Christ and the dramas of doubt, studies in the problem of evil

Contents

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER I

PAGE

The Causes of Doubt 3

CHAPTER II The Epochs of Doubt 18

The drama as an expression of the problem in its most living form in all lands and ages ■ — The age of iEschylus — The age of Job — The age of Hamlet — Of Shakespeare — Of Goethe — Of Ibsen.

vi CONTENTS

THE FIRST STEP

Prometheus Bound — The Struggle with an Impossible Theology

Chapter III

page

The Revolt Against an Inhuman God 35

Story and problem of Prometheus Bound — A God without moral responsibility in an increasingly moral world.

CHAPTER IV Groping After the Way 45

The law of retribution an assured fact — The law of sacrifice making demands on life — The necessity of reconciliation between man and God — (a) On the part of Prometheus — (b) On the part of Zeus — The Grecian demand for the incarnation.

THE SECOND STEP

Job — The Struggle with the Mystery of Pain

CHAPTER VIII The Plains of Peace 93

The things that time and sense cannot restore — That which is better than happiness — The partial nature of human experience — Understanding not necessary to peace — Doubt not to be solved intellectually — To have God is enough.

THE THIRD STEP

Hamlet — The Struggle with the Problem of an Outraged Moral Order

Chapter IX

The Heart of Tragedy — Practical Doubt . . 107 Hamlet's a practical doubt — The story and problem — The unethical character of inviii CONTENTS

tellectual belief — The insidious nature of practical doubt — The modern lesson in Hamlet's problem — The Divine Nemesis.

Chapter X Page

The Task Beyond the Powers 119

The stupendous character of Hamlet's task — The pessimism of modern life like that of Hamlet — A moral paralysis in the face of tasks — The sense of God in the moral order.

CHAPTER XI The Unlit Lamp and the Ungirt Loin. . . . 131

The harvest of irresolution — The common ruin of guilty and innocent — Indifference to moral questions inexcusable — To lose the soul — What does it mean? — Hamlet's salvation in the existence of a moral order.

THE FOURTH STEP

Faust — The Struggle with the Problem of Redemption

CHAPTER XV Did Goethe Solve the Problem? 184

The attempt to avoid a Dualistic world — Too short to span the distance between hell and heaven — The "Streben" philosophy in modern life — The unappreciated secret of the Cross.

x CONTENTS

THE FIFTH STEP

Brand — The Struggle Arising from the Failure of Spiritual Ideals

CHAPTER XVIII The Problem in Modern Thought 235

The modern pessimists — Readjustment of ideas — Misconception about happiness — The presence of moral and physical disorder — The lack of motive — The Breakdown of religious ideals — Re'sume' of the problem.

CONTENTS xi

Chapter XIX Page

Jesus of Nazareth and the Personal Solution 259

The individual must be considered in relations

— The identification of God with cosmic

^ life — The identification of God with human

achievement — The lifting of the individual

life to the universal plane.

INTRODUCTORY

Chapter I The Causes Of Doubt

A clergyman is said recently to have announced that he would preach from the subject, "Why do the corners of the mouth turn down?" We do not know how the good brother dealt with his question, nor what was the outcome, but in his homely phrase was a world of meaning. The phrase might well have been the theme of this chapter. In one form or another, now facetious and now in the darker phrasing of tragedy, it has been the fateful question of life which men have been working at from the beginning even until now. And though many misconceptions have been cleared away, in its abstract aspect very little positive ground has been gained. The problem still faces us, the despair of poet and philosopher alike. The reason for this failure to put at rest these questions will eventually be found to lie, not in the imperfection of the natural world, but in the unfinished, unperfected quality of the human spirit, which cannot be satisfied with a world which is less than perfect and as yet is far from the moral goal which is home. The eternal words of Augustine come with a new pertinence and conviction to the present age, and we know them true: "Our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee."

Basis of the Problem

How deep and how ancient is this problem may be seen by reflection upon the earliest history of religion. The great religious myths are all concerned with the struggle of gigantic forces for mastery: light against darkness, good against evil. The rising and setting of the sun, the morning and evening stars, the waxing and waning moon, the approach and recedence of the seasons become but the poetic symbol and imagery, the outward representation of that which was, in the last analysis, the deeper struggle of man's own unresting heart. It is not to be wondered at that all in him which called out for the eternal, the good, the pure, the abiding, seemed linked with the higher powers and processes of nature in a world in which he was but an atom.

Doubt Comes w t ith Culture

In this early stage man was not a doubter. Despair may have been a constant factor in his life; fear surely was, but to his naive imagination there was no place for doubt. Doubt is not the product of those active days in the life of a race, a nation, or an individual, when struggle is being made for conquest of natural forces. Those nations that have had the hardest struggle for existence have ever been the most religious. Doubt comes with ease, with reflection, with fullness — physical and intellectual. It therefore never appears in decided form in early stages of civilization, when men are pioneering the world, but is, rather, the product of more cultured days. The great literature of doubt appears not in the beginning but in the decadence of culture.

Doubt Arises from the Existence of Moral and Physical Disorder

Perhaps the first great shock to the reflective mind arises from the existence of moral and physical disorder in a universe created and controlled by a good God. However much certain persons may arise to affirm that evil, pain, sorrow, and misfortune are but aberrations of the mind, such a solution can never satisfy the souls of any but the well fed, well dressed and comfortable. It is a useless thing for men whose lives are daily tragedies, and who are not satisfied with a perfectly selfish and, therefore, immoral solution. However one may go on in his isolated self-sufficiency, the fact remains that great floods devastate and destroy the earth and the people in it. The pathos of Jean Ingelow's "faire Elizabeth," with her children drowned by the high tide on the coast of Lincolnshire and cast by the ebb before her own door, is a tragedy that has been often repeated. The ebbing tide of disaster too often lays our dearest and most precious stark and lifeless at our feet. Great fires destroy the innocent and the guilty. Earthquakes have no way of passing by the homes of the just, but move with a startling impartiality. Epidemics of disease carry off the brightest and the best. Ofttimes the vicious, the useless, and the evil live through long years, corrupting the stream of life, while the good and the brave do not live out half their days.

Nor do we seem to be much better off when we approach the moral realm. Here we see not only the innocent suffering with the guilty, but the innocent suffering for the guilty. The greatest sufferer is not the man who commits sin, but some innocent and blameless life that is tied to him by bonds of relationship and affection. Very often there is an obtuseness in the criminal by which he seems to be incapable of deep suffering. The more revolting his crime the less his capacity for sensitive feeling. The burden of a man's sin falls less upon himself than it does upon those nearest to him.

When the seven sons of Saul for Saul's crime were hanged by the men of Gibeah, the greatest suffering was neither Saul's nor his sons'. The great sufferer was the tearless Rizpah, watching through days of heat and starless nights, from the beginning of harvest until the coming winter. The same truth is borne home in the verses of Kipling's "Mother o' Mine." 1

If I were hanged on the highest hill, Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!

I know whose love would follow me still, Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!

If I were drowned in the deepest sea, Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!

I know whose tears would come down to me, Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!

If I were damned of body and soul, I know whose prayers would make me whole, Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine J

He who declares there is no pain nor evil takes but a shallow and inadequate view of the deepest moving facts of life. Nor is this all. Many lives seem to go astray in the scheme of things. Sometimes the finest spirits are forced to pessimism by a sense of personal wrong and social isolation, as

1 Kipling, Dedication to The Light that Failed.

in the case of Shelley and Heinrich Heine. The shallow and the superficial are often exalted to the place of prominence and power, and set to rule over men of far greater capability, whose capacities go undeveloped and undiscovered, and who sink out of life with no opportunity to speak their message to the world — "of whom the world is not worthy," and of whose possibilities the world stands in sore need.

No age has ever been so conscious of the immeasurable wastes of society as the present. Little children toil away strength, childhood, imagination, the possibility for the spiritual, the opportunity for mental development, in sweatshop, home, and factory. A greedy and materialistic age robs them of the most priceless gifts of life before they have attained the age of understanding, and turns them into middle life with diseased bodies and minds, uncultivated spiritual lives, in some cases but little better than the beasts of the field, in some cases worse. The existence of moral and physical disorder becomes thus one of the most pressing problems of the age.

Doubt Arises from the Missed Aim of Happiness

The darkness cast by the cloud of moral and physical disorder might perhaps be forgotten if only a considerable portion of the race seeking happiness could find the way thither. But this way seems forever closed. Happiness does not dwell in the halls of the great. No class finds life so futile and unsatisfying as that which sits continually in the lap of ease. The struggle for amusement among the rich becomes more tragic than in the so-called less fortunate is the struggle for bread. That pessimism cannot be exceeded which, as President Jordan 1 says, is "a reaction from unearned pleasures and spurious joys."

All gratification that becomes an end in itself seems to yield the same result. Unbridled indulgence makes further enjoyment impossible. Pleasure, to remain pleasurable, must be earned. Even in the religious realm this is true. Stirred emotions and states of rapture which are never

David Starr Jordan, The Philosophy of Despair, p. 27, connected with genuine gains in character and in service of one's fellows, end in a disillusionment and spiritual poverty in which one may hear the cry, "All is vanity." This despair arises out of a false conception of happiness, a false estimate of its relation to the remainder of life, and the fact that nothing which is not itself eternal can satisfy the human soul.

Doubt Arises from Mental and Moral Readjustment

The necessity for moral, mental, and political readjustment is also a cause for despair in many minds. There come times when the very face of the earth is so changed by upheaval that men have to make complete readjustment and build them new homes before life can go on.

The scientist in his laboratory makes a discovery which renders inconsistent a whole system of theology that has remained unquestioned for years. A political upheaval casts upon a monarchical theism the necessity to look upon God across a rising tide of individualism. The tribal god of

Israel's national life gives way with political dependence to a God whom Jesus teaches men to call Father. The vindictive and irresponsible gods of older Greece fall before a growing sense of individual moral responsibility. A political theory goes down in the crash of war, and for a time there is much confusion and noise. Many charges and counter-charges are made, and only with time do many readjust their thinking to the new order of things. Such an age came to Israel with the exile and the readjustment following that most significant event in her national history. Greece saw such a day when the little confederation first realized its strength in the turning back of the Persian tide under Xerxes which made possible the age of Pericles. England witnessed such a period of transition after the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the call to empire in a newly discovered world. Europe witnessed like scenes of tumult in the rise of a new individualism, the revolt of the human spirit generally present but spectacularly realized in the French Revolution.

When old systems of thought become inadequate the extremists declare that the old is without virtue and should be thrown over altogether. The other side, realizing the truth of the old, and not yet seeing the way clear to readjustment, appeals to tradition. Such an age is always one of doubt and darkness.

Doubt Arises from Lack of Adequate Life Motive

One very much underestimated cause of despair has yet to be named. More pessimism springs from lack of adequate motive in life than from all other causes. The causes already named are speculative, but this is practical. The world can move on so long as doubt concerns itself exclusively with the speculative issues, but when it enters into practical life it- becomes vicious and harmful. Speculative doubt is the indulgence of a few reflective minds, or of men with morbid physical and mental conditions. Practical doubt is the possession of vast multitudes. The man who, devoid of motive, hid his talent in the earth was not only struck with despair at his own helplessness and weakness, but he was struck also with moral blindness. He overlooked his responsibility for what had been only trusted to his keeping, and was cast out both for his sloth and for his wickedness. The reason men are struck with world-weariness is because they have wandered through the world of sense and experience with no motive beyond that of self-gratification. Their excursion into the world of learning has been without moral aim. It is such lives, with motive inadequate for an immortal being, that turn back disappointed on the toilsome way. Neither the will to feel nor the will to know is in itself enough. In a moral being they demand a moral purpose. Both experience and knowledge are the means to action. They awaken the strongest impulses to action, and if these impulses are resisted, there is moral and spiritual deadness and despair. Experience that is not wrought out in life, that does not lead to a better character, making one more honest, more sympathetic, more loving, more serviceable, is like Israelitish manna whose worth did not last beyond a single day.

The men who despair for the well-being of the world are never the men who are throwing themselves into the saving of the world. They are men whose hearts have been convicted of responsibility. They are men who have sensed the need of selfgiving, but have not been willing to enter upon the saving of the world in the only way it can be saved — by personal contact and unselfish action.

When one hears the voice of despair one may be certain of this alternative: the presence of morbid pathological conditions in the man's body or the weakening of the man's moral fiber. The skepticism that is most dangerous to the church does not much concern itself with the theoretical aspect of belief. The unbelief that threatens the life of the church is the unbelief that sings songs, repeats creeds, testifies on Sunday, and during the week gives itself solely to the accumulation and enjoyment of the things of the world. Such a religion is no more exempt from the pit of despair than is an intellectual world that learns and learns and never comes to a knowledge of the truth, because behind it is no adequate motive.

Man must discover the personal imperative of duty between his life and the world of relations around him. He cannot take it out in intellectual dream or religious vision. To be able to abide, it must touch the ground. There must be a sense of personal relationship to God which calls him to practical duty. The personal imperative of duty must be a divine command on his life. Knowledge or so-called religious experiences not wrought into life and action deaden and disarm both mind and soul, and the end is despair. "The experience of all the ages brings only despair if it cannot be wrought into life." 1

Doubt Arises from the Failure of Spiritual Ideals

This brings us close to the problem raised by the failure of spiritual ideals. Sometimes men in the very pursuit of religion

1 David Starr Jordan, The Philosophy of Despair, p. 14.

seem to overshoot the mark and end in absolute denial. This is sure to be true of any man who follows a religious ideal that is not open to revision by the growing experience of life. Spiritual ideals must have the power of expansion and change under the light of reason and experience. We undertake a dangerous course when we decide upon a religious action which demands that we hoodwink the mind or do injustice to our finer sense. Religion, instead of being out of harmony with the finer sentiments of life, is in strict keeping with them. No truly religious ideal can remain ever the same for any living soul. Day by day it must become something better and more perfect. Dissatisfaction and spiritual unrest should be taken not as the tokens of failure but as the evidences of a life struggling for expression. The true man, having done his best, must feel that he has failed. The mountain heights of Jesus's character remain to rebuke the low levels of his own attainment.

Chapter II The Epochs Of Doubt

The Drama as an Expression of the

Problem in Its Most Living Form

in All Lands and Ages

So soon as one begins to study the great literary monuments that deal with the problem of evil he will be struck by the similarity of conditions under which they have been produced. Upon the sands of time successive waves have left their highest mark, but there are many evidences of the same primal impulse from the same unresting sea. Man's literary effort has reached its high tide in the drama or tragedy, and tragedy's one question concerns itself with the solution of the problem of evil. We need but to name them over to realize this fact. The book of Job, iEschylus's masterpiece, the Prometheus, Hamlet, and Faust would by common consent be granted the highest rank in the literary world. The most significant drama of recent years might perhaps with less unanimity be accorded as being Ibsen's Brand. The eras that brought them forth present most striking similarities. Each of these dramas brought the ever-recurring problem to the surface at a time when a new individualism was forcing itself upon civilization by reason of great religious, intellectual, or political changes.

Because of this living element the drama is the truest expression of real problems. It presents problems as they exist in the common thought of a nation or people. Such problems are not dramatized, or, at least, do not make successful appeal to their time unless they have been keenly felt in contemporary living. Their message is thus more direct and clear than that of other contemporary literature.

Awakened by new scientific and intellectual attainment, startled by the discovery of new worlds, or the renaissance of old civilizations, men follow the stars of great hopes. But the moment of fulfillment is sure to be a moment of disillusionment. The national triumph looked forward to, instead of settling national problems, only opens the way out of the old contentments into a far more perilous road of larger tasks and struggles. Man casts his spear into the ground at every hillcrest of attainment and, before looking around, says, "Here we rest" — but the next moment discloses to his startled perception higher peaks and vaster pilgrimages. He cannot rest, and his task seems too great for him.

In the religious realm the tragedy becomes far more acute, for here men are ever demanding certainty. The possibility of theological change threatens to the common mind the direst calamity. We are strictly told that we walk by faith and not by sight, but who can be content with so dangerous a program? We immediately endeavor to bolster faith with philosophical theory that shall make faith more or less unnecessary. That theory we falsely dignify with the name of faith. Growth in intellectual perception, the rising tide of human experience, has swept out the foundation of the underlying philosophy, and man in despair has set forth again upon this shoreless sea, while

. . . evermore Most weary seem'd the sea, weary the oar, Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.

The accomplishment of political reformation, the firm seating of new intellectual systems, the triumph of a cause, the disillusionment which comes with the unsatisfying Utopia, brings a moment of great popular despair. Outside is hindrance which, unforeseen, keeps man back from entering his promised land, with the ruthlessness of an arbitrary fate. At such a time the thoughts of men turn inward. There comes within the consciousness of higher spiritual qualities which can conquer, yea, rise to the highest when the dearest material dream 1 lies in hopeless ruin.

The Age of JEschylus

Such an age produced iEsehylus. The Grecian confederacy had by a supreme

1 Courtney, The Idea of Tragedy.

effort turned back the barbarian hordes of Persia. The threatened supremacy of Persian culture was at an end. iEschylus himself had been a soldier in that war for Grecian independence and civilization. Greece reveled in her triumph. At first blush there was promise of a new birth of freedom. She felt the call of a great national destiny. Her triumph was the triumph of Greek institutions. There was to be a new girding of the loins for tasks. The inspiration was thrilling the hearts of all classes of society. There was a breaking away from old thralldoms and superstitions. The lower classes were demanding a place and a voice in government. Along with this came a new birth of the Grecian religious consciousness. The triumph of Grecian institutions meant also the triumph of the Grecian gods. Yet the old religious conceptions were like old winesacks that were incapable of containing the new wine of religious feeling. With a new touch upon Egyptian civilization there had come a new sense of the sinfulness of sin. Egyptian Orphism had rendered the older Grecian conceptions inadequate by introducing a new sense of sin and blood-guiltiness. 1

Men were awed by the seriousness of the readjustments that faced them. There were the ancient doctrines of divine malignity and moral perverseness which had been made impossible by the rising consciousness of the supremacy of moral values. A Zeus who could sit supreme and in laughing contempt

Looking over wasted lands,

ships, and praying hands —

to whom all was as a tale of little meaning — fell far short of satisfying the necessities of the human spirit. To meet the problem raised by such a crisis iEschylus wrote his great tragedies. With all his faith he was not without trepidation at the threatening elements in the new day that had come to Greece. He feared the growing power of the masses. He feared the collapse of old

1 Campbell, Tragic Drama, p. 147.

institutions ; most of all he feared that in the shifting tides of change might be lost the consciousness of God. His mind was alert to what seemed to him the impieties of the time. Is not all this reflected in the sufferings of an impious Prometheus, at the same moment in which are prophesied the final reconciliation and deliverance, and the justification of the ways of God which we must believe formed the climax of the third and last member of the Promethean drama ?

The Age of Job

In the case of the drama of Job it is not so easy to dogmatize, for there is among scholars the widest range of opinion as to the age that produced it. The foremost objection to a late age for the book is the almost total lack of any reflection in it of Jewish institutions as we know them after the exile. It was this fact that led Renan to declare its author not a Jew but an Idumean. There seems to be much plausibility in this theory until we reflect upon the possibility of literary culture and philosophic grasp among the wandering Arab tribes of Edom, the singular solitariness of this great book, and the needed explanation of its arrival in the Jewish canon.

If, on the other hand, the priestly literature did not arise until some time after the return from exile, it would be possible for the book to have been written after the exile, and in that period following the return when the high hopes raised by the restoration had been blasted by partial failure. It is best to leave this part of the problem to the biblical experts with more adequate resources and to go meekly where the greatest own themselves puzzled by conflicting considerations. Suffice it to say that from the exile on to the very coming of Jesus there were recurring political situations in Judah that closely fit the common condition for the drama of doubt. The completion of the temple, the rise of a king, the fall of an ancient enemy, each was sufficient to awaken the consciousness of defeated and misunderstood destiny.

After the exile the Hebrew race was ever conscious of such a religious destiny. The return from the exile and the reconstruction of the temple were the tokens of God's favor and the evidences of the national mission. During this period that portion of Asia was convulsed by sweeping tides of political change. Kingdoms waxed and waned; dynasties that had promised to be eternal passed in a night. It was a period of great migrations that decided the destinies of the Western world.

Profoundly conscious of the superiority of his religious system, the Jew lived possessed by a great hope that Israel was soon to take her true place in the leadership of the nations. The more the years grew away from the exile the more intense became her problem. She had held to a doctrine of a God who overruled the stream of history, 1 and who rewarded righteousness with material prosperity and evil with calamity and adversity.

Hitherto Israel's religious problem had been national, the problem of a group. Ezekiel had filled the darkness of exile with lightning flashes proclaiming inevitable personal responsibility. He declared their sins

1 Wenley, Aspects of Pessimism, pp. 16, 17.

to be not the sins of a group but of individuals, who had brought destruction upon the nation, and who would suffer their individual punishment. But the temporal reward of righteousness and the punishment of the evildoers did not agree with the facts as seen in human life, and to this problem the author of Job addressed himself.

The Age of Shakespeare

The age that produced Hamlet was likewise remarkable. Europe was now reaping the fruits of the revival of learning. Protestantism had, over considerable sections of Europe, come into undisputed power. The destruction of the Spanish Armada had been for England the birth of a new national consciousness. It had brought the idea of national destiny. Spain's empire beyond the seas was already sending home its golden argosies. Spain had been conquered on the seas by the grace of God and the intrepidity of English sailors. Bacon, in the world of investigation, was laying the foundation for the new day of scientific knowledge. The heavy hand of change had been laid upon medisevalism with its constant tendency to substitute theory for fact. Among the masses the superstition concerning magic, satanic influences, the black arts, lingered still. On the one side were the people clinging to the mechanical mediaeval conception of the problem of evil; on the other hand were the scientific men tinctured with a spirit of skepticism in the ardor of the new learning. Hamlet represents the problem raised by this contest. Was Hamlet Shakespeare's English answer to the soliloquizing pessimism of Montaigne? 1 Shakespeare's demand was for action. He had a conviction of divine Nemesis as clear as iEschylus himself. He saw the truth that evil draws destruction in its own train. He saw also that a living faith was necessary to a true meeting of the problem of existence. The sinews of righteousness would be cut by doubt. It was better to stumble blindly toward the goal than by inaction to unnerve the true forces of character.

1 Jacob Feis, Shakespeare and Montaigne.

The Age of Goethe

The world that witnessed the production of Goethe's Faust was also a world of ferment, political, intellectual, and religious. Over western Europe and America existed the spirit of individualism which was most spectacularly set before the world in the French Revolution. An ancient feudalists aristocracy was dissolved with great heat, and its world passed away before the new world had found itself. In the philosophical world Kant had already come to show the inconsistencies and failures of the inductive philosophy. With the rising demand for individual freedom there was also a demand for greater freedom of thought and the emancipation of the spirit. Everywhere life was bowed down by conventions. 1 The age was singularly poor in the spiritual and moral values. Men had lost the consciousness of personal touch with God. In England the Wesley an revival was only beginning. There was not present, as in iEschylus's Greece or Shake-