Part 3

It was an unhappy and almost fatal attitude of mind, and it was engendered not so much by the trend of civilization since the Renaissance and Reformation, nor by the compulsion and cumulative influence of the things themselves, as by the natural temper and inclinations and the native standards of this emancipated mass of humanity that, oppressed, outraged and degraded for four hundred years had at last burst out of its prison-house and had assumed control of society through industrialism, politics and social life. The saving grace of the old aristocracies had disappeared with the institution itself: between 1875 and 1900 the great single leaders, so fine in character, so brilliant in capacity, so surprising in their numbers, that had given a deceptive glory to the so-called Victorian Age, had almost wholly died out, and the new conditions neither fostered the development of adequate successors, nor gave audience to the few that, anomalously, appeared. It is not surprising therefore that the new social element that had played so masterly a part in bringing to its perfection the industrial-financial-democratic scheme of life should have developed an apologetic therefor, and imposed it, with all its materialism, its narrowness, its pragmatism, its, at times, grossness and cynicism, on the mind of a society where increasingly their own followers were, by sheer energy and efficiency, acquiring a predominant position.

I am not unconscious that these are hard sayings and that few indeed will accept them. They seem too much like attempting that which Burke said was impossible, viz., to bring an indictment against a people. I intend nothing of the sort. Out of this same body of humanity which as a whole has exerted this very unfavourable influence on modern society, have come and will come personalities of sudden and startling nobility, men who have done as great service as any of their contemporaries whatever their class or status. Out of the depths have come those who have ascended to the supreme heights, for since Christianity came into the world to free the souls of men, this new liberty has worked without limitations of caste or race. Indeed, the very creations of the emergent force, industrialism and democracy, while they were the betrayal of the many were the opportunity of the few, taking the place, as they did, of the older creeds of specifically Christian society, and inviting those who would to work their full emancipation and so become the servants of God and mankind. By the very bitterness of their antecedents, the cruelty of their inheritance, they gained a deeper sense of the reality of life, a more just sense of right and wrong, a clearer vision of things as they were, than happened in the case of those who had no such experience of the deep brutality of the regime of post-Renaissance society.

True as this is, it is also true that for one who won through there were many who gained nothing, and it was, and is, the sheer weight of numbers of those who failed of this that has made their influence on the modern life as pervasive and controlling as it is.

What has happened is a certain degradation of character, a weakening of the moral stamina of men, and against this no mechanical device in government, no philosophical or social theory, can stand a chance of successful resistance, while material progress in wealth and trade and scientific achievement becomes simply a contributory force in the process of degeneration. For this degradation of character we are bound to hold this new social force in a measure responsible, even though it has so operated because of its inherent qualities and in no material respect through conscious cynicism or viciousness; indeed it is safe to say that in so far as it was acting consciously it was with good motives, which adds an element of even greater tragedy to a situation already sufficiently depressing.

If I am right in holding this to be the effective cause of the situation we have now to meet, it is true that it is by no means the only one. The emancipation and deliverance of the downtrodden masses of men who owed their evil estate to the destruction of the Christian society of the Middle Ages, was a clamourous necessity; it was a slavery as bad in some ways as any that had existed in antiquity, and the number of its victims was greater. The ill results of the accomplished fact was largely due to the condition of religion which existed during the period of emancipation. No society can endure without vital religion, and any revolution effected at a time when religion is moribund or dissipated in contentious fragments, is destined to be evacuated of its ideals and its potential, and to end in disaster. Now the freeing of the slaves of the Renaissance and the post-Reformation, and their absorption in the body politic, was one of the greatest revolutions in history, and it came at a time when religion, which had been one and vital throughout Western Europe for six centuries, had been shattered and nullified, and its place taken, in the lands that saw the great liberation, by Calvinism, Lutheranism, Puritanism and atheism, none of which could exert a guiding and redemptive influence on the dazed hordes that had at last come up into the light of day.

In point of fact, therefore, we are bound to trace back the responsibility for the present crisis even to the Reformation itself, as well as to the tyranny and absolutism of government, and the sordid and profligate ordering of society, which followed on the end of Mediaevalism.

So then we stand today confronting a situation that is ominous and obscure, since the very ideals and devices which we had held were the last word in progressive evolution have failed at the crisis, and because we who created them and have worked through them, have failed in character, and chiefly because we have accepted low ideals and inferior standards imposed upon us by social elements betrayed and abandoned by a world that could not aid them or assimilate them since itself had betrayed the only thing that could give them force, unity and coherency, that is, a vital and pervasive religious faith.

There are those who hold our case to be desperate, to whom the disillusionment of peace, after the high optimism engendered by the vast heroism and the exalted ideals instigated by the war, has brought nothing but a mood of deep pessimism. The sentiment is perhaps natural, but it is none the less both irrational and wicked. If it is persisted in, if it becomes widespread, it may perfectly well justify itself, but only so. We no longer accept the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination, we believe, and must highly believe, that our fate is of our own making, for Christianity has made us the heirs of free-will. What we will that shall we be, or rather, what we are that shall we will, and if we make of ourselves what, by the grace of God, we may, then the victory rests with us. It is true that we are in the last years of a definite period, on that decline that precedes the opening of a new epoch. Never in history has any such period overpassed its limit of five hundred years, and ours, which came to birth in the last half of the fifteenth century, cannot outlast the present. But these declining years are preceding those wherein all things are made new, and the next two generations will see, not alone the passing of what we may call modernism, since it is our own age, but the prologue of the epoch that is to come. It is for us to say what this shall be. It is not foreordained; true, if we will it, it may be a reign of disaster, a parallel to the well-recognized "Dark Ages" of history, but also, if we will, it may be a new and a true "renaissance," a rebirth of old ideals, of old honour, of old faith, only incarnate in new and noble forms.

The vision of an old heaven and a new earth was vouchsafed us during the war, when horror and dishonour and degradation were shot through and through with an epic heroism and chivalry and self-sacrifice. What if this all did fade in the miasma of Versailles and the cynicism of trade fighting to get back to "normalcy," and the red anarchy out of the East? There is no fiat of God that fixes these things as eternal. Even they also may be made the instruments of revelation and re-creation. Paris and London, Rome, Berlin and Washington are meshed in the tangled web of the superannuated who cannot escape the incubus of the old ways and the old theories that were themselves the cause of the war and of the failure of "modern civilization," but another generation is taking the field and we must believe that this has been burned out of them. They may have achieved this great perfection in the field, they may have experienced it through those susceptible years of life just preceding military age. It does not matter. Somehow they have it, and those who come much in contact in school or college with boys and men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five, know, and thankfully confess, that if they can control the event the future is secure.

In the harlequinade of fabulous material success the nations of "modern civilization" suffered a moral deterioration, in themselves and in their individual members; by a moral regeneration they may be saved. How is this to be accomplished? How, humanly speaking, is the redemption of society to be achieved? Not alone by change of heart in each individual, though if this could be it would be enough. Humanly speaking there is not time and we dare not hope for the divine miracle whereby "in the twinkling of an eye we shall all be changed." Still less by sole reliance on some series of new political, social, economic and educational devices; there is no plan, however wise and profound, that can work effectively under the dead weight of a society that is made up of individuals whose moral sense is defective. Either of these two methods, put into operation by itself, will fail. Acting together they may succeed.

I repeat what I have said before. The material thing and the spiritual force work by inter-action and coördinately. The abandonment or reform of some device that has proved evil or inadequate, and the substitution of something better, changes to that extent the environment of the individual and so enables him more perfectly to develop his inherent possibilities in character and capacity, while every advance in this direction reacts on the machinery of life and makes its improvement more possible. With a real sense of my own personal presumption, but with an equally real sense of the responsibility that rests on every man at the present crisis, I shall venture certain suggestions as to possible changes that may well be effected in the material forms of contemporary society as well as in its methods of thought, in order that the spiritual energies of the individual may be raised to a higher level through the amelioration of a hampering environment, and, with even greater diffidence, others that may bear more directly on the character-development of the individual. In following out this line of thought I shall, in the remaining seven lectures, speak successively on: A Working Philosophy; The Social Organism; The Industrial and Economic Problem; The Political Organization of Society; The Function of Education and Art; The Problem of Organic Religion; and Personal Responsibility.

I am only too conscious of the fact that the division of my subject under these categorical heads, and the necessities of special argument, if not indeed of special pleading, have forced me to such particular stress on each subject as may very likely give an impression of undue emphasis. If each lecture were to be taken by itself, such an impression would, I fear, be unescapable; I ask therefore for the courtesy of a suspension of judgment until the series is completed, for it is only when taken as a whole, one paper reacting upon and modifying another, that whatever merit the course possesses can be made apparent.

A WORKING PHILOSOPHY[*]

The first reaction of the World War was a great interrogation, and the technical "Peace" that has followed brings only reiteration. Why did these things come, and how? The answers are as manifold as the clamourous tongues that ask, but none carries conviction and the problem is still unsolved. According to all rational probabilities we had no right to expect the war that befell; according to all the human indications as we saw them revealed amongst the Allies we had a right to expect a better peace; according to our abiding and abounding faith we had a right to expect a great bettering of life after the war, and even in spite of the peace. It is all a non sequitur, and still we ask the reason and the meaning of it all.

It may be very long before the full answer is given, yet if we are searching the way towards "The Great Peace" we must establish some working theory, if only that we may redeem our grave errors and avoid like perils in the future. The explanation I assume for myself, and on which I must work, is that, in spite of our intentions (which were of the best) we were led into the development, acceptance and application of a false philosophy of life which was not only untenable in itself but was vitiated and made noxious through its severance from vital religion. In close alliance with this declension of philosophy upon a basis that had been abandoned by the Christian world for a thousand years, perhaps as the ultimate reason for its occurrence, was the tendency to void religion of its vital power, to cut it out of intimate contact with life, and, in the end, to abandon it altogether as an energizing force interpenetrating all existence and controlling it in certain definite directions and after certain definite methods.

The rather complete failure of our many modern and ingenious institutions, the failure of institutionalism altogether, is due far less to wrong theories underlying them, or to radical defects in their technique, than it is to this false philosophy and this progressive abandonment of religion. The wrong theories were there, and the mechanical defects, for the machines were conditioned by the principle that lay behind them, but effort at correction and betterment will make small progress unless we first regain the right religion and a right philosophy. I said this to Henri Bergson last year in Paris and his reply was significant as coming from a philosopher. "Yes," he said, "you are right; and of the two, the religion is the more important."

If we had this back, and in full measure; if society were infused by it, through and through, and men lived its life, and in its life, philosophy would take care of itself and the nature of our institutions would not matter. On the other hand, without it, no institution can be counted safe, or will prove efficacious, while no philosophy, however lofty and magisterial, can take its place, or even play its own part in the life of man or society. I must in these lectures say much about institutions themselves, but first I shall try to indicate what seem to me the more serious errors in current philosophy, leaving until after a study of the material forms which are so largely conditioned by the philosophical attitude, the consideration of that religion, both organic and personal, which I believe can alone verify the philosophy, give the institutions life and render them reliable agencies for good.

For a working definition of philosophy, in the sense in which I use it here, I will take two sayings, one out of the thirteenth century, one from the twentieth. "They are called wise who put things in their right order and control them well," says St. Thomas Aquinas. "Philosophy is the science of the totality of things," says Cardinal Mercier, his greatest contemporary commentator, and he continues, "Philosophy is the sum-total of reality." Philosophy is the body of human wisdom, verified and irradiated by divine wisdom. "The science of the totality of things": not the isolation of individual phenomena, or even of groups of phenomena, as is the method of the natural sciences, but the setting of all in their varied relationships and values, the antithesis of that narrowness and concentration of vision that follow intensive specialization and have issue in infinite delusions and unrealities, "Philosophy regards the sum-total of reality" and it achieves this consciousness of reality, first by establishing right relations between phenomena, and then, abandoning the explicit intellectual process, by falling back on divine illumination which enables it to see through those well-ordered phenomena the Divine Actuality that lies behind, informing them with its own finality and using them both as types and as media of transmission and communication. So men are enabled by philosophy "to put things in their right order" and by religion "to control them well," thus becoming indeed worthy to be "called wise."

Now, from the beginnings of conscious life, man has found himself surrounded and besieged by un-calculable phenomena. Beaten upon by forces he could not estimate or predict or control, he has sought to solve their sphynx-like riddle, to establish some plausible relation between them, to erect a logical scheme of things. Primitive man, as Worringer demonstrates in his "Form Problems of the Gothic," strove to achieve something of certitude and fixity through the crude but definite lines and forms of neolithic art. Classical man brought into play the vigour and subtlety and ingenuity of intellect in its primal and most dynamic form, expressed through static propositions of almost mathematical exactness. The peoples of the East rejected the intellectual-mathematical method and solution and sought a way out through the mysterious operation of the inner sense that manifests itself in the form of emotion. With the revelation of Christianity came also, and of course, enlightenment, which was not definite and closed at some given moment, but progressive and cumulative. At once, speaking philosophically, the intellectual method of the West and the intuitive method of the East came together and fused in a new thing, each element limiting, and at the same time fortifying the other, while the opposed obscurities of the past were irradiated by the revealing and creative spirit of Christ. So came the beginnings of that definitive Christian philosophy which was to proceed from Syria, Anatolia and Constantinople, through Alexandria to St. Augustine, and was to find its fullest expression during the Middle Ages and by means of Duns Scotus, Albertus Magnus, Hugh of St. Victor and St. Thomas Aquinas.

It is an interesting fact, though apart from my present consideration, that this philosophical fusion was paralleled in the same places and at the same time, by an aesthetic fusion that brought into existence the first great and consistent art of Christianity. This question is admirably dealt with in Lisle March Phillipps' "Form and Colour."

This great Christian philosophy which lay behind all the civilization of the Middle Ages, was positive, comprehensive and new. It demonstrated divine purpose working consciously through all things with a result in perfect coherency; it gave history a new meaning as revealing reality and as a thing forever present and never past, and above all it elucidated the nature of both matter and spirit and made clear their operation through the doctrine of sacramentalism.

In the century that saw the consummation of this great philosophical system--as well as that of the civilization which was its expositor in material form--there came a separation and a divergence. The balanced unity was broken, and on the one hand the tendency was increasingly towards the exaggerated mysticism that had characterized the Eastern moiety of the synthesis, on the other towards an exaggerated intellectualism the seeds of which are inherent even in St. Thomas himself. The new mysticism withdrew further and further from the common life, finding refuge in hidden sanctuaries in Spain, Italy, the Rhineland; the old intellectualism became more and more dominant in the minds of man and the affairs of the world, and with the Renaissance it became supreme, as did the other qualities of paganism in art as well as in every other field of human activity.

The first fruit of the new intellectualism was the philosophy of Dr. John Calvin--if we can call it such,--Augustinian philosophy, misread, distorted and made noxious by its reliance on the intellectual process cut off from spiritual energy as the sufficient corrective of philosophical thought. It is this false philosophy, allied with an equally false theology, that misled for so many centuries those who accepted the new versions of Christianity that issued out of the Reformation. The second was the mechanistic system, or systems, the protagonist of which was Descartes. If, as I believe, Calvinism was un-Christian, the materialistic philosophies that have gone on from the year 1637, were anti-Christian. As the power of Christianity declined through the centuries that have followed the Reformation, Calvinism played a less and less important part, while the new philosophies of mechanism and rationalism correspondingly increased. During the nineteenth century their control was absolute, and what we are today we have become through this dominance, coupled with the general devitalizing or abandonment of religion.

And yet are we not left comfortless. Even in the evolutionary philosophy engendered by Darwin and formulated by Herbert Spencer and the Germans, with all its mistaken assumptions and dubious methods, already there is visible a tendency to get away from the old Pagan static system reborn with the Renaissance. We can never forget that Bergson has avowed that "the mind of man, by its very nature, is incapable of apprehending reality." After this the return towards the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages is not so difficult, nor even its recovery. If we associate with this process on the part of formal philosophy the very evident, if sometimes abnormal and exaggerated, progress towards a new mysticism, we are far from finding ourselves abandoned to despair as to the whole future of philosophy.

Now this return and this recovery are, I believe, necessary as one of the first steps towards establishing a sound basis for the building up of a new and a better civilization, and one that is in fact as well as in name a Christian civilization. I do not mean that, with this restoration of Christian philosophy, there we should rest. Both revelation and enlightenment are progressive, and once the nexus of our broken life were restored, philosophical development would be continuous, and we should go on beyond the scholastics even as they proceeded beyond Patristic theology and philosophy. I think a break of continuity was effected in the sixteenth century, with disastrous effects, and until this break is healed we are cut off from what is in a sense the Apostolical succession of philosophical verity.

Before going further I would guard against two possible misconceptions; of one of them I have already spoken, that is, the error so frequent in the past as well as today, that would make of philosophy, however sound, however consonant with the finalities of revealed religion, a substitute in any degree for religion itself. Philosophy is the reaction of the intellect, of man to the stimuli of life, but religion is life and is therefore in many ways a flat contradiction of the concepts of the intellect, which is only a small portion of life, therefore limited, partial, and (because of this) sometimes entirely wrong in its conclusions independently arrived at along these necessarily circumscribed lines.

The second possible error is that philosophy is the affair of a small group of students and specialists, quite outside the purview of the great mass of men, and that it owes its existence to this same class of delving scholars, few in number, impractical in their aims, and sharply differentiated from their fellows. On the contrary it is a vital consideration for all those who desire to "see life and see it whole" in order that they may establish a true scale of comparative values and a right relationship between those things that come from the outside and, meeting those that come from within, establish that plexus of interacting force we call life. As for the source of philosophic truth, Friar Bacon put it well when he said "All the wisdom of philosophy is created by God and given to the philosophers, and it is Himself that illumines the minds of men in all wisdom." It is a whimsical juxtaposition, but the first pastor of the Puritans in America, the Rev. John Robinson, testifies to the same effect. "All truth," he says, "is of God ... Wherefore it followeth that nothing true in right reason and sound philosophy can be false in divinity.... I add, though the truth be uttered by the devil himself, yet it is originally of God." There are not two sources of truth, that of Divine Revelation on the one hand, that of science and philosophy and all the intellectual works of man on the other. Truth is one, and the Source is one; the channels of communication alone are different. But truth in its finality, the Absolute, the noumenon that is the substance of phenomena, is in itself not a thing that can be directly apprehended by man; it lies within the "ultra-violet" rays of his intellectual spectrum. "The trammels of the body prevent man from knowing God in Himself" says Philo, "He is known only in the Divine forces in which He manifests Himself." And St. Thomas: "In the present state of life in which the soul is united to a passable body, it is impossible for the intellect to understand anything actually except by turning to the phantasm." Religion confesses this, philosophy constantly tends to forget it, therefore true religion speaks always through the symbol, rejecting, because it transcends, the intellectual criterion, while philosophy is on safe ground only when it unites itself with religion, testing its own conclusions by a higher reality, and existing not as a rival but as a coadjutor.

It is St. Paul who declares that "God has never left Himself without a witness" and the "witness" was explicit, however clouded, in the philosophies of paganism. Plato and Aristotle knew the limitations of man's mind, and the corrective of over-weaning intellectuality in religion, but thereafter the wisdom faded and pride ousted humility, with the result that philosophy became not light but darkness. Let me quote from the great twelfth century philosopher, Hugh of St. Victor, who deserves a better fate than sepulture in the ponderous tomes of Migne: