Humanism and America

This catastrophe, when fully recognised, can point us to fresh hope and faith. We may win afresh the old faith which goes hand in hand with a certain disillusion, a certain kind of scepticism, foreign to our current disillusionists. This faith, says Newman, “looks for no essential improvements or permanent reformations in the dispensation of those precious gifts which are ever pure in their origin, ever corrupted in man’s use of them.”⁠[33]

So far, the moral corruption of the twentieth century has not produced the flagrancy of conduct that characterised a good many earlier ages. “My ideas of life have become so rotten,” thus a Pragmatised and Behaviourised youngster confessed to me, “that I wonder my life is not rottener.” He looked startled when I told him to give his ideas time. However, it appeared that, partly in spite of and partly by means of his marked self-consciousness, he had attained to some veracity of inward unhappiness. We may hope that his case is quite typical. In other words, our self-conscious modern age has provided a wide and unprecedented demonstration of the fact that the chief danger to human happiness is immorality of ideas. Previous ages have done lip-homage to high moral standards while grossly violating them in practice. The modern age has proudly assumed that it has grown far beyond such hypocrisy. Meanwhile it has developed the subtler hypocrisy of cultivating depraved and specious ideas while shrinking from the full consequences of them in conduct. The result is that life looks dully undramatic, culture and art degenerate, and thoughtful persons who are harmless enough in their acts have a real misery in their spirit. Surely, therefore, we have now a chance to learn afresh the inward relentlessness of the Moral Laws; particularly that “precious gift” which we have so bitterly corrupted, the law of humility.

We may now perceive that the universal proverb “Pride goes before a fall” is no less applicable to our age than to the old aristocratic ages; and that, far from being merely a maxim of external prudence, it is the folk-sign of an inward region of cause and effect that we, with all our self-consciousness, have scarcely penetrated.

We may find again the inward and yet superhuman rigour of the Laws. We may learn that they are supernatural without being ever unnatural; always immanent in us and yet, in a mystery beyond the reach of our science, always transcendent of us. Browning’s Paracelsus, embodying the modern mixture of romance and science, complained in regard to his own catastrophe that “God’s intimations fail in clearness rather than in force.” Precisely so; but there is no use in whining about it. The human task is to clarify and obey, as well as we can, Laws which we did not invent; which no man, except when stupified by pride—either his own pride or the pride of his teachers, relentlessly visited upon him to the third and fourth generation—can conceive to be merely human inventions.

Those Laws fail in human clearness, certainly, but not in force. They came to send a sword into the earth, more than Peace. They have been the cause of agony and misery for millions of innocent or ignorant people; and no man has succeeded in making clear the full ground of this. From the standpoint of human justice, those Laws are fearfully general, vague, and incalculable. Yet our truest happiness, and indeed our truest originality, depend on a constant effort to elucidate them and apply them afresh to each new generation and individual. This task is of course, in a worldly sense, an impossible one. New sins and difficulties, or rather old sins and difficulties in inexhaustibly new modes, appear at every step. Salvation for the individual never becomes easier; and the social frame is so built, beneath our building, that it cannot be saved. Old seers and new scientists are true to a deep human instinct in prophesying that some day the world will be destroyed by fire, collision, or decay; will “dissolve like an insubstantial pageant faded.” Our surest Comfort, at the opposite pole from modern comfortableness and not divisible from right conduct, is in knowing that those Laws, while “ever corrupted by man’s use of them” are indeed “precious gifts ever pure in their origin.” Clough, that fine religious humanist who faced the modern situation without blinking, had a sound humility when he wrote:

The fresh humility that we need must be built up patiently by religion and by humanism; each working in its own way and carefully respectful of the other, even (perhaps especially) when these two approaches are equally employed by one person.

Religion is normally theistic, and therewith mediatorial and sacramental. Otherwise she is not catholic and, in the long run, loses her right humility. This should be evident enough from the long history of religion, Christian and non-Christian, past and present. Theism decays continually, but by reason of its own sins rather than the virtues of opposing doctrines. Pantheism, deism, and all the others flourish in its decadencies, more or less parasitically, but cannot take deep root in human humility. I do not mean that theism is true because it works, but that it works because at its best it is our truest mode of conceiving the Eternal One. Voltaire’s epigram, “God created man in His own image and man promptly returned the compliment,” is superb and lasting because the doctrine here parodied is lasting and sublime. The parody is catholically critical because the doctrine itself is deeply catholic. Modernism, when strictly criticising catholic doctrine, is helpful; when frankly rejecting it, respectable; when blandly attempting to reduce it to poetry, baneful—baneful in its hidden pride—and, I trust, hopeless. Not similarly hopeless is Latin Fundamentalism; by which I mean the attempt of Latinised theology, no matter in what branch of the Christian church it appears, to define religious mysteries with a literalism that is too precise to be accurate. Most hopeful is the work of a small and quiet group of theologians, belonging to various churches, who are resuming and carrying forward the thwarted hope of the great Christian humanists of the Renaissance.

Yet the Temple, or let us say “the church militant here upon earth,” is at its best inadequate. The man of good sense has always found and will always find it necessary to take the church with a grain of salt, even though the salt loseth its savour without the church. Good sense is a distinct foundation; and humanism is built upon it. Humanism may be theistic or non-theistic; it is unsound when it is anything between. When non-theistic, it falls short of the full truth that is in the human imagination. The pre-eminent example of course is the sublime religious humanism of the Buddha. However, if it be true that the primitive Hindu pantheon had 330,000,000 gods, doubtless the Buddha had several million good reasons for not being a theist. Theism at its worst fosters, as nothing else can, the proud imaginations of the human heart. Humanism, which in one of its most important functions is a criticism of religion, is essential for sound religious humility. Religion needs the humility derivable from the consideration that happiness may be obtained without religion. Humanism is the study and practice of the principles of human happiness uncomplicated by naturistic dogmas on the one side and religious dogmas on the other. When religion, as at present, has degraded “God’s love” and abolished “God’s anger,” humanism will insist that the former doctrine (though at its best supreme) is no less metaphorical than the latter, and not less subject to unconscious superstition.

Just here I am forced to express the hope that those estimable critics, Mr. T. S. Eliot and Mr. Walter Lippmann, will at one point counteract each other’s influence upon the public. Mr. Eliot, aiming toward humane religion, tends to reduce humanism to a mere balance of mind, a ghost of the Arnoldian culture, subservient to anglo-catholicism. Mr. Lippmann, aiming toward religious humanism, tends to reduce deity to “an ideal of the human personality,”⁠[34] a rather ghostly ally of practical morals. Each is somewhat swayed by the modern desire for immediate measures.

Providentially, however, a more catholic attitude has already been erected by two older critics, Baron Friedrich von Hügel and Professor Irving Babbitt—the two most potent and distinguished personalities, though not the finest writers, that have so far appeared in English literature of the twentieth century. The one, a devout Roman Catholic of England, has indirectly done much for the best interests of humanism. The other, a rigorous moral humanist of New England, has indirectly done much for the best interests of religion. Their extraordinary scholarship is guided by a sound humility of spirit. In their writings, neither ventures further than his equipment warrants into the other’s field, and they do not contradict each other in fundamental points. They agree in the conviction that now, for the sake of religion itself, the way of humanism must be clearly discriminated from the way of religion. Mr. Babbitt has urged that religion at its best is far above, and at its worst far below, a sound humanism. Baron von Hügel has urged that Christians should face now, more frankly and fully than they have ever faced before, the fact that the ethical or humane way has a distinct and divinely ordained validity of its own for those who cannot honestly follow the religious way; and that the full health of each way depends upon the health of the other.

This truly catholic attitude, which is essential for modern humility, is not palatable to the pseudo-catholicity of the modern mind. We have fancied, especially in America, that expert reason aided by democratic tolerance could soon discover the underlying relationships between the different ways of salvation, thus federating these in a single “concern,” a sort of efficient successor and substitute for the universal infallible church of the Middle Ages. Behind this enterprise stands the overweening assumption of modern philosophy that the universe itself is a single organism with a large variety of inter-assimilable aspects, such as religion and science, love and morals, good and evil, God and Nature. Tennyson would not have been so shocked by his rediscovery of the perennial fact that God and Nature are at strife if he had not been so infected by the modern notion that they ought not to be,—that properly they belong in a universal banking trust whose members, however they may quarrel on the surface, never suffer a real severance of business relations. Nor would our current disillusionists feel so badly about the inevitable dissolution of that trust if their grandfathers had not credited it so heavily. Let us now recognise pride as the grand sponsor of that trust—the pride of unity and immediacy, or of universal “continuity” as the late T. E. Hulme would say. Let us humbly admit that the universe is faulted, geologically speaking, deeper and higher than our knowing. What of ultimate plan and unity its strata may have, God only knows.

Our youths who have learned to smile with a weary superior air at the traditional division of reality into God, Man, and Nature, would breathe more freely and begin again to taste the vital zest of the universal drama, if we would now teach them that this traditional division is less naïve than the theory of universal continuity; is better grounded in universal human experience; and, above all, is more truly accordant with the profound division which any thinking man may find within himself to-day when he is sufficiently self-reliant and experimental to plumb beneath the surfaces where our ephemeral psycho-physicisms weave and flutter. Recently humanism, in its attempt to fulfil and deepen the experimentality of the modern spirit, has of necessity placed its chief emphasis upon that inward division. It has insisted that the opposition between the higher and lower wills within us, whether they be called “divine” and “natural” or what not, is essentially inexplicable by expert reason and is nevertheless, from the present standpoint of human happiness, the most important feature of the universe arrived at by free and full experimentation.

This humane dualism strikes at the very heart of modern pride, the pride of spiritual monism. It sets a true immediacy over against a false immediacy. It assigns a central value to the paradox established by the immediate experience of Everyman when he tries (in the terminology of common sense) to be “at one with himself” by keeping his “better self” above his “worser self.” It depreciates the expert reasonings and romantic emotions which, overriding that vital paradox of good sense, would leap immediately at spiritual unity and continuity. Consequently the humane dualism, more than any other doctrine of recent criticism, has met with angry rejection or obfuscating comment. A good example of the latter is afforded by a generous and intelligent reviewer who comments as follows upon the dualistic humanism of Milton: “Milton, after all, had not read Darwin; we have ... Milton’s energetic dualism was based on religious conceptions which are genuinely outlived; the power behind his allegory of the soul was his belief that the world was shaped and created for mankind; and, conceiving of ourselves now so much more humbly than he did, we cannot set our lives on such a stage.... We cannot invent an opposition we do not feel.”⁠[35]

The above, in a representative modern fashion, confuses modesty and humility. The modern modest dogma that the world was not “shaped and created for mankind” has shown itself, when all its implications are considered, no less deficient in real humility than the conceited belief that the world was created for human comfortableness. This belief was far more radically repudiated by Milton than by us. Only with the aid of modern pride can we be sure that his basic religious ideas have been “genuinely outlived” and that we, having read Darwin, conceive of ourselves “much more humbly than he did.” He, to be sure, was no adept either in Darwinian or in Emersonian modesty. As a man among men he had strong intellectual and even personal pride. But above it he had true spiritual humility; which may consist with, and derive support from, that virtue too much obscured by modern modesty, namely “self-esteem, founded on justice and right, well managed.” This kind of self-reliance enabled Milton to assign full value to the moral division he found within himself. His “energetic dualism,” as the reviewer calls it, his dramatic sense of the real opposition between the nature of lust, pride, and Chaos and the nature of purity, humility, and Peace, was not “based on” transient religious concepts. It was “based on” the duality he found at the centre of himself as well as at the centre of European experience, Christian and pagan. He would have found it also at the centre of ancient Buddhism, if he had known this as we know it to-day.

But, says my reviewer, “we cannot invent an opposition we do not feel.” Very true. Nevertheless, with the aid of right self-esteem and humility, with a patient critical reverence for what is best in ourselves and in accumulated tradition, European and Oriental, we may not only “feel” but realise, in thought and conduct, an opposition we did not invent.

Only thus can we proceed to a spiritual use of our scientific modesty. Over against the self-flattery of religious superstition, science has revealed the indifference of a vast physical universe. Here is wholesome seed for a fresh humility. But so far its growth in the modern spirit is blighted; blighted much less by the old superstitions which the modern religionist enjoys attacking than by the new superstition which he himself has fostered—the bastard ideal of love. This ideal, religiously derived from an illegitimate mixture of two fallibles, democracy and St. John, infects to-day the blood of many who, rejecting St. John and perhaps also democracy, believe loudly in Sex; or who, tired of Sex also, believe in nothing because it seems the sole alternative to the spurious all-immanent divinity of modern love. This love, though masquerading as powerful and strenuous, is essentially soft. It has succeeded in masking the Cross, not only the Christian but the universal Cross, in soft flummeries. The hard universe of science disowns it. And so does the severity of the divine Laws. If we learn again to revere these in their full severity as we find it in history (especially recent history) and in ourselves, to bow before their awful beauty with a love that fears to call itself worthy of casting out fear, then the outward laws can again become real images of the inward Laws.

Outward nature with her unfathomable self-subsistence, her rigorous detachment from the egoistic delusions of the human heart, and her firm satisfactions for those who seek only to know and follow her laws, can again be seen as a real though very distant representation of the Divine Nature itself. The dual nature of man, freed from the intervolving vapours of old metaphysical dualisms and new metaphysical monisms, guarded from insidious loves, and cultivated with renewed moral vigour, can be seen again as the isthmus between Time and Eternity: our firm and fruitful land between unfathomable, unmixing, but not unkindly seas.