Studies in Christianity

Front matter

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CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

Introduction

I AM often told by my friends that Christianity is nothing but a set of statements about supernatural history which no one now can honestly believe. When I deny this, they ask me what Christianity is j and, if I try to tell them, they reply — That is not Christianity at all but certain beliefs which were held by men before Christ was bom and may be held by them after his name has been forgotten. But, all the while, I am convinced that there is a body of behef , not concerned with supernatural history, which is Christian ; that it began with the teaching of Christ, as Platonism began with the teaching of Plato, that it has been enlarged and enriched with the experience of nineteen centuries and yet has remained itself. I am not anxious to prove the originality of Christ in detail. It may be that he said no single thing which had not been said before him. The originality of a great teacher consists, not in particular sayings or doings, but in his power of giving life to an idea so that it continues to live in other men's minds and is enriched with other men's thought. The greatest ideas are not those which remain peculiar to their authors. Rather they are those which take on an independent .life of

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their own, changing and growing yet remaining always themselves, like a living thing. So, I believe, Christianity has changed and grown and remained itself ; and in this book I have tried to state what it is to us now.

At aU times it has been adulterated with beliefs irrelevant or incongruous. Every age has its own peculiar heresies which seem to it part of the Christian faith ; for that faith, being expressed always by the mind of man, is always tainted by man's imperfections. But these pass and change, while the faith itself remains. And yet the faith itself also changes in its expression, because in different ages it is confronted with different counter-beliefs ; and it always expresses itself in terms of the prevailing counter-beMefs. But, again, they pass and change, while Christianity remains. For, although it is expressed by the minds of men, yet, for those who believe it, it is a truth independent of those minds, a truth which they recognise and to which they make answer. So our very expressions of it are rather answers to this truth than the truth itself ; and those who are most convinced of this truth know best that their own statements of it are not the truth itself. Was not Christ aware of a truth independent of his own mind, to which he made his own passionate answer ? To him that truth was not his own word but the word of God. We cannot understand his teaching unless we see it as the answer which he made to the word of God, as

INTRODUCTION vii

something to which he was moved by the truth of God, as a musician is moved to music by the beauty of the universe. So we are moved by the words of Christ as we are by music ; and at one time we see one truth in them, at another another. But through all generations men are moved by them and discover new truths in them ; it seems to them that his words have never been understood before. So to us now it seems that we understand them in the hght of all our new knowledge and experience ; and, even while we are told that Christianity is dead, we see it rising from the grave, as men have always seen it when they were not content to accept it on hearsay. Perhaps every age needs to reject the Christianity of the past so that it may discover Christianity for itself. Only through disbehef in what we are told do we attain to belief in that truth which remains independent of aU man's expression of it.

And yet all the past efforts to express it are not vain ; for we can recognise the truth in them as in the words of Christ himself. And they are connected with each other by the truth that is in them. That truth is the Christian tradition : it is what persists from generation to generation, while that which is false becomes obsolete. There is, in all the struggle for life of conflicting beliefs, a survival of the true ; and the true is tested by that struggle. But we need to be aware that the true does not necessarily survive in our individual minds. Even when we are most sure of it, we need to be aware that viii STUDIES IN CHEISTIANITY

we ourselves are very imperfect mediums of expression for it. And the more surely we know that it is a truth independent of oiu'selves, the more we shall be aware of that fact. The truth is not something made by man but something that knocks at the mind of man ; and his mind may open to it or be closed against it. But when it enters his mind, he can express it to himself or to others only through his mind. The knocking is that which arouses in him the desire for expression, the desire to make the truth his own. The truth itself is perfect ; but his mind and the language in which alone he can express it are imperfect. So the more urgently it knocks, the more he is aware of its glory and perfection, the greater is his sense of his own failure to express it. Even as he makes it his own by expression, he knows that he has not made it aU his own ; that there is that in him which misrepresents whatever it tries to express, an egotism which turns the universal into the particular, and provokes the egotism of other men against it. Only those at whose minds truth has never knocked, or who have never recognised the knocking, suppose that they can express the truth perfectly, or that any past expression of it is perfect.

So the truth knocks still at our minds ; but in many difEerent ways. It may seem to come suddenly out of our own experience of life ; or it may seem to come in the words of some great man of the past. But, even when it does that, those words are

INTRODUCTION ix

not enough for us. Because the truth is knocking at our minds in them, we feel the need to make it our own, to give it our own expression. And we know that, until we have done that, we have not received it into our minds. So there is, and can be, no end to the expressions of Christianity ; so long as it is a truth knocking at the minds of men, they will continue to express it for themselves ; and in this unceasing effort at expression the Christian tradition lives from one generation to another.

The eflfort which I have made in this book does not pretend to be complete. I meant it to be so when I began it ; but I soon found that the task was beyond my powers. I was not able to express even aU that Christianity means to me ; and, if I had tried to do so, I should never have finished the book. I had meant, for instance, to write a chapter on Christianity and politics ; but in writing it I found that it was growing longer than the rest of the book. I therefore put it aside ; but without it the book is not complete, as any reader can see for himself. So I have called it Studies in Christianity ; but I have tried to maintain a continuity of thought through it, and to produce not merely a set of separate essays. I have also tried to say as little as possible about those points of belief on which I differ from many other Christians, points so important that some of them, perhaps, would refuse to call me a Christian at all. My object has been to state what is positive in my own beliefs, not what is negative. It is

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necessary, I think, to rid Christianity of beliefs that can no longer be held ; but, before we do that, we must state as clearly as possible what we believe to be the eternal essence of it. And we must be aware that what seems incredible to us may seem so only because we misexpress it to ourselves. All through the ages men, individually and in common, have tried to express Christianity ; and, if we know that they have never quite succeeded, we shall be less impatient of each other's attempts at expression, even when they are unintelligible to us. It is when men pretend that their own expressions are perfect, that other men are provoked to call them false ; and that is so whether the expression is that of an individual or of a church.

Contents

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Introduction ..... v

CHAP.

Chapter I

The nature of religion, like that of man himself, consists in what it is trying to become. Like man, religion tries to free itself more and more from the tjnranny of its own past, to grow more and more aware of its own nature, to purge itself of what is foreign to that nature, and to gain in the power of expression by discovering what it has to express. But, for this reason, it is hard to define ; and men still dispute what it is. Some would define it ia terms of its origins and discredit it with their definition. So we might define, and discredit, science by talking of the alchemist or the medicine man. There is magic in the past both of science and of rehgion, but both outgrow magic as they free themselves of the egotism of the individual, as they discover that they are not themselves until they are freed from it. The virtue of both consists in freedom from egotism and at that the man of science and the religious man continually aim. They know that egotism is always producmg error in science and in religion ; but they are on their guard against it, and it is a function of both to set men on their guard against it»

A

But they are on their guard against it for different reasons. The man of science, because it hinders him from discovering the truth ; for it tempts him to beheve what he wishes to beheve, as, for instance, that he has discovered the truth before he has discovered it. The religious man, because it perverts his conduct, and through his conduct, his thought. For religion asserts a constant interaction between conduct and thought, that interaction which is asserted in the Christian doctrine of faith and works. Indeed reUgioh is an effort to produce a complete harmony in conduct and thought ; and we may describe it imperfectly as the effort to express aU that is implied in a right way of living. Men, in aU reasoned conduct, necessarily imply certain convictions about the nature of the universe, convictions about matters that are beyond their own knowledge and experience. They may live rightly and imply these convictions without ever trying to express them, without even being aware of them. They may even consciously refuse the attempt to express them, as being impossible and sure to lead them into error. But religion makes the attempt and, in making it, assumes that the convictions implied in right living can be expressed ; and that, if rightly expressed, they are true, even about matters beyond the knowledge and experience of man.

It also makes this assumption about right living ; that what is right is not to be discovered by observation and experiment alone, but that men have a power of recognising it, and a desire for it, as natural as their appetites ; and that this power and desire grow in proportion as they Uve rightly. So, to religion, this power of recognition and this desire are the most important of aU facts. They are the facts upon which man should base his beliefs about the nature of the universe. Through them, and through them alone, is there a connection between the known and the unknown. For they are themselves a connection between man himself and the unknown ; by means of them he does experience the unknown even while it remains unknown to him. ' It is the way of Heaven not to speak but it knows how to obtain an answer.' That saying of Lao-tze is the basis of all true religion ; and religion only becomes itself when its aim is to make that answer. Heaven does not speak to us ; it does not tell us about itself, for if it did man could not understand it. If an angel came down from Heaven to reveal the nature of the universe to me, he could use only that language which men have developed for and with their own thoughts, a language capable only of the thoughts of men. And there are thoughts, even of men, which I cannot fully understand, though they have expressed them in human language. I know, from the difference between myself and Plato, how infinite is the capacity of thought and how, in Plato himself, it struggles with the medium of language. Always the poets and philosophers are enlarging that medium, because they, as individuals, think beyond the capacity of the common medium of language. But Heaven, if there is a Heaven that would reveal its secret to us, must use the medium of our language and of our intelligence. Whatever it says to us, we must say to ourselves, and in our own words. Therefore it is true that Heaven does not speak to us in a heavenly language of its own. It speaks to us only through the medium of ourselves, and in the answer we make to it.

What is this answer ? It is our absolute values ; and we may say of religion that it is the affirmation of absolute values. But this phrase ' absolute values ' needs explanation, for there are those who say that it is meaningless.

The word value cannot be defined, for it is a fact of the human mind like thought or desire. What I value in the present I desire to persist. If I value life, I desire to go on living. But religion asserts, and Christianity more consciously than most religions asserts, that two kinds of values are possible to man ; namely the value for life itself, and so the mere desire to go on living ; and that other kind of value which is called absolute value. This absolute value is the answer which man makes to Heaven and the manner in which Heaven expresses itself to man.

If a man values life itself above aU things and above aU things desires to go on living, he wiU value all things as they help him to go on living. They wUl, in a useful phrase, have for him only a survival value ; that is to say he will see them only in relation to his own survival. Now there are those who maintain that man is of such a nature that he must value life above all things, and that everything has for him only a survival value. Sometimes they assert that he is capable of valuing the survival of the human race above his own individual survival. They assume the existence of some power, which they often caU Nature, more interested in the survival of the race than of the individual, a power which exists apart from the individual yet works in him. This power struggles, sometimes with success sometimes with failure, to make the individual man value the survival of the race above his own survival. This is the struggle we call moral conflict in ourselves. It produces in us the sense of higher and lower values, the higher being those which make for the survival of the race, the lower those which make for the survival of the individual. But it is Nature who, for purposes of her own, makes us caU one set of values higher and the other lower, makes us value one set above the other. And in either case our values remain survival values. It is life itself that we value, whether for ourselves or for the race, and we value all things in terms of life.

This is a dogmatic assertion ; and religion denies it dogmatically, the more dogmatically the more it becomes religion. There are those who assert the existence only of survival values and yet rise into religion, illogicaUy enough, by proclaiming the absolute value of Nature. They tell us that, although we can value nothing but life itself for the individual or for the race, yet we are also to value the universe in which only these values are possible. We are to affirm that this force, which makes us value life above all things, is itself good ; that is to say, it -is to be valued above life itself, it is what makes life valuable. That is a religion, but an illogical one, a religion trying to escape from its own irreUgious affirmations. For religion is, in its essence, the effort to escape from the valuing of life for its own sake and from living for the sake of living. Nor can it be content with living for the sake of the life of the race ; for, if his own life is not to be valued by the individual above aU things, why should he sacrifice himself, as an individual, to give that which he does not value for himself to an abstraction called the race ? The race consists of individuals ; and in sacrificing himself, he asserts some value above the value for life. There is something which he himself values more than his life. His desire must be that the race, that is to say other men, should have this something, not that they should have merely life itself, which has no values without this something.

It may be, of course, that man, in his belief that he values something above life itself, is merely deceived by Nature for her own purpose, which is the survival of the race. But, in that case, he cannot value the Nature that so deceives him. As soon as he finds her out, which he can do by the exercise of his own reason, he will cease to value her, or life, either for himself or for the race. Therefore she must be against his exercise of his reason, at least beyond a certain point ; and man's reason must be dangerous to the existence of man. The further it is exercised, the more it will empty life of values for him, unless he can reconcile himself to the valuing of his own individual life for its own sake.

In that case he will be rid of religion and of morality altogether, even of that religion which affirms that Nature is good, or of that morality which makes for the persistence of the race. He wOl be merely an individual concerned for his own survival as an individual. Enlightened self-interest will be the basis of his society, if self-interest, become thus conscious and supreme, can bring him any enlightenment.

But religion asserts that it cannot. All religion asserts that, even the religion of Nature ; and in doing so it affirms, whether consciously or unconsciously, the existence of absolute values in the mind of man. Man, it says, does not, cannot, live only so that he may go on living. He does desire to go on living ; he has an instinct of self-preservation. But that is only a part, not the whole, of his mind, nor are the values produced in him by it all his values. Besides them, and often in conflict with them, he has other values, those which are called absolute because in them he forgets his desire to go on living, forgets himself altogether, and values things for their own sake, not as they help him to go on Hving. It is said sometimes that we cannot value anything thus absolutely ; we must value it in relation to ourselves, as, for instance, because it gives us pleasure. But we do not value beauty because it gives us pleasure. It gives us pleasure because we value it. Without the absolute value for beauty we cannot be aware of it. The pleasure comes when we are aware of it and is therefore the effect, not the cause, of the absolute value. The belief in absolute values implies, not merely that we are capable of valuing things absolutely, but also that there is in things, in the universe, an absolute value, a virtue not dependent on the use which any one thing may have for another. It is possible to see' the universe merely in terms of use, to see God Himself in those terms. Many people think that they can explain aU things in terms of use. They explain beauty, for instance, as the expression of something useful to man, as the manner in which use presents itself to man's emotions ; when he takes pleasure in the contemplation of use he calls it beauty. So beauty has no real existence ; it is not a quality or a virtue of the thing itseK but exists for us because the thing is useful to us. If it ceased to be useful, it would cease to be beautiful. And so there are devout people for whom God Himself is good because He is useful. They are always expressing His goodness in terms of use ; they cannot conceive it otherwise, because they cannot conceive any relation between any one person or thing and another except one of use. There is a sort of commerce between aU existing things which alone gives them their value and apart from it they have no virtue in themselves. They are like the parts of a machine which, if they were separated, would have no function ; or they are like food which, considered as food, is of no value except to those who wish to eat it.

But it is part of belief in God to affirm the absolute value of God. God is good, we say — ^the two words mean the same thing — God is good in Himself and apart from His use to us or to anything else. If we believe in Grod we believe in absolute good, we affirm it in the very word God ; and the love of God means the love of absolute good. When we speak of the love of God, we assert that there is a relation between ourselves and God, which is not merely one of use or of emotions produced by use. We see God as good in itself and we love that good. But ' no man hath seen Grod at any time.' What we have seen is good, and to believe in God is to believe that we have seen absolute good in those things which we do see, the good which we call by the names of truth, beauty, and righteousness. One may believe this without believing in God ; and one may believe in God without believing this. But a passionate and real belief in absolute good usually expresses itself as a belief in God ; and a passionate and real beUef in

God usually expresses itself also as a belief in absolute good. In either case there is asserted a relation between ourselves and the universe which is not a relation of use but one of love ; and this relation is also asserted to be more real, more lasting, more valuable, than the relation of use. We need to rise above the relation of use to be aware of it ; but, as soon as we are aware of it, we are aware of its superior reality. We are aware that we live, and fulfil the purpose of our lives, in the relation of love not in the relation of use ; and we have a vision of life that shall be all love and not at all use, that vision which we call Heaven. For love, in the Christian sense of the word, is absolute value. When we say that we love we mean that we value absolutely and not in terms of use. We assert a virtue in that which we love, a virtue that constrains us to love it as soon as we see it ; and, in loving it, to forget ourselves, that is to say the use which it may have for ourselves. Love is self-forgetfulness and the only way in which we can attain to self-forgetfulness ; but we value self-forgetfulness because it is love, not love because it makes us forget ourselves. The Christian doctrine of love is but a more precise and passionate form of the religious affirmation of absolute values. The saying that God is love means that all God's values are absolute and that we are most like God when our values are absolute. In the utterly real existence of God there is no relation of use but only a relation of love ; and our existence becomes more real as we rise from the relation of use to the relation of love.

It is the religious instinct that makes us value absolute values above other values, because they are absolute. This instinct is not acquired by men but bom in them. Religion itself is but the conscious expression of it ; and the effort of religion is to make this expression more and more conscious both in thought and in action. For it asserts a constant interaction between conduct and belief, between faith and works. Absolute values must be expressed in conduct or they are not real ; love is not merely a passive thing, for unless it passes into action it ceases to be love. And since we understand only when we love, we understand only when we love in action. So a knowledge of the nature of the universe can be obtained only by love and that interaction of conduct and belief which love produces. A man may attain to that truth which is commonly called scientific without any interaction between conduct and belief, for he is concerned with truths that do not affect his conduct, or affect it only in less important matters. And this kind of truth is called scientific because it is a matter of knowing, not a matter of doing. But there is a further truth about the nature of the universe, not called scientific because it is not merely a matter of knowing, because it cannot be attained to except by the interaction of conduct and belief, of faith and works. This ia religious truth, which is often denied to be truth at all ; partly because it is hard to express ; partly because it cannot be proved by scientific means, not being a matter of mere knowledge. He who does not act upon it cannot grasp it, however clearly it may be put to him. Only by acting upon it can we imderstand it ; and this very understanding is itself not merely understanding. Rather it is like the instinct of the craftsman, a matter of practice as well as of thought. Without the practice, the thought cannot be rightly directed.

Hence the difficulty of attaining to religious truth, and the many failures to attain to it. When a scientific truth has once been discovered, it may be expressed in words once for all and so preserved for the pure intellect of man. But a religious truth, even when an individual man has discovered and expressed it, can be fuUy understood only by those who act on it. So, if the expression of it be preserved as a dogma and not acted upon, it is emptied of meaning for those who so preserve it. Religious dogmas, for those who profess them without acting upon them, fail to mean what they meant to him who first expressed them ; and since few of us act upon the rehgious dogmas of Christ, we may conjecture that they fail to mean to us what they meant to him, that for us they are often as untrue as the enemies of Christianity assert them to be. To understand them we must act upon them ; for only so will they become religious truth to us, if indeed they are capable of becoming religious truth at all.

Christ incessantly affirms absolute values. He tells us that we have these absolute values and that we can attain to truth, and to eternal Hfe, only by acting upon them. He that would save his life shall lose it. Christ is a religious teacher, not a philosopher,' because for him truth can be attained to only by an incessant interaction of conduct and thought ; and for him that interaction is the main business of man. Act rightly so that you may think rightly ; think rightly so that you may act rightly. Truth itself, that word he uses so often, is not to him merely intellectual or scientific truth. It is to be known through the interaction of conduct and thought, and to be understood only by means of that interaction. The knowledge of this truth is linowledge of the scientifically unknown, and therefore a knowledge not scientific, a knowledge, rather, designed to provoke certain conduct through which alone it can be understood. So the very statement of it is designed to make men act, and not merely think, in a certain way. It is like the sayings of a craftsman rather than of a philosopher, of one who speaks to other craftsmen and assumes that only they can understand him.