
action, since unqualified self-assertion
must lead to mutual destruction. But
prudential morality reveals the same defects in
inter-group relations which we have noted in
simpler social problems. Its ends are always
too immediate and its perspective is too narrow.
Moral action which lacks some reference
to an absolute standard and some ultra-rational
dynamic inevitably falls short even of satisfying
the social necessities. The prudence of
nations in the present state of international
relations tends to prompt a few, usually neighboring
nations, to compose their differences, but
for the sake and at the price of sharpening the
conflict with some other alliance of states. The
net result of such an enterprise is simply to
enlarge the unit of conflict once more without
abolishing warfare. The manner in which the
triple entente and the triple alliance, both
formed with high moral pretensions, helped to
make the World War inevitable is a matter of
history. More recently there are indications
that France and Germany will compose their
differences “for the sake of Europe.” Such
a reconciliation will hasten the unification of
Europe but will also help to raise the specter
of intercontinental wars with continental units
of conflict. The unification of Asia upon a
basis of common resentment against Western
imperialism is an almost unavoidable development
in international affairs. All these continental
alliances are logical enough from any
immediate perspective but dangerous from the
perspective of the welfare of the whole race.
There is no indication that prudential statecraft
has the resources to prevent America
from inciting the whole of Europe against our
economic overlordship of that continent. The
increasing feeling aroused by the problem of
debt liquidations is symptomatic of the natural
resentment which must inevitably issue out
of a relation of economic interdependence
between a very wealthy and a poor continent.
For the settlement of this issue no policy will be
wise except one which will appear very foolish
to the wise statesmen. A prudent statecraft
has made the anxiety of a wealthy creditor the
dominant note in American international
policy, and envy and fear the chief characteristics
in the attitudes of the peoples who must
deal with us.
Social intelligence does of course produce a
finer fruit than the type of prudence which characterizes
the international policy of modern
states. There is a whole class of social idealists
who understand the economic basis of most
international difficulties and who would bring
peace to the warring classes and nations by
an economic reorganization of modern society.
Since modern industrialism and capitalism
have materially complicated the ancient feuds
between races and classes, it is evident that no
amount of moral and spiritual goodwill can
produce an ordered and stable international
society if the economic roots of war are not
clearly discerned and finally eliminated. However
the same intelligence which is capable of
such discernment easily drifts into a cynicism
which discounts all moral and personal factors
in social reconstruction and places its hope
entirely in a new social strategy. Loyalty to
the class is substituted for loyalty to the state,
and class conflict is expected to issue in a lasting
peace for both classes and nations. Economic
determinists show a superior discernment
in recognizing that in a civilization which
is forced to organize its economic life across
national boundaries the conflict of interest
between classes does become more significant
than the conflict between states, particularly
since the latter conflict is due either to economic
or to fantastic and imaginary causes. But
their very realism betrays them into a cynicism
which finally issues in the most romantic and
unrealistic dreams. They imagine that social
peace will result from the victory of one class
over all other classes. They have not taken
into account that modern capitalism produces
a formidable middle class the interests of which
are not identical with the proletarians. Moral
and spiritual considerations may conceivably
prompt this class to make common cause with
the workers in the attainment of ethical social
ends, but it will never be annihilated even by
the most ruthless class conflict nor will it be
persuaded by the logic of economic facts that
its interests are altogether identical with those
of the workers. Even if one class were able to
eliminate all other classes, which is hardly
probable, it would require some social grace
and moral dynamic to preserve harmony
between the various national groups by which
this vast mass would be organized and into
which it would disintegrate. Even within one
national unit any economic class will dissolve
into various groups, according to varying and
sometimes conflicting interests, as soon as its
foes are eliminated. The Russian communists
were not long able to preserve their absolute
solidarity after their revolution was firmly
established. The dominant group soon learned
that no amount of ruthlessness was able to
prevent the gradual formation of a minority
group under Trotzky and Zinoviev. Significantly,
the conflict of interest between peasants
and industrial workers is the real basis of this
schism within communist ranks.
In Europe the qualification of patriotism by
class loyalties has in some instances led to a
mitigation of national animosities, but it has
not destroyed them. On the contrary it has
added new hatreds to the old and created a
society which is divided not only by vertical but
also by horizontal divisions. The Marxian
idea of the unification of the world upon the
basis of the common interests of the proletarian
class must be relegated to the category
of millennial dreams. It is based upon an illusion
little better than that of nationalism.
The nationalists seek to escape the moral
problem by delegating the vices of the individual
to the group and the Marxians fantastically
endow the group with virtues which
it does not possess. Religious and moral idealism,
preaching goodwill and peace without
taking the brutal realities of the modern economic
conflict into consideration, is little better,
and probably less serviceable than a cynical
realism which is blind to everything but the
secular facts revealed in modern economic life.
The moral futility of such idealism is one of
the very roots of such a cynicism. Yet, finally,
the problem of social reconstruction cannot be
solved without the resources of religious insight
and moral goodwill. The economic reorganization
of society will not be effected without conflict
between those who possess the privileges
and those who suffer from the inequalities of
modern industrialism. Neither can it be
effected without the mutual sacrifice of rights,
the mutual forgiveness of sins and a mutual
trust going beyond the deserts of any party to
the controversy. In England, where economic
theory and practice has never been as completely
divorced from religious idealism as on
the Continent, a gradual transfer political
power and social privilege to the ranks of the
workers is being made with much less peril of
a social convulsion than in any nation of the
Continent. Both the possessors of privilege
and those who challenge the possession are
stubborn in the defense of their advantages and
in the championship of their rights; but at least
a measure of influence upon the struggle is
exercised by spiritual and moral considerations
which Continental critics of England identify
with the British capacity for compromise but
which probably has deeper and more spiritual
roots. Meanwhile religious idealism in
America is almost completely corrupted by
sentimentality and betrayed into social futility
because the momentary unification of American
society upon the basis of the interests of
the middle classes absolves the religious conscience
from facing the moral challenge in the
social and economic facts of modern society.
Economic determinists are not alone in
sharing with an ordinary prudential statecraft
in the effort to organize the life of groups by
means of the resources of intelligence. The
hopes of the more conventional yet socially
intelligent people for a new world are involved
in the idea of a society or league of nations.
Since an inchoate international society created
by the new intimacy in which nations live exists
in spite of international anarchy, it is reasonable
to attempt the creation of more adequate forms
and machinery for the crystallization and
expression of its collective will, the conciliation
of disputes among its members and the closer
integration of its life. Moral and spiritual
forces are sometimes frustrated merely by the
lack of adequate machinery for the application
of generally accepted principles to specific
situations. There is therefore great need for
an intelligent statesmanship which will give the
soul of an international society a body, and
incarnate its aspirations in the instruments of
political order.
From another point of view, however, international
society does not yet exist and needs to
be created; and the means for its creation are
not laws but attitudes, not organization but a
type of life. Politically minded people easily
suffer from the illusion that laws create morality,
that organization creates society. Societies
are not created by political mechanism but by
attitudes of mutual respect and trust. Where
these exist social relations are established and
traditions formed. These in turn are gradually
codified and given definition and precision by
legal enactments. No one now takes the
theory seriously that human society was
created by a conscious mutual contract between
individuals who suddenly realized that they
could save themselves in no other way from
mutual self-destruction. Society is older than
human history and exists wherever individuals
establish relations of mutual reverence and
trust. The family is usually the beginning of
society because here nature aids the imagination
and consanguinity creates an atmosphere
of mutual trust. The family is enlarged by
the fortunes and the needs of war, the resulting
clans may amalgamate into larger units
through intermarriage of leaders or through
other exigencies, and the emerging national or
racial group is formed by similar forces. The
love and trust which unite a society are no
more rational than the hatred and mistrust
which divide one society from another. People
do not regard each other as morally dependable
because reason persuades or experience
prompts them to such an attitude. The attitude
is determined by natural and instinctive
or by ideal and religious forces and, once it is
assumed, is inevitably verified; for in an atmosphere
of mutual trust human action finally
becomes trustworthy and morally dependable.
In so far as national and racial groups live
in a state of mutual fear and hold life outside
of the group in contempt rather than in reverence
there is no international society nor can
political machinery create it. Only in rare
instances are new social traditions created by
legal enactments. Political forms and legal
measures are usually belated recognitions of
previously established social facts and necessities.
The problem of group relations in modern
society is as difficult as it is because natural
causes have operated to make the social units
larger and larger while no ideal forces have
been strong enough to prompt the group to
enter into ethical relations with other groups.
If a higher degree of imagination than now
seems probable does not inform the life of
modern nations only, one further step is possible—the
consolidation of continents. In such
an eventuality the present League of Nations
could easily become the instrument of pan-Europeanism
in conflict with other Continents.
A society of nations is impossible, in short,
without those ultra-rational attitudes which
either instinct or religion must create and
which in the case of this final venture is
beyond the resources of natural instincts—except
in the event of a threat from some other
planetary community.
If the creation of an international society is
a task to which moral and spiritual resources
must contribute, its maintenance and development
are no less dependent upon the coöperation
of spiritual insight with political prudence.
Even at best human nature is so imperfect
and relations between groups as well as individuals
so fruitful in misunderstandings that
it is impossible to maintain the mutual trust
and confidence which are the basis of society
without the spiritual achievement of mutual
repentance and forgiveness. In the relation
between groups the ability to detect flaws in
one’s own and extenuating circumstances in the
actions and attitudes of others is at once more
necessary and more difficult than in intra-group
relations. It is more difficult because
the intricacy and long range of the relations,
and the inevitable hypocrisy in the pretensions
of governments, easily obscure the limitations
of one and the virtues and good intentions of
the other party of the relationship. It is more
necessary because the frictions which fret the
relations of national and other groups are
much more generally due to mutual guilt than
those of individual relations. They develop
in a narrow world and in a society of but few
members in which a suspected peril may lead
to a gesture of defense, the defensive measure
be regarded as offensive and in turn prompt an
actual attack which will be justified in turn as
a defensive measure. Thus fears produce
hatreds, hatreds express themselves in ugly
grimaces and someone finally strikes the first
blow. The World War resulted from a spontaneous
combustion of fears and hatreds, and
the partial mobilizations, full mobilizations
and final declarations of war are so intimately
related to each other that impartial historians
find it increasingly difficult and irrelevant to
decide who was responsible for the actual hostilities.
The obvious fact is that every generation
of every European state for several centuries
had gathered fuel for flames of war.
Yet each group declared its absolute innocence
and heaped abuse upon the foe. Years after
the conflict only a small minority in each of the
participating nations has had the imagination
to see or the grace to confess the share of its
nation in the mutual guilt. Meanwhile ancient
feuds are perpetuated because the hypocrisy of
the victors is written into solemn treaties and
produces a resentment among the vanquished
which makes them incapable of any higher sincerity.
Issues between nations are so involved
that only expert knowledge is able to ascertain
the real facts, but the very intricacies of the
problems involved make it possible to use the
facts for the validation of almost any thesis
which national pride may dictate. The real
task of persuading groups to encourage forgiveness
by repentance and repentance by forgiveness,
and thus to overcome rather than
perpetuate evil, is a spiritual and a moral one
and cannot be accomplished in a completely
secular atmosphere. There is little evidence
to justify the hope that spiritual and moral
forces, as they are now oriented, are prepared
to aid in such a task. But their responsibility
is obvious; social intelligence may be a partner
in the process of conciliation but intelligence
cannot bear the burden alone when a disposition
to humility and a capacity for mercy is
lacking.
Urging the necessity of religious attitudes
between social and political groups may seem
to be a counsel of perfection when it is remembered
that intra-group relations, except in the
circle of the family and in small religious fellowships,
have never been able to profit by their
aid. Society in general has usually contented
itself with the expedient of composing social
friction and arbitrating dispute by apportioning
the relative guilt and innocence of the disputants
through a presumably impartial
judicatory which enforces its decisions upon
the belligerents, however irreconcilable or
obstreperous they may be. But the fact is that
such a method is both easier and more effective
in a society composed of individuals than in a
society of groups. In an ordinary national
society the impartiality of the court is guaranteed
by a society of thousands and even
millions of individuals who are supposed not
to be biased in favor of one or the other litigants;
and the parties to a controversy are
therefore more inclined to accept the verdict
of a court. Furthermore the society which supports
the judicial tribunal is so powerful compared
to whatever political or physical strength
the litigants possess that it is able to enforce
the awards of the latter however recalcitrant
the disputants may be. But the society of
nations is too small, judged by the number of
its member nations, to function with absolute
impartiality in any major dispute. Judicial
action is therefore immediately less effective.
It is to be noted that courts are less serviceable
instruments of social conciliation even within
nations when they deal with large economic
and social groups such as unions and trusts or
when the issue involves basic economic problems;
and the reason for this is that the parties
to a litigation represent so large a part of the
total community that the unbiased character
of the court is not as readily assumed and ought
not be taken for granted. Tradition and social
custom usually bias the court in favor of one
or the other litigants, generally the one most
firmly established in the traditional organization
of the society. In the case of nations it is
obvious that for some time to come an international
court must confine itself mainly to
petty disputes among powerful nations and to
the real disputes of the petty nations, from
whose perspective the large nations may represent
an impartial international society.[16]
Even at best no formal conciliation can heal
wounds such as were made by the World War
if nations cannot develop the capacity for
repentance and mercy and learn how to
restrain both the proud and the vindictive
passions which are the natural products of
unreflective social life.
Though morally dependable action develops
most readily in an atmosphere of mutual trust,
it is not to be assumed that either nations or
individuals always justify trust by trustworthy
action. Faith does not produce conscience
automatically. Much of the pacifism now
cultivated by socially effective religious forces
has the defect that it fails to gauge the stubborn
resistance to ideal forces in the predatory
nature of national groups. It is difficult to
develop moral attitudes sufficiently honest not
only to give the bearer of trust the prestige of
sincerity but to make the object of trust
worthy of its faith. Trust united with selfishness
results in moral futility; and when it is
based upon illusion and fails to take account
of the imperfect social attitudes which it must
overcome, it issues in mere sentimentality. It
is significant that the idea of the outlawry of
war should be espoused particularly in
America and find little favor in other nations;
for here extraordinary power is united with
remarkable political naïvete, so that American
idealists find it difficult to appreciate the
unsatisfied hungers of other nations or their
resentful reaction to our own satiety. If
nations cannot be moved to make some sacrifices
for the sake of the ideal and to qualify
their expansive desires by moral purpose, all
efforts to create an international society must
finally prove vain. It may be that the secular
ambitions of nations are so firmly established
in social custom and their unethical attitudes
so generally sanctioned by the popular mind
that nothing will avail to give their actions even
a touch of ethical character. It is difficult
enough to subdue and discipline the immediate
and anarchic desires which struggle for
expression in the soul of the individual; but
when they express themselves in the life of
groups and are veiled in seeming sanctities
even while they achieve new and more diabolical
forms they can be subdued only by the most
astute intelligence united with a high moral
passion. Modern civilization lacks both this
intelligence and this moral passion and is in the
peril of losing what it has of the latter as it
develops the former. Moral idealism which
fails to gauge the measure of resistance which
its ideals must meet in the confused realities of
life or to fashion adequate weapons for its conflict
degenerates into mere sentimentality.
But a social intelligence which is overwhelmed
by the discouraging realities and despairs of
the attainment of any ideal sinks into a morally
enervating cynicism. Moral leadership in
Western society is divided to-day between
sentimentalists and cynics who combine to
render the prospect of an ethical regeneration
of modern life well-nigh hopeless. If men are
really to be redeemed from the sins of greed
and mutual fears and hatreds by which they
make their common life intolerable they need
a faith which is not held too cheaply but which
is held nevertheless in defiance of every discouragement.
The same intelligence which the
complexities of modern life demand and create
easily prompts not only to the cynicism which
declares that “all men are liars” but to a moral
ennui which cries, “Vanity, vanity, all is
vanity.”
Benjamin Kidd who understood the need
for ultra-rational sanctions in social life better
than most sociologists put the problem of modern
society in these words: “The great problem
with which every progressive society stands
confronted is: How to retain the highest operative
ultra-rational sanctions for those onerous
conditions of life which are essential to its life,
and at one and the same time to allow freest
play to those intellectual forces which, while
tending to come into conflict with such sanctions,
contribute nevertheless to raise to the
highest degree of social efficiency the whole
of its members.”[17]
To develop the wisdom of serpents while
they retain the guilelessness of doves is the
task which faces the religio-moral forces if they
would aid in the moral regeneration of society.
It may be that such a task is too difficult for
the resources of this or any generation of the
immediate future and that painful experience
must first prove other strategies inadequate.
Meanwhile even the possibility of future usefulness
of religion demands the largest possible
measure of immediate detachment from
the unethical characteristics of modern society.
If religion cannot transform society, it must
find its social function in criticizing present
realities from some ideal perspective and in
presenting the ideal without corruption, so
that it may sharpen the conscience and
strengthen the faith of each generation.
CHAPTER VII 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.
CHAPTER VIII 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.”
CHAPTER IX CONCLUSION
At the risk of unnecessary repetition it may
be well to capitulate the most important conclusions
which emerge from our study of
religion in contemporary civilization. Religion
is dying in modern civilization not only because
it has not yet been able to restate its affirmations
so that they will be consistent with scientific
fact, but also because it has not been able
to make its ethical and social resources available
for the solution of the moral problems of
modern civilization. Its rejuvenation therefore
waits upon a reorientation of its ethical
traditions as well as of its theological conceptions.
It is under the necessity of finding some
metaphysical basis for its personalization of
the universe, but its scientific and philosophical
respectability will be of no avail if the moral
fruits which issue from its affirmations and
experiences do not actually qualify the brute
struggle of life, so largely determined by
natural forces.
Religion is scientifically verified if freedom
and purpose are found to have a place in the
cosmic processes, and it is ethically justified if
it helps to create and maintain creative freedom
and moral purpose in human life. The present
moral impotence of Protestant Christianity is
partially derived from the inadequacy of some
of its traditions which it inherited out of
periods of history which had different moral
needs than our own day. Its individualism
rendered a universal service at the dawn of the
modern era but survives to-day chiefly as a
sanctification of the peculiar interests and
prejudices of one particular class in Western
society. The limitations of its ethical traditions
are easily obscured not only because all
religion easily gives the semblance of finality
to the relativities of history, but because a
religion which imagines itself devoted to
the spirit of Jesus is under the temptation
of exploiting the prestige of his absolute
ethics without approximating his ethical position.
The moral effectiveness of religion depends
upon its ability to detach itself from the historical
relativities with which its ideals are
inevitably compounded in the course of history.
The avowed loyalty of the Christian church to
the spirit of Christ may become the basis of
such a detachment, since there is little in the
gospel of Jesus which conforms to the dominant
interests of modern life. But the very
reverence in which Jesus is held may operate
to obscure the essential genius of his life.
Religion is therefore under the necessity of
developing the critical faculty even while it
maintains its naïvete and reverence. The
necessity of coöperation between the naturally
incompatible factors of reason and imagination,
of intelligence and moral dynamic, is really the
crux of the religious and moral problem in
modern civilization. The complexity of modern
life demands that moral purpose be
astutely guided; but moral purpose itself is
rooted in ultra-rational sanctions and may be
destroyed by the same intelligence which is
needed to direct it. Both humility and love,
the highest religious virtues, are ultra-rational;
yet they cannot be achieved in an intricate
social life without a discriminating intelligence
which knows how to uncover covert sins and to
discover potential virtues. The incidental
limitations which every historic type of religion
reveals can be dealt with only if the religious
devotee can be persuaded to regard the values
of his religion critically; yet the cultivation of
such a critical spirit may easily lead to the
enervation of the religious spirit itself. If the
highest values of religion are themselves conditioned
rather than absolute, it must be possible
to assign them a place in the hierarchy
of values, without encouraging a complete loss
of confidence in them. Such a task is difficult
but not impossible. A robust moral idealism
will help to create a spiritual fervor which will
not be easily defeated by any superficial intellectualism.
If institutions of religion gave
preference to the ethical rather than the intellectual
problem of religious faith, it might be
possible to create a religious spirit sufficiently
vigorous to permit the free play of the critical
faculties without a loss of moral or spiritual
dynamic. Obviously civilization cannot afford
to dispense with either the irrational moral will
or the critical intelligence by which it is made
effective in complex situations. Men need to
subject all partial moral achievements to comparison
with the absolute standards of truth,
beauty and goodness of their religious faith,
and yet be able to see and willing to concede
the relativities in the absolute values of their
devotion. They can be saved from a morality
of mere utilitarianism only by the religious
quest for an absolute moral standard; yet they
need to be discerning enough to see that every
ethical achievement, even when inspired by
religious motives, is tinged with prudential self-interest.
They must continue to strive after
freedom and yet realize that human life and
character is largely determined by environment.
If they seek happiness, divorced from
fortune, they nevertheless cannot escape the
duty of making the material world serve human
welfare. Their ability to discover the transcendent
values in human personality has value
only if they maintain faith in human nature
after they have discovered its imperfections.
They must search after the perfect goodness
in God and yet be prepared to face the cruelties
of life without either denying their reality
or being driven to despair by them.
If it is true that moral sincerity is even more
necessary to a vital religion in modern life than
intellectual modernity, a strategy must be
developed to sever religious idealism from the
unethical tendencies in modern civilization.
Any strategy which will succeed in such an
enterprise will savor of asceticism. The limitations
of historic asceticism may teach the
present how to avoid inevitable pitfalls in the
task of detaching religious idealism from the
corruptions of society. An asceticism which
flees the world and develops its saints at the
price of abandoning industrial civilization even
more completely to the natural and anarchic
forces which operate in its life, is obviously of
no use to modern civilization. Yet a type of
asceticism is needed, if for no other reason,
because greed is the dominant motive of
Western civilization and nothing less than an
ascetic discipline will free religious idealism
from its entanglement with the covetousness
of modern life. Since Western life is intent
upon material advantages, no religious idealism
can maintain any degree of purity if it does
not enter into a conscious conflict with the civilization
in which it functions and succeed in
setting some bounds to the expansive desires
of men and of nations.
The church as such has sufficient spiritual
resources to become the recruiting ground for
such a movement of detachment, but it is too
much to hope that it will take the leadership
in it. It is too deeply enmeshed with the interests
and prejudices of contemporary civilization
to possess the insight and courage which
the enterprise requires. Such a movement of
detachment must be, as it has always been, a
minority movement. But the minority ought
not detach itself from the majority so completely
that it will sacrifice the possibility of
acting as a leaven in it. There is no force or
strategy which can prevent the great majority
from using religion to give human personality
dignity and self-respect without a serious effort
to approximate a moral ideal which would
justify religion’s estimate of human worth.
Some types of religion will continue to obscure
the defects in nature and human nature. They
will reassure the perplexed soul by recounting
the victories of the past without seeking new
triumphs. They will build systems of faith
upon past experiences without any effort to
validate or amend them in fresh experience.
Thus rejuvenation and progress must come
from the few who understand the fuller implications
of the faith which they share with the
multitudes whose eyes are holden and who lack
the courage to follow even such visions as may
come to them.
A highly spiritual religion cannot be an
esoteric possession to which the multitudes
may never aspire. It cannot afford to lose confidence
in the multitudes; yet it must resist the
gravitation toward moral mediocrity among
them. It certainly must avoid the cultivation
of a priestly cult into which the layman cannot
be initiated. If the modern movement of
detachment is to be effective it must in fact be
a layman’s movement; for it must express itself
in rebuilding the social order rather than
in building new religious institutions. Its
most effective ministers will be laymen who
will lack neither the technical skill nor the
spiritual resource to deal with the practical
problems of industry and politics. Religious
teachers may help to inspire such a movement,
but its efficacy will depend upon those who are
engaged in the world’s work. If the greed of
Western civilization is to be qualified by
religious idealism, it will be accomplished by
men who use and direct the machines of modern
industry without making mechanical efficiency
an end in itself and without succumbing to the
lure of the material rewards which come so
easily to those who are proficient in the industrial
enterprise. A revival of either puritan or
monastic asceticism will be unequal to the task
which faces modern religion. Puritanism sanctified
economic power, and monasticism fled its
responsibilities. The new asceticism must produce
spiritualized technicians who will continue
to conquer and exploit nature in the interest
of human welfare, but who will regard their
task as a social service and scorn to take a
larger share of the returns of industry than is
justified by reasonable and carefully scrutinized
needs. The new asceticism must, in short,
be in the world and yet not of the world. It
must be truly scientific in gauging the advantage
to human personality in the conquest of
nature and truly religious in finding a basis
for human happiness beyond the material
rewards which this conquest returns.
If Christian idealists are to make religion
socially effective they will be forced to detach
themselves from the dominant secular desires
of the nations as well as from the greed of
economic groups. The socially minded portion
of the church has in fact made some progress
in this direction. The lessons of the World
War have not been altogether futile, and there
is a wholesome mood of repentance in the
church for its easy connivance with an unethical
nationalism in the past centuries. The church
has not yet had an opportunity to prove the
sincerity of its contrition in this matter, for the
moment of crisis has not yet come. In that
moment, which will come inevitably, many
religiously inspired peace idealists will no
doubt bow their knees to Baal; but there is
real reason to hope that there is a new conscience
in the church which will resist the claims
of an unethical nationalism to the utmost.
Perhaps the greatest weakness of the religious
idealists who have become critical of an
unethical nationalism is that they are not sufficiently
aware of the intimate and organic relation
between the imperialism of nations and
the whole tendency of avarice which characterizes
Western life. Too few realize that it is
not possible to detach oneself from an
unethical nationalism if one continues to enjoy
the material advantages which flow from the
nation’s unqualified insistence upon the right
to hold its advantages against the world. It
may be impossible to arrive at a complete
equalization of living standards among all individuals
who desire to achieve and express the
ideal of the brotherhood of man. But a
religious idealism which does not move in that
direction will be convicted of insincerity and
moral confusion. Unrepentant political realists
may well pour contempt upon it and justly
accuse those who profess it of profiting from
policies which they ostensibly condemn. Religious
idealism is in desperate need of a strategy
which will express its detachment from the
dominant desires and impulses of modern civilization
by something more than desultory and
usually qualified criticism of unethical political
ideals and industrial policies.
The old challenge “be ye not conformed to
this world” must be accepted anew in a more
heroic fashion than is customary in enlightened
religious circles. The policy of building a
Kingdom of God by regenerating individual
lives has become discredited, not because moral
character is dispensable to a wholesome social
life, but because the criteria of moral character
have been too individualistic to serve the needs
of modern society. It is important enough
that men gain some control over their immediate
desires and discipline their momentary
passions. Society is always in need of integrated
personalities. But the validity of the
religious ideal must finally be judged by its
capacity to create not only unified personalities
but personalities which know how to restrain
their expansive desires for the sake of social
peace. Religion intensifies selfishness when it
adds sanctity to a respectable selfish life and
creates a self-respect which is impervious to
emotions of contrition. If the religious ideal
is to gain any potency in modern life it must be
able to convict men of sin and inspire them to a
conversion. But the sins of which they need
most to be convicted are those which are covert
in the social and economic relations which custom
has hallowed; and the conversion of life
which is most needed is that which will express
itself in terms of the economic and political
relationships in which men live. Not to be conformed
to this world, if it is to have any real
meaning in modern life, will mean that the
religiously inspired soul knows how to defeat
the avarice and to overcome the indifference to
the worth of human personality which inheres
in the whole economic and industrial structure
of modern society. Practically and individually
such a detachment from the world will
express itself in the sacrifice of material advantages
for the sake of realizing a more intimate
fellowship with the underprivileged, in the
careful analysis of industrial policies from the
standpoint of their effect upon personality, in an
unwillingness to profit by social and economic
practices and policies which are fundamentally
unethical and in a willingness to bear some
pain for the sake of expressing loyalty to the
community of mankind as against all lesser and
conflicting loyalties.
The hope of persuading any large number
of religious people to express their spiritual
convictions in any such socially tangible and
revolutionary terms is made rather desperate
by the fact that the modern church seems no
more inclined to undertake the task of spiritual
regeneration than the orthodox church. The
orthodox church still possesses some of the
religious fervor which is required to defy the
world, but it is too anti-rational in its theology
to gain the respect of the intelligent classes and
too individualistic in its ethics to express religious
idealism in socially helpful terms. The
modern churches are not acutely conscious of
any serious defects in contemporary civilization.
If they do recognize limitations in the
social order, they give themselves to the pleasant
hope that time and natural progress will
bring inevitable triumph to every virtuous
enterprise. They have relegated the eschatological
note of the gospel, by which Jesus
expressed his sense of the tragic, to the limbo
of theological antiquities. The possibility of a
catastrophe seems never to arouse their fears
or to give energy to their ambitions. Life,
according to their gospel, goes automatically
from grace to grace and from strength to
strength.
Though neither the orthodox nor the modern
wing of the Christian church seems
capable of initiating a genuine religious
revival which will evolve a morality capable of
challenging and maintaining itself against the
dominant desires of modern civilization and
yet expressing itself in terms relevant to
civilization’s needs, there are resources in the
Christian religion which make it the inevitable
basis of any spiritual regeneration of Western
civilization. Christianity, as Dr. Ernst
Troeltsch has observed, is the fate of Western
society. Spiritual idealisms of other cultures
and societies may aid it in reclaiming its own
highest resources; and any universal religion
capable of inspiring an ultimately unified
world culture may borrow from other religions.
But the task of redeeming Western society
rests in a peculiar sense upon Christianity. It
is congenial to the energy and activism of
Western peoples and is yet capable of setting
bounds to their expansive desires. It has
reduced the eternal conflict between self-assertion
and self-denial to the paradox of self-assertion
through self-denial and made the
cross the symbol of life’s highest achievement.
Its optimism is rooted in pessimism and it is
therefore able to preach both repentance and
hope. It is able to condemn the world without
enervating life and to create faith without
breeding illusions. Its adoration of Jesus
sometimes obscures the real genius of his life
but cannot permanently destroy the fruitfulness
of his inspiration. If there is any lack of
identity between the Jesus of history and the
Christ of religious experience, the Jesus of history
is nevertheless more capable of giving
historical reality to the necessary Christ idea
than any character of history. Intelligence
will gradually soften prejudices and allay the
conflict between Christianity and the Judaism
out of which it emerged and with which it is
organically related so that the religions of the
prophetic ideal may make common cause.
Such a coöperation will probably never lead
to complete fusion because Christianity cannot
afford to sacrifice the Christ idea and the Jews
will continue to regard this as a Hellenistic
and unacceptable element in the Christian
religion. Christianity will not disavow it, for
it gives dramatic force and historical concretion
to its theism and dualism. The God of our
devotion is veritably revealed most adequately
in the most perfect personality we know, as he
is potentially revealed in all personal values;
and his conflict with the inertia of the concrete
and historical world is expressed most vividly
in the cross of Christ. When dealing with
life’s ultimates, symbolism is indispensable,
and a symbolism which has a basis in historic
incident is most effective. The idea of a potent
but yet suffering divine ideal which is defeated
by the world but gains its victory in the defeat
must remain basic in any morally creative
world view.
It is possible of course that the resources of
the Christian religion will not be made available
in time to save Western civilization from
moral bankruptcy. It is possible that life will
continue to run its course of conflict between
the unrestrained ambitions and desires of individuals
and groups until unqualified self-assertiveness
will issue in mutual destruction.
It is possible that cynicism will continue to discount
the moral potentialities of human nature
while science continues to give plausibility to a
depreciation of the moral factors in life by
arming the brute in man and making his vices
more deadly. Civilization may be beyond
moral redemption; but if it is to be redeemed
a religiously inspired moral idealism must aid
in the task. A purely naturalistic ethics will
not only be overcome by a sense of frustration
and sink into despair, but it will lack the force
to restrain the self-will and self-interest of men
and of nations. If life cannot be centered in
something beyond nature, it will not be possible
to lift men above the brute struggle for survival.
Intelligence may mitigate its cruelties
and prudence may prompt men to eliminate its
worst inhumanities; but the increased power
which the conquest of nature supplies merely
substitutes unintended cruelties for those which
have been consciously abolished. Living on
the naturalistic level men are bound to contend
for life’s physical prizes and to use physical
force in the contest with more and more deadly
effect.
It is the virtue of a vital religious idealism
that it lifts life above the level of nature and
makes the development of an ethical personality
the ultimate goal of human existence.
Without the vivid and realistic other-worldly
hopes and fears with which the medieval
church disciplined life and which the modern
church cannot restore, it may seem that religion
possesses no force which could counteract the
primitive impulses which move men and
nations. But these hopes and fears were
merely crude ways of expressing the idea that
life is fundamentally moral and that its destiny
transcends the animal conflict. Life will continue
to develop in the direction of the ideal
implicit in it and every organism is impelled to
move toward the goal of its own completeness.
The ideal implicit in human character is that of
ethical freedom; and awakened personalities
will seek to realize that ideal. They will seek
to realize it even at the expense of physical
sacrifices and pain. They will learn how to
find life by losing it. It is the quest for what
is not real but is always becoming real, for what
is not true but is always becoming true, that
makes man incurably religious. Modern
religion is therefore not without resource in
contending against the forces of nature. The
great difficulty is that the struggle for ethical
integrity is so painful that most men are
tempted to seek some short-cut to it; and
organized religion generally expresses the
hopes and desires of this easygoing multitude.
In the medieval church magic provided the
short-cut. In the modern church it is provided
by a sanctified prudence which teaches
men how to be unselfish and selfish at the same
time, how to gain moral self-respect without
sacrificing too many temporal advantages.
The hope of a revival of ethical religion and
of an ethical reconstruction of society therefore
depends, as it did in the past, upon a
renunciation of the religious short-cuts which
lead to hypocrisy.
If religious aspiration can be united with
perfect moral sincerity a fruitful partnership
may again be established between religion and
morality. The moral struggle will give meaning
to the affirmations of religion and the
religious experience will strengthen the moral
purpose. While religion does not issue automatically
in moral action and the moral enterprise
does not inevitably create religious
experience and hope, there is nevertheless a
relation of interdependence between religious
aspiration and moral endeavor. This relationship
is due to the fact that a perfect ethical
freedom is possible only if personality is withdrawn
from or lifted above the immediate
necessities of the physical life. The other-worldly
hopes and the mystical experience of
religion by which the strategy of withdrawal
and transcendence has been effected is momentarily
discredited because it has resulted too
frequently in absolving the soul of its moral
responsibilities in the specific problems of
society. But the fact that religious hopes and
religious experiences may help people to escape
the onerous duties of the moral enterprise cannot
permanently obscure the need of religious
experience and religious hope for the development
of an ethical life. If men are to center
their life in moral purpose they must reassure
themselves periodically on the moral purpose
in life itself. That is mysticism and prayer.
If they are to develop a perfect ethical freedom
which makes no compromises with life’s
immediate necessities, they must find a content
and a meaning in life beyond its present conflict
of interests and desires. That is other-worldliness.
If the quest for ethical freedom
and integrity does not lead to religious experience
and religious hope, it will issue in despair.
If the assurances of religious hope and the certainties
of religious experience are not accompanied
by sincere moral effort, they result in
hypocrisy. The hope of an ethical society is
therefore bound up in the possibility of restoring
ethical integrity to religion and religious
dynamic to the moral effect.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Professor Alfred Whitehead, in his Science and the Modern
World and Religion in the Making, indicates the inevitable
anti-mechanistic trend of philosophical thought as it achieves
mastery of the varied fields of modern science.
[2]Prospects of Industrial Civilization, page 218.
[5] Stuart Mill’s refutation of LePlay’s thesis that the salvation
of the working classes can come only through the benevolence
of their superiors is worth quoting in this connection:
“No times can be pointed out in which the higher classes of
this or any other country performed a part even distantly
resembling the one assigned to them in this theory. All
privileged and powerful classes have used their power in the
interest of their own selfishness. I do not affirm that what
has always been must always be. This at least seems to be
undeniable, that long before superior classes could be sufficiently
inspired to govern in the tutelary manner supposed,
the inferior classes would be too much improved to be
governed.”
[9] The relation of puritanism to modern capitalism has been
most exhaustively treated by Max Weber in his essay on “Die
Protestantische Ethic und der Geist des Kapitalismus.”
[10] Quoted in Southey’s Life of Wesley, Chapter xxix.
[11] Both Max Weber and E. Troeltsch make much of the relation
of Calvinism to medieval asceticism. See Max Weber,
op. cit., and E. Troeltsch, Sociallehren der Christlichen Kirche.
[16] Commenting on the first Hague conference Count Holstein
of the German foreign office made some realistic observations
which may not have justified his obstructive conclusions but
which are nevertheless pertinent. He wrote: “Subjects of
international law are states and not individuals. It will
therefore be formally difficult and practically impossible to
isolate the individual judge from the passions and interests
of the whole in a way that happens or is supposed to happen
in private law. Of all conceivable judges Great Powers are
least disinterested, for in every conceivable question of any
importance that may come up all Great Powers are interested
à un degre quelconque. An impartial decision is therefore
excluded by the nature of things.... Small disinterested
states as subjects, small questions as objects of arbitral decision
are conceivable; great states and great questions are not.”
(Quoted by Dickinson in International Anarchy, p. 351.)