Damn! Part 6

The throwing overboard of free will is commonly denounced on the ground that it subverts morality and makes of religion a mocking. Such pious objections, of course, are foreign to logic, but nevertheless it may be well to give a glance to this one. It is based upon the fallacious hypothesis that the determinist escapes, or hopes to escape, the consequences of his acts. Nothing could be more untrue. Consequences follow acts just as relentlessly if the latter be involuntary as if they be voluntary. If I rob a bank of my free choice or in response to some unfathomable inner necessity, it is all one; I will go to the same jail.

Conscripts in war are killed just as often as volunteers. Men who are tracked down and shanghaied by their wives have just as hard a time of it as men who walk fatuously into the trap by formally proposing.

Even on the ghostly side, determinism does not do much damage to theology. It is no harder to believe that a man will be d.a.m.ned for his involuntary acts than it is to believe that he will be d.a.m.ned for his voluntary acts, for even the supposition that he is wholly free does not dispose of the ma.s.sive fact that G.o.d made him as he is, and that G.o.d could have made him a saint if He had so desired. To deny this is to flout omnipotence--a crime at which, as I have often said, I balk. But here I begin to fear that I wade too far into the hot waters of the sacred sciences, and that I had better retire before I lose my hide.

This prudent retirement is purely deterministic. I do not ascribe it to my own sagacity; I ascribe it wholly to that singular kindness which fate always shows me. If I were free I'd probably keep on, and then regret it afterward.

XLII

QUID EST VERITAS?

All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of G.o.d exactly and completely. "For who hath known the mind of the Lord?" asked Paul of the Romans. "How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!" "It is the glory of G.o.d,"

said Solomon, "to conceal a thing." "Clouds and darkness," said David, "are around him." "No man," said the Preacher, "can find out the work of G.o.d." ... The difference between religions is a difference in their relative content of agnosticism. The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.

XLIII

THE DOUBTER'S REWARD

Despite the common delusion to the contrary the philosophy of doubt is far more comforting than that of hope. The doubter escapes the worst penalty of the man of hope; he is never disappointed, and hence never indignant. The inexplicable and irremediable may interest him, but they do not enrage him, or, I may add, fool him. This immunity is worth all the dubious a.s.surances ever foisted upon man. It is pragmatically impregnable.... Moreover, it makes for tolerance and sympathy. The doubter does not hate his opponents; he sympathizes with them. In the end, he may even come to sympathize with G.o.d.... The old idea of fatherhood here submerges in a new idea of brotherhood. G.o.d, too, is beset by limitations, difficulties, broken hopes. Is it disconcerting to think of Him thus? Well, is it any the less disconcerting to think of Him as able to ease and answer, and yet failing?...

But he that doubteth--_d.a.m.natus est_. At once the penalty of doubt--and its proof, excuse and genesis.

XLIV

BEFORE THE ALTAR

A salient objection to the prevailing religious ceremonial lies in the att.i.tudes of abas.e.m.e.nt that it enforces upon the faithful. A man would be thought a slimy and knavish fellow if he approached any human judge or potentate in the manner provided for approaching the Lord G.o.d. It is an etiquette that involves loss of self-respect, and hence it cannot be pleasing to its object, for one cannot think of the Lord G.o.d as sacrificing decent feelings to mere vanity. This notion of abas.e.m.e.nt, like most of the other ideas that are general in the world, is obviously the invention of small and ign.o.ble men. It is the pollution of theology by the _sklavmoral_.

XLV

THE MASK

Ritual is to religion what the music of an opera is to the libretto: ostensibly a means of interpretation, but actually a means of concealment. The Presbyterians made the mistake of keeping the doctrine of infant d.a.m.nation in plain words. As enlightenment grew in the world, intelligence and prudery revolted against it, and so it had to be abandoned. Had it been set to music it would have survived--uncomprehended, unsuspected and unchallenged.

XLVI

PIA VENEZIANI, POI CRISTIANI

I have spoken of the possibility that G.o.d, too, may suffer from a finite intelligence, and so know the bitter sting of disappointment and defeat.

Here I yielded something to politeness; the thing is not only possible, but obvious. Like man, G.o.d is deceived by appearances and probabilities; He makes calculations that do not work out; He falls into specious a.s.sumptions. For example, He a.s.sumed that Adam and Eve would obey the law in the Garden. Again, He a.s.sumed that the appalling lesson of the Flood would make men better. Yet again, He a.s.sumed that men would always put religion in first place among their concerns--that it would be eternally possible to reach and influence them through it. This last a.s.sumption was the most erroneous of them all. The truth is that the generality of men have long since ceased to take religion seriously.

When we encounter one who still does so, he seems eccentric, almost feeble-minded--or, more commonly, a rogue who has been deluded by his own hypocrisy. Even men who are professionally religious, and who thus have far more incentive to stick to religion than the rest of us, nearly always throw it overboard at the first serious temptation. During the past four years, for example, Christianity has been in combat with patriotism all over Christendom. Which has prevailed? How many gentlemen of G.o.d, having to choose between Christ and Patrie, have actually chosen Christ?

XLVII

OFF AGAIN, ON AGAIN

The ostensible object of the Reformation, which lately reached its fourth centenary, was to purge the Church of imbecilities. That object was accomplished; the Church shook them off. But imbecilities make an irresistible appeal to man; he inevitably tries to preserve them by cloaking them with religious sanctions. The result is Protestantism.

XLVIII

THEOLOGY

The notion that theology is a dull subject is one of the strangest delusions of a stupid and uncritical age. The truth is that some of the most engrossing books ever written in the world are full of it. For example, the Gospel according to St. Luke. For example, Nietzsche's "Der Antichrist." For example, Mark Twain's "What Is Man?", St. Augustine's Confessions, Haeckel's "The Riddle of the Universe," and Huxley's Essays. How, indeed, could a thing be dull that has sent hundreds of thousands of men--the very best and the very worst of the race--to the gallows and the stake, and made and broken dynasties, and inspired the greatest of human hopes and enterprises, and embroiled whole continents in war? No, theology is not a soporific. The reason it so often seems so is that its public exposition has chiefly fallen, in these later days, into the hands of a sect of intellectual castrati, who begin by mistaking it for a sub-department of etiquette, and then proceed to anoint it with b.u.t.ter, rose water and talc.u.m powder. Whenever a first-rate intellect tackles it, as in the case of Huxley, or in that of Leo XIII., it at once takes on all the sinister fascination it had in Luther's day.

XLIX

EXEMPLI GRATIA

Do I let the poor suffer, and consign them, as old Friedrich used to say, to statistics and the devil? Well, so does G.o.d.