Part 19

How different from all this is the spirit of that recent movement within the Christian church that is generally called Modernism! “Defined and condemned in the encyclical Pascendi,” writes J. Bourdeau, in 1907, “modernism continues to fill the reviews and the periodicals, even those that ordinarily treat of matters profane. This internal crisis of Catholicism, this new attempt to reconcile the church with the times, aimed at internal reform, not at schism. It was destined to end in the excommunication or interdiction of some of its more refractory spirits and in the submission of almost all. And yet, by those who shared its hopes, modernism is not looked upon as the bed of a torrent from now on to be dry; it runs like an underground river, and some day, perhaps, will come to the surface again with sufficient force to sweep away the dikes.”

Well, this modernism which M. Bourdeau, in his little volume, “Pragmatisme et Modernisme,” brackets with pragmatism as being of the same temper, is, like all other modernities, not very new. We associate it with such names as Father Tyrrel, in England; l’Abbé Loisy, in France; the senator and novelist Fogazzaro, in Italy, and if the matter has interested us, with a host of other writers no less distinguished. But it is really of the essence of Newman, and goes back to Pascal. For “The heart,” Pascal has said, “has its reasons that the reason does not understand.” It was to these reasons that Newman listened, and offers us again in his “Grammar of Assent,” and it is these reasons that modernism would have to be the only ones on which Christianity can be safely founded.

But what are they, these reasons, and what does this voice of the heart say? Its first clear utterance is negative. It does not care who wrote the various books of the Scriptures, or what corroborative or contradictory evidence those who study the documents and monuments of the past may come upon. “Higher critics,” so far from being its enemies, are welcome participants in its cause. As little does it cling to the literal sense of the various dogmatic interpretations the Church has from time to time put upon the sacred writings. Would you know, for example, whether there is a Real Presence? Modernism would answer: The Eucharist is indeed meaningless unless there be a Real Presence; but whether Christ is really there for you or not depends on you alone. And the like of other dogmas.

Yet it would appear that history, sacred, ecclesiastical, or profane, is no dead letter to the modernist. He is intensely conscious and amply studious of the past. Nor will he, if I make him out, permit its episodes to be treated as symbols, parables and allegories. No, the past tells the story of a great religious truth in the making. If you ask him what Christianity is, he will tell you it isn’t, it never has been, it never will be any definitely finished thing; but for him it is the best guide to living that he with all his devotion and all his thought can make it. The modernists are Christians because they are heirs to, and imbued with the spirit of Christianity, as they are not inspired of the Buddha or of Confucius. Yes, they are devout Catholics because they can work better at the making of a religion in the atmosphere of their ancestral church than in any other air. Religion to them is to aid in the way best suited to their temperaments and traditions in the evolution of religion; for them Christianity is in process, and we are the potters that mould it, not the explorers that discover it.

Well, J. Bourdeau is not wrong; modernism and pragmatism are indeed of like temper and children of the same age--an age of troubled outlook, but of brave if chastened hope. The contrast between the realistic theologian with his ancient texts, documents, monuments, and the idealistic theologian who turns to the past not for authority but for guidance, not for facts but for a sense of tendency and direction--this contrast is not unlike that other one pragmatism has brought about between “Natural Religion” and what I may call “Human Religion.” Natural religion sought in the order of nature evidence of its designer, of a thoughtful purpose back of or in it, the same spirit that a naturalist might hunt for the tracks of a mastodon or follow the wanderings of a glacier. For the humanist, the purpose of nature is a thing in the making, and we are here to help make it. It will turn out as our finite efforts form it--good or bad, as we are good or bad; wise or not, as we are. The practical message of “Human Religion” is pretty much that with which James closes his little essay, “Is Life Worth Living?” “Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief helps create the fact. The ‘scientific proof’ that you are right may not be clear before the day of judgment (or some stage of being which that expression may serve to symbolize) is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and there will represent them, may then turn to the faint-hearted who here decline to go on with words like those with which Henry IV. greeted the tardy Crillon after a great victory had been gained: ‘Hang yourself, brave Crillon! we fought at Arques, and you were not there.’”

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I have tried to show pragmatism as a moment in the swing of thought from realism to idealism, and how for it the most vital, that is to say, the moral and religious aspects of our world are things to work and fight for, to make and to mould, not just to find and come across. Its god is indeed a god of battles, and we are his soldiers on whom his victory depends. But as I view this battle, it is not to be fought out in heart throes and outpourings of sentiment. These may indeed change and better human relationships; but it must not be forgotten that human relationships exist in a physical universe that is older than they, and promises to outlast them. Now, just the physics of things show a strong tendency to be amoral and atheistic. “You all know the picture of the last state of the universe which evolutionary science foresees. I cannot state it better than in Mr. Balfour’s words: ‘The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. “Imperishable monuments” and “immortal deeds,” death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as if they had not been. Nor will anything that is be better or worse for all that the labor, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through countless ages to effect.’

“That,” comments James, “is the sting of it, that in the vast drifting of the cosmic weather, though many a jeweled shore appears, and many an enchanted cloud-bank floats away, long lingering ere it be dissolved--even as ours now lingers for our joy--yet, when these transient products are gone, nothing, absolutely nothing remains to represent those particular qualities, those elements of preciousness which they may have enshrined. Dead and gone are they, gone utterly from the very sphere and room of being. Without an echo; without a memory; without an influence on aught that they may come after to make it care for similar ideals.”

Has not, then, realism the last word in this argument and does not the rolling mechanism of things have its way with us in the end--since it compasses not only our death, but the collapse of the very theatre in which our little lives have played themselves out?

No, I should say, this is not the moral of the tale, though there is a moral to the tale. “Knowledge,” writes Francis Bacon, in his “Novum Organum,” “knowledge and human power are synonymous.” So are human impotence and human ignorance synonymous. The child that dips a cup of water from the fountain is subduing nature’s mechanism to its needs. It is only a question of how great is our knowledge if we would know how great is our power.

We die, our world dies, only because we know no better, have thought of no way of preventing; but knowledge and human power are indeed synonymous, and I know of no end to either. But, as for those of us bound to die before we have learned how not to, and as for our children whose world may well vanish before they have thought of a way of saving it, we have always this solace--that we know we are facing the only way salvation can come from when our face is toward science. “For nature,” says Bacon, with his queer crooked smile,--“nature is only subdued by submission.”

PROGRESS

We little realize, until we have met them socially, how engaging the manners of cannibals can be. It is unfortunate that so many obstacles lie in the way of our making their better acquaintance,--they live so far out of town for one thing, and for another are so clannish a set that only occasionally is one of our sort welcomed to their inner circles. Yet when one who has had this fortune returns to tell about it,--which happens too rarely--we can see it has been a revelation to him and an enlightenment. There is that friend of our youth, Herman Melville, who about the year 1840 was entertained by the Merquesan Islanders--I swear that as I read him I find something very winning about the ways of these people. It is true they were what Melville calls “occasional cannibals”; but although cannibalism, however occasional, cannot win our entire approval (perhaps because, as Montaigne suggests, we have learned how much better it is to torment our enemies alive than to consume them dead) yet it is not wise or just to allow our prejudice against an odd local custom to blind us to so much that is fair in their lives.

For much there is that is fair in the lives of the Typees. Dwelling on that enchanted island of the Pacific, their lines are cast in pleasant places. The asperities which civilization seems rather to have aggravated than smoothed do not roughen their way. Their existence is passed in the midst of tropical plenty, on which their numbers, few and hot on the increase, make light demand. They toil not to cover what nature has conceived in innocence, and spin but lightly to adorn what nature has fashioned fair. Little thought do they take on their housing. “There are few villages,” Melville tells us, “the houses stand here and there in the shadow of groves or are scattered along the banks of the winding stream; their bamboo sides and their gleaming white thatch forming a beautiful contrast to the perpetual verdure in which they are embowered. There are no roads of any kind in the valley; nothing but a labyrinth of foot paths twisting and turning without end.” Yet the morals of these people do not seem to have been so far below our standards as their benighted condition might lead us to expect. “There seemed,” says Melville, “to be no rogues of any sort in Typee. In the darkest nights the natives slept securely with all their worldly wealth around them, in houses the doors of which were never fastened. The disquieting thought of theft and assassination never disturbed them. Each islander reposed beneath his own palmetto thatching, or sat under his own breadfruit tree, with none to molest or alarm him. There was not a padlock in the valley.”

I had gone so far in one of my readings of Melville, and was beginning to wonder in the back of my head what a Typee introduced into our civilization could find to say of us half as pleasant as the things their guest had noted of them, when I recalled that another had long ago put the like question to himself when he was in much better position to answer it. It was when the New World was very much newer than it is now, that Villegaignon landed in a country he surnamed Antarctic France, where dwelt a people of cannibals the very counterpart (as I judge) of our friends the Typees. “Three of these people,” the Sieur de Montaigne records, “were at Rouen in the reign of our late King, Charles the Ninth, who talked with them a great while. They were showed our fashions, our pomp, and the form of a fair city; afterwards some demanded their advice, and would needs know of them what things of note and admirable they had observed amongst us. They answered three things,” ... of which Montaigne seems particularly impressed with this one: “They had perceived [they said] there were men among us full gorged with all sorts of commodities, and others which hunger-starved and bare with need and poverty begged at their gates: and found it strange these moieties [they have a phrase whereby they call men but a moiety one of another]--strange these moieties so needy could endure such an injustice, and that they took not the others by the throat, or set fire to their houses.”

I do not suppose Montaigne approved, any more than we can, the touch of savagery that concludes these observations; but on the whole they seem to have confirmed him in certain opinions he had already formed on the pretended advantages of civilized over barbarous life. For this occasion on which he actually met and conversed with the cannibals was not the first acquaintance he had with them. There had long been with him a certain serving-man who had spent some ten or twelve years in their country, and seems to have given his master much the same account of them as Melville has given us of the Typees. I cannot refrain from recalling in Montaigne’s own words his reflections on the whole spectacle of savagery and civilization:

“Now I find,” he says, “as far as I have been informed, there is nothing in that nation that is either barbarous or savage,--unless men call that barbarism which is not common to them.... They are even savage as we call those fruits wild which nature of herself and of her ordinary progress hath produced,--whereas, indeed, they are those which ourselves have ordered by our artificial devices and diverted from their common order we should rather term savage. In those are the true and most profitable virtues, and natural properties most lively and vigorous, which in these we have bastardized, applying them to the pleasure of our corrupted taste.... And if notwithstanding, in diverse fruits of those countries that were never tilled, we shall find that in respect of ours they are most excellent and as delicate to the taste, there is no reason art should gain the point of honor over our puissant mother Nature. We have so much by our invention surcharged the beauties and riches of her works, that we have altogether choked her; yet wherever her purity shineth, she maketh our vain and frivolous enterprises wonderfully ashamed.

“Et veniunt hederae sponte sua melius, Surgit et in solis formosior arbutus antris, Et volucres nulla dulcius arte canunt.

“All our endeavor or wit cannot so much as reach to represent the nest of the least birdlet, ... no, nor the web of a silly spider....

“Those nations seem therefore so barbarous unto me because they have received very little fashion from human wit, and are yet near their original naturality. The laws of nature do yet command them which are but little bastardized by ours, and that with such purity as I am sometimes grieved the knowledge of it came not sooner to light, what time there were men that, better than we, could have judged of it. I am sorry Lycurgus and Plato had it not; for me seemeth that what in these nations we see by experience doth not only exceed all the pictures wherewith licentious poesy hath proudly embellished the Golden Age, but also the conception and desire of philosophy.... It is a nation, would I answer Plato, that hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no name of magistrate nor of politic priority, no use of service, of riches or of poverty, no occupation but idle, no respect of kindred but common, no apparel but natural, no measuring of lands, no use of wine, corn or metal.... The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction and pardon were never heard of amongst them. How dissonant would Plato find his imaginary commonwealth from this perfection?

“Hos natura modos primum dedit.”

I had thought to begin a sound philosophical account of the nature of progress with a picture, not, if I could help it, unsympathetic, of man’s condition before he had felt its benefits. The plan would recommend itself to any philosopher as suitable and convenient to its purpose, yet here am I well beyond the beginning of my discourse, still lingering with the cannibals, and, what is worse, sensible that I have not been diligent to uncover the many causes there must be for rejoicing that we are not as they were. Not that there is any difficulty in pointing to the host of things we can do which they could not. We have only to mount in one of our winged ships and look down on the simple Typee rubbing two sticks together for their spark, to see in all the distance that lies between us the like of what Prometheus scaled Heaven for. But what in all this is there to rejoice over?

It is singular how many have asked this question and found no answer, or have answered--Nothing. I do not cite the licentious poets Montaigne refers to as having invented a Golden Age and feigned a happy condition of man before progress had spoiled the world for him; although these are many, and if their wisdom is not of the philosopher’s kind, yet is it all the closer to that “ancient wisdom of childhood” a wise man does well to keep near him. But even learned academies have thought the question not beyond their interest and study. In 1749, the Academy of Dijon set for the prize competition of the following year the question, “Whether the progress of the arts and sciences had contributed to the purification of life?” The prize was won by J.-J. Rousseau. His little essay, generally known as the “Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts,” worked on the thought of its time as seldom so casual a thing. “One cannot,” Jean-Jacques wrote then, “one cannot reflect on the ways of life without finding pleasure in recalling the image of its first simplicity. That was a fair shore, bedecked by only Nature’s hand, toward which our eyes are ever turning back regretfully as we watch it fade in the distance.”

There may be, nay, I think there must be, a meaning and a moral to this disgust of the enlightened here and now, this longing for a life not all “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” But the interpretations of this feeling we most commonly meet with are not I hope to be taken very seriously, for if they are, there is no counsel for us but one of despair. Thus, whatever could come of the lament for the good old days, the golden days, before science had done this or that to cloud our first innocence? No history written in such ancient times but that it can recall times still more ancient when things went better with the sons of the gods because then they knew less. And it is still open to any one--traveler, philosopher, poet--to draw what picture he will of far away lands wherein, for that nobody wanted very much, everybody found all he wanted. The subject of this sketch may vary from Diogenes snarling in his tub to a Typee girl dancing in her flowers; from the desert to which the Christian cenobites withdrew to Tasso’s bosky places, where, before that vain word Onore had mingled its grief with love,

Sedean pastori e ninfe, Meschiando alle parole Vezzi e susurri, ed ai susurri i baci Strettamente tenaci ...

But of all this, nothing is serious, nothing sincere,--of all those who lament the past not one would take the first step toward it, so little is it in man’s nature to retreat. Or if anyone would, yet what could he do, save drag his own sadness into the desert with him? As for the world, it must even go on with its science, though it be but the science of hurting itself.

Wherefore, no less futile than regret for a past we cannot recover, is fear for a future we cannot avert. It is natural that certain conditions arising out of the progress of science should make gentle souls anxious for what is to come. Science is power, and as no man can commit the sins he is impotent to commit, there is a certain safeguard for innocence in ignorance. Only after having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge did our first parents come to mourn outside the gates. No shepherds and shepherdesses conceived the iniquity of Babel’s tower, and Egypt and great Babylon were of no children’s dreaming. Yet must man go on gathering unto himself knowledge with all its power for harm and no warning gesture of the fearful can stay him. Our only comfort can be that however great a power for harm science may bring, it ought to enhance in equal measure the power for good,--did we but know what good and evil were.

Did we but know good and evil! In the suggestion that perhaps we do not, in the suspicion that this is just the knowledge to which science does not help us,--yes, in the fear that it is science itself which throws doubt on ethical standards--is, I conceive, a motive for deprecating the progress of science more serious than the others, and more sincere. Science is, indeed, endlessly critical; no authority of tradition or of general acceptance imposes upon it; nothing for it is finished, nothing fixed; and to those to whom all goodness is in danger the moment one asks, What is good? science may well seem a dangerous growth,--unhallowed in its origin, curiosity; damnable in its outcome, unrest. And yet if as we assume science must progress, stayed neither by regret for the past nor by fear for the future, then must its questioning spirit invade every realm of opinion, examine the most sacred of beliefs, look into the very meaning of good and evil.