Part 14 (1/2)
Hence, the writer concludes: ”Materialism, when its defect is discovered and understood, points on to idealism. Idealism, when its defect is disclosed, points to Christian theism.” For those who have not come to Christian theism by this th.o.r.n.y and circuitous path, the mode in which the idealist extricates himself from his self-wrought entanglement may seem of little interest; but inasmuch as they take for granted the existence of that same mult.i.tude of mutually impenetrable personalities which he, by a revolt of his common-sense against his philosophy is forced to confess, the problem of the ultimate unity exists for them also.
If in its endeavour to vindicate the spirituality of man against the materialist, idealism tumbles into the slough of solipsism and needs to be fetched out by the doctrine of the Trinity, it fares much the same way in its attempted defence of free-will against necessity. That freedom from determination by the ”not-self” which idealism vindicates, can belong only to the all-inclusive Spirit, outside whose self nothing exists; it belongs to me only on the supposition that I am the all-inclusive; and this, as before, is the point at which common-sense revolts. ”Free-will is based on man's consciousness of his moral nature.
It represents not any speculative theory, but one of the great facts which every theory of things must explain or perish.” If we ascribe freedom to the Absolute and to other spirits (whose existence is forced on us in spite of Idealism), it is because we first find it in ourselves as the very essence of our spiritual nature. But if we accept our freedom as a fact which it is the business of philosophy to explain and not to deny; on just the same testimony we must accept the fact of the manifold limitations of our liberty of which we are continually conscious. Now here it is that the Idealist defence of liberty against materialism fails by a deplorable _nimis probat_. It can only save our liberty by denying our limitations; or at least it leaves us facing a problem which can be solved only by an a.s.sumption for which Idealism offers no philosophical warrant. Hence we are brought back to the world-old dilemma ”between a freedom of G.o.d which annihilates man, and a freedom of man which annihilates G.o.d.” Idealism has really contributed nothing to the solution of the difficulty which is persistent as long as G.o.d is known only as a Sovereign and Infinite Personality among a mult.i.tude of finite personalities, and until revelation hints at the possibility of a higher ”unity which transcends personality, by which He is to be the reconciling principle and home of the mult.i.tude of self-determining agents.” ”Final reconciliation of the Divine and human personality is in fact beyond us.”
Similarly, in dealing with problems of moral evil, Idealism leads to an _impa.s.se_. As long as we keep to the notion of one all-inclusive Spirit, the Subject of universal experience, it is easy to show that sin is but relatively evil, that it is, when viewed absolutely, as much a factor of the universal life as is righteousness; yet surely this is not to account for so large and obstinate a part of our experience, but to deny it. Nor can the ethical corollaries of such a view be tolerated for a moment. That sin is an absolute, eternal, in some sense, irreparable evil is a conception altogether fundamental to that morality with which Christianity and modern civilization have identified themselves. It is but another aspect of the doctrine of freedom and responsibility. Of physical and necessary evil it is possible to a.s.sert the merely negative or relative character; we can view it as the good in process of making; or as the good imperfectly comprehended; but if this optimism be extended to sin it can only be because sin is regarded as necessitated, _i.e._, as no longer sin. Hence the view in question does not account for, but implicitly denies the existence of sin.
Furthermore, the whole tendency of more recent idealism is to explain moral evil as an offence against man's social nature by which he is a member of an organism or community. It is the undue self-a.s.sertion of the part against the interests of the whole. Of course the idealist explains this organic conception with a respect for personality which is absent from socialistic and evolutionary doctrines of society. But the notion of sin as a rebellion of one member against all, is common to both. The latter consider the external life and activity of the unit as an element in the collective external life of the community--as part of a common work; the former considers the unity as a free spiritual agency, an end for itself--whose liberty is curtailed only by the claims of other like agencies, equal or greater. But by what process, apart from faith and practical postulates and regulative ideas, can subjectivism pa.s.s to belief in other free agencies outside the thinking and all-creating self? The result of Mr, D'Arcy's criticism of the matter is that ”it is because the man exists as a member of a spiritual universe, and must therefore so exert his power of self-determination as to be in harmony or discord with G.o.d above him, and with other men around him, that the distinction between the good self and the bad self arises. But in this very conception of a universe of spirits we have pa.s.sed beyond the bounds of a purely rational philosophy. Such a universe is not explicable by reference to the vivifying principle of the self;” and accordingly we are driven back as before upon the alternative of philosophical chaos, or else of faith in such a superpersonal unity as is suggested by the doctrine of the Trinity.
We have but hinted at the barest outlines of Mr. D'Arcy's argument which, as against Idealism, is close-reasoned and subtle; and now we have left but little s.p.a.ce to deal with the more really interesting chapter on the ”Ultimate Unity.” It is not pretended that we can form any conception of the precise nature of that unity, but merely that some such unknown kind of unity is needed to deliver us from the antinomies of thought. As we could never rise to the intrinsic conception of personal unity from the consideration of some lower unity, material or mechanical; so neither can we pa.s.s from the notion of personal to that of superpersonal unity or being.
This is only a modern and Hegelian setting of the truth that ”being” and ”unity” are said a.n.a.logously and not univocally of G.o.d and creatures.
That there are grades of reality; that ”substance is more real than quality and subject is more real than substance,” that ”the most real of all is the concrete totality, the all-inclusive universal”--the _Ens determinatissimum_, is not a modern discovery, but a re-discovery. That our own personality is the highest unity of which we have any proper non-a.n.a.logous notion; that it is the measure by which we spontaneously try to explain to ourselves other unities, higher or lower, by means of extensions or limitations; that our first impulse, prior to correction, is to conceive everything self-wise, be it super-human or infra-human, is of course profoundly true; but for this reason to make ”self” the all-explaining and only category, to deny any higher order of reality because we can have no definite conception of its precise nature, is the narrowness which has brought Idealism into such difficulties. It is probably in his notion of Divine personality that Mr. D'Arcy comes most in conflict with the technicalities of later schools. If, as he says, modern theology oscillates between the poles of Sabellianism and Tritheism, he himself inclines to the latter pole. Father de Regnon, S.J., in his work on the Trinity, shows that the Greek Fathers and the Latin viewed the problem from opposite ends. ”How three can be one,” was the problem with the former; ”How one can be three,” with the latter.
These inclined to an emptier, those to a fuller notion of personality.
Mr. D'Arcy's Trinitarianism is decidedly more Greek than Latin. The more ”content” he gives to Divine personality, the more he is in-danger of denying ident.i.ty of nature and operation; as appears later.
Plainly, the word ”person,” however a.n.a.logously applied to G.o.d, must contain something of what we mean when we call ourselves ”persons,” else ”we are landed in the unmeaning.” When Christ spoke of Himself as ”I,”
the selfness implied by the p.r.o.noun must have had some kind of resemblance to our own; just as when He called G.o.d His Father He intended to convey something of what fatherhood meant for His then hearers. That He intended to convey what it might come to mean in other conditions and ages seems very doubtful; and so if the word ”person” has acquired a fuller and different meaning in modern philosophy, we are not at once justified in applying this fuller conception to the Divine persons, unless we can show that it is a legitimate development of the older sense.