Part 31 (1/2)

Nothing could be clearer than the grounds on which pious men in the beginning recognise divine agencies. We see, they say, the hand of G.o.d in our lives. He has saved us from dangers, he has comforted us in sorrow. He has blessed us with the treasures of life, of intelligence, of affection. He has set around us a beautiful world, and one still more beautiful within us. Pondering all these blessings, we are convinced that he is mighty in the world and will know how to make all things good to those who trust in him. In other words, pious men discern G.o.d in the excellence of things. If all were well, as they hope it may some day be, G.o.d would henceforth be present in everything. While good is mixed with evil, he is active in the good alone. The pleasantness of life, the preciousness of human possessions, the beauty and promise of the world, are proof of G.o.d's power; so is the stilling of tempests and the forgiveness of sins. But the sin itself and the tempest, which optimistic theology has to attribute just as much to G.o.d's purposes, are not attributed to him at all by pious feeling, but rather to his enemies. In spite of centuries wasted in preaching G.o.d's omnipotence, his omnipotence is contradicted by every Christian judgment and every Christian prayer. If the most pious of nations is engaged in war, and suffers a great accidental disaster, such as it might expect to be safe from, _Te deums_ are sung for those that were saved and _Requiems_ for those that perished. G.o.d's office, in both cases, is to save only. No one seriously imagines that Providence does more than _govern_--that is, watch over and incidentally modify the natural course of affairs--not even in the other world, if fortunes are still changeable there.

[Sidenote: Need of an opposing principle.]

The criterion of divine activity could not be placed more squarely and unequivocally in the good. Plato and Aristotle are not in this respect better moralists than is an unsophisticated piety. G.o.d is the ideal, and what manifests the ideal manifests G.o.d. Are you confident of the permanence and triumph of the things you prize? Then you trust in G.o.d, you live in the consciousness of his presence. The proof and measure of rationality in the world, and of G.o.d's power over it, is the extent of human satisfactions. In h.e.l.l, good people would disbelieve in G.o.d, and it is impious of the trembling devils to believe in him there. The existence of any evil--and if evil is felt it exists, for experience is its locus--is a proof that some accident has intruded into G.o.d's works.

If that loyalty to the good, which is the prerequisite of rationality, is to remain standing, we must admit into the world, while it contains anything practically evil, a principle, however minimised, which is not rational. This irrational principle may be inertia in matter, accidental perversity in the will, or ultimate conflict of interests. Somehow an element of resistance to the rational order must be introduced somewhere. And immediately, in order to distinguish the part furnished by reason from its irrational alloy, we must find some practical test; for if we are to show that there is a great and triumphant rationality in the world, in spite of irrational accidents and brute opposition, we must frame an idea of rationality different from that of being. It will no longer do to say, with the optimists, the rational is the real, the real is the rational. For we wish to make a distinction, in order to maintain our loyalty to the good, and not to eviscerate the idea of reason by emptying it of its essential meaning, which is action addressed to the good and thought envisaging the ideal. To pious feeling, the free-will of creatures, their power, active or pa.s.sive, of independent origination, is the explanation of all defects; and everything which is not helpful to men's purposes must be a.s.signed to their own irrationality as its cause. Herein lies the explanation of that paradox in religious feeling which attributes sin to the free will, but repentance and every good work to divine grace. Physically considered--as theology must consider the matter--both acts and both volitions are equally necessary and involved in the universal order; but practical religion calls divine only what makes for the good. Whence it follows at once that, both within and without us, what is done well is G.o.d's doing, and what is done ill is not.

[Sidenote: The standard of value is human.]

Thus what we may call the practical or Hebrew theory of cosmic rationality betrays in plainest possible manner that reason is primarily a function of human nature. Reason dwells in the world in so far as the world is good, and the world is good in so far as it supports the wills it generates--the excellence of each creature, the value of its life, and the satisfaction of its ultimate desires. Thus Hebrew optimism could be moral because, although it a.s.serted in a sense the morality of the universe, it a.s.serted this only by virtue of a belief that the universe supported human ideals. Undoubtedly much insistence on the greatness of that power which made for righteousness was in danger of pa.s.sing over into idolatry of greatness and power, for whatever they may make. Yet these relapses into Nature-wors.h.i.+p are the more rare in that the Jews were not a speculative people, and had in the end to endow even Job with his worldly goods in order to rationalise his constancy. It was only by a scandalous heresy that Spinoza could so change the idea of G.o.d as to make him indifferent to his creatures; and this transformation, in spite of the mystic and stoical piety of its author, pa.s.sed very justly for atheism; for that divine government and policy had been denied by which alone G.o.d was made manifest to the Hebrews.

If Job's reward seems to us unworthy, we must remember that we have since pa.s.sed through the discipline of an extreme moral idealism, through a religion of sacrifice and sorrow. We should not confuse the principle that virtue must somehow secure the highest good (for what should not secure it would not be virtue) with the gross symbols by which the highest good might be expressed at Jerusalem. That Job should recover a thousand she-a.s.ses may seem to us a poor sop for his long anguish of mind and body, and we may hardly agree with him in finding his new set of children just as good as the old. Yet if fidelity had led to no good end, if it had not somehow brought happiness to somebody, that fidelity would have been folly. There is a n.o.ble folly which consists in pus.h.i.+ng a principle usually beneficent to such lengths as to render it pernicious; and the pertinacity of Job would have been a case of such n.o.ble folly if we were not somehow a.s.sured of its ultimate fruits. In Christianity we have the same principle, save that the fruits of virtue are more spiritually conceived; they are inward peace, the silence of the pa.s.sions, the possession of truth, and the love of G.o.d and of our fellows. This is a different conception of happiness, incomplete, perhaps, in a different direction. But were even this attenuated happiness impossible to realise, all rationality would vanish not merely from Christian charity and discipline, but from the whole Christian theory of creation, redemption, and judgment. Without some window open to heaven, religion would be more fantastic than worldliness without being less irrational and vain.

[Sidenote: Hope for happiness makes belief in G.o.d.]

Revelation has intervened to bring about a conception of the highest good which never could have been derived from an impartial synthesis of human interests. The influence of great personalities and the fanaticism of peculiar times and races have joined in imposing such variations from the natural ideal. The rationality of the world, as Christianity conceived it, is due to the plan of salvation; and the satisfaction of human nature, however purified and developed, is what salvation means.

If an ascetic ideal could for a moment seem acceptable, it was because the decadence and sophistication of the world had produced a great despair in all n.o.ble minds; and they thought it better that an eye or a hand which had offended should perish, and that they should enter blind and maimed into the kingdom of heaven, than that, whole and seeing, they should remain for ever in h.e.l.l-fire. Supernatural, then, as the ideal might seem, and imposed on human nature from above, it was yet accepted only because nothing else, in that state of conscience and imagination, could revive hope; nothing else seemed to offer an escape from the heart's corruption and weariness into a new existence.

CHAPTER IX

THE CHRISTIAN COMPROMISE

The human spirit has not pa.s.sed in historical times through a more critical situation or a greater revulsion than that involved in accepting Christianity. Was this event favourable to the life of Reason?

Was it a progress in competence, understanding, and happiness? Any absolute answer would be misleading. Christianity did not come to destroy; the ancient springs were dry already, and for two or three centuries unmistakable signs of decadence had appeared in every sphere, not least in that of religion and philosophy. Christianity was a reconstruction out of ruins. In the new world competence could only be indirect, understanding mythical, happiness surrept.i.tious; but all three subsisted, and it was Christianity that gave them their necessary disguises.

[Sidenote: Suspense between hope and disillusion.]

The young West had failed in its first great experiment, for, though cla.s.sic virtue and beauty and a great cla.s.sic state subsisted, the force that had created them was spent. Was it possible to try again? Was it necessary to sit down, like the Orient, in perpetual flux and eternal apathy? This question was answered by Christianity in a way, under the circ.u.mstances, extremely happy. The Gospel, on which Christianity was founded, had drawn a very sharp contrast between this world and the kingdom of heaven--a phrase admitting many interpretations. From the Jewish millennium or a celestial paradise it could s.h.i.+ft its sense to mean the invisible Church, or even the inner life of each mystical spirit. Platonic philosophy, to which patristic theology was allied, had made a contrast not less extreme between sense and spirit, between life in time and absorption in eternity. Armed with this double dualism, Christianity could preach both renunciation and hope, both asceticism and action, both the misery of life and the blessing of creation. It even enshrined the two att.i.tudes in its dogma, uniting the Jewish doctrine of a divine Creator and Governor of this world with that of a divine Redeemer to lead us into another. Persons were not lacking to perceive the contradiction inherent in such an eclecticism; and it was the Gnostic or neo-Platonic party, which denied creation and taught a pure asceticism, that had the best of the argument. The West, however, would not yield to their logic. It might, in an hour of trouble and weakness, make concessions to quietism and accept the cross, but it would not suffer the naturalistic note to die out altogether. It preferred an inconsistency, which it hardly perceived, to a complete surrender of its instincts. It settled down to the conviction that G.o.d created the world _and_ redeemed it; that the soul is naturally good _and_ needs salvation.

[Sidenote: Superficial solution.]

This contradiction can be explained exoterically by saying that time and changed circ.u.mstances separate the two situations: having made the world perfect, G.o.d redeems it after it has become corrupt; and whereas all things are naturally good, they may by accident lose their excellence, and need to have it restored. There is, however, an esoteric side to the matter. A soul that may be redeemed, a will that may look forward to a situation in which its action will not be vain or sinful, is one that in truth has never sinned; it has merely been thwarted. Its ambition is rational, and what its heart desires is essentially good and ideal. So that the whole cla.s.sic att.i.tude, the faith in action, art, and intellect, is preserved under this protecting cuticle of dogma; nothing was needed but a little courage, and circ.u.mstances somewhat more favourable, for the natural man to a.s.sert himself again. A people believing in the resurrection of the flesh in heaven will not be averse to a reawakening of the mind on earth.

[Sidenote: But from what shall we be redeemed?]

Another pitfall, however, opens here. These contrasted doctrines may change roles. So long as by redemption we understand, in the mystic way, exaltation above finitude and existence, because all particularity is sin, to be redeemed is to abandon the Life of Reason; but redemption might mean extrication from untoward accidents, so that a rational life might be led under right conditions. Instead of being like Buddha, the redeemer might be like Prometheus. In that case, however, the creator would become like Zeus--a tyrant will responsible for our conditions rather than expressive of our ideal. The doctrine of creation would become pantheism and that of redemption, formerly ascetic, would represent struggling humanity.

[Sidenote: Typical att.i.tude of St. Augustine.]

The seething of these potent and ambiguous elements can be studied nowhere better than in Saint Augustine. He is a more genial and complete representative of Christianity than any of the Greek Fathers, in whom the Hebraic and Roman vitality was comparatively absent. Philosophy was only one phase of Augustine's genius; with him it was an instrument of zeal and a stepping-stone to salvation. Scarcely had it been born out of rhetoric when it was smothered in authority. Yet even in that precarious and episodic form it acquired a wonderful sweep, depth, and technical elaboration. He stands at the watershed of history, looking over either land; his invectives teach us almost as much of paganism and heresy as his exhortations do of Catholicism. To Greek subtlety he joins Hebrew fervour and monkish intolerance; he has a Latin amplitude and (it must be confessed) coa.r.s.eness of feeling; but above all he is the illumined, enraptured, forgiven saint. In him theology, however speculative, remains a vehicle for living piety; and while he has, perhaps, done more than any other man to materialise Christianity, no one was ever more truly filled with its spirit.

[Sidenote: He achieves Platonism.]

Saint Augustine was a thorough Platonist, but to reach that position he had to pa.s.s in his youth through severe mental struggles. The difficult triumph over the sensuous imagination by which he attained the conception of intelligible objects was won only after long discipline and much reading of Platonising philosophers. Every reality seemed to him at first an object of sense: G.o.d, if he existed, must be perceptible, for to Saint Augustine's mind also, at this early and sensuous stage of its development, _esse_ was _percipi_. He might never have worked himself loose from these limitations, with which his vivid fancy and not too delicate eloquence might easily have been satisfied, had it not been for his preoccupation with theology. G.o.d must somehow be conceived; for no one in that age of religious need and of theological pa.s.sion felt both more intensely than Saint Augustine. If sensible objects alone were real, G.o.d must be somewhere discoverable in s.p.a.ce; he must either have a body like the human, or be the body of the universe, or some subtler body permeating and moving all the rest.

These conceptions all offered serious dialectical difficulties, and, what was more to the point, they did not satisfy the religious and idealistic instinct which the whole movement of Saint Augustine's mind obeyed. So he pressed his inquiries farther. At length meditation, and more, perhaps, that experience of the flux and vanity of natural things on which Plato himself had built his heaven of ideas, persuaded him that reality and substantiality, in any eulogistic sense, must belong rather to the imperceptible and eternal. Only that which is never an object of sense or experience can be the root and principle of experience and sense. Only the invisible and changeless can be the substance of a moving show. G.o.d could now be apprehended and believed in precisely because he was essentially invisible: had he anywhere appeared he could not be the principle of all appearance; had he had a body and a _locus_ in the universe, he could not have been its spiritual creator. The ultimate objects of human knowledge were accordingly ideas, not things; principles reached by the intellect, not objects by any possibility offered to sense. The methodological concepts of science, by which we pa.s.s from fact to fact and from past perception to future, did not attract Augustine's attention. He admitted, it is true, that there was a subordinate, and to him apparently uninteresting, region governed by ”_certissima ratione vel experientia_,” and he even wished science to be allowed a free hand within that empirical and logical sphere. A mystic and allegorical interpretation of Scripture was to be invoked to avoid the puerilities into which any literal interpretation--of the creation in six days, for instance--would be sure to run. Unbelievers would thus not be scandalised by mythical dogmas ”concerning things which they might have actually experienced, or discovered by sure calculation.”

Science was to have its way in the field of calculable experience; that region could be the more readily surrendered by Augustine because his attention was henceforth held by those ideal objects which he had so laboriously come to conceive. These were concepts of the contemplative reason or imagination, which envisages natures and eternal essences behind the variations of experience, essences which at first receive names, becoming thus the centres of rational discourse, then acquire values, becoming guides to action and measures of achievement, and finally attract unconditional wors.h.i.+p, being regarded as the first causes and ultimate goals of all existence and aspiration.

[Sidenote: He identifies it with Christianity.]