Human Traits and their Social Significance Part 27

"...The G.o.ds, who haunt The lucid inters.p.a.ce of world and world, Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind, Nor ever falls the least white star of snow, Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans, Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar Their sacred everlasting calm!"[1]

[Footnote 1: Tennyson: _Lucretius_.]

Divinity has, again, quite universally been recognized as exerting over the individual a compelling power, and of insistently arousing his veneration. The psychological origins of this phenomenon have already been noted. Men fear, need, feel themselves dependent on the G.o.ds. But further than this many religious thinkers hold that man cannot even be aware of the divine power without wis.h.i.+ng to adjust himself harmoniously to it. And they hold, as did Immanuel Kant, that man is born with an awareness of the divine.

The attributes of divinity have been differently a.s.signed at different times in the history of religion. In general two qualities have been regarded as characteristic: power and goodness. In primitive belief, the first received the predominant emphasis; the higher religions have emphasized the second. For savage man, as we have seen, the divine personages were conceived in effect as human beings with superhuman powers. They were feared and flattered, needed and praised. Adjustment to them was a practical, imperative necessity. They combined infinite capacity with human and finite caprice. The attention they received from humans was distinctly utilitarian in character. These forces of wind and sun and rain might be brutal or benignant. Primitive man established, therefore, a system of magic, sacrifice, and prayer, whereby he might minimize the precariousness of existence, and keep the G.o.ds on his side.

In the more spiritualistic monotheistic religions, while the power of G.o.d has been insistently reiterated, there has been an increasing emphasis upon the divine goodness. The Psalmist is continually referring to both:

Praise ye the Lord. O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good: for his mercy endureth forever.

Who can utter the mighty acts of the Lord?

Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men!

For he hath broken the gates of bra.s.s, and cut the bars of iron in sunder.

Wrath and terror gradually give place to mercy and benevolence as the primary attributes of the divine. The power of G.o.d, in Christianity, for example, is still regarded as unlimited, but it is completely expended in the loving salvation of mankind.

Where the divinity has ceased to be a willful power and has become instead the G.o.d of mercy and loving kindness, it is no longer necessary to placate him by material sacrifice, to win his favor by trivial earthly gifts. Divine favor is sought rather by aspiration after and the practice of a better life.

The mighty but capricious deity gives place to the G.o.d of unfailing charity and love. One earns G.o.d's mercies by walking in the ways of the Lord. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see G.o.d.... Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled."

In both Christianity and Judaism, G.o.d's grace and mercies go always to the pure in heart, and the righteous in spirit.

"What doth the Lord require of thee," proclaims Micah, "but to do justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy G.o.d?"

THE DIVINE AS THE HUMAN IDEAL. There has been in certain latter-day philosophies, a tendency to interpret the divine as the objectification of human ideals. That is, according to this theory, men have found in their imagined divinities the fulfillment of ideals that they could never have realized on earth.

Men, says this theory, long to be immortal, so they imagine G.o.ds who are. Finite man has infinite desires. In G.o.d is infinite fulfillment through eternity. No men are all good; some desire to be. Such fulfillment they find in the divine.

Our conception of G.o.d is an index of our own ideals. When men were savages, their divinity was a jealous monster. In the refinement and spiritualization of the human imagination, divinity becomes all-beautiful and all-benevolent as well as the wielder of infinite power. John Stuart Mill gives possibly the clearest expression to this att.i.tude which is, if not in the strictest sense religious, at least deeply spiritual:

Religion and poetry address themselves, at least in one of their aspects, to the same part of the human const.i.tution; they both supply the same want, that of ideal conceptions grander and more beautiful than we see realized in the prose of human life. Religion, as distinguished from poetry, is the product of the craving to know whether these imaginative conceptions have realities, answering to them in some other world than ours. The mind, in this state, eagerly catches at any rumors respecting other worlds, especially when delivered by persons whom it deems wiser than itself. To the poetry of the supernatural, comes to be thus added a positive belief and expectation, which unpoetical minds can share with the poetical. Belief in a G.o.d or G.o.ds, and in a life after death, becomes the canvas which every mind, according to its capacity, covers with such ideal pictures as it can either invent or copy. In that other life each hopes to find the good which he has failed to find on earth, or the better which is suggested to him by the good which on earth he has partially seen and known. More especially this belief supplies the finer minds with material for conceptions of beings more awful than they _can_ have known on earth, and more excellent than they probably _have_ known.[1]

[Footnote 1: Mill: _Three Essays on Religion_ (Henry Holt & Co.), pp. 103-04.]

In his religion, Mill maintains, man thus finds the fulfillment of unfulfilled desire. Religion is thus conceived as an imaginative enterprise of a very high and satisfying kind. It peoples the world with perfections, not true perhaps to actual experience, but true to man's highest aspirations. It gives man companions.h.i.+p with divinity at least in imagination.

It enables him to live, at least spiritually, in such a universe as his highest hopes and desires would have him live in, in fact.

It must be pointed out, however, that the devoutly religious do not regard their G.o.d as a beautiful fiction, but as a dear reality whom they can serenely trust and love, and whose existence is the certain faith by which they live.

THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, THEOLOGY, AND SCIENCE. It has already been pointed out that theology is the reasoned formulation of the religious experience which comes to men with varying degrees of intensity, or the revelation by which some man, a Moses or a Mohammed, has been inspired. Such a formulation has a dual importance. For the individual it brings clarity, order, and stability into his religious experience.

For the group, it makes possible the social transmission of religious conceptions and ideals.

Reason in a man's religion, as in any other experience, introduces stability, consistency, and order. It makes distinctions; it resolves doubts, confusions, and uncertainties. It is true that there have been in religion, as in politics and morals, rebels against reason. There have been mystics who preferred their warm ecstatic visions to the cold formulations and abstractions of theology. But there have been, on the other hand, those gifted or handicapped, according to one's point of view, by an insistence on reason as well as rapture in their religion. These have not been satisfied with an intuition of G.o.d. They have wished to know G.o.d, as the highest possible object of knowledge. Thus in the Middle Ages philosophy and science were regarded as the Handmaids of Theology. All was dedicated to, as nothing could be more important than, a knowledge of G.o.d. So we have, in contrast with ecstatic visions of G.o.d, the plodding a.n.a.lysis of the scholastics, the subtle and clean-cut logic by which such men as Saint Anselm sought to give form, clarity, and ultimacy to their sense of the reality of G.o.d. There has possibly nowhere in the history of thought been subtler and more thoroughgoing a.n.a.lysis than some of the mediaeval schoolmen lavished upon the clarification and demonstration of the concept of G.o.d. The necessity for reasoning upon one's sense of the reality of the divine, as it was felt by many mediaeval schoolmen, is thus stated by one historian:

Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury ... is the true type of the schoolman; firmly convinced of the truth of the dogmas and yet possessed of a strong philosophical impulse, he seeks to prove to reason what has to be accepted on authority. He bravely includes in his attempt to rationalize the faith not only such general propositions as the existence of G.o.d, but the entire church scheme of salvation, the Trinity, and Incarnation, and the Redemption of man. We must believe the Catholic doctrine--that is beyond cavil--but we should also try to understand what we believe, understand _why_ it is true.[1]

[Footnote 1: Thilly: _History of Philosophy_, p. 169.]

But theology has public as well as purely private importance.

It must not be forgotten that religion is a social habit as well as a personal activity. From primitive life down to our own day, religion has been intimately a.s.sociated with the other social activities of a people, and has indeed been one of the chief inst.i.tutions of moral and social control. Ethical standards have been until very recent times in the history of Christian Europe almost exclusively derived from religion.

Where the religious experience is of such crucial importance, it has been necessary to give it a fixed form and content which might be used to initiate the young and the outsider.

Theology, though essentially a product of reflection upon the religious experience itself, tends to incorporate extra-religious material into its system. In its demonstration of the divine order and of man's relations.h.i.+p to the divine, it incorporates both science and history. Science becomes for it the manifestation of the divine arrangements of the universe; history becomes a revelation of the divine purpose and its realization. In primitive belief science and religion are practically indistinguishable from each other. The way of the G.o.ds is the way of the universe. The attribution of personal motives to the G.o.ds was primitive man's literal and serious way of conceiving the government of the cosmos. He believed himself actually to be living in a world governed by living and personal powers, an animistic world. The myths which describe the birth and life of the G.o.ds, the creation of man, the bestowing of the gift of fire are conceived as the literal and natural history of creation.

Christianity affords a striking example of how theology incorporates science and natural history into its world view.

For the early Christian Fathers, natural science was interesting and useful in so far as it ill.u.s.trated, which it did, the ways of G.o.d upon earth.

"The sole interest [of the Fathers] in natural fact," writes Henry Osborn Taylor, "lay in its confirmatory evidence of Scriptural truth.

They were constantly impelled to understand facts in conformity with their understanding of Scripture, and to accept or deny accordingly.

Thus Augustine denies the existence of Antipodes, men on the opposite side of the earth, who walk with their feet opposite to our own. That did not harmonize with his general conception of spiritual cosmogony."[1]

[Footnote 1: H. O. Taylor: _The Medioeval Mind_, vol. I, pp. 75-76.]

All the natural science current, as represented, for example, in the compilation called the _Physailogus_, is used as symbolical of the ways of the Lord to man.

The Pelican is distinguished by its love for its young. As these begin to grow they strike at their parents' faces, and the parents strike back and kill them. Then the parents take pity, and on the third day the mother comes and opens her side and lets the blood flow on the dead young ones, and they become alive again. Thus G.o.d cast off mankind after the Fall, and delivered them over to death; but he took pity on us, as a mother, for by the Crucifixion He awoke us with His blood to eternal life.[2]

[Footnote 2: Thilly: _loc. cit._, p. 76.]

History is treated in the same way. Nearly all the histories written by the early Christian Fathers were written in deliberate advocacy of the Faith. It was to silence the heresies of those who attributed to the Church the entrance of Alaric into Rome that Augustine wrote his famous _City of G.o.d_. The whole of history is a revelation of the divine purpose which is eventually to be fulfilled. Orosius, again, a disciple of Augustine, wrote his _Seven Books of Histories against the Pagans_ to prove the abundance of calamities which had afflicted mankind before the birth of Christ. He gathers together all the evidence he can to exhibit at once the patience and the power of G.o.d. "Straitened and anxious minds" might not be able to see the purpose always, but all was ordained for one end.

Thus he writes at the beginning of his seventh book:

The human race from the beginning was so created and appointed that living under religion with peace without labor, by the fruit of obedience it might merit eternity; but it abused the Creator's goodness, turned liberty into wilful license, and through disdain fell into forgetfulness; now the patience of G.o.d is just and doubly just, operating that this disdain might not wholly ruin those whom He wished to spare ... and also so that He might always hold out guidance although to an ignorant creature, to whom if penitent He would mercifully restore the means to grace.[1]

[Footnote 1: Orosius: _Seven Books of Histories against the Pagans_, II, 3.]

History thus comes to reveal the fulfillment of the divine purpose, as science reveals the divine arrangements of the universe.

It has already been noted that theology, certainly Christian theology, maintains that G.o.d is all-good. In consequence the natural world which scientific inquiry reveals must be all-good in its operations and its fruits. The history of the universe must be a steady and unfaltering fulfillment of the divine, of the beneficent eternal purpose. The ways of the Almighty, so theology tells us, are just ways, and the universe in which we live, so theology tells us, is a revelation of that justice. The eighteenth century "natural theologians"

spent much energy in demonstrating how perfectly adapted to his needs are man's natural environment and his organic structure.

They pointed to the eye with its delicate membranes so subtly adapted to the function of sight. All Nature was a continuous and magnificent revelation of G.o.d's designs, which were good. Christian Wolff, for example, a rationalistic theologian of the late eighteenth century, writes:

G.o.d has created the sun to keep the changeable conditions on the earth in such an order that living creatures, men and beasts, may inhabit its surface.... The sun makes daylight not only on our earth, but also on the other planets; and daylight is of the utmost utility to us; for by its means we can commodiously carry on those occupations which in the night-time would either be quite impossible, or at any rate impossible without our going to the expense of artificial light.[2]

[Footnote 2: Christian Wolff: _Vernunftige Gedanken von den Absichten der naturlichen Dinge_, 1782, pp. 74 ff.; quoted by James in _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p.492.]

MECHANISTIC SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. With the rise of mechanistic science there has come about a sharp collision between the conception of the goodness of the universe as theology declares it, and of its blindnesses and indifference as science seems to unfold it to us. Contrast the picture of a cosmos which was deliberately and considerately made by G.o.d to serve every exigency of man's welfare, with the picture earlier quoted from Bertrand Russell as the natural scientist gives it to us. It is no longer easy to say the Heavens declare the glory of G.o.d, and the firmament showeth his handiwork. As far as we can see natural processes go on without the slightest reference to the welfare of man, who is but an accidental product of their indifferent forces. The universe is a system of blind regularities. "Omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way." Nature is thoroughly impersonal, and indeed, were it to be judged by personal or human standards, it could with more accuracy be maintained that it is evil than that it is good. As Mill puts it in a famous pa.s.sage:

In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are Nature's everyday performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives, and in a large proportion of cases, after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow-creatures....

Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations.... A single hurricane destroys the hopes of a season; a flight of locusts or an inundation desolates a district; a trifling chemical change in an edible root starves a million of people.[1]

[Footnote 1: Mill: _Three Essays on Religion_ (Holt), pp. 28-30.]

The theology which insists on the patent and ubiquitous evidences of G.o.d's beneficent purpose, attempts, as already pointed out, to demonstrate that purpose in the history of mankind. Orthodox Christian doctrine, for example, insists that man has been especially created by G.o.d, as were the other animals each after their kind, and that man's ultimate and unique destiny is salvation through G.o.d's grace. Man was created in perfection in the Garden of Eden, sinned, and will, through G.o.d's mercy, find eventual redemption.

Following the publication of Darwin's _Origin of Species_, in 1859, the rapid spread of evolutionary doctrine aroused violent opposition on the part of Christian thinkers and devout Christians generally. In the first place it conflicted sharply with the orthodox version of special creation. Secondly, it made more difficult the insistence on marks of design or purpose in Nature. These two points will be clearer after a brief consideration of the nature of Darwinian evolution, with whose thoroughgoing mechanical principles nineteenth-century theology came most bitterly in conflict. The theory explains the origins of species, somewhat as follows:

The variety of species now current developed out of simpler forms of animal life, from which they are lineally descended.

Their present forms and structures are modifications from the common forms possessed by their remote ancestors. These modifications are, in the stricter forms of Darwinian evolution, explained in mechanical terms by the theory of the "survival of the fittest." That is, those animals with variations adapted to their environment survive; those without, perish.

In consequence when any individual in a species happens to be born with a variation specially adapted to its environment, in the sharp "struggle for existence" that characterizes animal life in a state of nature, it alone will be able to survive and reproduce its kind. All the variations of species current are, therefore, examples of this continuous process of descent with adaptive modifications. The origin of the human species came about through just such a variation or mutation from one of the higher mammals (we have reason to believe, a species similar to that of the anthrapoid ape). Man's ancestry, it seems, from the scientific evidence which has been marshaled, may be traced back biologically, in an almost unbroken chain to unicellular animals.[1]

[Footnote 1: For detailed discussion see Scott: _Theory of Evolution_.]

This theory profoundly affected theological thinking. In the first place, the evolutionary account not only of the origin of man, but of the origin of all species, as a descent with modification from simpler-animal forms, conflicts with the account of special creation, certainly in the literal form of the Biblical story. Secondly, the arguments from design which had been drawn from the adaptation of organic life to environment were, if not disproved, at least rendered dubious. Although evolution did not account for the first appearance of life on earth, it did account for the processes of adaptation, and without invoking design or purpose.