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On the Devil and Politics

At dessert, we were in agreement: what is most lacking in America is belief in the Devil. The table dispersed. It was at the club. While waiting for the elevator, I said to the Philosopher:

"That’s the trouble: if I talked about the Devil, here, I’m the one that would be considered diabolical or, who knows, the Devil himself."

"Oughtn’t you perhaps accept the risk ?" he asked seriously.

The elevator door opened; we entered.

"That at last would be a new tragic situation: becoming the Devil himself in order to prove he exists! . . . After all, it may be that Nietzsche or Luther sometimes thought of it. ‘I could wish that myself were accursed,’ wrote St. Paul."

"I know a good story," replied the Philosopher. "One of the early Irish apostles who evangelized Switzerland explained to his peasant audience that the martyrs are our best interceders with God. The listeners believed him so sincerely that they killed him. And the best part of it is, it worked: they became Christians."

"We need these parables to remind us how dangerous it is to speak the truth generally, and the Christian truth in particular: I mean dangerous for the one who speaks it. Kierkegaard never stopped repeating this in all his works: if you want to be Christians, well and good, but know the price. For nineteen centuries that price has been fixed."

Drawing room. Coffee. There was fresh discussion of world events, as though the Devil did not exist. I told myself that I should write a book about him. Here are a few notes towards it.

The Devil’s first trick, remarks Andre Gide, is to make us believe that he does not exist. This trick has never better succeeded than in the modern epoch. All America has fallen into the snare.

God says: "I am that I am." But the Devil, like Ulysses to the Cyclops, says: "I am Nobody. What should you be afraid of ?"

Nevertheless, the Bible gives notice of the Devil’s existence on every page. In the original text, it speaks much less of "evil" than of the "Evil One." It assigns the Devil a number of revealing names which ought help us to recognize him: the Accuser, the fallen Angel, the Prince of this world, the Father of lies, and finally—Legion. The latter furnishes one of the most valuable clues for our time. It means that the Devil assumes as many aspects as there are individuals in the world. It may also mean that the Devil is the mob, and that, being everybody or anybody, he necessarily appears to us to be nobody in particular.

Before achieving this result, the Devil has resorted to a homely device: for a few centuries, he had adopted a medieval appearance—the red-horned demon of the miracle plays—which made him out absolutely harmless and anachronistic. One might say that since the Reformation, since Luther hurled an inkstand straight at him, we have not known how to form a modern, contemporary picture of the Devil. Kierkegaard alone had perhaps recognized him with accuracy in the ink of the newspapers, when he noted that one cannot preach Christianity any longer in a world dominated by the daily press.

Yet the Devil’s incognito became difficult to maintain in the course of the first half of our century, while glaring catastrophes shook the foundations of our faith in progress. And so the Devil resorted to a prudent alibi, meant to forestall any stirring of awareness in the democratic countries. From 1933 on, he made us believe that he was simply Hitler. That was his second trick.

Is Hitler the Antichrist? The question is not a simple one. For my part, I can only give it an answer that is at first sight enigmatic. Hitler is more diabolical than is imagined by those who believe him to be the Devil in person, or the Antichrist. (And there are many who believe this.)

I remember hearing Karl Barth say in Switzerland, a year ago: "This man whose name censorship causes me to forget is certainly not the Antichrist. For he has no power over our salvation. The true Antichrist will only reveal himself at the end of time, as our pitiless Accuser, and then we shall no longer have any other Intercessor but Christ himself. The man you are thinking of is still only a little gentleman, a first forerunner of the Antichrist. And the struggle that he is conducting against the Christian world is but a warning to prepare in earnest for the final Combat."

When we believe Hitler to be the Devil, we obviously do great honor to the Austrian ex-corporal, but what is more serious, we delude ourselves as to Satan’s real stature. Let us not forget that Satan is Legion. The assassination of a dictator would by no means suffice to rid the present world of the evil that torments it.

In fact, the very thing that is diabolical about Hitler is the way in which he persuaded the Germans that all evil came from the Treaty of Versailles, or from the Jews, therefore from others. It is in such tactics that one recognizes Satan’s handiwork among his delegates.

Today, the democrats who sincerely believe that Hitler incarnates all the evil of our time are the victims of an altogether similar tactic, this time promulgated by the Prince of this earth himself. "See, I am only Hitler !" he tells us. We see only Hitler, we find him terrible, we detest him, we weigh against him, with more or less determination, our ancient democratic virtues, and we no longer see our true demons. The trick is played, we are taken in, and it is humiliating to recall that not long ago this trick was considered just good enough for the primitives of Melanesia.

Everyone knows that the so-called primitives are in the habit of personifying or objectifying the evil forces which menace them. Whether it be a sorcerer or a profaner of the sacred, an animal, a cloud or a bit of colored wood, the cause of the evil from which these savages suffer is always external to themselves and must be combated and annihilated outside themselves.

On the other hand, Christianity has striven for centuries to make us understand that the Kingdom of God is in us, that evil, too, is in us, and that their battlefield is nowhere else than in our souls. Still, this education has largely failed, and we persist in our primitivism, holding the people opposed to us, or the force of events, responsible for our evils. If we are revolutionaries, we believe that by changing the disposition of the objects of this world—by displacing wealth, for example—we shall suppress the causes of our present evils. If we are good honest democrats, anxious or optimistic, we believe that by roasting a few dictators, profaners of the right, and sorcerers, we shall re-establish peace and prosperity. In this, we still have the complete magic mentality, and like choleric children, we beat the table we have run against. Or like Xerxes, we scourge the waters of the Hellespont—with great lashes of rhetoric upon the short waves.

We forget that in reality our adversaries do not differ essentially from us. Each man bears in his body and in his soul the microbes of all known diseases. Annihilating the external symptoms of the menace would by no means be sufficient to rid us of it. Those symptoms—Hitler, Stalin, the "wicked" in general—personify possibilities which exist in us too, latent temptations that might very well develop some day, under stress, or fatigue, or some temporary unbalance.

Let us try to avoid here a threatening misapprehension. The intention of these remarks is in no way to justify "the others" and to lump us all together, without distinction, as in 1939 the Oxford Group seemed to do in the pamphlet entitled: "We Are All Guilty." For what I mean is this: We are all guilty in the measure in which we do not condemn and do not also recognize in ourselves the mentality of. the totalitarians, that is the active and personal presence of the Demon in our passions, in our need for sensation, in our fear of responsibilities, in our civic inertia, in our ignorance of our neighbor, in our rejection finally of any absolute that transcends and judges our "vital" (as they always are) interests.

Here is a very simple observation: nobody has ever pretended to act in bad faith. We are all, Hitler included, "men of good will." Yet look at what is happening, and who has brought it about. Is it the Devil? Yes, but with our hands and our thoughts. It is here that we should remember our democratic slogan: All men are equal!

There are degrees of evil. There are inequalities of responsibility. But we are all in evil, and we are all the accomplices of the most responsible in the world. And this much is certain: The true Christian would be a man with no other enemy to fear than the one he lodges in himself.

Not having known how to recognize what is truly diabolical about a Hitler—his manner of localizing all evil in the outsider so as to clear himself—we fell into the same error as he. We turned him into an image of the Demon altogether external to our reality. And while we were regarding it, fascinated, the Demon returned by the back door to torment us in disguises that could not arouse our suspicions.

In the nineteenth century it was believed that automatic progress could replace providence, but when we see today what the blind faith has brought us to, we are forced to recognize that automatic progress was only the Devil’s disguise. Not that all progress is diabolical in itself, obviously not. But if we abandon ourselves to progress, letting things go with the comfortable assurance that all will be well in the end, then progress becomes the most dangerous of soporifics, a veritable Demon’s drug, and one of his new names.

In that age, apparently out of kindliness toward others, we believed in the fundamental goodness of man. But such a view can lead a person to believe in his own natural goodness, then to being blinded to the evil that he bears in himself, then to denying the active presence of the Demon, then finally to granting the Demon free scope to dupe him.

We believed that evil was relative in the world, that it sprang from an unsatisfactory distribution of wealth, from an ill digested education, from inadequate laws, or from pressures and injustices that might be eradicated by adroit measures. Yet, these superstitious beliefs had only one effect—to blind us to the reality of man, that is, to the reality of evil rooted in our essential freedom, in our primary data, "in the human nature in itself" (as Reinhold Niebuhr so forcefully has pointed out).

We were, and we remain, optimists out of principle—almost out of good manners, one might say—despite all contradictions from reality. This optimism is not the naive confidence of the child. It is a kind of lie. Specifically, it is a flight from reality, for in reality, we well know that there is evil, that there is the Devil’s influence. But as this shocks us and alarms, we try to conjure away the evil by denying it, thus using the magic mentality. We think that whoever denounces evil as fundamental must himself be very wicked. We believe that by acknowledging evil, we create it in some way. We prefer not to dwell on it. We "repress," Freud would say. This flight and this lie, within the subconscious, leave us unable to understand what is happening in the world, and deliver us over to the simplest ruses of the Evil One.

Just as we say, in the presence of a miracle of good, "Too good to be true," we say in the presence of certain descriptions of evil, "Too frightful to be true !" Meanwhile, it is true, but that makes us uncomfortable, and irresistibly we dismiss it from our thoughts. For if it were truly true, it would be necessary to act, and if we set ourselves to act, we should very quickly see that this evil has roots in our lives too, and that, in a certain way, we like it! There is the great secret.

The Devil succeeded in making democrats believe that they did not like evil at all, that they in no way desired it, that they were good and others wicked, and that the whole thing was that simple! From that precise moment, democracy became the Devil’s best instrument for duping our good intentions. The proof is that certain democrats are going to think I must be anti-democratic to speak thus, but I am simply speaking, here, as a European who has seen firsthand certain bizarre phenomena of democratic disintegration and of conversion to fascism.

The France of 1939 was on the whole democratic, and almost every Frenchman sincerely called himself anti-Nazi, and believed himself proof against this kind of temptation. He had his good conscience as a democrat. Hitler came, France capitulated, and today the "anti-fascist intellectuals" of Paris suddenly discover that at bottom Nazism is not so bad as all that, that, on the whole, they had always desired something passably resembling it, and that after all, "the Nazis are men like us, so let us work together."

That is the danger that American democracy is exposed to, as were the others. She too believed and still believes that the Nazis are animals of an altogether different race from Americans. She too risks discovering some day that "after all, they are men like us." And it is quite true that they are men like us, in the sense that their sin is also in us, secretly.

It seems to me that the clearest lesson which emerges from European events is this: The sentimental hatred of the evil that is in others may blind one to the evil that one bears in himself and to the gravity of evil in general. The overly facile condemnation of the wicked man on the opposite side may conceal and favor much inward complaisance toward that very wickedness. I suspect a profound ambivalence in certain democratic denunciations of Hitlerism, for in the violence of the tone and the obstinate simplism of the judgments, we betray our bad conscience, our secret anxiety, our unacknowledged temptation. In regard to anti-fascists who wish only to be anti, I cannot help thinking that sooner or later the pro which slumbers in a corner of their soul will suddenly awaken and overwhelm them. I have seen too many cases of this kind, individual and collective. I saw the population of the Saar throw itself into Hitler’s arms in 1935. I saw a democratic Vienna transformed in twenty-four hours into a Vienna delirious with Hitlerian passion. I saw France, or let us say certain Frenchmen, discover inside a few weeks the "good points" of the totalitarian system. I believe that I know whereof I speak when I say to honest democrats: Look at the Devil that is among us! Stop believing that he can only resemble Hitler, or Stalin, or Senator Wheeler, for it is you yourself that he will always contrive to resemble the most. If you want to catch him, I am going to tell you where you will most surely find him—seated in your own armchair. It is in you alone that you will catch him in the very act. And then only will you be in a state to track him down in others. And then only will you be cured of your almost incredible naiveté before the totalitarian danger and be able to escape hypnosis.

I sum up. We were lacking a modern picture of the Demon. We had therefore stopped believing in him. Then we imagined that the Devil was Hitler. And the Devil rejoiced. (Hitler too.) It would be more fruitful, more realistic, and finally more truthful, to try picturing the Devil to ourselves as having the features of a dynamic and optimistic playboy, lacking all thought. Or, if we are liberal intellectuals for example, as having the features of a liberal intellectual who does not believe in the Devil.

The Christian Witness in a Secular Age

The most obvious fact in thc spiritual climate of our age, to which the preaching of the Christian gospel must adjust itself, is that a world view, usually defined as scientific, is discredited in its interpretation of the human situation by contemporary events. It is discredited though it boasted tremendous triumphs in the technical conquest of nature; and had gained such prestige that "modern" Christianity thought itself capable of survival only by reducing its world view to dimensions which would make it seem compatible with the scientific attitudes of "modern" men.

There was a curious pathos in this adjustment, because the failure of modern culture to understand man and his history stemmed precisely from its inability to appreciate the uniqueness of man as distinguished from nature. It therefore misunderstood everything about man, his grandeur and his misery, because it transferred attitudes and tcchnics, which had been such a tremendous success in understanding nature, to the human situation, where they were the source of misunderstanding.

The "idea of progress," for instance, resulted from a transmission of the concept of evolution, true enough in nature, to human history, where human freedom made a determined development impossible; for man was always free to use his growing powers over nature for egoistic and parochial, rather than for universal, ends. Thus modern culture was unable to anticipate or to understand the evils which would arise in the technical possibilities of modern society, or the demonry of the cynical revolt against the standards of civilization manifested in nazism, or the even greater evils in the Communist revolt, which was animated, not by moral cynicism, but by a utopianism akin to the very utopianism of the liberal world.

Dignity, Misery and Freedom

In short, everything in our present historic situation -- as not understood because of characteristic, rather than fortuitous, errors in modern culture. Its confidence in the perfectibility of man rested in its trust in both the virtue and the power of mind. This was akin to the confidence in mind of the Greek rationalists; modern optimism also shared the Greek belief that evil was the subrational forces of the self which mind could gradually master. Hence our psychologists are always looking for the roots of human "aggressiveness" on a level where scientific technics can eliminate them. They do this precisely in the moment when the fury of Communist idealism and fanaticism proves its most dangerous "aggressiveness" to be compounded of monstrous power lusts and illusory heavenly visions. These are in a dimension which is not understood by those who think of man as one of the objects in nature, to be manipulated and beguiled to seek "socially approved ends." While they prate endlessly about the "dignity" of man, they actually rob him of his dignity. They make this mistake because they do not understand that his dignity and his "misery" have the same root in man’s radical freedom.

It is not possible to understand this radical freedom if we try to comprehend human selves as parts of some system of nature or of reason. This freedom can be apprehended only in dramatic-poetic terms, because it consists of the self’s transcendence over every rational or natural scheme to which it may be related. In other words, the affirmations of a religion of history and revelation arc based upon the presupposition that there is a power of self-revelation in the mystery of the divine; and then the power of faith to apprehend such a revelation is a proof of the human self’s greatness. These presuppositions are precisely the treasures about which modern Christianity was so embarrassed and which it tried so desperately to fit into systems elaborated by a Hcgel, a Comte or a Marx. They are the sources of its understanding of man and his history, including his wholly unanticipated and totally tragic modern history.

Relevant, But Still a Faith

The refutation in experience of alternate views does not prove the truth of the Christian faith. This only establishes its relevance, after generations had assumed its irrelevance and regarded it as merely the remnant of a prescientific past. The fact is that the essentials of the Christian faith cannot he proved, as one proves either scientific propositions or metaphysical theories. For the basis of the Christian view is the presupposition that the mystery of the divine is disclosed, not so much in the permanent structures and essences of existence, as in historical disclosures of which the life, death and resurrection of Christ is the climax. The agape of Christ is thus the clue to the divine mystery which is encountered in creation on the one hand, and on the other hand is met at the outer limits of our consciousness, when the perennial dialogue within the self is felt to be transmuted into a dialogue between the self and a divine "other" who is always judging and forgiving the self.

How can the self prove that its encounters with such an "other" are real? Must not the encounter between selves, whether human or divine, be a matter of faith and love rather than rational proof? Is the Christian enterprise in any different position in a scientific age than it was in the classical metaphysical age, when it had to bear witness to the reality of a divine judgment and mercy of the God of whom the Bible spoke, as against the conception of Plato’s or Aristotle’s "god," who could be philosophically proved? In short, the proof that we encounter a God who is above the structures and forms of life and has a freedom at least as great as our own; that we do not merely face an ocean of mystery which is at the same time the fullness and the absence of being (as that mystery is described for us by the mystics)-the proof of such a reality must be the "witness" of a life.

Thus the Christian community, founded in a unique disclosure of God to those who ai ready to receive it, is called upon to "witness" to the truth of Christ by the fruits which emerge from an encounter between the self and such a God as Christ revealed. "By their fruits ye shall know them," declared Jesus; and St. Paul defined the characteristic fruits by which we bear witness to the truth of Christ as "love, joy and peace." That is to say, the only effective witness of the truth of Christ is a life in which the anxieties and fears of life have been overcome, including the fear of death; in which the prison of self-love, of preoccupation with the self, its interests and securities, has been broken so that the self can live in "love, joy and peace." That is, be so free of anxieties as to enter creatively into the lives of others.

Faith and Repentance

The relation between the self and God is not primarily an intellectual one, though everyone will have the intellectual problem of relating what he has perceived about God in this personal and "existential" encounter with what he knows about the structures, coherences and intelligibilitics of the universe. This encounter is one of faith or trust on the one hand, and of repentance on the other. It requires faith as trust because the soul commits itself to the tremendous proposition that it deals with a power which can give meaning to, and can complete, both its own fragmentary life and the whole strange drama of human history. Neither the life of the individual nor the whole drama of history fits neatly into any system of rational intelligibility. The root of the modern, as of the classical, error is either to complete life falsely or to deny it any significance because its unity cannot be fitted into the coherence of either nature or mind. The mystic of course annuls life in all its rich historical variety because he thinks he has discerned a divine ground of existence which consists of undifferentiated being and which negates all particular being and historical striving.

The encounter between the self and God under the prompting of the primary self-disclosure of God-that is, under the presupposition that Christ is the clue to the character of God-moves in a circle of faith and repentance. Faith is required that the mysterious power can complete our fragmentary lives. But repentance is the precondition of faith because, in the ultimate encounter, every soul is convicted of trying to complete its life prematurely and making itself into the center of some system of meaning, of power or of virtue. The self is not condemned for being a particular self; it is condemned for being a false self.

Redemption for the self means, not the annihilation of the self, but its transfiguration from a self-centered and self-defeating self to one which finds its life in creative loyalties and affections. Thus the Christian plan of salvation re-enacts the theme of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, of dying to live. St. Paul declares that we are "buried with Christ in our baptism that we may rise with and peace" are the only effective witnesses that the Christian faith has rightly apprehended the dimension and the reality of both the divine and the human self.

We would probably all agree that in a world of "clamor and evil speaking," the the most significant witness would be the nonchalance and charity of Christians who know how "to forgive one another even as God, also Christ, has for. given you."

Limitations of the ‘Gathered Church’

But we must admit humbly that there is no such clear witness by the church as the "body of Christ" to the world. Every effort of evangelistic sectarianism to select out the true saints from the morally ambiguous multitude, which makes up the church, has proved abortive. The "gathered church" always proves itself as unclear in its witness as the conventionally inclusive church. Why should this be so?

The first element in an adequate answer to that question embodies a truth which erupted tumultuously in the history of Christianity at the Reformation, but has since been periodically suppressed. That truth is that rebirth of the Sold man," even if genuine, does not wholly eradicate all tendencies to self-seeking; so that even the most gracious saints remain in some sense sinners. Luthcr put this truth in the phrase, "Justus et peccator simul." Nothing could of course be more obvious than this truth. Experience with monks or bishops, theologians or princes of the church, pastors and ordinary laymen, attest to the persistence of sin in the life of the redeemed, to the persistent power of human self-love which can be radically broken by the love of Christ. But it cannot be destroyed! We therefore face this interesting situation: that the church would be powerless and ineffective if it did not manifest some "fruits of the spirit," but that it, just like any individual, must be embarrassed when it calls attention to itself as a proof of the powers of God. For the very pretension of virtue is yet another mark of the sin in the life of the redeemed.

The lack of a clear spiritual witness to the truth in Christ is aggravated by certain modern developments, among them the increasing complexity of moral problems and the increasing dominance of the group or collective over the life of the individual. The complexity of ethical problems makes an "evangelical" impulse to seek the good of the neighbor subordinate to the complicated questions about which of our various neighbors has first claim upon us or what technical means are best suited to fulfill their need. The "Enlightenment" was wrong in expecting virtue to flow inevitably from rational enlightenment. But that doeS not change the fact that religiously inspired good will, without an intelligent analysis of the factors in a moral situation and of the proper means to gain desirable ends, is unavailing.

Dominance of Collectives

The dominance of the life and the destiny of groups and collectives in the life of the modern man is another complicating factor. It is ironic that the igth century individualism presented human history as the gradual emancipation of the individual from the group, while we to be placed in trusteeship, but any colony or territory may be voluntarily placed under United Nations supervision.

At present only onetime (German colonies, mandated after World War I, form the grist of the Trusteeship Council mill. These are the tiny and relatively insignificant countries of Ruanda-Urundi, Tanganyika, the Cameroons, Togoland, New Guinea, Nauru, Western Samoa and some Pacific islands. (South West Africa ought to be added to the list, but the intransigence of the Union of South Africa prevents this.) About 20 million souls live on these ribbons and specks of soil. Only one Italian colony, Somali-land, is under the Trusteeship Council, and that for a period limited to ten years. Libya has achieved full independence and Eritrea has been federated with Ethiopia.

Where are the colonies which were to be voluntarily placed under U.N. trusteeship by such powers as Britain, France, Holland, and Portugal -- colonies in which about 180 million people live? There is no answer. In the British colonial empire, the following are some of the areas over which the Trusteeship Council has no supervision: the Sudan, Kenya, Bechuanaland, Northern Rhodesia, Uganda, Nigeria, Swaziland, North Borneo, Cyprus, British Guiana, the Bahamas, and many Pacific islands. The flag of France flies over Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, and Madagascar. Little Portugal controls the lives of millions in Mozambique and Angola. In the heart of the Dark Continent Belgium has her great Congo, but she has not accepted United Nations supervision. Only tiny fragments of Africa have come under the Trusteeship Council’s authority.

If France, Britain, Portugal and Belgium were voluntarily to agree, as administering authorities, to submit reports to the Trusteeship Council, to allow natives to present grievances to the council, and to permit missions to visit these areas, world peace and human rights would be substantially advanced.

Such an agreement on the part of the imperial powers of Europe is morally right. No country should assume the right to control arbitrarily the life of another national group, and none should cling to that power when a better course is open. Democracy requires that the temptation of self-interest be checked by United Nations discussion and criticism. The Christian faith applies here: "He who loses his life for my sake shall find it." In "losing" India, Britain has strengthened the Commonwealth and the democratic tradition, and has moved closer to India than ever before.

Under this plan the colonists would no longer be able to blame all their troubles on Lisbon, Paris or London. Their aspirations would be weighed and judged by many nations. This would make for more responsible nationalism. Just grievances would find sympathetic response.

The administering authorities would not lose their investments in their colonies. Each would still be the chief country in charge in its former dependency. It is becoming obvious to some colonial peoples that they very much need the economic and cultural assistance of more advanced nations. Libya is finding it difficult to stand altogether on its own feet economically. The people of Somaliland will need Italian capital and assistance after they win political independence. The Gold Coast of Africa has learned much from British agronomists and finds in Britain a good market for its cocoa.

The Trusteeship Council would help the colonies rise to freedom. One of the finest things about the programs of the United Nations is that they give men freedom at so many points: freedom to vote, freedom from disease, illiteracy and hunger. Linked with the Trusteeship Council’s supervision would he assistance from the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the Technical Assistance Administration.

Finally, supervision of the world’s i8o million non-self-governing people by the U.N. Trusteeship Council would give that body more work to do, help it to prove its worth in the field of colonialism, and pave the way for a world community where the aspirations of colonial peoples are the concern of all.

The King’s Chapel and the King’s Court

The founding fathers ordained in the first article of the Bill of Rights that "Congress shall pass no laws respecting the establishment of religion or the suppression thereof." This constitutional disestablishment of all churches embodied the wisdom of Roger Williams and Thomas Jefferson -- the one from his experience with the Massachusetts theocracy and the other from his experience with the less dangerous Anglican establishment in Virginia -- which knew that a combination of religious sanctity and political power represents a heady mixture for status quo conservatism.

What Jefferson defined, rather extravagantly, as "the absolute wall of separation between church and state" has been a creative but also dangerous characteristic of our national culture. It solved two problems: (1) it prevented the conservative bent of established religion from defending any status quo uncritically, and (2) it made our high degree of religious pluralism compatible with our national unity. By implication it encouraged the prophetic radical aspect of religious life, which insisted on criticizing any defective and unjust social order. It brought to bear a higher judgment, as did the prophet Amos, who spoke of the "judges" and "rulers of Israel" who "trample upon the needy, and bring the poor of the land to an end (Amos 8:4).

As with most prophets, Amos was particularly critical of the comfortable classes. He warned: "Woe to those who lie on beds of ivory, and stretch themselves on their couches, and eat lambs from the flock, who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp "(Amos 6:4—5). It is significant that Amaziah, a court priest of Amos’s time also saw the contrast between critical and conforming types of religion. However, he preferred the conventional conforming faith for the king’s court and, as the king’s chaplain, he feared and abhorred Amos’s critical radicalism.

Then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sent to Jeroboam, King of Israel saying: "Amos hath conspired against thee in the midst of the house of Israel: the land is not able to hear all his words. For thus Amos saith: Jeroboam shall die by the sword, and Israel shall surely be led away captive out of their own land.’" Also Amaziah said unto Amos ‘ 0 thou seer, go, flee thee away into the land of Judah, and there eat bread, and prophesy there. But prophesy not again any more at Bethel: for it is the king’s chapel and it is the king’s court" (Amos 7:10—13).

We do not know the architectural proportions of Bethel. But we do know that it is, metaphorically, the description of the East Room of the White House, which President Nixon has turned into a kind of sanctuary. By a curious combination of innocence and guile, he has circumvented the Bill of Rights’ first article. Thus, he has established a conforming religion by semiofficially inviting representatives of all the disestablished religions, of whose moral criticism we were naturally so proud. Some bizarre aspects have developed from this new form of conformity in these weekly services. Most of this tamed religion seems even more extravagantly appreciative of official policy than any historic establishment feared by our Founding Fathers. A Jewish rabbi, forgetting Amos, declared: I hope it is not presumptuous for me. in the presence of the president of the United States, to pray that future historians, looking back on our generation may say that in a period of great trial and tribulations, the finger of God pointed to Richard Milhous Nixon, giving him the vision and wisdom to save the world and civilization, and opening the way for our country to realize the good that the century offered mankind.

It is wonderful what a simple White House invitation will do to dull the critical faculties, thereby confirming the fears of the Founding Fathers. The warnings of Amos are forgotten, and the chief current foreign policy problem of our day is bypassed. The apprehension of millions is evaded so that our ABM policy may escalate, rather than conciliate, the nuclear balance of terror.

When we consider the difference between the Old World’s establishment of religion and our quiet unofficial establishment in the East Room, our great evangelist Billy Graham comes to mind. A domesticated and tailored leftover from the wild and woolly frontier evangelistic campaigns, Mr. Graham is a key figure in relating the established character of this ecumenical religion to the sectarian radicalism of our evangelical religion. The president and Mr. Graham have been intimate friends for two decades and have many convictions in common, not least of all the importance of religion.

Mr. Nixon told the press that he had established these services in order to further the cause of "religion," with particular regard to the youth of the nation. He did not specify that there would have to be a particular quality in that religion if it were to help them. For they are disenchanted with a culture that neglects human problems while priding itself on its two achievements of technical efficiency and affluence. The younger generation is too realistic and idealistic to be taken in by barbarism, even on the technological level.

Naturally, Mr. Graham was the first preacher in this modern version of the king’s chapel and the king’s court. He quoted with approval the president’s inaugural sentiment that "all our problems are spiritual and must, therefore, have a spiritual solution." But here rises the essential question about our newly tamed establishment. Is religion per se really a source of solution for any deeply spiritual problem? Indeed, our cold war with the Russians, with whom we wrestle on the edge of the abyss of a nuclear catastrophe, must be solved spiritually, but by what specific political methods? Will our antiballistic defense system escalate or conciliate the cold war and the nuclear dilemma?

The Nixon-Graham doctrine of the relation of religion to public morality and policy, as revealed in the White House services, has two defects: (1) It regards all religion as virtuous in guaranteeing public justice. It seems indifferent to the radical distinction between conventional religion -- which throws the aura of sanctity on contemporary public policy, whether morally inferior or outrageously unjust -- and radical religious protest -- which subjects all historical reality (including economic, social and radical injustice) to the "word of the Lord,’ i.e., absolute standards of justice. It was this type of complacent conformity that the Founding Fathers feared and sought to eliminate in the First Amendment.

(2) The Nixon-Graham doctrine assumes that a religious change of heart, such as occurs in an individual conversion, would cure men of all sin. Billy Graham has a favorite text: "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature." Graham applies this Pauline hope about conversion to the race problem and assures us that "If you live in Christ you become color blind." The defect in this confidence in individual conversion is that it obscures the dual and social character of human selves and the individual and social character of their virtues and vices.

If we consult Amos as our classical type of radical nonconformist religion, we find that he like his contemporary Isaiah, was critical of all religion that was not creative in seeking a just social policy. Their words provide a sharp contrast with the East Room’s current quasi-conformity. Thus Amos declared: I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream (Amos 5:21, 23—4).

Amos’ last phrase was a favorite text of the late Martin Luther King. He used it in his "I Have a Dream" speech to thousands at the March on Washington. It is unfortunate that he was murdered before he could be invited to that famous ecumenical congregation in the White House. But on second thought, the question arises: would he have been invited? Perhaps the FBI, which spied on him, had the same opinion of him as Amaziah had of Amos. Established religion, with or without legal sanction, is always chary of criticism, especially if it is relevant to public policy. Thus J. Edgar Hoover and Amaziah are seen as quaintly different versions of the same vocation -- high priests in the cult of complacency and self-sufficiency.

Perhaps those who accept invitations to preach in the White House should reflect on this, for they stand in danger of joining the same company.

Our Secularized Civilization

Unqualified optimism on the present state or future prospect of religion in modern civilization can emanate only from a very superficial analysis of modern life. In America such optimism is justified by the undeniable prestige of the church in the popular mind and the vitality of the institutions of religion. In Europe optimism is not even supported by these facts. Yet America is in many respects more pagan than Europe, which means that the vitality of the institutions of religion is not in itself a proof of authentic religious life. The fact is that we are living in a completely secularized civilization which has lost the art of bringing its dominant motives under any kind of moral control.

Recent events in Europe reveal what unrepentant tribalists Western people are and how little they have learned from the great tragedy. They seem to lack both the imagination to realize the folly of their ways and the humility to conceive of their folly as sin. While we in America affect to pity Europe, the sense of moral superiority, which is always the root of pity, is based on illusion. We are no more moral than Europe, but our tremendous wealth and our comparative geographic isolation save us from suffering any immediate consequences of our moral follies. However active the institutions of religion may be in our national life, there is no trace of ethical motive in our national conduct. To the world we appear, what we really are, a fabulously wealthy nation, intent upon producing more wealth and seemingly oblivious to the consequences which unrestrained lust of power and lust of gain must inevitably have on both personal morality and international harmony.

The fact is that the social life of the Western world is almost completely outside of ethical control. A political leader of Gandhi’s type would be unthinkable in the Western world. While it may be true that all groups are naturally predatory and have never been effectually restrained by moral scruples, yet there is a measure of indifference to and defiance of moral law in our modern world which compares unfavorably with the best in either our own or oriental history. The fact is that we are living in a completely secularized civilization.

The secularization of modern civilization is partly due to our inability to adjust the ethical and spiritual interests of mankind to the rapid advance of the physical sciences. However much optimists may insist that science cannot ultimately destroy religion, the fact remains that the general tendency of scientific discovery has been to weaken not only religious but ethical values. Humanism as well as religion has been engulfed in the naturalism of our day. Our obsession with the physical sciences and with the physical world has enthroned the brute and blind forces of nature, and we follow the God of the earthquake and the fire rather than the God of the still small voice. The morals of the man in the street, who may not be able to catch the full implications of pure science, are corrupted by the ethical consequences of the civilization which applied science has built. While pure science enthroned nature in the imagination, applied science armed nature in fact.

It is a part of the moral obfuscation of our day to imagine that we have conquered nature when in reality applied science has done little more than debase one part of humanity to become purely physical instruments of secular purpose and to cause the other part to be obsessed with pride in the physical instruments of life. The physical sciences armed nature -- the nature in us -- and lured us into a state where physical comfort is confused with true happiness and tempted us to indulge our lust for power at the expense of our desire for spiritual peace. We imagine we can escape life’s moral problems merely because machines have enlarged our bodies, sublimated our physical forces and given us a sense of mastery. The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self-mastery. So a generation of men is being bred who in their youth subsist on physical thrills, in their maturity glory in physical power and in their old age desire nothing more than physical comfort.

Vaguely conscious of the moral inadequacy of such an existence, men try to sublimate it by restraining their individual lusts in favor of the community in which they live. Thus nationalism becomes the dominant religion of the day and individual lusts are restrained only to issue in group lusts more grievous and more destructive than those of individuals. Nationalism is simply one of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life’s ethical problems. Delegating his vices to larger and larger groups, he imagines himself virtuous; the larger the group the more difficult it is to fix moral responsibility for unethical action.

It would have been too much to expect of religion that it find an immediate antidote for the naturalism and secularism which the modern scientific world view has created. It was inevitable that the natural world, neglected for centuries, should take vengeance upon the human spirit by making itself an obsession of the human mind. But it cannot be said that religion has been particularly wise in the strategy it developed in opposition to naturalism. Religion tried to save itself by the simple expedient of insisting that evolution was not mechanistic but creative, by discovering God in the evolutionary process. Insofar as this means that there is room for freedom and purpose in the evolutionary process, no quarrel is possible with the defenders of the faith. But there is, after all, little freedom or purpose in the evolutionary process -- in short, little morality; so that if we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.

It would be foolish to claim that the defense of a morally adequate theism in the modern world is an easy task; but it is not an impossible one. Yet most modernists have evaded it. Modernism on the whole has taken refuge in various kinds of pantheism, and pantheism is always destructive of moral values. To identify God with automatic processes is to destroy the God of conscience; the God of the real is never the God of the ideal. One of the vainest delusions to which religionists give themselves is to suppose that religion is inevitably a support of morality. There are both supramoral and submoral factors in religion. Professor Santayana makes the discrimination between two instincts in religion, the instinct of piety and the instinct of spirituality, the one seeking to hallow the necessary limitations of life and the other seeking to overcome them Pantheism inevitably strengthens those forces in religion which tend to sanctify the real rather than to inspire the ideal.

That is why modernism, which has sloughed off many of religion’s antimoral tendencies but has involved itself in philosophic monism and religious pantheism more grievously than orthodoxy ever did, has been so slight a moral gain for mankind. Liberal religion is symbolizing a totality of facts under the term God which orthodoxy, with a truer moral instinct, could comprehend under no less than two terms, God and the devil. It would be better to defy nature’s immoralities in the name of a robust humanism than to take the path which most modern religion has chosen and play truant to the distinctive needs of the human spirit by reading humanity into the essentially inhuman processes of nature. There is little to choose between the despair to which pure naturalism tempts us when we survey the human scene and the easy optimism which most modern religion encourages. What we need is both the spirit of repentance and the spirit of hope, which can be inspired only by a theism which knows how to discover sin by subjecting man to absolute standards and how to save him from despair by its trust in absolute values.

The secularization of modern life is partly due to the advance of science, but also to the moral inadequacies of Protestantism. If liberal Protestantism is too pantheistic, traditional Protestantism is too quietistic to meet the moral problems of a socially complex age. Protestantism, as Professor Whitehead in his Science and the Modern World has with rare insight pointed out, has no understanding of the social forces and factors which impinge on and condition human personality. It believes that righteousness can be created in a vacuum. It produces no sense of tension between the soul and its environment. The conversions of which it boasts may create moral purpose, but that moral purpose is applied to a very limited field of motives where application is more or less automatic. It helps men to master those sins which are easily discovered because they represent divergence from accepted moral customs: the sins of dishonesty, sexual incontinence and intemperance.

No religion is more effective than Protestantism against the major social sins of our day, economic greed and race hatred. In a recent trial of Negroes, growing out of a race riot in one of our metropolitan centers, the defense lawyer shrewdly manipulated the selection of the jury so that there would be at least a minority of Jews and Catholics in the jury box, and it is reported that their votes were for the defense when the jury failed to reach a decision. No real progress can be made against the secularization of modern life until Protestantism overcomes its pride and complacency and realizes that it has itself connived with the secularists. By giving men a sense of moral victory because they have mastered one or two lusts, while their lust for power and their lust for gain remain undisciplined, it is simply aggravating those lusts which are the primary perils of modern civilization.

Protestantism reacted against the dualism in Roman Catholic ethics which produces asceticism on the one hand and an easy-going connivance with human weakness on the other. It is true that there is a dualism in Roman Catholic ethics, which can develop, let us say, a Cardinal O’Connell on the one hand and a Cardinal Mercier on the other. But Protestantism has a dualism equally grievous, which produces a Cardinal O’Connell and a Cardinal Mercier in the same skin, a pagan and a puritan in one person, whose puritanism becomes an effective anodyne for a conscience not altogether easy in the sins of paganism. If a choice is to be made between monastic and quietistic ethics, surely monastic ethics must be termed the most Christian, for it is better that the world shall be feared than that it be embraced with a good conscience.

How a fretful anxiety about a number of lustful temptations can develop a perfect complacency in regard to other temptations may be seen by the fact that the church is not now so conscious of some of the sins of modern civilization as some of our most thoroughgoing, realists. If Scott Nearing had the ear of New York he could convict it of sin more surely than Bishop Manning can. The Nation prompts its readers to a consciousness of social sin more effectively than does, say, the Watchman-Examiner. It is significant, too, that the very part of the country in which the churches insist upon "regenerate membership" and recruit such a membership by persistent revivals is most grievously corrupted by the sin of race hatred. Protestantism -- and insofar as Roman Catholicism has departed from the best medievalism, Catholicism, too -- has no understanding of the complex factors of environment out of which personality emerges. It is always "saving" individuals, but not saving them from the greed and the hatred into which they are tempted by the society in which they live. Protestantism, it might be said, does not seem to know that the soul lives in a body, and that the body is part of a world in which the laws of the jungle still prevail.

Perhaps it might not be irrelevant to add that its failure to understand the relation between the physical and the spiritual not only tempts Protestantism to create righteousness in a vacuum but to develop piety without adequate symbol. That is why the church services of extreme Protestant sects tend to become secularized once the first naive spontaneity departs from their religious life. In Europe nonconformist Protestants tend more and more to embrace the once despised beauty of symbol and dignity of form in order to save worship from dullness and futility. In America nonconformist Protestantism, with less cultural background, tries to avert dullness by vulgar theatricality. The Quakers alone escape this fate because their exclusion of symbol is so rigorous that silence itself becomes symbol. If worship is to serve man’s ethical as well as religious needs, it must give him a sense of humble submission to the absolute. Humility is lacking in Protestant worship as it is missing in Protestant civilization. If this humility is medievalism, we cannot save civilization without medievalism.

Christian Faith and the World Crisis

It is our purpose to devote this modest journal to an exposition of our Christian faith in its relation to world events. This first article will seek, therefore, to offer a general introduction to the faith that is in us. We believe that many current interpretations have obscured important elements in that faith and have thereby confused the Christian conscience. This confusion has been brought into sharp relief by the world crisis; but it existed before the crisis, and it may well continue after the crisis is over. We therefore regard our task as one that transcends the urgent problems of the hour, though we do not deny that these problems are the immediate occasion for our enterprise.

At the present moment a basic difference of conviction with regard to what Christianity is and what it demands runs through the whole of American Protestantism and cuts across all the traditional denominational distinctions. There is, on the one hand, a school of Christian thought that believes war could be eliminated if only Christians and other men of good will refused resolutely enough to have anything to do with conflict. Another school of thought, while conceding that war is one of the most vivid revelations of sin in human history, does not find the disavowal of war so simple a matter. The proponents of the latter position believe that there are historic situations in which refusal to defend the inheritance of a civilization, however imperfect, against tyranny and aggression may result in consequences even worse than war.

This journal intends to express and, if possible, to clarify this second viewpoint. We do not believe that the Christian faith as expressed in the New Testament and as interpreted in historic Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, implies the confidence that evil and injustice in history can be overcome by such simple methods as are currently equated with Christianity. We believe that modern Christian perfectionism is tinctured with utopianism derived from a secular culture. In our opinion this utopianism contributed to the tardiness of the democracies in defending themselves against the perils of a new barbarism, and (in America at least) it is easily compounded with an irresponsible and selfish nationalism.

We intend this journal to be both polemic and irenic, as far as human frailty will permit the combination of these two qualities. It will be polemic in the sense that we shall combat what seem to us false interpretations of our faith, and consequent false analyses of our world and of our duties in it. It will be irenic in the sense that we shall seek to appreciate the extent to which perfectionist and pacifist interpretations of Christianity are derived from genuine and important elements in our common faith.

Perfectionists are right in their conviction that our civilization stands under the judgment of God; no one can have an easy conscience about the social and political anarchy out of which the horrible tyranny that now threatens us arose. But they are wrong in assuming that we have no right or duty to defend a civilization, despite its imperfections, against worse alternatives. They are right in insisting that love is the ultimate law of life. But they have failed to realize to what degree the sinfulness of all men, even the best, makes justice between competing interests and conflicting wills a perennial necessity of history.

The perfectionists rightly recognize that it may be very noble for an individual to sacrifice his life or interests rather than participate in the claims and counterclaims of the struggle for justice (of which war may always be the ultima ratio). They are wrong in making no distinction between an individual act of self-abnegation and a political policy of submission to injustice, whereby lives and interests other than our own are defrauded or destroyed. They seek erroneously to build a political platform upon individual perfection. Medieval perfectionism, whatever its limitations, wisely avoided these errors. It excluded even the family from the possible consequences of an individual’s absolute ethic, and it was profoundly aware of the impossibility of making its rigorous standards universal.

We believe that there are many Christians whose moral inclinations might persuade them to take the same view of current problems as our own, except for the fact that they are inhibited by religious presuppositions that they regard as more "purely" Christian than those represented by the consensus of the Church through all the ages. Therefore we will begin with an analysis of these religious presuppositions.

Christians are agreed that the God who is revealed in Christ is source and end of our existence and that therefore his character and will are the norm and standard of our conduct. It is only in recent decades, however, that it has been believed that the "gentleness" of Jesus was a sufficient and final revelation of the character of God, that this character was one of pure love and mercy, and that this revelation stood in contradiction to an alleged portrayal of a God of wrath in the Old Testament.

Both the Old and the New Testament take the wrath of God as well as the mercy of God seriously. The divine mercy, apprehended by Christian faith in the life and death of Christ, is not some simple kindness indifferent to good and evil. The whole point of the Christian doctrine of Atonement is that God cannot be merciful without fulfilling within himself, and on man’s behalf, the requirements of divine justice. However difficult it may be to give a fully rational account of what Christ’s atoning death upon the Cross means to Christian faith, this mystery, never fully comprehended by and yet not wholly incomprehensible to faith, speaks to us of a mercy that transcends but also satisfies the demands of Justice.

The biblical answer to the problem of evil in human history is a radical answer, precisely because human evil is recognized as a much more stubborn fact than is realized in some modern versions of the Christian faith. These versions do not take the problem of justice in history seriously, because they have obscured what the Bible has to say about the relation of justice to mercy in the very heart of God. Every sensitive Christian must feel a sense of unworthiness when he is compelled by historic destiny to act as an instrument of God’s justice. Recognition of the common guilt that makes him and his enemy kin must persuade him to imitate the mercy of God, even while he seeks to fulfill the demands of justice. But he will seek to elude such responsibilities only if he believes, as many modern Christians do, that he might, if he tried a little harder, achieve an individual or collective vantage point of guiltlessness from which to proceed against evil doers. There is no such vantage point.

Christians are agreed that Christ must be the norm of our human life as well as the revelation of the character of God. But many modern versions of Christianity have forgotten to what degree the perfect love of Christ was recognized both in the Bible and in the Christian ages as finally transcending all historic possibilities. The same St. Paul who admonishes us to grow into the stature of Christ insists again and again that we are ‘‘saved by faith’’ and not ‘‘by works’’; which is to say that our final peace is not the moral peace of having become what Christ defines as our true nature but is the religious peace of knowing that a divine mercy accepts our loyalty to Christ despite our continued betrayal of him.

It cannot be denied that these emphases are full of pitfalls for the faithful. On the one side there is always the possibility that we will not take Christ as our norm seriously enough, and that we will rest prematurely in the divine mercy. On the other hand an abstract perfectionism is tempted to obscure the most obvious facts about human nature and to fall into the fury of self-righteousness. The Protestant Reformation was in part a protest against what seemed to the Reformers an overly optimistic Catholic doctrine of human perfection through the infusion of divine grace. Yet modern Protestant interpretations of the same issue make the Catholic doctrine wise and prudent by comparison.

Once it is recognized that the stubbornness of human selfishness makes the achievement of justice in human society no easy matter, it ought to be possible to see that war is but a vivid revelation of certain perennial aspects of human history. Life is never related to life in terms of a perfect and loving conformity of will with will. Where there is sin and selfishness there must also be a struggle for justice; and this justice is always partially an achievement of our love for the other and partially a result of our yielding to his demands and pressures. The intermediate norm of justice is particularly important in the institutional and collective relationships of mankind. But even in individual and personal relations the ultimate level of sacrificial self-giving is not reached without an intermediate level of justice. On this level the first consideration is not that life should be related to life through the disinterested concern of each for the other, but that life should be prevented from exploiting, enslaving or taking advantage of other life. Sometimes this struggle takes very tragic forms.

It is important for Christians to remember that every structure of justice, as embodied in political and economic institutions, (a) contains elements of injustice that stand in contradiction to the law of love; (b) contains higher possibilities of justice that must be realized in terms of institutions and structures; and (c) that it must be supplemented by the graces of individual and personal generosity and mercy. Yet when the mind is not confused by utopian illusions it is not difficult to recognize genuine achievements of justice and to feel under obligation to defend them against the threats of tyranny and the negation of justice.

Love must be regarded as the final flower and fruit of justice. When it is substituted for justice it degenerates into sentimentality and may become the accomplice of tyranny.

Looking at the tragic contemporary scene within this frame of reference, we feel that American Christianity is all too prone to disavow its responsibilities for the preservation of our civilization against the perils of totalitarian aggression. We are well aware of the sins of all the nations, including our own, which have contributed to the chaos of our era. We know to what degree totalitarianism represents false answers to our own unsolved problems—political, economic, spiritual.

Yet we believe the task of defending the rich inheritance of our civilization to be an imperative one, however much we might desire that our social system were more worthy of defense. We believe that the possibility of correcting its faults and extending its gains may be annulled for centuries if this external peril is not resolutely faced. We do not find it particularly impressive to celebrate one’s sensitive conscience by enlarging upon all the well-known evils of our western world and equating them with the evils of the totalitarian systems. It is just as important for Christians to be discriminating in their judgments, as for them to recognize the element of sin in all human endeavors. We think it dangerous to allow religious sensitivity to obscure the fact that Nazi tyranny intends to annihilate the Jewish race, to subject the nations of Europe to the dominion of a "master" race, to extirpate the Christian religion, to annul the liberties and legal standards that are the priceless heritage of ages of Christian and humanistic culture, to make truth the prostitute of political power, to seek world dominion through its satraps and allies, and generally to destroy the very fabric of our western civilization.

Our own national tardiness in becoming fully alive to this peril has been compounded of national selfishness and religious confusion. In recent months American opinion has begun to respond to the actualities of the situation and to sense the fateful destiny that unites us with all free peoples, whether momentarily overrun by the aggressor or still offering heroic resistance. How far our assistance is to be carried is a matter of policy and strategy. It could be a matter of principle only if it were conceded that an absolute line could be drawn in terms of Christian principle between "measures short of war" and war itself. But those who think such a line can be drawn have nevertheless opposed measures short of war. They rightly have pointed out that such measures cannot be guaranteed against the risk of total involvement.

The measures now being taken for the support of the democracies are a logical expression of the unique conditions of America’s relation to the world. They do justice on the one hand to our responsibilities for a common civilization that transcends the hemispheres, and on the other hand to the fact that we are not as immediately imperiled as other nations. Whether our freedom from immediate peril will enable us to persevere in the reservations that we still maintain cannot be decided in the abstract. The exigencies of the future must determine the issue.

We cannot, of course, be certain that defeat of the Nazis will usher in a new order of international justice in Europe and the world. We do know what a Nazi victory would mean, and our first task must therefore be to prevent it. Yet it cannot be our only task, for the problem of organizing the technical civilization of the western world upon a new basis of economic and international justice, so that the anarchy and decay that have characterized our life in the past three decades will be arrested and our technical capacities will be made fruitful rather than suicidal, is one which must engage our best resources. We must give some thought and attention to this great issue even while we are forced to ward off a horrible alternative.

We believe that the Christian faith can and must make its own contribution to this issue. The task of building a new world, as well as the tragic duty of saving the present world from tyranny, will require resources of understanding and resolution which are inherent in the Christian faith. The profoundest insights of the Christian faith cannot be expressed by the simple counsel that men ought to be more loving, and that if they became so the problems of war and of international organization would solve themselves.

Yet there are times when hopes for the future, as well as contrition over past misdeeds, must be subordinated to the urgent, immediate task. In this instance, the immediate task is the defeat of Nazi tyranny. If this task does not engage us, both our repentance and our hope become luxuries in which we indulge while other men save us from an intolerable fate, or while our inaction betrays into disaster a cause to which we owe allegiance.

Religiosity and the Christian Faith

The "unknown god" in America seems to be faith itself. Our politicians are always admonishing the people to have "faith." Sometimes they seem to imply that faith is in itself redemptive. Sometimes this faith implies faith in something. That something is usually an idol, rather than the "God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ," who both judges and has mercy upon sinful men and nations. Sometimes we are asked to have faith in ourselves, sometimes to have faith in humanity, sometimes to have faith in America. Sometimes it is hope, rather than faith, which is really intended. We are to have hope that we will win the "cold war" or that the "cold war" will not break out into an atomic conflict.

These provisional hopes are no doubt rather better than despair, for desperate actions and policies are generated in despair. But the objects of faith are almost always idolatrous. For whether it is in ourselves, or in mankind, or in civilization, or in America, that we are asked to have faith, the admonition always points to an object of faith which is less than God and which certainly does not deserve unreserved commitment or adoration. The question is whether a generation which has lost its faith in all the gods of the nineteenth century, that is, in "history," or "progress," or "enlightenment," or the "perfectibility of man," is not expressing its desire to believe in something, to be committed somehow, even though it is not willing to be committed to a God who can be known only through repentance, and whose majesty judges all human pretensions. It is precisely faith in this God which is avoided in all this religiosity. A nation as powerful and as fortunate as ours is not inclined to worship a God before whom "the nations are as a drop in the bucket," and "who bringeth princes to naught." Our modern religiosity, in short, expresses various forms of self-worship. It is a more specifically religious ethos than the so-called "secular" faiths which history in our tragic age has refuted. The strategy seems to be to bring the discredited pagan gods in Christian disguises, hoping that the traditional piety may be merged with the secular forms of self-confidence.

The cause of this procedure seems to be that we are so sure of ourselves, of our power and of our virtue, and yet we are not sure of our destiny at all. We live on the edge of an abyss, and at any moment our private securities may be swallowed in the world-wide insecurity. The religiosity which seems to correspond to this combination of self-esteem and anxiety would seem to be a secular faith clothed in traditional terms. The most disquieting aspect of such religiosity is that it is frequently advanced by popular leaders of the Christian church and is not regarded as a substitute, but as an interpretation of that faith. The gospel admonition, "Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand," is a challenge to submit all our achievements and ambitions and hopes to a much higher judge than those judges who support our self-esteem. This admonition would seem to have little affinity with the "power of positive thinking."

It is significant that although this modern religiosity makes for self-esteem, particularly collective self-esteem, the nation is helped to find and to hold its rightful place in the perilous position of leadership in the alliance of free nations by many shrewd and critical "secular" thinkers who help us to weigh our responsibilities and judge the hazards of the task in which we are engaged. One must come to the conclusion that religion per se and faith per se are not virtuous, or a cause of virtue. The question is always what the object of worship is, and whether the worship tends to break the pride of the self so that a truer self may arise, either individually or collectively. If worship and faith do not serve this rebirth of men and of nations they are the source of confusion. We can therefore take no satisfaction in the pervasive religiosity of our nation. Much of it is a perversion of the Christian gospel. It aggravates, rather than mitigates, the problems of a very successful people.

It will be remembered that the prophet Jeremiah was worried about the false prophets who did not speak "the word of the Lord" but spoke their own dreams and imaginations. He had a test for detecting false prophecy. The false prophet was one who accentuated complacency and promised those who despised God, "You shall have assured peace in this place." It is as difficult in our day as in the day of Jeremiah to preach "the word of the Lord," for that runs counter to the complacency of men and of nations. It is sharper than a "two edged sword." It must hurt before it can heal.

Let Liberal Churches Stop Fooling Themselves

Recently a well-known liberal clergyman returned from Europe and reported that he was highly gratified to find so many evidences of conciliation in Europe’s political and religious life. He gave it as his opinion that the Continent was slowly but surely approaching the longed-for goal of harmony and peace. It so happens that the Europe about which this optimistic judgment was made is, in many respects, in a more perilous position than it was in 1914. France and Italy keep watch over each other with shrewd and narrow eyes. Poland maintains an unbearable military autocracy because she fears both Russia and Germany. The Germans express themselves with increasingly unrestrained resentment against the Polish depredations upon German minorities. Worst of all, the growing anger of the German people over the economic slavery to which the treaty of Versailles condemns them, voiced particularly in the Hitler movement, threatens not only the parliamentary government of Germany but the whole peace of Europe. There is no real health and there are only a few signs of convalescence in the body politic of continental Europe. But liberal religion has a dogma and it views the contemporary world through the eyes of this dogma. The dogma is all the more potent in coloring opinion because it is not known as a dogma. The dogma is that the world is gradually growing better and that the inevitability of gradualness guarantees our salvation.

The liberal church has held to this dogma ever since John Fiske and his school made the doctrine of evolution acceptable to the religious mind and heart. . . . It has given a note of romantic and unreal optimism to the preaching of the liberal church and has prevented it from making any realistic estimate of the moral problems of our day.

The real fact about our civilization is that it is flirting with disaster. There is as yet no proof that we have the social imagination to bring the economic intricacies of our common life under the control of reason and conscience. Europe, faced with the anarchy of tariff barriers, knows that some kind of economic reciprocity must be developed, but lacks the moral energy and good will to overcome her confusion. America insists on large debt payments from Europe but refuses to accept Europe’s goods. All of the Western nations are anxious to sell Russia the machinery which she needs, but arouse warlike passions when Russia tries to pay for the machinery with her raw products. We conduct our international relations, in other words, with a social imagination hardly worthy of primitive savages.

If modern civilization faces disaster in its international life because it cannot bring its intricate economic relations under social control, we face moral confusion in our urban life because an impersonal megalopolitan life has robbed men of whatever shreds of social responsibility they once had. . . .

Meanwhile the church lives in a comfortable world. . . . The liberal church[’s] optimism is really the optimism of the middle classes who rose to power in the 19th century and who naturally interpreted the whole course of history in terms consonant with their own good fortune.

A pessimistic determinism may not be any closer to the facts than an optimistic determinism, and the remnant of optimism with which the Marxian saves himself may also be illusion. If another world war came upon us at the present juncture it is very questionable whether we would have the sense to use the occasion for the purpose of building a new world. Very probably new types of fascism would arise out of it, rather than a new cooperative world. The fact is that both pessimistic and optimistic determinisms are dangerous to the moral life.

Perhaps most dangerous of all is the pessimism which is sweeping the religious life of Europe and is robbing many of its sensitive spirits of the last shred of ambition to save their world from collapse. For the Barthians the world is too evil to be saved and all moral striving is, though necessary, futile. Salvation lies completely outside of the field of social responsibility; and less or more decency in human relations is irrelevant to the business of redemption. The Barthians make a much more realistic analysis of the moral facts of modern civilization than do the liberal Christians from whom they have dissociated themselves. They consign the world of history to the devil. They are done with the illusions of the middle-class world. But one may be pardoned for suspecting that they are complete pessimists partly because they represent that part of the middle-class world which has discovered the hypocrisy of its moral pretensions and the unsoundness of its moral life but which is not willing to take the heroic measures which are necessary to save modern civilization.

The fact is that no one who looks at the facts of contemporary society from any high or even decent moral perspective can be an optimist, and no one who tries to meet its moral problems can be a complete pessimist. Moral energy creates its own optimism. The gospel is certainly not optimistic in regard to the world. Jesus had none of the evolutionary optimism which is the chief characteristic of modern liberal Protestantism. He did not see God in the processes of nature, working inevitably toward a glorious consummation. But he did believe that God would bring ultimate victory. It is this theistic root of optimism to which modern liberalism appeals, but it does so prematurely.

A real faith in God must arise out of conflict with the world, otherwise it is the world and not God in whom one reposes confidence. The ethical struggle demands a sharp antithesis between the real and the ideal. It is not easy to maintain this antithesis without losing confidence in the possibility of realizing the ideal, or to restore that confidence without effacing the distinction between the two. In fact, this task is so difficult that it can never be done in terms of pure reason. The purely rational approach betrays us either into pessimism or optimism.

It is the genius of morally vital religion that it is not too consistent in regard to this problem. It has an ideal for which the forces of nature and history offer only the slightest opportunity of triumph, yet those who give themselves to it with complete abandon never lose confidence that it can be realized. That is the foolishness of religion which has the root of wisdom in it. Only those who submit completely to the will of God know how potent that will is and are able to interpret the future in its terms. The mistake of the liberal church lies in its identification of an easy evolutionary optimism with the desperate and heroic optimism which can arise out of and be justified by only a heroic defiance of the forces of nature which so largely control the life of human society.

The romanticism of the liberal church is revealed not only in its view of history but in its estimate of man. It holds, on the whole, to a Rousseauistic view of human virtue. It has made an easy identification of this view with the Christian estimate of man as the child of God. The result is that it fails to understand the diabolical aspects of human life, particularly those aspects which are revealed when the selfishness and greed of individuals are compounded and express themselves in the predatory group. The fact is that all large economic and political groups are much more predatory than they are social in their dominant passions. That is what gives modern society its great moral problem. The ever-increasing capacity for social cohesion and cooperation increases rather than decreases the conflict of selfish interests. If that fact is not clearly discerned, there is no possibility of dealing realistically with our total moral problem.

Man is neither totally depraved nor naturally virtuous. He is a creature of impulses which are in themselves neither good nor evil but which tend to become more and more evil as they express themselves through instruments which increase their force and in a society which constantly enlarges the potential evil which resides in them. In our kind of world the expansive desires of man need constantly more inner and social restraint if they are to be prevented from reducing society to anarchy. The liberal church is easily fooled by the little amenities which have always veiled the nakedness of the lust for power. It is fooled as well by the superficial harmony of interests which society creates by subjecting the interests of one portion of the population to the interests of another. Any contemporary view of any society reveals a kind of peace; but it is a peace without justice and the battle is bound to be reopened. When it is reopened those who have taken a superficial view of the situation are inevitably betrayed into a position of hostility toward those who disturb the peace rather than toward those who would like to perpetuate privilege by the perpetuation of peace.

One could hardly expect that the church would ever become sufficiently potent to persuade those who hold unequal privilege and power to divest themselves of it voluntarily in any large numbers. But if it deals realistically with the facts of human nature, it could create an atmosphere in which the eternal social struggle could become a series of tensions rather than open conflict. It could do this merely by helping people to see themselves as they really are, by destroying their illusions about themselves, by puncturing their nice self-deceptions. It would need only to make the insights of the gospel available and in performing this task it could avail itself of the unmistakable evidence of modem psychological and economic sciences. Religion is very easily used to obscure rather than to reveal the primitive forces which control so much of human action. Religion without a constantly replenished force of penitence easily becomes a romance which brutal men use to hide the real sources of their actions from themselves and from others.

That is why romantic religion is dangerous and that is why liberal religion is not now an effective agent of moral redemption in our contemporary society. Premature confidence in human virtue is on the same level with premature confidence in human history. In fact, they come to one and the same thing. Man is nature and yet the child of God. History is nature and yet the dominion of God’s will. But the nature in man and in history is the stuff with which moral purpose in man and in God must work. It is the business of true religion to preach judgment without reducing man to despair and to preach hope without tempting him to complacency. That double purpose can best be accomplished by a rigorous analysis which shows the sharp distinction between the real and the ideal and by vigorous action which reveals the potency and the potentialities of the moral will.

A View of Life from the Sidelines

It may be hazardous to give an account of my experiences, and my changed perspectives and views, following a stroke that lamed my left side in 1952, in the 60th year of my life. Perhaps the simile “from the sidelines” is inadequate to describe the contrast between my rather too-hectic activities as a member of the Union Theological Seminary faculty; as weekly circuit rider preaching every Sunday in the colleges of the east; and as a rather polemical journalist who undertook to convert liberal Protestantism from its perfectionist illusions in the interventionist political debates at a time when Hitler threatened the whole of Western culture -- and the inactivity and helplessness I experienced after my stroke. The physical trauma prompted at least three depressions, which my neurologist regarded as normal. He was not, however, averse to my seeking advice from friendly psychiatrists. I learned from them, particularly those who combined clinical experience with wisdom and compassion, that the chief problem was to reconcile myself to this new weakness; I had to live through these depressions. Then, as various ancillary ailments increased, my working day grew shorter and shorter but my depressions ceased -- because, I imagine, I had adjusted myself to my increasing weakness. Also, daily therapy prevented spastic limbs from growing worse, and this gave me hope. In 1952, neurologists were not particularly interested in rehabilitation; I had to wait about ten years for these therapies. Then my old friend the late Waldo Frank told me about his daughter, Deborah Caplan. who had been trained by the famous Howard Rusk. She not only gave me weekly treatments but trained a number of young nurses, some of whom happened to be the wives of my students, to give me daily therapy. I owe to them a tremendous debt, as I do also to our old friend, Hannah Burrington of Heath, Massachusetts, who stayed with my wife and me every summer and gave me twice-daily treatments.

My first stroke, which was not too severe, was caused by a cerebral vascular thrombosis. Some of my doctors attributed it to nervous exhaustion, while others said it was caused by defective “plumbing” and might have occurred in the life of a janitor. I lost my speech for two days, and the following two years were rough. I was given sick leave from the seminary, but eventually resumed my academic work until my retirement in 1960. With the help of my wife, I was able to accept visiting professorships at Harvard, Princeton and Columbia. My frustration at the relative inactivity was overcome somewhat in that I could continue writing articles and editorials. I used an electric typewriter but found it impossible to use a dictaphone. The habits of a lifetime ordained that I must see what I write, line by line.

In short, my dismissal from the “playing fields” to the “sidelines” was accomplished gradually; but now, in the 75th year of my life, suffering from various ills and weaknesses, I am conscious of the contrast between an active and a semidependent status. These 15 years represent almost a quarter of the years of my ministry.

I must confess my ironic embarrassment as I lived through my depressions, which had the uniform characteristic of an anxious preoccupation with real or imagined future perils. The embarrassment, particularly, was occasioned by the incessant correspondence about a prayer I had composed years before, which the old Federal Council of Churches had used and which later was printed on small cards to give to soldiers. Subsequently Alcoholics Anonymous adopted it as its official prayer. The prayer reads: ‘‘God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”

Many friendly and inquiring correspondents asked for the original inspiration of the prayer, whether I was really its author, or whether it had been Francis of Assisi, or even an admiral who had used it in a shipboard worship service. I received about two such letters a week, and every answer to an inquiring correspondent embarrassed me because I knew that my present state of anxiety defied the petition of this prayer. I confessed my embarrassment to our family physician, who had a sense of humor touched with gentle cynicism. “Don’t worry,” he said, “Doctors and preachers are not expected to practice what they preach.” I had to be content with this minimal consolation.

Now I must come to a discussion of the view of life from the sidelines as compared with the view of life that active participation encourages. This cannot be adequately presented without a discriminate analysis of two connotations of the word “sidelines.” Sidelines are on the one hand filled with athletes who have been injured in the battles of the arena, and on the other hand with spectators. My view of life since my stroke had to be informed by both connotations. I was dismissed from the battle, but I was also a spectator to engagements that had hitherto occupied me. Emancipation from the endless discussions of committee meetings, trying to solve problems in both religious and political communities that had hitherto occupied so much of my time, was a desirable freedom from the chores of a democratic society; but it also meant an emancipation from responsibility -- a doubtful boon, because responsibility engages us in the causes of moral, political and religious movements.

I still remain uncertain whether the relaxation of the polemical attitudes of my youthful zest for various causes represents the wisdom of old age, the disengagement of a spectator, or an increasing awareness of the strange mixture of good and evil in all the causes and purposes that once had prompted me to carry the banners of religion against secularism, and of Protestantism against Catholicism. I now hope that the unpolemical attitudes of my old age and dependence may have had their roots in experience, rather than in the irresponsibility of weakness and lack of engagement. My early polemical attitude toward the Catholic Church had been modified when, in the days of the New Deal social revolution, the Catholic Church revealed that it was much more aware of the social substance of human nature, and of the discriminate standards of justice needed in the collective relations of a technical culture, than was our individualistic Protestantism. But my view from the sidelines of illness made me more fully aware of the impressive history of the Catholic faith, and of its sources of grace and justice, which even our Reformation polemics cannot obscure.

There is some advantage in the spectator’s view as opposed to the advocate’s. One can see all the strange forms of spirit and culture that a common faith may take, without disloyalty to one’s inherited beliefs. It can be exciting when one ceases to be a consistent advocate and polemical agent of a belief system. If I feel, at times, that an attitude from the sidelines may betray the irresponsibility of a pure spectator, I console myself with the fact that my current loyalty to causes, while less copious, is also more selective. And on the two main collective moral issues of our day -- the civil rights movement that seeks democratic improvements for our black minority, and opposition to the terrible and mistaken war in Vietnam -- the thoroughly ecumenical cooperation among the three biblical faiths gives one a reassuring confidence that unpolemical attitudes are not in contrast to moral commitments. My semiretirement has brought me nearer to the common moral commitments of the three faiths.

The physical ills that consigned me to the “sidelines” were productive in furnishing me with insights about human nature that had never occurred to me before. I learned to know the goodness of men and women who went out of their way to help an invalid. Among the persons who impressed me with their helpfulness were my doctors, nurses and therapists, my colleagues and friends in the realms of both politics and religion. I soon learned that some of these people who entered my life professionally, or who served me nonprofessionally with visits and walks, showed an almost charismatic gift of love. And, of course, my chief source of spiritual strength was my wife. She was my nurse, secretary, editor, counselor and friendly critic through all those years of illness and occasional depression. We had been happily married for two decades, but I had never measured the depth and breadth of her devotion until I was stricken. It may be an indication of my male pride that I had only casually relied on her superior sense of style in editing my books and articles. Now I absolutely relied on her editing, and it dealt not only with style but, more and more, with the substance of my thought.

Again and again she assured me that I would do as much for her, were she ill. But I doubted it, because I was inclined to affirm the superior agape of woman.

The retrospective view that my illness made inevitable was not reassuring for my ego. I found it embarrassing that my moral teachings, which emphasized the mixture of self-regard and creativity in all human motives, had not been rigorously applied to my own motives. I do not pretend that this new insight made for saintliness. My experience is that constant illness tends to induce preoccupation with one’s ills; the tyranny of invalids is a well-known phenomenon.

The mixture of motives in all people, incidentally, refutes the doctrines both of total depravity and of saintliness. In my case, retrospection from the sidelines prompted me to remember many instances in my earlier years when my wife had protested my making an extra trip or going to yet another conference, despite my weariness; I always pleaded the importance of the cause that engaged me, and it never occurred to me that I might have been so assiduous in these engagements because the invitations flattered my vanity.

I now proceed to two more objective insights from the “sidelines.” The one concerns my view of the church as a hearer, rather than a preacher, of sermons. I had only one parish, in Detroit, where I served as pastor after my graduation from the Yale Divinity School in 1915 until my appointment to the faculty of Union Seminary in 1928. But in subsequent years I was, as I said, a preacher in the universities and, of course, in our seminary chapel. The life of the local church was therefore terra incognita to me. After my illness I worshiped in many local churches, particularly in the summer months.

I had always believed that the vitality of religion after the rise of modern science, which tended to discredit the legends of religious history, was due to the simple fact that faith in an incomprehensible divine source of order was an indispensable bearer of the human trust in life, despite the evils of nature and the incongruities of history. An aura of mystery surrounded every realm of historical meaning. But as I became a pew-worshiper rather than the preacher, I had some doubts about the ability of us preachers to explicate and symbolize this majesty and mystery. These pulpit-centered churches of ours, without a prominent altar, seemed insufficient. Moreover, in the nonliturgical churches the ‘‘opening exercises” -- with a long pastoral prayer which the congregation could not anticipate or join in -- seemed inadequate. I came to view the Catholic mass as, in many religious respects, more adequate than our Protestant worship. For the first time I ceased to look at Catholicism as a remnant of medieval culture. I realized that I envied the popular Catholic mass because that liturgy, for many, expressed the mystery which makes sense out of life always threatened by meaninglessness.

The second insight about religious faith that I gained from the years of partial invalidism has to do with the problem of mortality and our seeming disinclination to accept the fact. All human beings face death as an inevitable destiny, but those of us who are crippled by heart disease or cerebral injury or other illness are more conscious of this destiny, particularly as we advance in years. The fear of death was a frequent topic of conversation with my closest friend. We were both in a situation in which death might be imminent. We both agreed that we did not fear death -- though I must confess that we did not consider the unconscious, rather than the conscious, fear that might express itself. We believed in both the immortality and the mortality of the person, and acknowledged that the mystery of human selfhood was quite similar to the mystery of the divine. In the Hebraic-Christian faith, God both transcends, and is involved in, the flux of time and history. The human personality has the same transcendence and involvement, but of course the transcendence of mortals over the flux of time is not absolute. We die, as do all creatures. But it is precisely our anxious foreboding of our death that gives us a clue to the dimension of our deathlessness.

The belief in a life after death, held by both primitive and high religions, reveals the human impulse to speculate about our deathlessness, despite the indisputable proofs of our mortality. In the Greek and Hebrew faiths, which converge in the Christian faith, we have a significant contrast of the symbols of this faith. The Hebrews, and of course our New Testament, are confident of the “resurrection of the body,” thus emphasizing the integral unity of the person in body and soul.

This symbolic expression of faith is currently almost neglected, despite the biblical references to it in the liturgy of funeral services. We moderns seem to believe that the notion of a disembodied immortal soul is more credible than the idea of resurrection. In fact, we have no empirical experience either of a resurrected body or of a disembodied soul. This confusion of symbols in the religious observance at the time of death, incidentally observed even by families of little religious faith, may indicate that belief in the deathlessness of mortal humans is not taken too seriously in strict dogmatic terms. But it does reveal the faith that most of us have, a presupposition of the residual immortality of our mortal friends. We express it simply in the phrase, “I can’t believe he’s dead.” There are, of course, many forms of social immortality. Political heroes are immortal in the memory of their nations; the great figures in the arts and sciences, or of any discipline of culture, have social immortality in their respective disciplines; we common mortals are, at least, remembered by our dear ones. But there is a dimension of human personality that is not acknowledged in these forms of social immortality.

The very contrast between the two symbols of resurrection and immortality in our Western Christian tradition calls attention to this ambiguity in the dimension of deathlessness in our mortal frame. I am personally content to leave this problem of deathlessness in the frame of mystery, and to console myself with the fact that the mystery of human selfhood is only a degree beneath the mystery of God.

This symbolic expression of faith is currently almost neglected. If we recognize that the human self is not to be equated with its mind, though the logical and analytic faculties of the mind are an instrument of its freedom over nature and history, and if we know that the self is intimately related to its body but cannot be equated with its physical functions, we then are confronted with the final mystery of its capacity of transcendence over nature, history and even its own self; and we will rightly identify the mystery of selfhood with the mystery of its indeterminate freedom.

This freedom is its guarantee of the self s relations with the dimension of the “Eternal.” While mortal, it has the capacity to relate itself to the ‘‘things that abide.” St. Paul enumerates these abiding things as “faith, hope and love.” Faith is the capacity to transcend all the changes of history and to project an ultimate source and end of temporal and historical reality. Hope is the capacity to transcend all the confusions of history and project an ultimate end of all historical existence, that which does not annul history but fulfills it. Love is the capacity to recognize the social substance of human existence, and to realize that the unique self is intimately related to all human creatures. These capacities relate the self to the eternal world and are its keys to that world.

In an Hebraic-biblical faith, neither history nor human selfhood is regarded as an illness of the flux of the temporal world from which we must escape. Each is regarded as a creation of the divine which is fulfilled, and not annulled by the source and end of history which is rightly revered as divine. Thus the individual, though mortal, is given, by self-transcendent freedom, the key to immortality. Individual selfhood is not a disaster or an evil. It is subsumed in the counsels of God and enters the mystery of immortality by personal relation to the divine. I could not, in all honesty, claim more for myself and my dear ones, as I face the ultimacy of death in the dimension of history, which is grounded in nature.

Unmediated Prehensions: Some Observations

Whitehead’s position on unmediated prehensions of the past is at best unclear. Some passages in Process and Reality suggest that there is prehension of the distant past only through the mediation of intervening contiguous occasions. Others indicate that there can be direct, unmediated feeling of a noncontiguous occasion in the distant past. In this paper I shall review these passages and offer some suggestions as to how we are to understand Whitehead on this issue.

His comments in PR 183f rather clearly suggest that there is prehension of the past only through the mediation of contiguous occasions, The issue is presented there in the midst of a wider discussion about the functioning of bodily feelings in perception. The transmitted datum, Whitehead observes, acquires additional sensa as it is relayed along the chain of occasions. Accordingly, "the final perception is the perception of the stone through the touch in the hand" (PR 183). Of course some of the transmitting occasions may not draw attention to themselves. "In normal, healthy, bodily operations the chain of occasions along the arm sinks into the background, almost into complete oblivion" (PR 184). But in the transmission of influence, whether recognized or not, there is a chain of mediation. Objectification of noncontiguous occasions is effected only through the mediating occasions.

Br contrast, in PR 435 Whitehead allows for unmediated prehension by speaking of at least two feelings of some past occasion, a direct prehension as well as the mediated one. And in PR 468f Whitehead asserts that his philosophy need not "entirely" deny that there can be direct objectification of an earlier by a later, noncontiguous occasion. The denial by physical science of "action at a distance" is a comment about the present cosmic epoch and carries with it no metaphysical generality. Indeed, if we remember the distinction between pure and hybrid prehensions, it is "more natural" to require mediated objectification only for the physical poles of occasions)¹ "For the conceptual pole does not share in the coordinate divisibility of the physical pole, and the extensive continuum is derived from this coordinate divisibility" (PR 469). At this point Whitehead produces his oft-cited statement about empirical support "both from the evidence for peculiar instances of telepathy, and from the instinctive apprehension of a tone of feeling in ordinary social intercourse" (PR 469).

Donald Sherburne reviewed this issue briefly in his "Whitehead Without God" (PPCT 320-22). There he pointed out that if there is immediate prehension of noncontiguous actual occasions then God’s functioning as ground of the past is rendered arbitrary and ad hoc. There would be no reason why one datum rather than another is presented. Such incoherence is really unnecessary, Sherburne contends, for "all our knowledge of the past is quite explicable in terms of a doctrine which limits immediate prehension to contiguous actual occasions" (PPCT 322). Certainly science supports such a doctrine, It does not speak of "action at a distance." And he thinks that experiences of telepathy, when fully understood, will not violate this doctrine either. Finally, by means of past experiences and unconscious memories "the instinctive apprehension of a tone of feeling in ordinary social intercourse" to which Whitehead also appeals is explicable without reference to unmediated feelings.

Although I do not agree with the larger thesis toward which Sherburne is working in his article, I am in basic sympathy with his treatment of unmediated prehension.² Doubtless we all have occasions when what we experience seems as though it were a direct and unmediated prehension of something that happened to us long ago. Sometimes we have clear memories of distant experiences -- memories which are so fresh and vivid as to suggest no influence by intervening events. Something stimulates us, for instance an odor, a sound, or an idea, and things click into place, as though the distant event were present to us unmediated.

However, such memories can be interpreted without reference to unmediated feelings. The flashes of memory can be of experiences always indirectly mediated to us, but not precipitated into full awareness unless touched off by some suggestive or evocative event. That which clicks may be just our preceding experience provoking conditions so that the succeeding occasion can bring into consciousness a previously unconscious memory. We need not interpret such experiences as direct prehensions of occasions in the distant past. We can do just as well by regarding them as mediated.

Still, there is a certain awkwardness here, for the argument just presented runs against those three passages in Process and Reality where Whitehead does speak of direct prehension of the distant past. At this point it looks as though one should simply choose the position which best advances the thrust of his own argument. However there is another passage in Process and Reality which presents a third possibility. On the one hand it recognizes the direct prehension of which PR 98, 435, and 468 speak. On the other hand, it understands these direct prehensions as effective in a manner compatible with PR 183. I suggest this third possibility best represents Whitehead’s position on unmediated prehensions.

In PR 345f Whitehead is illustrating the importance of the first three categoreal obligations. He presents the notion of a medium and asserts that there is no direct objectification of a past occasion without adjustments due to the prehensions of the mediating occasions. He uses as an example the prehension of some temporally remote occasion D, also mediated through occasions B and C. Thus for the concrescing entity there are three initial feelings of D. One of them is direct and two are mediated. But by the first three categories these prehensions cannot be independent. The

subjective unity of the concrescence introduces negative prehensions, so that D in the direct feeling is not felt in its formal completeness, but objectified with the elimination of such of its prehensions as are inconsistent with D felt through the mediation of B, and through the mediation of C. (PR 346)

The relevant point of this passage is that the content of the direct objectification of some remote occasion must be adjusted to the objectifications of the mediating entities.

Since this passage is dealing directly and explicitly with the categoreal obligations for concrescence, I suggest that it is regulative of Whitehead’s position. From this perspective it is too strong to say that immediate objectification is limited to contiguous occasions. It is more accurate to say that whatever immediate objectification there is, is limited by those occasions contiguous to each other and through each other to the concrescing entity. There can be direct prehensions of the past, but the past thus felt is that past as also mediated and sifted through the intervening occasions.

Does this then rule out any direct prehension of some aspect of a past event not also mediated through the contiguous occasions?³It would appear not, so long as that prehension is not inconsistent with what is mediated. Such an unmediated prehension can add something to the present experience of that past if, but also only if, it is compatible with the mediated transmission. However, since that past must in any case be dealt with in some way, unmediated prehensions are still limited by mediated feelings. As Whitehead notes, "immediate objectification is also reinforced, or weakened, by routes of mediate objectification" (PR 469).

To return to our example, if we are suddenly recalled to a distant happening of ours by some present odor, what is experienced is that happening, but that happening as adjusted to the mediation and evaluation of intervening occasions, conscious or not. The attenuations, enhancements, and supplementations of emotion and value that these occasions have effected are all important in this experience. These modifications may be directly important because they are experienced as such. Alternatively, they could be important because they precipitate negative prehensions. Either way, the present experience is not simpliciter a direct prehension of the unmediated past.

References

PPCT -- Delwin Brown, Ralph E. James, Jr.. and Gene Reeves, eds., Process Philosophy and Christian Thought. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971.

Notes

1In a statement at PR 98 Whitehead also alludes to the direct objectification of the remote past, but dismisses it as "practically negligible, so far as concerns prehensions of a strictly physical type."

2 I think the claim that God does function as ground of the past is a reasonable one, though I recognize that it is not a self-evident feature of Whitehead’s thought. In any case, the outcome of this paper is fairly independent of that claim.

3 This question, together with the passage at PR 98, was brought to my attention in discussion with John Cobb.

The Disembodied Soul

In A Christian Natural Theology, John B. Cobb, Jr., has provided a number of interesting applications of Whitehead’s systematic categories to anthropological problems and concepts. Among the problems he explores is the question of life after death, understood in terms of the disembodied soul (CNT 63-70). Cobb correctly notes that Whitehead gave no extended attention to the issue, and that when he did consider it, he thought his doctrine neutral (RM 107). However, if Whitehead’s thought is really neutral on the disembodied soul, then that thought cannot be incompatible with such a possibility. Cobb accordingly argues that Whitehead’s thought can at least make sense of the notion -- that is, that Whitehead’s system provides a context in which the possibility of such disembodied survival can be seen as a meaningful one. Of course, whether it in fact obtains is another question. But to establish the meaningfulness of such a notion is no small achievement and Cobb thinks that Whiteheadian resources make this possible.

I do not find Cobb’s argument to be entirely persuasive. In part this is because of Cobb’s identification of the person with his soul, to the neglect of his body. For one thing, such an identification runs counter to Whitehead’s argument for the persuasiveness of his thought. For in opting for, a one-substance cosmology Whitehead must find elements of continuity between nature and human experience. Thus his argument in support of his system involves an appeal to the fundamental importance of our bodily experience rather than simply our experience as centered selves (cf. AI 243).

A second problem with this identification is that it runs counter to Whitehead’s phenomenological claim for the identification of the present moment with the body as well as with the soul. Whitehead contends that we always experience ourselves as embodied. "While we exist, body and soul arc inescapable elements in our being, each with the full reality of our own immediate self" (MT 220f; see AI 243). Persons are more than souls. They are embodied as well as selfed. Both of these considerations suggest that the basic meaning of "person" is the mind-body unity, and the identification of the person with his soul involves an abstraction from this prior unity. Both considerations thereby argue against the adequacy of the notion of the disembodied soul.

However, Whitehead’s writings are by no means clear on this issue of the identification of the person with his soul. Cobb can cite in his favor a number of passages. The critical point then seems to be whether the systematic categories uphold the notion of a disembodied soul. When he wrote Religion in the Making, Whitehead seemed to think that they do, and later writings suggest a similar belief (AI 267). Parts of Process and Reality argue against this possibility, however, and I suggest these have fairly considerable force. At any rate, I wish to review this issue here. If Cobb’s argument for the disembodied soul is not persuasive, it may be because Whitehead himself has been misleading.

My suggestion, then, is that the logic of Whitehead’s categories works against the viability of the notion of the disembodied soul. We are told that the soul-body relationship is such that the soul is the center of novel origination for the body as a whole and the body provides the requisite protective environment (PR 157). I take this to mean that the whole psychophysical organism is a complex structured society providing a favorable environment for its component societies.¹The question is whether the soul retains social order, and so its dominant defining characteristics, apart from the body. Can the soul genetically sustain its identity independent of the body? Whitehead’s principles of Psychological Physiology suggest a negative answer, though admittedly his discussion here is only conjectural.

According to this discussion the soul is a thread of personal order supported by, and part of, an entirely living nexus (PR 163). Now as Whitehead notes, "an ‘entirely living’ nexus is not a ‘society’" (PR 157). It requires for its survival a supporting society (see PR 152, 159f). "By itself the nexus lacks the genetic power which belongs to ‘societies’" (PR 163). Thus the nonsocial nexus requires a body for its continued existence. But a "living person requires that its immediate environment be a living, non-social nexus" (PR 163). Thus the living person or soul is also dependent upon its body. My bodily existence provides the favorable environment for the continued existence of myself more narrowly construed as a centered self.

In terms of the distinction Whitehead draws between a subordinate nexus and a subordinate society, I would classify the soul as a subordinate nexus. That is, souls "present no features capable of genetically sustaining themselves apart from the special environment" provided by their bodies (PR 151f). To be sure, each soul is also regnant within its structured society. But in separation from that society it has no social features. It is a personal society only in conjunction with the body.

It may be helpful to note the progression of the discussion in Process and Reality. First, Whitehead identifies the "empty" space within a cell as an example of a subordinate nexus (PR 152). Then he contends that the living occasions of a cell "in abstraction from the inorganic occasions of the animal body" do not "form a corpuscular sub-society, so that each living occasion is a member of an enduring entity with its personal order" (PR 158). Finally, he concludes that "in abstraction from its animal body an ‘entirely living’ nexus is not properly a society at all, since ‘life’ cannot be a defining characteristic" (PR 159f).

Is any relevant difference introduced by the concept of a living person with its notion of defining characteristics via hybrid prehensions? I think not.² I suggest that it is still the case that the differentiated response characteristic of the living person presupposes a supporting environment. And it is still the case that "it is misleading . . . to term such a nexus a ‘society’ when it is being considered in abstraction from the whole structured society" (PR 152).

Whitehead identifies his discussion of the principles of Psychological Physiology as conjectural. But I suggest that it establishes a strong presumption against the viability of the notion of the disembodied soul. Certainly it also suggests that such a soul would be impoverished. As a structured society, the body is so ordered that it provides the conditions converting incompatibilities into contrasts. As Whitehead notes, the body is related to the soul not only as protective device, but also as the "complex amplifier" (PB 181) requisite for the sophisticated content of the dominant occasion. Without the body’s "complexity of order which procures contrasts" (PR 153) instead of incompatibilities, the soul could have no fresh complex experiences and would be at best confined to memories of the past experiences it had while embodied.

In fact, Whitehead’s discussion really suggests more. Independent of the body, the soul would have no recognizable features at all. For the structured society provides the special environment requisite for the soul’s social order -- for the genetic transmission of defining features or characteristics. Apart from the complex content it makes possible, there are no special defining features to be genetically transmitted, in separation from the whole structured nexus, the soul would have no distinctive social features. It is true that every occasion inherits from its entire past, but its capacity for complexity is a function of its immediate environment. With the alteration of that environment, there is also an alteration in its potential for complexity and so also in its personal identity. Thus apart from the body, the soul would not only not have the variety of content and degree of novelty that properly characterize a living person -- it would not even have the capacities required for an enduring object.

I have argued that capacity for complexity of concrescence is a function of environment. The defining characteristics of personal identity reflect (and in some sense are the manner of) the resolution of this complexity.³ I think it follows that in the living person both the complex content of concrescence and the manner of integrating the content are dependent upon the environing society -- so dependent that the disembodied soul appears to be in categoreal difficulty.

One passage, presumably written after Process and Reality, may appear to support the meaningfulness of disembodied existence. Referring to the everlasting nature of God, Whitehead suggests that "in some important sense the existence of the soul may be freed from its complete dependence upon the bodily organization" (AI 267). This possibility, however, runs counter to several important things which Whitehead otherwise wants to affirm. It is a reasonable interpretation of the complex that the soul by itself is merely a subordinate nexus, becoming a personal society only in conjunction with the body. If so, then Whitehead’s system, regardless of what he himself may have thought, does not provide the conditions for speaking of continued, ongoing personal existence after death in separation from one’s body. Of course, one may then be provided with a new body. Indeed this may be the meaning of the passage. In any case, though, to speak of a new body is to speak of a different sort of subjective immortality from that of a disembodied soul.

References

CNT -- John B. Cobb, Jr. A Christian Natural Theology. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1965.

Notes:

1A very helpful analysis of this relationship is provided by Donald W. Sherburne, "Whitehead’s Psychological Physiology," The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 7/4 (Winter, 1969-70), 401-07.

2 Notice that Whitehead extends his discussion of social order via hybrid prehension downward to include even "the lowest form of life" (PR 164).

3 I have argued elsewhere that personal identity is not to be understood as a function of hybrid prehensions alone, but rather that such prehensions presuppose common defining characteristics. See my "Whitehead and Personal Identity," The Thomist 37/3 (July, 1973), 510-21.