Part 32 (1/2)

[Sidenote: Original sin.]

Everything in the world which obscured the image of the creator or rebelled against his commandments (everything, that is, which prevented in things the expression of their natural ideals) was due to sin. Sin was responsible for disease of mind and body, for all suffering, for death, for ignorance, perversity, and dulness. Sin was responsible--so truly _original_ was it--for what was painful and wrong even in the animal kingdom, and sin--such was the paradoxical apex of this inverted series of causes--sin was responsible for sin itself. The insoluble problems of the origin of evil and of freedom, in a world produced in its every fibre by omnipotent goodness, can never be understood until we remember their origin. They are artificial problems, unknown to philosophy before it betook itself to the literal justification of fables in which the objects of rational endeavour were represented as causes of natural existence. The former are internal products of life, the latter its external conditions. When the two are confused we reach the contradiction confronting Saint Augustine, and all who to this day have followed in his steps. The cause of everything must have been the cause of sin, yet the principle of good could not be the principle of evil. Both propositions were obviously true, and they were contradictory only after the mythical identification of the G.o.d which meant the ideal of life with the G.o.d which meant the forces of nature.

[Sidenote: Forced abandonment of the ideal.]

It would help us little, in trying to understand these doctrines, to work over the dialectic of them, and to express the contradiction in somewhat veiled terms or according to new pictorial a.n.a.logies. Good and evil, in the context of life, undoubtedly have common causes; but that system which involves both is for that very reason not an ideal system, and to represent it as such is simply to ignore the conscience and the upward effort of life. The contradiction can be avoided only by renouncing the meaning of one of the terms; either, that is, by no longer regarding the good as an absolute creator, but merely as a partial result or tendency in a living world whose life naturally involves values, or else by no longer conceiving G.o.d as the ideal term in man's own existence. The latter is the solution adopted by metaphysicians generally, and by Saint Augustine himself when hard pressed by the exigencies of his double allegiance. G.o.d, he tells us, is just, although not just as man is, _nor as man should be_. In other words, G.o.d is to be called just even when he is unjust in the only sense in which the word justice has a meaning among men. We are forced, in fact, to obscure our moral concepts and make them equivocal in order to be able to apply them to the efficient forces and actual habits of this world. The essence of divinity is no longer moral excellence, but ontological and dynamic relations to the natural world, so that the love of G.o.d would have to become, not an exercise of reason and conscience, as it naturally was with Saint Augustine, but a mystical intoxication, as it was with Spinoza.

The sad effects of this degradation of G.o.d into a physical power are not hard to trace in Augustine's own doctrine and feeling. He became a champion of arbitrary grace and arbitrary predestination to perdition.

The eternal d.a.m.nation of innocents gave him no qualms; and in this we must admire the strength of his logic, since if it is right that there should be wrong at all, there is no particular reason for stickling at the quant.i.ty or the enormity of it. And yet there are sentences which for their brutality and sycophancy cannot be read without pain--sentences inspired by this misguided desire to apologise for the crimes of the universe. ”Why should G.o.d not create beings that he foreknew were to sin, when indeed in their persons and by their fates he could manifest both what punishment their guilt deserved and what free gifts he might bestow on them by his favour?” ”Thinking it more lordly and better to do well even in the presence of evil than not to allow evil to exist at all.” Here the pitiful maxim of doing evil that good may come is robbed of the excuse it finds in human limitations and is made the first principle of divine morality. Repellent and contorted as these ultimate metaphysical theories may seem, we must not suppose that they destroyed in Saint Augustine that practical and devotional idealism which they contradicted: the region of Christian charity is fortunately far wider and far nearer home than that of Christian apologetics. The work of practical redemption went on, while the dialectics about the perfection of the universe were forgotten; and Saint Augustine never ceased, by a happy inconsistency, to bewail the sins and to combat the heresies which his G.o.d was stealthily nursing, so that in their melodramatic punishment his glory might be more beautifully manifested.

[Sidenote: The problem among the protestants.]

It was Saint Augustine, as we know, who, in spite of his fervid Catholicism, was the favourite master of both Luther and Calvin. They emphasised, however, his more fanatical side, and this very predestinarian and absolutist doctrine which he had prevailed on himself to accept. Here was the pantheistic leaven doing its work; and concentration of attention on the Old Testament, given the reformers'

controversial and metaphysical habit of thought, could only precipitate the inevitable. While popular piety bubbled up into all sorts of emotional and captious sects, each with its pathetic insistence on some text or on some whimsey, but all inwardly inspired by an earnest religious hunger, academic and cultivated Protestantism became every day more pale and rationalistic. Mediocre natures continued to rehea.r.s.e the old plat.i.tudes and tread the slippery middle courses of one orthodoxy or another; but distinguished minds could no longer treat such survivals as more than allegories, historic or mythical ill.u.s.trations of general spiritual truths. So Lessing, Goethe, and the idealists in Germany, and after them such lay prophets as Carlyle and Emerson, had for Christianity only an inessential respect. They drank their genuine inspiration directly from nature, from history, from the total personal apprehension they might have of life. In them speculative theology rediscovered its affinity to neo-Platonism; in other words, Christian philosophy was washed clean of its legendary alloy to become a pure cosmic speculation. It was Gnosticism come again in a very different age to men in an opposite phase of culture, but with its logic unchanged.

The creation was the self-diremption of the infinite into finite expression, the fall was the self-discovery of this finitude, the incarnation was the awakening of the finite to its essential infinity; and here, a sufficient number of pages having been engrossed, the matter generally hastened to a conclusion; for the redemption with its means of application, once the central point in Christianity, was less pliable to the new pantheistic interpretation. Neo-Platonism had indeed cultivated asceticism, ecstasies, and a hope of reabsorption into the One; but these things a modern, and especially a Teutonic, temperament could hardly relish; and though absolutism in a sense must discountenance all finite interests and dissolve all experience, in theory, into a neutral whole, yet this inevitable mysticism remained, as with the Stoics, sternly optimistic, in order to respond to the vital social forces which Protestantism embodied. The ethical part of neo-Platonism and the corresponding Christian doctrine of salvation had accordingly to be discarded; for mystical as the northern soul may gladly be in speculation, to satisfy its sentimentality, it hardly can be mystical in action, since it has to satisfy also its interest in success and its fidelity to instinct.

[Sidenote: Pantheism accepted.]

An absolutism which thus encourages and sanctions the natural will is Stoical and pantheistic; it does not, like Indian and Platonic absolutism, seek to suspend the will in view of some supernatural destiny. Pantheism subordinates morally what it finds to be dependent in existence; its religion bids human reason and interest abdicate before cosmic forces, instead of standing out, like Buddhism and Christianity, for salvation, for spiritual extrication, from a world which they regard as delusive and fallen. The world of German absolutism, like the Stoic world, was not fallen. On the contrary, it was divinely inspired and altogether authoritative; he alone who did not find his place and function in it was unholy and perverse. This world-wors.h.i.+p, despising heartily every finite and rational ideal, gives to impulse and fact, whatever they may be, liberty to flourish under a divine warrant. Were the people accepting such a system corrupt, it would sanction their corruption, and thereby, most probably, lead to its own abandonment, for it would bring on an ascetic and supernaturalistic reaction by which its convenient sycophancy would be repudiated. But reflection and piety, even if their object be material and their wors.h.i.+p idolatrous, exalt the mind and raise it above vulgar impulse. If you fetch from contemplation a theoretic license to be base, your contemplative habit itself will have purified you more than your doctrine will have power to degrade you afresh, for training affects instinct much more than opinion can.

Antinomian theory can flourish blamelessly in a puritan soil, for there it instinctively remains theoretical. And the Teutonic pantheists are for the most part uncontaminated souls, puritan by training, and only interested in furthering the political and intellectual efficiency of the society in which they live. Their pantheism under these circ.u.mstances makes them the more energetic and turns them into practical positivists, docile to their social medium and apologists for all its conventions. So that, while they write books to disprove naturalism in natural philosophy where it belongs, in morals where naturalism is treason they are themselves naturalists of the most uncritical description, forgetting that only the interests of the finite soul introduce such a thing as good and evil into the world, and that nature and society are so far from being authoritative and divine that they have no value whatever save by the services they may render to each spirit in its specific and genuine ambitions.

[Sidenote: Plainer scorn for the ideal.]

Indeed, this pantheistic subordination of conscience to what happens to exist, this optimism annulling every human ideal, betrays its immoral tendency very clearly so soon as it descends from theological seminaries into the lay world. Poets at first begin to justify, on its authority, their favourite pa.s.sions and to sing the picturesqueness of a blood-stained world. ”Practical” men follow, deprecating any reflection which may cast a doubt on the providential justification of their chosen activities, and on the invisible value of the same, however sordid, brutal, or inane they may visibly be. Finally, politicians learn to invoke destiny and the movement of the age to save themselves the trouble of discerning rational ends and to colour their secret indifference to the world's happiness. The follies thus sanctioned theoretically, because they are involved in a perfect world, would doubtless be perpetrated none the less by the same persons had they absorbed in youth a different religion; for conduct is rooted in deep instincts which affect opinion more than opinion can avail to affect them in turn. Yet there is an added indignity in not preserving a clear and honest mind, and in quitting the world without having in some measure understood and appreciated it.

[Sidenote: The price of mythology is superst.i.tion.]

Pantheism is mythical and has, as we have just seen, all the subversive powers of ordinary superst.i.tion. It turns the natural world, man's stamping-ground and system of opportunities, into a self-justifying and sacred life; it endows the blameless giant with an inhuman soul and then wors.h.i.+ps the monstrous divinity it has fabricated. It thereby encounters the same dilemma that defeats all mythology when it forgets its merely poetic office and trespa.s.ses upon moral ground. It must either interpret the natural world faithfully, attributing to the mythical deity the sort of life that dramatically suits its visible behaviour, or if it idealises and moralises the spectacle it must renounce the material reality and efficacy of its G.o.ds. Either the cosmic power must cover the actual goodness and badness in nature impartially, when to wors.h.i.+p it would be idolatrous, or it must cover only the better side of nature, those aspects of it which support and resemble human virtue. In the latter case it is human virtue that mythology is formulating in a dramatic fiction, a human ideal that is being ill.u.s.trated by a poet, who selects for the purpose certain phases of nature and experience. By this idealisation the affinity which things often have to man's interests may be brought out in a striking manner; but their total and real mechanism is no better represented than that of animals in aesop's fables. To detect the divergence it suffices to open the eyes; and while nature may be rationally admired and cherished for so supporting the soul, it is her eventual ministry to man that makes her admirable, not her independent magnitude or antiquity. To wors.h.i.+p nature as she really is, with all her innocent crimes made intentional by our mythology and her unfathomable const.i.tution turned into a caricature of barbarian pa.s.sions, is to subvert the order of values and to falsify natural philosophy. Yet this dislocation of reason, both in its conceptions and in its allegiance, is the natural outcome of thinking on mythical lines.

A myth, by turning phenomena into expressions of thought and pa.s.sion, teaches man to look for models and goals of action in that external world where reason can find nothing but instruments and materials.

CHAPTER X

PIETY

[Sidenote: The core of religion not theoretical.]

Hebraism is a striking example of a religion tending to discard mythology and magic. It was a Hebraising apostle who said that true religion and undefiled was to visit the fatherless and the widow, and do other works of mercy. Although a complete religion can hardly remain without theoretic and ritual expression, we must remember that after all religion has other aspects less conspicuous, perhaps, than its mythology, but often more worthy of respect. If religion be, as we have a.s.sumed, an imaginative symbol for the Life of Reason, it should contain not only symbolic ideas and rites, but also symbolic sentiments and duties. And so it everywhere does in a notable fas.h.i.+on. Piety and spirituality are phases of religion no less important than mythology, or than those metaphysical spectres with which mythology terminates. It is therefore time we should quite explicitly turn from religious ideas to religious emotions, from imaginative history and science to imaginative morals.

Piety, in its n.o.bler and Roman sense, may be said to mean man's reverent attachment to the sources of his being and the steadying of his life by that attachment. A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world. If we wish to live a.s.sociated with permanent racial interests we must plant ourselves on a broad historic and human foundation, we must absorb and interpret the past which has made us, so that we may hand down its heritage reinforced, if possible, and in no way undermined or denaturalised. This consciousness that the human spirit is derived and responsible, that all its functions are heritages and trusts, involves a sentiment of grat.i.tude and duty which we may call piety.

[Sidenote: Loyalty to the sources of our being.]

The true objects of piety are, of course, those on which life and its interests really depend: parents first, then family, ancestors, and country; finally, humanity at large and the whole natural cosmos. But had a lay sentiment toward these forces been fostered by clear knowledge of their nature and relation to ourselves, the dutifulness or cosmic emotion thereby aroused would have remained purely moral and historical.

As science would not in the end admit any myth which was not avowed poetry, so it would not admit any piety which was not plain reason and duty. But man, in his perplexities and pressing needs, has plunged, once for all, into imaginative courses through which it is our business to follow him, to see if he may not eventually reach his goal even by those by-paths and dark circ.u.mlocutions.

[Sidenote: The pious aeneas.]

What makes piety an integral part of traditional religions is the fact that moral realities are represented in the popular mind by poetic symbols. The awe inspired by principles so abstract and consequences so remote and general is arrested at their conventional name. We have all read in boyhood, perhaps with derision, about the pious aeneas. His piety may have seemed to us nothing but a feminine sensibility, a faculty of shedding tears on slight provocation. But in truth aeneas's piety, as Virgil or any Roman would have conceived it, lay less in his feelings than in his function and vocation. He was bearing the Palladium of his country to a new land, to found another Troy, so that the blood and traditions of his ancestors might not perish. His emotions were only the appropriate expression of his priestly office. The hero might have been stern and stolid enough on his own martial ground, but since he bore the old Anchises from the ruins of Ilium he had a.s.sumed a sacred mission.

Henceforth a sacerdotal unction and lyric pathos belonged rightfully to his person. If those embers, so religiously guarded, should by chance have been extinguished, there could never have been a Vestal fire nor any Rome. So that all that Virgil and his readers, if they had any piety, revered in the world had been hazarded in those legendary adventures. It was not aeneas's own life or private ambition that was at stake to justify his emotion. His tenderness, like Virgil's own, was enn.o.bled and made heroic by its magnificent and impersonal object. It was truly an epic destiny that inspired both poet and hero.