Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher Part 27

"This is the glory,--that in all conceived, Or felt or known, I recognize a mind Not mine but like mine,--for the double joy,-- Making all things for me and me for Him."[A]

[Footnote A: _Prince Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau_.]

That which is finite is hemmed in by other things, as well as determined by them; but the infinite is all-inclusive. There exists for it no other thing to limit or determine it. There is nothing finally alien or foreign to reason. Freedom and infinitude, self-determination and absoluteness, imply each other. In so far as man is free, he is lifted above the finite. It was G.o.d's plan to make man on His own image:--

"To create man and then leave him Able, His own word saith, to grieve Him, But able to glorify Him too, As a mere machine could never do, That prayed or praised, all unaware Of its fitness for aught but praise or prayer, Made perfect as a thing of course."[B]

[Footnote B: _Christmas-Eve_.]

Man must find his law within himself, be the source of his own activity, not pa.s.sive or receptive, but outgoing and effective.

"Rejoice we are allied To That which doth provide And not partake, effect and not receive!

A spark disturbs our clod; Nearer we hold of G.o.d Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe."[C]

[Footnote C: _Rabbi Ben Ezra_.]

This near affinity between the divine and human is just what Browning seems to repudiate in his later poems, when he speaks as if the absolute, in order to maintain its own supremacy over man, had to stint its gifts and endow him only with a defective reason. In the earlier period of the poet there is far less timidity. He then saw that the greater the gift, the greater the Giver; that only spirit can reveal spirit; that "G.o.d is glorified in man," and that love is at its fullest only when it gives itself.

In insisting on such ident.i.ty of the human spirit with the divine, our poet does not at any time run the risk of forgetting that the ident.i.ty is not absolute. Absolute ident.i.ty would be pantheism, which leaves G.o.d lonely and loveless, and extinguishes man, as well as his morality.

"Man is not G.o.d, but hath G.o.d's end to serve, A Master to obey, a course to take, Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become."[A]

[Footnote A: _A Death in the Desert_.]

Man, at best, only moves _towards_ his ideal: G.o.d is conceived as the ever-existing ideal. G.o.d, in short, is the term which signifies for us the Being who is eternally all in all, and who, therefore, is hidden from us who are only moving _towards_ perfection, in the excess of the brightness of His own glory. Nevertheless, as Browning recognizes, the grandeur of G.o.d's perfection is just His outflowing love. And that love is never complete in its manifestation, till it has given itself. Man's life, as spirit, is thus one in nature with that of the absolute. But the unity is not complete, because man is only potentially perfect. He is the process _of_ the ideal; his life is the divine activity within him. Still, it is also man's activity. For the process, being the process of spirit, is a _free_ process--one in which man himself energizes; so that, in doing G.o.d's will, he is doing his own highest will, and, in obeying the law of his own deepest nature, he is obeying G.o.d. The unity of divine and human within the spiritual life of man is a real unity, just because man is free; the ident.i.ty manifests itself through the difference, and the difference is possible through the unity.

Thus, in the light of an ideal which is moral, and therefore perfect--an ideal gradually realizing itself in a process which is endless--the poet is able to maintain at once the community between man and G.o.d, which is necessary to religion, and their independence, which is necessary to morality. The conception of G.o.d as giving, which is the main doctrine of Christianity, and of man as akin with G.o.d, is applied by him to the whole spiritual nature of man, and not merely to his emotion. The process of evolution is thus a process towards truth, as well as goodness; in fact, goodness and truth are known as inseparable.

Knowledge, too, is a Divine endowment. "What gift of man is not from G.o.d descended?" What gift of G.o.d can be deceptive?

"Take all in a word: the truth in G.o.d's breast Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed: Though He is so bright and we so dim, We are made in His image to witness Him."[A]

[Footnote A: _Christmas-Eve_.]

The Pope recognizes clearly the inadequacy of human knowledge; but he also recognizes that it has a Divine source.

"Yet my poor spark had for its source, the sun; Thither I sent the great looks which compel Light from its fount: all that I do and am Comes from the truth, or seen or else surmised, Remembered or divined, as mere man may."[B]

[Footnote B: _The Ring and the Book_--_The Pope_, 1285-1289.]

The last words indicate a suspicion of a certain defect in knowledge, which is not recognized in human love; nevertheless, in these earlier poems, the poet does not a.n.a.lyze human nature into a finite and infinite, or seek to dispose of his difficulties by the deceptive solvent of a dualistic agnosticism. He treats spirit as a unity, and refuses to set love and reason against each other. Man's _life_, for the poet, and not merely man's love, begins with G.o.d, and returns back to G.o.d in the rapt recognition of G.o.d's perfect being by reason, and in the identification of man's purposes with His by means of will and love.

"What is left for us, save, in growth Of soul, to rise up, far past both, From the gift looking to the giver, And from the cistern to the river, And from the finite to infinity And from man's dust to G.o.d's divinity?"[C]

[Footnote C: _Christmas-Eve_.]

It is this movement of the absolute in man, this aspiration towards the full knowledge and perfect goodness which can never be completely attained, that const.i.tutes man.

"Man, therefore, thus conditioned, must expect He could not, what he knows now, know at first: What he considers that he knows to-day, Come but to-morrow, he will find mis-known; Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns Because he lives, which is to be a man, Set to instruct himself by his past self: First, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn, Next, as man may, obliged by his own mind, Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law.

G.o.d's gift was that man shall conceive of truth And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake, As midway help till he reach fact indeed?"[A]

[Footnote A: _A Death in the Desert_.]

"Progress," the poet says, is "man's distinctive mark alone." The endlessness of the progress, the fact that every truth known to-day seems misknown to-morrow, that every ideal once achieved only points to another and becomes itself a stepping stone, does not, as in his later days, bring despair to him. For the consciousness of failure is possible in knowledge, as in morality, only because there has come a fuller light. Browning does not, as yet, dwell exclusively on the negative element in progress, or forget that it is possible only through a deeper positive. He does not think that, because we turn our backs on what we have gained, we are therefore not going forward; nay, he a.s.serts the contrary. Failure, even the failure of knowledge, is triumph's evidence in these earlier days; and complete failure, the unchecked rule of evil in any form, is therefore impossible. We deny

"Recognized truths, obedient to some truth Unrecognized yet, but perceptible,-- Correct the portrait by the living face, Man's G.o.d, by G.o.d's G.o.d in the mind of man."[A]

[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book--The Pope_, 1871-1874.]

Thus the poet ever returns to the conception of G.o.d in the mind of man.

G.o.d is the beginning and the end; and man is the self-conscious worker of G.o.d's will, the free process whereby the last which is first, returns to itself. The process, the growth, is man's life and being; and it falls within the ideal, which is eternal and all in all. The spiritual life of man, which is both intellectual and moral, is a dying into the eternal, not to cease to be in it, but to live in it more fully; for spirits necessarily commune. He dies to the temporal interests and narrow ends of the exclusive self, and lives an ever-expanding life in the life of others, manifesting more and more that spiritual principle which is the life of G.o.d, who lives and loves in all things. "G.o.d is a being in whom we exist; with whom we are in principle one; with whom the human spirit is identical, in the sense that He _is_ all which the human spirit is capable of becoming."[B]

[Footnote B: Green's _Prolegomena to Ethics_, p. 198.]

From this point of view, and in so far as Browning is loyal to the conception of the community of the divine and human, he is able to maintain his faith in G.o.d, not in spite of knowledge, but through the very movement of knowledge within him. He is not obliged, as in his later works, to look for proofs, either in nature, or elsewhere; nor to argue from the emotion of love in man, to a cause of that emotion. He needs no syllogistic process to arrive at G.o.d; for the very activity of his own spirit as intelligence, as the reason which thinks and acts, is the activity of G.o.d within him. Scepticism, is impossible, for the very act of doubting is the activity of reason, and a profession of the knowledge of the truth.

"I Put no such dreadful question to myself, Within whose circle of experience burns The central truth, Power, Wisdom, Goodness,--G.o.d: I must outlive a thing ere know it dead: When I outlive the faith there is a sun, When I lie, ashes to the very soul,-- Someone, not I, must wail above the heap, 'He died in dark whence never morn arose.'"[A]

[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book--The Pope_, 1631-1639.]

And this view of G.o.d as immanent in man's experience also forecloses all possibility of failure. Beneath the failure, the possibility of which is involved in a moral life, lies the divine element, working through contradiction to its own fulfilment. Failure is necessary for man, because he grows: but, for the same reason, the failure is not final.

Thus, the poet, instead of denying the evidence of his intellect as to the existence of evil, or casting doubt on the distinction between right and wrong, or reducing the chequered course of human history into a phantasmagoria of mere mental appearances, can regard the conflict between good and evil as real and earnest. He can look evil in the face, recognize its stubborn resistance to the good, and still regard the victory of the latter as sure and complete. He has not to reduce it into a phantom, or mere appearance, in order to give it a place within the divine order. He sees the night, but he also sees the day succeed it.

Man falls into sin, but he cannot rest in it. It is contradictory to his nature, he cannot content himself with it, and he is driven through it.

Mephistopheles promised more than he could perform, when he undertook to make Faust declare himself satisfied. There is not within the kingdom of evil what will satisfy the spirit of man, whose last law is goodness, whose nature, however obscured, is G.o.d's gift of Himself.

"While I see day succeed the deepest night-- How can I speak but as I know?--my speech Must be, throughout the darkness. It will end: 'The light that did burn, will burn!' Clouds obscure-- But for which obscuration all were bright?

Too hastily concluded! Sun--suffused, A cloud may soothe the eye made blind by blaze,-- Better the very clarity of heaven: The soft streaks are the beautiful and dear.

What but the weakness in a faith supplies The incentive to humanity, no strength Absolute, irresistible, comports?

How can man love but what he yearns to help?

And that which men think weakness within strength, But angels know for strength and stronger yet-- What were it else but the first things made new, But repet.i.tion of the miracle, The divine instance of self-sacrifice That never ends and aye begins for man?

So, never I miss footing in the maze, No,--I have light nor fear the dark at all."[A]

[Footnote A: _The Ring and the Book--The Pope_, 1640-1660.]

[Ill.u.s.tration]