BOOK III
APPLICATIONS: THE THREE SHADOWS, SICKNESS, SORROW AND SIN, AND THE RIGHT TO LIFE, PROPERTY AND REPUTATION
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Three main thoughts should be kept clear: the end to be realized, the incongruity of the finite and the infinite order, and hence, thirdly, the indispensable ministry of frustration in the realization of the purpose of life.
In regard to the so-called moral end of life, there has been much variety and contrarity of teaching. I shall touch only upon that aspect of the doctrine expounded in the previous book wherein it seems to resemble other doctrines, and where a distinct statement of the difference is therefore imperative. “So act as to develop the faculties of thy fellowman” is not the rule proposed. “So act as to develop the so-called good qualities in the man” is not the rule proposed. The rule reads, “Act so as to bring out the spiritual personality, the unique nature of the other.” Now, in putting the matter in this way, we incurred the danger of seeming to concentrate attention on the individual as a detached being, we seemed to have him only in mind, though it is true, in respect to what is intrinsic in him, the irreducible ethical unit which he essentially is. We must, therefore, constantly remind ourselves that the ethical unit, while unique, is at the same time an inseparable member of a society of differentiated units; that its very distinctiveness consists in injecting, as it were, streams of dynamic energy into its fellow-beings. Or, as I have elsewhere figuratively put it, the distinctiveness of any ethical being consists, so to speak, in emitting a ray the color of which is nowhere else to be found, the miraculous quality of which consists in acquiring this color at the very instant in which it causes counter or complementary colors to appear in its fellow-being. (I am using the words “instant,” “miraculous,” “ray of light,” etc., of course, in a wholly figurative sense.)
We have at last, this is my belief, achieved a positive definition of the spiritual nature. The spiritual nature is that which forever is social in a supra-social sense, as embracing not only human society, but a universal society of spirits. The spiritual nature is that of which the very life consists in starting up unlike but equally worthwhile life elsewhere, everywhere. The spiritual experience to get hold of, therefore, is the consciousness of this interrelation.
The moral end to be realized, in accordance with the deductions of Book II, is “So to act upon another as to evoke in him, and conjointly in oneself, in the same movement and counter-movement the consciousness of the interlacedness of life with life, the reciprocal, universal, infinite interrelatedness.” Now, as a fact, we never realize this end. If we did we should possess what alone is properly called freedom,—freedom in the positive sense being the exercise of power peculiar to ourselves, welling up out of our veriest self, and executing the totality of its effects. Freedom is marked by these two signs: energy coming unborrowed out of self, and producing the totality of its effects. I am free when the thing I do is verily my own, when the power released is the power of my essential self; and when that power is nowhere checked, inhibited or interrupted, so that it produces its due, that is, its universal effects.
An ethical being in an ethical universe would be free. The dynamic energy proceeding from it would be aboriginal. And since it would radiate upon every other member of the infinite society, it would also produce the unstinted plenitude of its effects. Each ethical unit, at its station, would be at once the producer and the recipient of the totality of life.[44]
It is apparent from what has been said that the superlative, sublime thing, freedom, is not realizable except in an infinite world. And hence that the supreme end to be realized by man as a finite being cannot be the full release of unique power in himself. But neither can the end be approximation. In so serious a business as a philosophy of life we ought not to play with words, nor delude ourselves with the implication of proximity seemingly contained in the word approximation. For it being admitted that we cannot reach the ideal, approximation seems to suggest that we come into its neighborhood. But the truth is that the more we advance the less do we arrive in the immediate neighborhood of the ideal, the distance at which it lies becoming ever more remote. The moral end, therefore, for a finite nature, like that of man, is just to realize the unattainableness of the end. There must be no heaven-on-earth illusions, no resting in the development of our inadequate human faculties, and no illusions as to approximation. The unattainableness of the infinite end in the finite world by the finite nature is the Alpha and Omega of the doctrine, as I propound it. Only after this truth has been fully faced and recognized, shall we be in a position to take in the vast significance of the fact that we are nevertheless under a certain coercion to persist in our efforts to attain the unattainable, and in inquiring into the source from which this pressure comes, we shall be led to infer the influence in us of an infinite nature enshrined in this finite nature of ours. In other words, to admit the unattainableness of the end in a finite world by a finite being is the very condition of our acquiring the conviction that there is an infinite world, and that we, as possessing an infinite nature, are included in it.[45]
I have now covered the points mentioned: the end to be realized, the incongruity of the two orders, and the cardinal importance of frustration as a spiritual experience, as a means of spiritual education.
From this point of view the whole question of how to deal with the frustrations of life assumes a new aspect. Lessing published his well-known essay on the Education of the Race towards the close of the eighteenth century.[46] Interest in the subject has since been obscured by the scientific movement, and especially by the evolutionary philosophy. The latter excludes the idea of education in the proper sense, and substitutes for it a natural process, a genetic unfolding. The education of the human race, and of the human individual from the spiritual point of view consists in a series of efforts never to be intermitted, but not necessarily following each other in an orderly series, aiming to embody the infinite in the finite.
Both partial success and failure in these efforts are instrumental to the achievement of the task of mankind. Both serve to make more explicit the character and extent of the ideal, while the ultimate inevitable failure painfully instructs man in the fact of the incongruity of the two orders. The only outcome of human history that we can view with satisfaction on a large scale, is the same as that which we should regard as the best outcome of an individual life, namely, the growing conviction and the clearer vision of the eternal spiritual universe as real. We might say that that man had lived best who on his deathbed could declare with perfect truth: “I have achieved the certainty, and in through the vicissitudes of my life, that there is a universe.” I here emphasize again the distinction between universe and world. To say that the universe is “good” is equivocal. The term “good,” as commonly used, describes the moral striving of a finite nature, and not the quality that belongs to the spiritual universe and its members, thinking of them as ideally we must, as freed from finite limitation. Of the spiritual universe, we might use the term “supra-good,” only we should then be careful to add that the “beyond good” is to be conceived as lying in the direction of the good, while transcending it. Thereby we avoid the pitfall of Nietzsche and of others who speak in a totally different sense of the “beyond good and evil.” We read of a man blessing his children on his deathbed. The highest type of man is the one who in articulo mortis can bless the universe.
The discrepancy of the finite and the infinite order appears on the physical and moral sides. On the physical side it thrusts itself upon our attention in the circumstance that juxtaposition and sequence are incapable of being unified, or totalized. Space and time and that which fills them, matter, are by nature incongruous with spirit. On the moral side the incongruity appears in the deflecting forces of appetite and passion which hinder us in the attainment of the spiritual end and in the fact that our so-called higher faculties are in irreconcilable conflict with one another. The harmonious union of all of them in any individual is a fiction. It is impossible to be fully developed on all sides. And in addition the social substrata in which the spiritual relation has to be worked out, are themselves too deeply beset with internal contrarieties to serve their purpose adequately. The sex relation, for instance, is to a certain extent favorable to the achievement of spirituality, that is, of living in the life of another; yet on the other hand there are elements in it that defeat this very object.
I write, therefore, at the head of such words of counsel as I can hope to give in respect to the conduct of life, the word Frustration. It is understood that this word is not used in the pathetic sense. First because there is partial achievement, moments in life at which the rainbow actually seems to touch the earth. Love and marriage, the completing of a beautiful work of art, the discovery of a new law of nature, the emancipation of an oppressed class, are examples. But these partial successes are presently seen to be partial; they are followed, or even in the moment of triumph, permeated, with the sense of incompleteness and the foreboding of new obscurities and perplexities advancing upon the mind. Yet essentially the doctrine is not a melancholy doctrine, because frustration, though a painful instrument, is yet a necessary instrument of spiritual development. We are not open to the reproach of dampening the zest and relish for life of those who are setting out to try the hazard of their fortunes. They shall put forth their best effort to succeed, but let them be so guided herein that they may meet in the right attitude of mind the disillusionment which is the condition of the revelation. The shadows will and must descend before they can be parted, disclosing the landscape of the spiritual universe.
CHAPTER II
THE THREE GREAT SHADOWS: SICKNESS, SORROW, SIN
Having concentrated attention upon the point that the end is not the development of any particular faculty or assemblage of faculties, but the awakening in man, in and through his development, of the consciousness of interrelation, of life in life, we shall now turn to the three great shadows: sickness, sorrow, sin. In the case of sickness the suffering, however acute, must be made to pass over into action. There is a certain work to be done, something to be accomplished on the sick bed. What is it? I shall briefly review a few of the answers that have been given.
First, the Stoic says: A man in pain is to resist the pain by an act of will, thereby demonstrating that his essential self is inaccessible to bodily suffering. “If there is a pain in thy limb, remember that the pain is in thy limb, and not in thyself.” Now the fortitude of the Stoic is admirable as far as it goes; his counsels are bracing and manly. But, because he is a materialistic pantheist, the reason he gives for his defiance of pain is not convincing. In effect his appeal is rather to the empirical than to the spiritual nature of man. The spiritual nature is characterized by humility; the appeal of the Stoic is to pride. Fate with all its sledgehammer blows shall not crush him. Yet the Stoic’s pride when put to the supreme test does not avail, and the proof of it is that at the last it breaks down in suicide.
We come to a second answer. There is business in hand for the sufferer on the sick bed. What is the business? To hide the expression of his suffering, so that the cloud which rests on him may not cast its shadow upon others, obscuring their sunshine. But, we are bound to ask, are others always worthy of such consideration? Is not our sympathetic regard for their pleasures, their sunshine, often misplaced? Are not their pleasures often selfish and frivolous? The Greeks believed that outcries in situations of great distress are perfectly legitimate, since they seem to afford a kind of relief. Is it not cruel to forbid such outcries? In our age the view prevails that it is a proof of moral grandeur to suppress the signs of suffering. But the cynical question obtrudes itself whether it may not be the collective selfishness of the multitude that imposes this rule. The common run of men desire to go on their way undisturbed by cries that emanate from the sick chamber, and perhaps it is on this account that they impose a rule of behavior based, not on the principle of human worth, but on its opposite. The individual forsooth is not to count; the unhappiness of one is not to interfere with the happiness of the greater number!
There is, however, another view of the matter possible. Everyone carries his own particular burden. When tortured by some painful malady, we are apt to think that others, because they wear a smiling exterior, are therefore free from pain. But often those who seem in sound health are in fact as great sufferers as we, or even greater. And physical pain is not the only kind of suffering. Why, then, should I, for one, add to the troubles of others by imposing my own upon them? Put in this way, it is plain that there is an ethical element in the kind of behavior that is expected of a manly person. But the reason assigned, sympathy with the pleasures of others, is unconvincing. Unless there be some good to which grievous suffering can be made instrumental, there is no warrant for enduring it. As for the Stoics, so for the philosopher of sympathy, the logical end would be suicide, at least when the pain is exceptionally intense.
There is a third answer. Something is to be worked out on the sick bed. What is it? To be purified in the furnace, to learn patience and humble submission to the inscrutable will of God. Patience is the supreme virtue. “Be patient, Oh, be patient,” I once heard a dying man repeat with touching accents. But patience for the sake of what? There must be some object to be gained by the patience to make it commendable. I can be patient in a storm at sea if I may entertain the hope of reaching port. I can be patient in conducting a difficult scientific experiment if I may hope that it will issue in an important discovery, or prepare the way for such discovery by others. I can be patient in sickness if I have any reason to expect a return to health. But patience for mere patience’s sake is absurd. Well, then, the third answer is,—patience for the sake of manifesting your faith and trust in a wise and beneficent Deity. Why he has sent this suffering, why he has so made the world that it is replete with the agony of sentient creatures we do not know. We cannot know. But he knows. Trust him, have faith in him: “Though he slay me yet will I trust him.”
Here a genuine characteristic of the spiritual attitude has been expressed, but the ground on which it is put is once more unconvincing. How do I know that there is such a being as this wise and loving Deity of whom you tell me? By the evidence of his works, by the testimony of the world he has created, by the life for which I am indebted to him. But the world is the playground of good and evil forces. There is a semblance of design; there is on the other hand apparently the wildest disorder. The stars in their courses travel with incredible celerity in every direction, but no astronomer has ever yet been able to discern a plan in their journeyings. Human life is full of sorrow as well as joy; and whether there be more sorrow or more joy in the lives of most persons, who will venture to say? There is kindness, but there is also cruelty. There is coöperation, and there is merciless competition. There is health and bloom, and there is miserable physical decay. At present, in my case, suffering and sorrow are in the ascendant. The picture of the Deity as fashioned from the evidence of experience is dark and bright, cruel and kind. If he be omnipotent, why did he introduce the elements of discord and trouble into his creation? Why, in particular, does he at present torture me so cruelly? In order that I may believe in him despite the evidence! But how can I believe, seeing that in my own case the evidence on the bad side preponderates? Thus the mind of the sufferer on his couch of pain gropes in the labyrinth of argument and counter-argument—for the intellectual processes are often preternaturally acute in times of physical suffering—and there is no outlet. In a fine spiritual nature there is something which pleads that the counter-arguments ought not to prevail. Desperately, by an act of faith, a man lays hold on his God. But presently his faith again relaxes, his state of mind becomes confused, and unless supported by strong impressions received in and retained from childhood on, the third answer will not avail him.
There is business in hand on the sick bed. What is it? The fourth answer, the answer as it appeals to me, depends on the very incongruity of the finite and the infinite order. Every attempt to explain this incongruity breaks down, every theodicy is a fiction. To explain is to find the cause of effects. But the notion of cause does not apply to the relation between the finite and the infinite. And of the infinite order itself we possess only the plan or scheme of relations. The members of this ideal world are related to one another in such a manner that the essential uniqueness of the one is to be provocative of the diverse distinctiveness of the others. This, as I think, is a very fruitful formula, furnishing a rule of conduct to be applied to our finite relations. But it sheds no light on the uniqueness itself, which is forever ideal. What in its ultimate constitution our spiritual being may be, remains unknown. Did we know, were we capable of comprehending the infinite order, and seeing things in that supersolar light, we might then be able to solve the insoluble riddle, the coexistence side by side of the finite and the infinite. As it is, the problem of finiteness especially in its human aspect of suffering and evil is impenetrable, inexplicable. But if we cannot explain suffering and evil, we can utilize them for a definite spiritual end. And that end is to achieve through the ministry of frustration and the persistence of the effort toward the unattainable, the consciousness of the reality of the spiritual universe and of our membership in it.
The answer, therefore, which I should offer, is based on this pivotal distinction between explaining and using. And thus the business in hand, the end to be gained, is the intensified realization of our spiritual interconnectedness with others, the life in life. To this end we accept from the Stoic, though for a reason which he does not give, resistance to pain, and from the philosopher of sympathy the obligation of not clouding the life of others with our shadow, and from the theologian the law of patience—and we take a step beyond all three.
Let me carry this out somewhat more in detail. To gain the consciousness of interrelation, there must be an object outside of myself of supreme interest to me, enabling me to transcend the ego. Now, pain has the opposite effect, that of concentrating attention on the ego. Pain builds a prison around us, raises up high walls which shut us in. Anyone in great pain is incessantly reminded of his physical state. In order that the mind may pass out of the prison cell and over the encompassing wall, there needs to be some object beyond the wall appealing enough to solicit the outward movement. This object is the spiritual self of my fellowmen. It is my concern for their spiritual self which is their highest good, it is my eager wish to reinforce what is best in them that works the transcendence of the ego and of its pains. In such supreme moments the lesser values dwindle into relative insignificance. And what is best in others is the same consciousness on their part of the interrelation. It is this that I am to awaken in them, to strengthen in them by the intensity with which I myself realize it. In the case of loving kin and friends, they, too, suffer with me. In vain I try to hide my sufferings. They divine what I try to suppress; and the more I try to suppress it, the more they suffer with me. They suffer not only with the suffering, but with the attempt to conceal the suffering. I have seen this in the case of a mother at the bedside of her dying daughter. They go with me to the brink of life. They enter into the anxieties and forebodings that haunt my mind as I face death. There may be young children that still need fostering care. Dangers to the family may arise after I am gone. The more my life is implicated in the lives around me, the more as I stand on the edge of life will my thoughts be occupied, not with the obliteration of my empirical self, but with the future of those that survive—that best future of theirs which I long to assure. And they, in turn, if they are fine natures, will pass through this inward experience with me. Thus I descend into the darkness and the depths, and they descend with me; and I am also to rise out of the darkness and the depths, and am to gain the force to do this in order that I may lift them with me.
This is the business in hand. I am to draw myself out of the depths, to overcome the centralizing, egotizing effects of physical and mental pain, in order by my effort to make those around me realize the intensity with which I feel my interrelatedness with them, and thereby to reveal to them the same spiritual power in themselves. Plans for the future education of the children, counsels of peace, by way of anticipation for the too lonely hours that await the most loving and the most beloved,—these things have value chiefly in so far as they are insignificant of the indissoluble interlacing of life with life.[47]
CHAPTER III
BEREAVEMENT
When we reflect on what actually happens in cases of bereavement, we shall find great diversity in different situations. It may be that the deceased person has led a worthless life, and that the grave is allowed to close over him without much regret. Nevertheless, the honor due to worth that never appeared in him ought to be shown. In the worst cases we may not treat human beings like animals. Besides, there are generally one or more persons who seem to have an unreasoning natural affection for the wretched being, and so he does not go wholly without the tribute of tears. Others, like sufferers from cancer, pass through days, weeks, months of acute pain before they die. In their case it is said that death comes as a relief, and often the final relief from the suffering obscures the loss.
Again, in most men’s lives there is an upper and an under side. Though the public career of statesmen, poets, artists may be dazzling, yet their faults or obliquities are probably well enough known to those who have seen them at close range. Obituaries are seldom truthful. Sometimes, however, the reverse happens; men whose names are held up to public obloquy are not always as black as they are painted. Their worst side becomes known to the public, yet they sometimes possess wonderfully fine traits.
Very pathetic is the mourning for a baby, and its unfulfilled promise, or for a defective child, long a burden, yet strangely grieved for when its feeble little flame of life is extinguished.
The most poignant sorrow is that which cannot be communicated to others or shared by others, because the tie severed by bereavement, like that of husband and wife, is between two only. The loss by death of a beloved life companion is apt to lead to an inconsolable state of mind, because in this relation, when finely interpreted, the empirical and the spiritual appear almost to coincide. The ethical rule, Live in the life of another, live so as to enhance to the highest degree the possibilities of another, seems almost no longer a counsel of perfection but an actual experience. Hence the utter grief into which the sundering of the tie is apt to plunge the survivor. On the other hand, Jonathan Edwards said on his deathbed to his wife: “Our relation has been spiritual, and therefore is eternal.” And there is indeed an element of eternality in marriage, only it is not the sex relation as such that is or can be conceived of as eternal. It is not man and woman in their empirical form to which this attribute belongs. Marriage is the sign; the spiritual relation that which is signified.[48]
It may be objected that marriage being a tie strictly between two, one can hardly think without repugnance of an equally intimate, nay, far more intimate, relation with all spiritual beings whatsoever. Yet the spiritual relation is one in which the ethical being is conceived to be in touch with each of the infinite beings that comprise the spiritual universe, pouring its essential life into them, and receiving theirs in return. Is not then the sign incompatible with and contradictory to the thing signified? But it is not of the multitude of mortal men and women surrounding us that we think when we speak of the eternal hosts. From this surrounding swarm of mortals, we retreat, taking refuge in the inmost privacy which we share with one other only. Yet this very inmost intimacy, so far as it is pure, is the emblem of that pure intercourse of essential being with essential being in which we are related to all.[49]
Following up the subject of bereavement, we find the following consolations employed:
The first to be mentioned is, “Bow to the inevitable.” I include this because frustration is inevitable, on account of the discrepancy between the finite and the infinite order, and because we are to use inevitable frustration for the purpose of experiencing the reality of the ideal. But without this use in mind, the inevitable presents itself as a mere blind necessity, in which we can see neither right nor reason, a hostile doom that simply crushes us. The psychological effect of the thought of an event as inevitable, it is true, is in any case calming, but the tranquillity thus induced is a heavy and hopeless one. And those who accept the inevitable in this stupefying manner often become meaner in their way of living. The light of life is for them extinguished. They put up perhaps with creature comforts, or with work that merely keeps the mind occupied, and prevents it from fretting the wound, thus allowing slow time to cicatrize it.
There is, however, a larger way in which a materialist may regard the inevitable. The world in his view being a vast machine, he may, as it were, identify himself with the machine, and thereby rise in thought superior to the injury it inflicts on him. But though we can imagine someone thus deadening his feelings when he himself is the victim, we cannot well conceive of the same remedy applying when a beloved person, say an only child, is being crushed under the Juggernaut car of the world-machine. The great test of one’s philosophy of life is whether it helps us in the case of those whom we love, rather than in the case of the sufferings we experience in our own person.
A second consolation is: Remember the universality of sorrow. Look around you, behold the vast multitude who are suffering like you; remember the countless generations who have suffered in the past, think of the generations to come that will suffer in like manner. Such are some of the consolations of the choruses in the Greek tragedies. Latent perhaps in this mournful view of the facts of existence is another aspect of the matter, namely, the uprising from frustration toward ideal realization. And in so far as this other uplifting view is indeed latent or suggested, the thought of the universality of sorrow has an ennobling effect. On the other hand, without the explication of what may be regarded as implicit in them the consolations of the Greek choruses are inexpressibly saddening.
A third and active variant of the former consolation is: Seek to mitigate the sorrow and trouble of thy fellow-sufferers. Appease the passion of thine own grief by compassion and the works to which it leads. And by as much as activity of any kind is better than passivity, or mere feeling, by so much is this third kind of consolation better than the ones above mentioned. But at bottom the same criticism applies to it. It leaves still unanswered the question, To what end this suffering both of others and of oneself? Not Why? is the question, but To what end? How bereavement may be used so as to bring it into relation with the final end of life?
A fourth consolation is the popular belief in immortality. This is a resort to supernaturalism, and the supernatural should ever be distinguished from the supersensible. Immortality as popularly held involves the continued existence in some empirical form of the essential, central entity in man. For the suggestion that new organs may replace the wornout terrestrial body does not alter the empirical character of the conception. The new organs are still conceived in some vague fashion as similar to those with which we are acquainted.
Finally, my own interpretation of consolation may be set forth in contrast to all these. Again I say that for the bereaved, as for the sick, there is business in hand, there is a task to be performed, a work to be done. What is it? Let me endeavor to explain. The spiritual nature of man is incognizable, only the plan of the relations between spirit and spirit being given. Yet to think of a relation at all we must think of entities or objects between which it subsists. Of the spiritual part of our fellow-beings, therefore, we are bound to fashion mentally a symbolic image, one that shall stand for the real object, the spiritual nature, though we are well aware that it does not adequately express it.
When the beloved person is no longer visibly present, the work we do upon the symbolic image of him is not to cease. We are to review, to summarize the whole existence of a departed friend, as we have probably never done while he was with us. We are to get the total perspective of his life, to see the fine qualities standing out more distinctly; to seize the net result of his existence so far as those character traits are concerned which in him were most analogous to spiritual traits. This image we can now ideally contemplate with the advantage that none of the actual infirmities of his nature can mar it, and that no future events can henceforth alter our impression. The work of clarifying the image of our friend goes on unimpeded. And our own activity in the process of purifying his image of all that was merely fallible in him benefits us in return. The effect of this activity of ours on the datum of his life is our permanent gain. Thus both what he was and what he was not is stimulative. While he lived we performed the function of elimination and concentration with a view of producing progress in him and in ourselves jointly. Progress, induced by us, so far as he is concerned, for all we know is at an end. Progress so far as we are concerned is assured by the activity we continue to expend as long as we live on his memory. And the memory, or the image, stands for the beloved person. There is real mental intercourse wherever there is a movement of one mind towards the outgoings of another, even though the retroactive relation be suspended. The beloved person benefits me, though I no longer benefit him, except indirectly so far as in my own life I possibly expiate his shortcomings and in so far as I bestow on other living persons the advantage I receive from my mental intercourse with him.[50]
What, then, is the business in hand? What is the work to be done? Plainly to tie anew the threads that were broken, to bring it about that the loss, infinitely painful though it be, shall lead to gain, to substitute for the mixed relation of touch and sight the purely spiritual relation.
One more remark must be made in connection with the above. There is at present a tendency to dishonor the past in comparison with the future. Interest seems to lie in what lies ahead. Hence a breathless, forward-urging mood. One consequence of this is that the dead are less honored than of old. Within a single generation, for instance, I have seen not a few eminent persons in the city of New York pass away who up to the time of their death and in their obituaries were greatly and justly praised. I have hardly ever seen their names publicly mentioned since. Already they seem practically forgotten. In our national history likewise only a few of the most eminent are remembered. In like manner in families, the names even of father and mother are seldom mentioned by their surviving adult children, and ancestors at second remove are barely remembered. Now excessive reverence for the past, as in China, is a mark of stationariness. A retrospective point of view is inconsistent with progress. Our face must necessarily be turned toward the future. And yet forgetfulness of those human beings whom we have known, and who represented to us while they lived much of the best that life had to give, seems inhuman and incredible. It is true that I have drawn a sharp distinction between the empirical selves and those spiritual selves which the former for a time enshrined. The empirical selves have now disappeared. The gleam of love in the eye, the luster of beauty, whether of form or of expression, that touched for a season the sacred features, have vanished. On the other hand, the spiritual self as a member of the spiritual universe is confessedly past knowing and past imagining. On what object then shall memory dwell? It may dwell on the empirical self in so far as it was the sign of the thing signified, in so far as the being we knew and loved was to us convincing of the reality of that spiritual world which itself is incognizable by sense or mind. The greatest boon any human being can confer on another is to serve him in attaining the end for which he exists; and the supreme end for us all is the realization of our interrelation with the infinite community of spirits. The woman whom we say we loved, we loved precisely because she revealed to us that spiritual galaxy—because she was a Beatrice, ascending with us, and opening to our sight the eternal expanses.
CHAPTER IV
THE SHADOW OF SIN
If any term in the moral vocabulary stands in need of strict redefinition, it is sin. Three elements combine to complete the idea of sin: first, that the deed was one that ought not to have been done, not so much because of its painful consequences to others or to self, or to both, or, by repercussion on society as a whole; but because it was opposed to what is intrinsically right: in other words, because it contravened the kind of interrelation which would exist in its purity in the ethical manifold.
Secondly, the idea of sin implies that the sinner himself is the doer of the deed, or that there is to this extent freedom of the will. I do not say that he is the cause of which the deed is the effect. Causality appertains to sequent phenomena. As regards freedom of the will, the distinction between the category of interdependence and that of causality is vital. A long series of causes, such as bad heredity, bad environment, etc., may have led A to determine to murder B.[51]
The notion of the freedom of the will as here viewed signifies that no matter what the causal series may have been which leads up to the act, when the act itself is about to be performed, when B is about to experience the effect of A as cause, in that moment the relation of interdependence between A and B ought to arise before the mind of A and withhold him from completing his evil purpose.
Thirdly, it is characteristic of sin that the fuller knowledge that the harmful deed is sinful comes after the act,—that it is the Fruit of the Tree, the enlightenment of the eyes. As the serpent said: “If ye eat of the fruit ye shall be as gods.”
Many a man has done what is called evil, and done it most deliberately, knowing evil as evil. Remember the career of a Cæsar Borgia, the extermination of the Caribbean Indians by the Spaniards, the outrages on women perpetrated during the present war, the exploitation of human labor practiced on a large scale among the civilized nations. That the blackest crimes may be committed with a full knowledge of the horrible consequences to the victims seems hardly to admit of doubt. Evil is known as evil.
But evil in its character as sin cannot be fully recognized prior to the act. In this respect the Greeks had a certain prescience of the truth when they asserted that no one can knowingly commit evil; only they failed to distinguish between evil and sin. A man can knowingly commit evil, but cannot with full consciousness commit sin. The knowledge of the sin is the divine elixir which may be distilled from the evil deed (“Ye shall be as gods”), and the object of every kind of punishment should be to extract that pain-giving but ultimately peace-giving elixir.
Above I mentioned the criminal as the extreme type. But evils in less formidable guise, though not on that account less evil, refined invasions of the personality of others, spiritual oppressions, sometimes deliberate, often unwitting, are included in everyone’s experience. And the process of expiation, by which evil is transcended through the recognition of sin (with its prostrating effect at first, its strangely elevating effect later on) is alike applicable to all. The best of men have to go through this ordeal as well as the worst. Especially is unwitting transgression inevitable. Sophocles makes it the text of his philosophy in the Œdipus, though the solution offered is that of Greek enlightenment and not that of the more profound ethical consciousness.
We have next, in close connection with sin, to consider the tremendous question of responsibility, interpreted from the point of view of our ethical principle. Responsible means answerable. Answerable to whom, and in what sense? As commonly understood, it means answerable to God the Law-giver, to God regarded as the Author of the moral law. God is likened to a sovereign. Any infraction of his law is an offense against the sovereign. Answerable means subject to the pains and penalties which it suits the sovereign to annex to moral offences. There is no intrinsic connection implied between pain and redemption. The pain is supposed to break the will of the offender, or to mellow him, so that he will in future obey the mandates of the sovereign without a murmur.
Again, responsibility may mean responsibility to society. Crime is infectious. A fissure opening at any one point in the dykes erected against crime may let in a flood. The social order as a whole is threatened in every single violation of law. The offender must answer for his defiance of the public will by being subjected to the pains or penalties which society annexes to his crime. The object is the same as before, to break him into submission, to fit or force him into the social mould, to make him harmless, or if possible what is called a “useful citizen.” No internal redemptive change in the nature of the evildoer is contemplated, except as it may be necessary to lead him to a useful or at least a harmless life. The antisocial attitude is to be replaced by the social attitude. Appeals to enlightened self-interest, and to the sympathies are commonly thought sufficient for this purpose.
Thirdly, responsibility means responsible to oneself. There is an inner forum, a tribunal in which the spiritual self sits in judgment on the empirical self. Conscience, the voice of this spiritual self, pronounces the verdict. (Cf. the passages in Kant in which this figure of speech is used.) These are metaphorical expressions.
To grasp the meaning of responsibility from the ethical standpoint, we must lift into view the concept of the task of mankind as a whole, and of the individual as a factor in the fulfilment of that task. This introduces a momentous turn into the discussion of the subject.
The task of mankind is to arrive through its commerce with the finite world, through its unremitting efforts to incorporate the infinite plan within the sphere of human relations, at an increasingly explicit conception of the ideal of the infinite universe; and through partial success and frustration to seize the reality of that universe. Responsibility means participation in this task, sharing its doom, and attaining in oneself, in part, its sublime compensation. The evildoer is to achieve the knowledge that his evil deed is sin, that is to say, that it not only carries with it harm to others and indirectly to himself, but that it is the defeat in him of the task which is set for the human race as a whole on earth. Instead of doing his share in fulfilling this task, in gaining a footing in the finite world for the spiritual relation of living so as to enhance the life of others and thereby his own, he has miserably sought to enhance his life at the expense of other life. The knowledge that he has so acted sears his awakened soul like fire, but it is also the beginning of healing. The transgressor, now sees what he did not see before. He sees by way of contrast the holy pattern of relations which in his act he has travestied, the holy laws which he has infringed, and in imputing sin to himself for transgressing them, he at the same time proclaims himself in his essential being holy, that is, capable of executing them, or at least of striving unceasingly to do so. It is thus that he opens within himself the sources of redemption, unseals the deeper fountains of spiritual energy.
That man is responsible means that he is answerable to do his share in discharging the task of mankind. And when he is inwardly transformed by the consciousness of the holy laws, and of himself as intrinsically committed to holiness, he does thereby advance the business of his kind on earth. In him humanity does take a step forward on the spiritual road. In him one other member of our race has been lifted out of evil, becoming perhaps, from the spiritual point of view, a more advanced member of the forward-pressing host than those who have never passed through an experience like his, who have not been overtly tempted, who have remained conventionally moral, who have not realized the evil that remains unexpurgated within them, and have not passed through the cleansing process of self-condemnation and rebirth.
The incongruity between the finite and the infinite order is the basis of this doctrine of responsibility. Mankind is responsible for seeking to embody the infinite in the finite. It fails to do so, but gains its compensation. The individual shares this responsibility, but both mankind and the individual jointly take a step forward whenever an evil deed is recognized, branded and expiated as sinful. The object of punishment, whether inflicted by society or self-inflicted, is to promote this regeneration which is the expiation.[52]
NOTE
Evil in its ethical meaning presupposes worth as attaching to human beings. To do evil is to offend against worth. To assert the worth of man is to view him as one of an infinite number of beings, united in an infinite universe, each induplicable in its kind. Of this spiritual multitude ideally projected by us as enveloping human society only our fellow human beings are known to us. The moral law is the law which reigns throughout the infinite spiritual universe applied within, the narrow confines of human society. It is applied within those confines, it is spiritual, universal in its jurisdiction.
The task of humanity as a whole is to embody more and more the universal spiritual law in human relationships, and thus to transform and transfigure human society. In the New Testament we read the expression: “the light of God reflected in the face of Christ.” The ideal here indicated may be expressed in the phrase, The spiritual universe with its endless lights reflected on the face of human society! The task of humanity is one which can never be completed, one from which mankind may never desist. To see evil as sin is to see it as contravening the collective task of mankind, the task of weaving the human groups more and more into the fabric of the spiritual relations.
To see evil as sin is to see any single act or series of acts ideally in their infinite connections. This is what I mean when I say that the knowledge of sin comes after the act. I do not mean that there may not be before the act a vague consciousness of the ramified consequences of evil, but that the fuller knowledge of it as sin is the fruit of the act. Nor do I mean that evil in its deeper significance is revealed to every guilty person. The opposite is obviously true. What I mean is that it is possible after having eaten of the Fruit of the Tree to gain the enlightenment, in other words, to become aware of the intrinsic holiness of our nature in consequence of our offense against the holy laws. If anyone should ask “Must I then do evil in order to gain the enlightenment?” the answer is that this question is an idle one. No one can escape doing evil. If not in its grosser forms, then in ways subtler and more complex, but not therefore less evil, every one is bound to make acquaintance with guilt. He need not go out of his way to seek occasion, let him see to it that he improves the occasion when it comes, as inevitably it will, to his spiritual advantage.