The freedom of authority Essays in apologetics

Front matter

BY THE) SAME AUTHOR

STUDIES IN HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

With Appendix on Christian Unity in America and the Historic Episcopate

Preface

These current discussions of contemporary themes and thinkers are Essays in Apologetics. Apologetics is the philosophical defense or justification of Religion. It aims at vindicating the concrete rationality of the religious side of humanity’s life. It attempts a critical refutation of all antagonistic world-views. It meets them in the open, on purely intellectual grounds, as to what is the most rational world-view—one that excludes and invalidates religion, or one that includes and validates it.

The volume is a series of Studies, rather than a sustained thesis. Yet there runs through them all, the contention that nature and man are known truly, only when they are viewed as a process of objective Mind, realizing itself afresh in and through empirical conditions.

Its fundamental object is to maintain the reasonableness of a man of modern culture frankly and earnestly worshiping in some form of “authoritative religion”—in any form, rather than in no form.

Hence the persistent polemic against the “mechanical view” of the universe. This merely mechanical interpretation of Nature and man and his institutions is a metaphysical perversion of the mechanical theory, properly used in Science. It is not Science, but the bad metaphysics of some men of Science. It is the metaphysics of Naturalism and of rigid mechanical determinism, in which there can be no worthy place for the humanities. These Essays seek a world-view in which Art and Religion and Philosophy are seen to have valid functions for human weal. The merely Scientific man, the man whose world-view is merely

Vv vi PREFACE that of mechanical Science—the undevout astronomer, or geologist,—is mad. Only the devout man is fully sane.

The use of the dialectic method will be noted. First statements, though put dogmatically, are not final ones. Criticism follows to show their patent limitations, and thus force them into more concrete forms.

The book may be too semi-technical for popular readers, and too semi-popular for technical readers. The odium Theologicum may sometimes seem to swamp the philosophic calm, in the author’s interest in such verities as God, Freedom and Immortality. The mixture of metaphor with the dialect of philosophy, and the appeal to men’s moral and religious needs, as against the regnant naturalism of a metaphysical Science, may be faulted. And yet we dare believe that there is a bit of real logic throughout the volume.

Certain truths having become axioms in philosophy like certain principles in mathematics, constantly applied, repetitions of these axiomatic realities had necessarily to be made throughout the book without adducing constant cross references.

The larger part of the book was written aus einem Gusse, in a heat, almost at a sitting, and must suffer for the faults of all such composition. —

At least the author can say, léberavi animam meam on some vital topics of the time. He sends the volume forth with the hope that it may help liberate some fellow-men from bondage to a godless world-view, and lead some others from the capriciousness of individualism, into that objective service of God, which is perfect freedom.

He has to thank his colleague, Professor Hermann Schonfeld for his valuable assistance in reading and correcting the final proof of the whole volume.

J. MacBRIDE STERRETT.

Tue GrorceE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY, Washington, D. C., January, 1905.

Contents

CHAPEERST

CHAPTER Til

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VIII

Hes

Chapter I

“Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist.” This dictum of Emerson in his Sturm und Drang period cannot be taken seriously. Taken literally in England, it would mean the exclusion of King, Archbishops, the clergy and the laity of the Church of England from the category of manhood. ‘Taken seriously anywheres, it would mean the denial of manhood to all men of good manners. ‘The good-mannered man is the one who conforms to the manners, or morals (mores, 70txd, Sitten) of his tribe, set, community, station and institutions.

It would mean that one must decivilize, desocialize himself —fanatically attempt not to be like other men. My set, people, church believe and behave so and so. I must behave unlike them and thus finally ostracise myself from all relations to my fellow men in order tobe aman. My good fellow citizens obey the laws, I must be an anti-nomian. My church believes in the Apostles’ Creed and has a prescribed form of worship. I must deny the creed and decry the cult. I must be a veritable Ishmaelite and heed “the call of the wild” against “the call of the tame.”

But what quality of manhood remains in one as a non-conformist? “No tribe, nor state, nor home hath he.” Selfschismed from all of his kind by his un-kindness; unformed by all his non-conformity, he must be as Aristotle said, “either a beast or a god.” He would be even less than a beast. For beasts are like their kind, conform to their type, physically and

I I psychically. “Insist on yourself, never imitate,” says Emerson again in his essay on Se/f-reliance. And again, “I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.” Emerson must have meant that the perfect man should be a non-conformist to the manners of imperfect men. A Jesus must not conform to the creeds and deeds of the Pharisees and Sadducees—hypocrites. This is evident from the transcendental lines prefixed to a previous essay :—

‘*T am the owner of the spheres, Of the seven stars and the solar year, Of Cesar’s hand and Plato’s brain, Of Lord Christ’s heart and Shakspere’s strain.”’

Such a cosmopolitan man is more like a god. Such an uncommon man may stand, as he further says, before every custom and law and say: “Under this mask did my Proteus nature hide itself.’ Jam the universal-human. Nihil human . alienum ame puto and so [am aman because I am a conformist. I can only be a non-conformist to imperfect forms, because I have been conformed to those of the universal-human. I, asa cosmopolitan, may slight provincial customs. But I have become a cosmopolite by being a conformist to the manners of all provinces. I can be a non-conformist only after and because I have become a conformed-ist. I have, Emerson virtually says, conformed to the type of perfect manhood and therefore I can non-conform to imperfect forms of the type. “The oversoul” is my soul. In me is a greater than me, that is, my realme. It is God that is my real self, and God cannot be conformed to anything but Himself. Thus Emerson’s non-conformist turns out to be a god, rather than a beast. What he means, if anything more than a striking expression is intended, is that the man who has become a real man by conformity to the perfect law of the universal-human, must non-conform to the manners, customs, morals of the imperfect human. In other words he meant to say that: Whoso would be a man must be a conformist.*

So says biology in its law of conformity to type. So says psychology, pedagogy, morality, religion and philosophy. So, too, says history. No form of organized society—from the tribal to the republican, from the lowest to the highest form of social, moral or religious society has any place for the mugwump, or non-conformist. Ostracism is always the penalty. The non-conformist is always at most a re-formist. He can be a non-conformist only because he hasbeen transformed to some other form. Non-conformity is thus often the highest type of moral and religious conformity. The non-conformists of England have had their moral nobility only by virtue of their conformity to a higher type of Christianity than that which they found about them.

It was the moral and religious imperfection of the Church of England that made their non-conformity possible because of their conformity to higher religious ideals. Yes, it is often true that to be a man—a typical man—one must often be a non-conformist to the customs of degenerates. Degenerates means, in fact, those who have lost the qualities proper to the genus or kind of mankind.

Isolate the child of cultured parents from all human intercourse. Let him be a private, subjective, uneducated potential man, You cannot take away from him the heredity that enters into his idiosyncrasy. But he is as nearly as possible unspoilt by the tyrants of domestic, religious, intellectual and moral authorities. No mother-tongue tyrannizes his speech —if speech he have. He is a private individual so far as that is possible. Let him then be cast into the desert, away from the shackles of civilization. Let him be nurtured by a wolf. Anthropomorphize his animal companions as much as Kipling or

*Thus Emerson in speaking of the true scholar says, “the truth is this: Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.”

Seton Thompson do. Let him be a Mogli. Still, “persistence of type” will keep him enough conformed to the human, to prevent his becoming wholly a beast, while his conformity to his bestial environment will keep him from becoming much of a man.

By patent analysis every avowed non-conformist can be shown to be nine-tenths a conformedist. Heredity and environment have done their ineffaceable work upon him. He is full of prejudices—pre-judgments of ancestors and fellowmen.

An unprejudiced judgment is a psychological impossibility. It is only important that one’s pre-judgments be good and true, normal and objective, rather than whimsical, peculiar, abnormal and subjective.

But if his judgments are so largely pre-judgments, prejudices imbibed from ancestry and his social, ethical environments, where is his distinctively private judgment? Where is what is termed his individuality?

Analysis shows this to be largely an idiosyncrasy, a peculiar blending of hereditary and environing traits. He never was an individual in the abstract sense, 7. e., as being abstracted from all such determining elements. He was not so when first abstracted from his mother’s womb. Then the mother’s love and the family ethos bathed and permeated, and together with the ethos of society, church and school made him a man among men. Hence his private judgment is always based upon objective, social judgments. Otherwise the right of private judgment becomes the wrong of misjudgment to society, which punishes him accordingly, and a wrong to his own human nature which is self-retributive. In all this, too, he had been and still is under authority. Conformity and authority are correlatives.

And here we have another bug-bear term—authority. The freedom of authority is an antinomy, and an unresolved antinomy is an insult to reason. The human spirit will not brook it. Where it cannot solve the antinomy by rising to a higher point of view, it will make a practical solution—will cut the Gordian knot.

To speak of the freedom of authority may seem to some like discoursing on the whiteness of blackness. Kant’s statement of some antinomies is classical. He denied the possibility of any rational solution of them. His critical solution of them left us with the unresolved dualisin between phenomena and noumena. Later philosophy multiplies the antinomies—finds that in every object or idea there is difference as well as identity. All that is needed to make an antinomy is to emphasize the difference and neglect the identity. To solve, it is to see the unity im and through the difference, as is done in Burns’ line ““A man’s a man for a’ that.” To make a bug-bear of authority, as fatal to freedom, seems like a belated survival of a worked-out and thoughtout antinomy. The scientific, historical and philosophical spirit and methods are all beyond the abstractions on which this antinomy is founded. And yet it lingers on in robust form—an encysted, but lively corpse in the cosmic thought of the twentieth century. In no spheres of life is this survival more pronounced in our day than in those of morals and religion. Napoleon remarked to Laplace that he could not find any mention of the Creator in his Méchanique Célesie. “Sire,” said Laplace, “I had no need of any such hypothesis.” So say some of authority in morals and religion—“Sirs, there is no need of that hypothesis in describing true religion.”

The author of one of the most significant and brilliant works on religion’ quotes approvingly the tempestuous claim of V inet, whom he styles the great prophet of the religion of the spirit in our age and country: “That which I absolutely repudiate is authority,” and adds, “the time has come, it seems to me, for those who have broken with authority in their inner life, to break definitely with it in their theology.”

But we are told that the right of private judgment was the

* Auguste Sabatier, Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit, p. 283.

essential characteristic of the Reformation, and that this meant the repudiation of all authority in religion. It need scarcely be said that this has not been true of Protestantism, except in that of some who have departed far from its substantial principles and historical forms. Such writers demand a suspense of judgment in religious matters till they can be approached simply as an unbiased intellectual study. To do this they should be kept from all authoritative religious education, as John Stuart Mill was by his father.

Authority may be defined as the power or influence through which one does or believes what he would not of his own unaided powers. Authorities are all presumably rightful. That lies in the very significance of the term. It is a personal relation between the wiser and better and those less wise and good. Society’s judgment as to who are the wisest and best is expressed in the form of laws. Laws are authorized. The personal is never wholly absent from any form of authority. Its function is to enable individuals to attain a higher development than they could by their own unaided powers. This mediation is primarily through the collective reason and beliefs and customs of mankind and the individuals. Ultimately all authority must be seen to be invested in God, “whose service is perfect freedom.” Speaking of it mediately, it is the power or influence conferred by wisdom, character, office and station. Its fundamental idea is that of law. Law is a rule of conduct to an end. That end is always the well being of those upon whom it is imposed. Primarily objective, its aim is to make itself subjective in its subjects, so that it may be seen to be their own law—the law of their own nature. But it becomes to one a law of his own nature through custom and conformity—the law of his educated nature—his nature converted into substantial manhood through conformity to the authorities which surround him from the cradle to the grave. Thus authority is the right of the species man over its individuals; and conformity is a duty of the individual to his set. It is this conformity that makes him a generic man. And thus it becomes his right, his good, the means of his being elevated to the grade of manhood. ,

Authority has its roots in the organic conditions of all forms of life and of good living. It is the pedagogue to whom all must always go to school. It is a necessary function of the species for its own preservation. As tradition, it is the bond of generations transmitting the accumulated heritage of the ages. Every form of society naturally and necessarily begets generic traditions, customs, beliefs, constitutions and by-laws which are authoritative for all its members. The society which is without them cannot remain a society. That which has no such organic past can have no continuing present. “Institutions,” it has been said, “are the lengthening shadow of man.” That is too feeble a simile. Say, rather, institutions are the lengthening and strengthening of the stature of man. Civilized men are civilized men only through institutions. Man is by nature—that is, by his educated nature—an institutional being, or as Aristotle said, “a political animal.” And generic constitutions always imply authority, conformity and, through these, real concrete freedom or self-realization. Law, authority is fundamental and final and freedom is in and by means of law.

But authority for man is always ultimately personal, and its aim is to enrich individuals by fulfilling them. Being personal it implies trust, confidence and obedience. Its function is its sufficient credential. It educates and sustains individuals. The individual cannot become a man except by conformity, as “the branch cannot bear fruit except it abide in the vine’ as a member. So we return to conformity as the necessary means of self-development. Authorities may sometimes seem external and obedience forced, but all education goes on under these principles. “One is always somebody’s child.” The man not less than the child and the race not less than man is always. under authorities, which can be traced to the One Supreme personal authority ‘whose service is perfect freedom.” Education is the influencing of person by person, to the end of the self-realization of the one influenced. It is the shaping of the individual to his civilized environment, so that rational habits and views—that is, the views and habits of his institutions, may take the place of mere caprice. It is erroneous to say that “education is the development of the theoretical and practical in the individual,” as if it were only an educing of what is already within, like shelling so many peas from a pod. Education is not merely an exegesis. It is rather an induction—a conveying a fullness into an emptiness. It is a conversion, a tegeneration of the merely natural man of babyhood. Apart from heredity and idiosyncrasy, if there is anything peculiar, it is bad | un-kind, and needs extirpation rather than education, for the good of the individual and society. The child, as Hegel says, “as a potential man is only subjective or negative.” His first nature must be converted into a second rational ethical nature, so that these become his second and true nature. Pedagogy is the art of making man ethical. It seeks to permeate him with the ethos, intellectual, moral and religious of his people. Toa father seeking the best way to bring up his son, a Pythagorean, or some other philosopher, replied, ‘““make him a citizen of a state which has good laws.” And by the state, Aristotle and Hegel mean the whole social organism—family, school, church, society, as well as government. Let him conform to these institutional authorities if-he would become a good and wise man. Let him conform his vocalization to the common language ; his reasoning to the common laws of thought; his knowledge to the common fund of science, art, literature and philosophy ; his devotional exercises to the common cult of his church, and his conduct to the ethical codes, customs and manners of his people, that he may attain to the stature of manhood.

The imperishable Greek ideal of education was not merely that of drawing out but also that of a putting in. And it was to be put in by line upon line and precept upon precept and example upon example, and custom upon custom—that is, as

Aristotle taught, by habituation to the objective, generic, and concrete wisdom and morals of the institution. During the process there is thus a species of self-enstrangement for the natural—the uneducated man, but its end is self-realization or the cultured moral man. All knowledge, all manners are foreign to the child. But familiarity with them removes their foreign air, and they become flesh of his flesh and spirit of his spirit —a second, regenerated nature. And as the process never ceases but with senility or death, one’s regeneration is never quite completed. Literal school days do not end the conformity that educates. “One is always somebody’s child.” The wisdom and experience of his fellowmen and of the institutions of which he is a member are always objective concrete authorities. Without me there is always a greater than me, unless I have with Emerson become the owner of “Lord Christ’s heart and Shakespere’s strain,’ and the “over soul” has become my own soul. Not till then will the right of the distinctively, peculiar private judgment be aught but mis-judgment. And in the process one’s judgment is of worth only so far as it conforms to public universal judgment, intellectual or moral. And when it is right and good, it is so in virtue of its not being one’s private judgment. The Lehrjahre always run through the Wanderjahre and even the Meisterjahre are years of Lehrjahre. Education is unending for the diving man and it is always under authorities.

But what place, we ask again, is left for freedom and individuality? Let us say briefly, and then try to see later on that in this process of education, freedom and He uieah are being truly realized.

We note the strange tendency of man to think in transcended forms of thought—to stand on overcome-standpoints. Men grow zealous and fight for old gods when they have thought themselves to new and higher ones. It is a species of intellectual and moral atavism. It is a recrudescence of the old Adam, which is often too strong for the new Adam in us,—to put it in religious way. Men of science who hold the strictly mechanical view of the universe, will often argue in terms of tetology and freedom. Or having passed beyond crude materialism to the higher category of force as a system of forces, they will argue from the standpoint of matter as the ultimately real. Or having accepted evolution, they will argue as if there were no teleology. Life is still a higher category and yet they will often subordinate life to conceptions of the inorganic. Illustrations in morals and religion also are abundant. Men, like the Jews of old, believe in and fear Jehovah and yet worship their old idols. In religion, the Methodists call it back-sliding. In thought and action it is inconsistency.

There is a whole nestful of eighteenth century conceptions —conceptions of the Eclaircissement, Aufklirung or rationalism, that have lived and fought through the nineteenth century, in spite of the accepted, historical method and the regnant conception of evolution. These are the abstract conceptions of reason, freedom, individuality and a generally static view of all things as separate and distinct, the universe being a collection of independent beings and things with no essential relations between them. In all human organizations the individual is the real. And the individual is an independent atom, impervious to foreign emigrations, a substantial unit, a microcosmic monad. ‘These monads, as Leibnitz said, “have no windows through which anything might go in or out of them.” No sponging is therefore possible or desirable. Each one being like a separate world, is “sufficient for itself, independent of every other creature, enveloping the infinite, expressing the universe and as durable, self-subsistent and absolute as the universe itself.”” This pluralistic view of the universe as a collection of many eternal and independent beings has its revival in the views of Professor James, Professor Howison, Professor Schiller and the authors of the volume of essays entitled “Personal Idealism.” This eighteenth century view was practically a revival of nominalism against a second growth of realism in thought and

THE FREEDOM OF AUTHORITY II institution. It was the principle of criticism used against all constituted authorities. The illuminated, enfranchised individual was in duty bound to summon before his private tribunal for evaluation all the accepted creeds, cults and institutions. The German name for this age is the Aufklarung—the clearing up, which Schelling happily characterized as an Ausklarung—a clearing out.*

Cui bono it asked of church and state and art and religion and every form of social organization. Does it, judged by the private reason of the private person, pay to belong to, to submit to any of these so called authorities? If not, then away with them from my universe. All organic unities—family, state, church, were looked upon as unities only in the sense of being collections or aggregations of independent individuals, formed by social contact for the enlarged happiness of the individual members. Never was there an age which was so sure that it had reached the ultimate point of view. The ofttimes arrogancy of the modern scientific view of the world pales before that of the Iilwmination. Reason was late born, but it had finally been born, full-fledged in their day and would henceforth rule the world. After us the deluge, was the cry. Each man was to be his own Moses and his own Christ. The Sinai was within and the Golgotha too, so far as any need of a cross was recognized. “Thus would J speak, if I were Christ,” are the words that Goethe put into the mouths of one of these rationalists, in characterizing the arrogant self-conceit of this phase of thought.

Thus measured, all institutions of civilized life were found wanting, and so Rousseau made his “call to the wild” from the call of the tame—“Back from civilization and artificiality to nature and the freedom of the woodland.” Ina word it was the assertion of the infinitude of the finite selfi—the deification of the individual as in modern pluralism. Some of the representatives of the modern form of this individualistic polytheism seem to be jealous of God—would fain banish Him, or reduce Him to being

* Cf. my Ethics of Hegel, p. 20, for further characterization.

at most primus inter pares, lest He should tamper with the sacred rights of individuals. These are, by nature, as eternal and independent as God Himself. All are gods. |

In the eighteenth century form, freedom from all forms of social and institutional authorities was proclaimed. The evils of man were held to be due to society. The individual could only reach perfection by being freed from all restraint and allowed to follow his own natural instincts. All relations between individuals were looked upon as artificial, made by compact, and in no way constitutive of them. Hence dissent became the rule and conformity the exception.

It may be well, at this point, to differentiate the principles of this “Age of Reason” from those of Protestantism, inasmuch as many falsely identify them. It is possible indeed for Sabatier to style himself a Protestant, after he has given much space to show that historically Protestantism, at least up till his day and to a few choice liberal souls, has always had its authoritative standards for its individual members. Indeed in his second work,” he classifies Protestantism along with Romanism under “Religions of Authority” and gives a most drastic criticism of historical Protestantism which is only equalled by that of Dr. Martineau.* Both of these writers err in holding that Protestants placed authority in a paper-pope, as the Bible has been stigmatized, and not recognizing too, that, historically, Protestants have also placed authority in their churches. They have all, always and everywheres, held to the Apostles’ Creed, with its article, “I believe in the holy Catholic Church.”

But for the point at issue—the right of the private judgment of the individual. Protestants have always claimed the right of personal conviction, but also that the right of private judgment is the right of judgment based upon the Scriptures and creeds of the church—upon the testimony of the Spirit as authorita-

* Sabatier’s Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, p. 222. ? Sabatier’s Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spint. *'Martineau’s Seat of Authority in Religion.

tively communicated to the individual, not by a paper-pope, but by holy and inspired men and writers and most fully by the personal Christ. Throughout, too, they had the conception of a kingdom of whose principles these persons were the authoritative exponents. Historically—that is—as a matter of fact, the fundamental doctrines of Protestants have been:

(1) The will of God revealed through the divine institutions and inspired men of holy Scriptures, as the authoritative rule of faith and practice.

(2) Justification by faith alone, through the divine grace, mediated by the Holy Scriptures and the Christian community.

(3) The universal priesthood of believers.

Protestanism never contended for, nor allowed the right of mere private judgment in any of its churches. It has insisted upon personal conviction. It has asserted the supreme value— not of the individual, but of the Christlike person. It has always condemned to final punishment, in terms lurid or gentle, sensuous or spiritual, according to the prevailing culture of the times —all individuals whose private judgment and life were not in accordance with the Word of God. The absolute value of the individual in hell—make that as unsensuous as you please—is not an absolute value of any worth. It means alienation from the Kingdom of God, the Church triumphant. That is, it is the kind of an individual that has worth—the individual that has been realized as a member of the Kingdom. It is true that some self-styled liberal Christians in a number of our churches think and act under the principles of “the age of reason,” and talk to their flock about the liberty of every man’s thinking as he pleases about the doctrines of their respective churches. The epithet liberal is not modest. And their talk about “a religion for this age,” or “the Church of the future” for which they stand, does not make for the edifying of the religious nature of men, as it is generally intellectual rather than devotional. They represent only eddies in the great stream of the life of their churches.

Protestants protested against the abuses and corruptions of the Church—protested against the decision of the Diet of Spires (A. D. 1529) when that Diet refused to reform these abuses and corruptions—and, historically speaking—the day for this protest is not yet over. Otherwise there is no reason against reunion with Rome. Certainly a reunited Christendom is the ideal Church of the future. But until Rome heeds the protest, it is difficult to hear with patience the voices of those in the Protestant Episcopal Church, who decry “the mistake of the Reformation” and “the failure of Protestantism,” and labor for the expurgation of the word “Protestant” from the title of their — Church?.