The Faith of the Millions (2nd series)

by George Tyrrell

ADAPTABILITY AS A PROOF OF RELIGION.

Much as we may think of the abstract and objective value of the treatise De vera religione, which forms the usual introduction to those cursus theologici whose multiplication of late has been so remarkable, it can hardly be denied that its cogency is much diminished for the large number of those thinkers who repudiate the philosophical presuppositions upon which that treatise rests. As long as negation halted before that minimum of religious truth which is in some way accessible to reason,—before belief in God and in immortality; as long as the principles and methods of proof by which "natural theology" reached its conclusion were admitted even by those who denied those conclusions, an apologetic such as we are speaking of had an undoubted practical value—not indeed as sufficing to bring conviction to the unwilling or ill-disposed, not as a cause of faith, but as removing an obstacle which existed in the supposed incompatibility of revealed truth with these same rational principles and processes.

Apart from this preparation of the intellect, to which perhaps the name "apologetic" should be more strictly reserved, a prior and more important need was the disposing of the will and affections to the acceptance of the truth. For, in a very real sense, love is the root of faith; and the wish that a thing should be true, not only stimulates the mind to inquire and investigate, but also creates a fear of self-deception and a spirit of incredulity which is the fruitful parent of intellectual difficulties.

Such an appeal to the affections is really outside the province of theological science and belongs rather to the rhetorician, the poet, or the prophet. Yet it was a work at all times needful for the extension and maintenance of the faith, in even a greater degree than the more dispensable preparation of the intellect. For the great multitude of men who are innocent of any really independent thought, who professedly or unconsciously take all their beliefs from some individual or society, there is really no need of scientific apologetic—the sole need being to win or maintain their confidence, their loyalty, their reverence, in regard to some teacher or leader, to Christ or the Church.

It was only towards the close of last century when scepticism was beginning to reach the very root from which the Christian apologetic sprang, and the former philosophic methods had themselves fallen in disrepute, that the necessity of accommodating the remedy to the disease began to be recognized here and there, and of framing an argument that would appeal to the perverse and erratic mind of the day, rather than to an abstract and perfectly normal mind, which, if it existed, would "need no repentance." That a given medicine is the best, avails nothing if it be not also one which the patient is willing to take. If a man has closed his teeth against everything that savours of scholasticism, we must either abandon him or else see if there be any among the methods he will submit to, which may in any wise serve our purpose. And, indeed, among the jangle of philosophies there is surely in all something that is a common heritage of the human mind, a unity which a little skill can detect lurking under that diversity of form which unfortunately it is the delight of most men to emphasize. To suppose that Christianity is pledged to more than this common substratum which none deny, except through verbal confusion, that there is no road to faith but through what is peculiar to scholasticism, or that my first step in converting a man to Christ must be to convert him to Aristotle, is about as intelligent as to suppose that because the Church has adopted Latin as her official language she means to discredit every other.

It was then with a view of meeting the exigencies of the world as it is, not as it might or ought to have been, that such a work as the Génie du Christianisme strove to find an apologetic in what previously had been regarded as outside the domain of theology and more properly the concern of the preacher. The beauty, the solace, the adaptation to our higher needs of Christian teaching had been one thing; its truth, quite another. By dilating eloquently on the first, men might be won to the love of such an ideal, to wish that it might be true; and then disposed to profit by the distinct and independent labours of the apologist whose theme was, not the utility or beauty of the Catholic religion, but solely its truth.

But now that the "scholastic" [1] apologetic was in disgrace with all but those who stood least in need of it, some more acceptable method had to be sought out, and amongst many others there was that of Chateaubriand, which strove to find an argument for the intellect in the very appeal which Christianity made to the will and affections. Because a religion is fair and much to be desired, because, if true, it would give unity and meaning to man's higher cravings, and turn human life from a senseless chaos into an intelligible whole, therefore, and for this reason, it is true.

It is hardly wonderful that such a method should incur the charge of sentimentalism. "It would be so nice to believe it, therefore it must be true," sounds like a shameless abandonment of reasonableness. The fact that a belief is "consoling," quite independently of its truth or falsehood, creates a bias towards its acceptance. That it is pleasant to believe oneself very clever and competent will incline one to that belief until something important depends, not on our thinking ourselves so, but on our being so. Before an examination, the wish to succeed will make me sceptical about my prospects, much as I should like to think them the brightest; afterwards, when self-deception can only console and can do no harm, I shall be credulous of any flattery that is offered me. In one case, my interest depends upon the facts, and therefore the wish to believe makes me critical and even sceptical; in the other, on my belief concerning the facts, and the wish to believe, makes me uncritical and credulous.

It was seemingly a bold and hazardous venture to justify this same credulity, and to affirm that an argument could be drawn from the wish to believe in just those cases where its influence would seem most suspicious; yet this was practically what the new apologetic amounted to. It was an argument from the utility of beliefs to their truth; from the fact that certain subjective convictions produced good results, to the correspondence of such convictions with objective reality. The advantages to the individual and to society of a firm belief in God the righteous Judge, in the sanction of eternal reward and penalty, in the eventual adjustment of all inequalities, in the reversible character of sin through repentance, in the divine authority of conscience, of Christianity, of the Catholic Church, are to a great extent independent of the truth of those beliefs. No amount of hypnotic suggestion will enable a man to subsist upon cinders, under the belief that they are a very nutritious diet; for the effect depends upon their actual nature, and not wholly upon his belief concerning their nature; but the salutary fear of Hell or hope of Heaven, depends not on the existence of either state, but on our belief in its existence. The fact that the denial of these and many similar beliefs would bring chaos into our spiritual and moral life, that it would extinguish hopes which often alone make life bearable, that it would issue for society at large in such a grey, meaningless, uninspired existence as Mr. F. W. Myers prognosticates in his admirable essay on "The Disillusionment of France," [2] all this and much more makes it our interest, if not our duty, to cling to such convictions at all costs. "If these things are not true, it might be said, then life is chaos; and if life be chaos, what does truth matter? Why may not such useful illusions and self-deceptions be fostered? If we are dreaming, let our dreams be the pleasantest possible!"

Nor can it be urged that though some part of our interest thus depends on the beliefs, rather than on their being true, yet the consequences of self-deception are so momentous, as to create a spirit of criticism to balance or over-balance the said bias of credulity. For though the consequences of denial are disastrous if the beliefs are true, yet if they are false, the ill-consequences of belief are almost insignificant. It is sometimes said too hastily that if religion be an illusion, then religious people lose both this life and the next; and it is assumed that an unrestrained devotion to pleasure would secure a happiness which faith requires us to forego. But unless we take a gross, and really unthinkable view of the homogeneity of all happiness, and reduce its differences to degree and quantity, the shallowness of the preceding objection will be apparent. It is only through restraint that the higher kinds of temporal happiness are reached, and as confusions are cleared away in process of discussion, it becomes patent that such restraint finds its motive directly or indirectly in religion. When the religious influence with which irreligious society is saturated, has exhausted itself, and idealism is no more, the unrestrained egoistic pursuit of enjoyment must tend to its steady diminution in quantity, and its depreciation in kind. The sorrow and pain entailed by fidelity to the Christian ideal is, on the whole, immeasurably less in the vast majority of cases than that attendant on the struggles of unqualified selfishness, while the capacities for the higher happiness are steadily raised and largely satisfied by hope and even by some degree of present fruition. Even vice would be in many ways sauceless and insipid in the absence of faith. Who does not remember the old cynic's testimony (in the "New Republic") to the piquancy lent by Christianity to many a sin, otherwise pointless. If the moralist distinguishes between actions that are evil because they are forbidden, and those that are forbidden because they are evil, the libertine has a counter-distinction between those that are forbidden because they are pleasant, and those that are pleasant because they are forbidden. St. Paul himself is explicit enough as to this effect of the law.

Look at it how we will, even were religion unfounded our life would on the whole gain in fulness far more than it would lose, by our believing in religion. Hence some of our more thoughtful agnostics, however unable themselves to find support in what they deem an illusion, are quite willing to acknowledge the part religion has played in the past in the evolution of rational life, and to look upon it as a necessary factor in the earlier stages of that process whose place is to be taken hereafter by some as yet undefined substitute. If indeed Nature thus works by illusions and justifies the lying means by the benevolent end, it is hard to believe in a moral government of the universe, or to hope that an "absolute morality"—righteousness for its own sake—will be the outcome of such disreputable methods. But till the illusion of "absolute morality" is strong enough to take care of itself, and has passed from the professors to the populace, it is plainly for the interest and happiness of individuals and of society to hold fast to religion.

Undoubtedly then the advantages resulting from a belief in religion, whether valid or illusory, are such as to incline not only the higher and more unselfish minds, but even those which are more prudential and self-regarding, to wish to hold that belief—to be unwilling to hear arguments against it. But among the former class will be found many intellectually conscientious and even scrupulous persons, whom the recognition of this inevitable bias will drive to an extreme of caution. Not so much because the facts believed-in are of such intense moment, but rather because the belief itself, whether true or false, is so consoling and helpful, that there seems to them a danger of self-deception just proportioned to their wish to believe.

It were then no small rest and relief to such, could it be shown that what they deem a reason for doubt, is really a reason for belief; that the welcome which all that is best in them gives to a belief, affords some sort of philosophical justification thereof.

This particular argument had undoubtedly a more favourable hearing in the age of Chateaubriand, when unbelief stopped short at the threshold of what was called "Natural Religion," and the apologist's task was confined to the establishment of revelation. "It is now pretty generally admitted," says the author of Contemporary Evolution, "with regard to Christianity and theism that the arguments really telling against the first, are in their logical consequences fatal also to the second, and that a Deus Unus, Remunerator once admitted, an antecedent probability for a revelation must be conceded."

Given an intelligent and benevolent author of the universe, it is not perhaps very difficult to show that any further religious belief approximates to the truth in the measure that it satisfies the more highly developed rational needs of mankind. It is not seriously denied any longer that religion is an instinct with man, however it may be lacking in some individuals or dormant in others. We have savages at both ends of the scale of civilization, but man is none the less a political creature; nor does the existence of idiots and deaf mutes and criminals at all affect the fact that he is a reasoning and speaking and ethical animal. As soon as he wakes to consciousness, he feels that he is part of a whole, one of a multitude; and that as he is related to his fellow-parts—equals or inferiors—so also is he related to the Whole which is above him and greater than all put together. Religion, taken subjectively, in its loosest sense, is a man's mental and moral attitude in regard to real or imaginary superhuman beings—a definition which includes pantheism, polytheism, monotheism; moral, non-moral, and immoral religions; which prescinds from materialist or spiritualist conceptions of the universe. And by a religion in the objective sense, so far as true or false can be predicated of it, we mean a body of beliefs intended to regulate and correct man's subjective religion. It is to such systems and their parts that we think the above test of "adaptability" maybe applied as we have stated it.

We must of course assume that our distinction of higher from lower states of rational development is valid; that we can really attach some absolute meaning to the terms "progress" and "decline;" that there is some vaguely conceived standard of human excellence which such terms refer to. Else we are flung into the very whirlpool of scepticism. Measured back from infinity it may be infinitesimal, but measured forward from zero, the difference of mental and, partly, of moral culture between ourselves and the aborigines of Australia is considerable, and is really to our advantage. Now if a given religion or religious belief suggests itself more readily, or when suggested commends itself more cordially in the measure that men's spiritual needs are more highly developed; if, furthermore, it tends to make men still better and to raise their desires still higher so as to prepare the way for a yet fuller conception of religious truth, it may be said to be adapted to human needs; and it is from such adaptability that we argue its approach to the truth. We say "its approach," for all our ideas of the Whole, of the superhuman, of those beings with which religion deals, are necessarily analogous and imperfect. What is admitted by all with regard to the strict mysteries of the Christian faith is in a great measure to be extended to the central or fundamental ideas of all religion. They are at best woefully inadequate, and if the unity between the parts of an idea be organic and not merely mechanical, they must be regarded as containing false mingled with true.[3] Still some analogies are less imperfect, less mingled with fallacy than others, and there is room for indefinite approximation towards an unattainable exactitude. For example, assuming theism, as we do in the argument under consideration, it is evident that man conceives the superhuman object of his fear and worship more truly as personal than as impersonal; as spiritual than as embodied; as one or few than as many; as infinite than as finite; as creator than as maker; as moral than as non-moral or immoral; as both transcendent and immanent than as either alone. If then it appears that as man's intelligence and morality develop in due proportion, he advances from a material polytheistic immoral conception of the All, to a spiritual and moral monotheism, it may be claimed that the latter is a less inadequate conception. And similarly with regard to other dependent religious beliefs which usually radiate from the central notion. It will be seen that we do not argue from the self-determined wishes or desires of any individual or class of individuals to their possible fulfilment,—to the existence in Nature of some supply answering to that demand; we do not argue that because many men or all men desire to fly, flying must for that reason alone be possible. We speak of the needs of man's nature, not of this individual's nature; of needs consequent on what man is made, and not on what he has made himself; of those wants and exigencies which if unsatisfied or insatiable must leave his nature not merely negatively imperfect and finite, but positively defective and as inexplicable as a lock without a key—not necessarily, of needs felt at all times by every man, but of those which manifest themselves naturally and regularly at certain stages of moral and social development; just as the bodily appetites assert themselves under certain conditions not always given.

Now there is one form in which this argument from adaptability is somewhat too hastily applied and which it is well to guard against. Were we to find a key accommodated to the wards of a most complicated lock, we should be justified in concluding, with a certainty proportioned to the complexity of the lock, that both originated with one and the same mind; and so, it is urged, if a religion, say Christianity, answers to the needs of human nature, we may conclude that it is from the Author of human nature with a certainty increasing as it is seen to answer to the higher and more complex developments of the soul.

Now if, like the key in our illustration, the religion in question were something given in rerum natura independent of human origination in any form, this argument would be practically irresistible. That besides those beliefs which lead man on to an ever fuller understanding of his better self, and stimulate and direct his moral progress, Christianity imposes others more principal, of which man as yet has no exigency, and which hint at some future order of existence that new faculties will disclose—all this, in no wise makes the argument inapplicable. The whole system of beliefs is accepted for the sake, and on the credit, of that part which so admirably unlocks the soul to her own gaze. "Now are we the sons of God, but it doth not yet appear what we shall be;" if besides satisfying our present ideal of religion, Christianity hints at and prepares us for such a transition as that from merely organic to sensitive life, or from this, to rational life, it rather adds to than detracts from the force of the argument.

Yet all this supposes that Christianity is something found by man outside himself, with whose origination he had nothing to do; but, if this be established, its supernatural origin, and therefore, supposing theism, its truth, is already proved, and can only receive confirmation from the argument of adaptability. If the Book of Mormon really came down from Heaven, my conviction that polygamy is not for the best, would seem a feeble objection against its claims. That the Judaeo-Christian religion is supernatural and is from without, not only with respect to the individual but to the race; that it is an external, God-given rule, awakening, explaining, developing man's natural religious instinct, correcting his own clumsy interpretations thereof, is just what gives it its claim to pre-eminence over all, even the most highly conceived, man-made interpretations of the same instinct.

Yet though claiming to be a God-made interpretation, it is confessedly through human agency, through the human mind and lips of the prophets and of Christ that this revelation has come to us. Moreover, it involves, though it transcends, all those religious beliefs of which human nature seems exigent and which are, absolutely speaking, attainable by what might be called the "natural inspiration" of religious genius. Viewing the whole revelation in itself, its adaptability is evident only in respect to that part which might have originated with those minds through which it was delivered to us. If the beliefs proposed seem to have anticipated moral and intellectual needs not felt in the prophet's own age or society, this might be paralleled from the inspiration of genius in other departments, and could not of itself be regarded as establishing the ab extra character of the revelation.

Plainly, then, so far as a religion claims to be from outside, its adaptability to our religious and moral instincts may confirm but cannot establish its Divine origin, which, given theism, is equivalent to its truth. For to show that it is from outside, is to show that it is from God.

It is only therefore with regard to man-made interpretations of our spiritual instincts, to the natural inspirations of religious genius, to the intuitions and even the reasoned inferences of the conscientious and clean-hearted, that the argument from adaptability can have any independent value. It is now no longer as one who argues from a comparison of lock and key to their common authorship; but rather we have a self-conscious lock, pining to be opened, and from a more or less imperfect self-knowledge dreaming of some sort of key and arguing that in the measure that its dream is based on true self-knowledge there must be a reality corresponding to it—a valid argument enough, supposing the locksmith to act on the usual lines and not to be indulging in a freak.

Such, in substance, is the argument from adaptability founded on the assumption of theism and applied to the criticism or establishment of further religious beliefs. It is indeed somewhat stronger when we remember that the self-consciousness, with which we fictitiously endowed the lock, plays chief part in the very design and structure of man; that his self-knowledge, his moral and religious instincts, his desire and power of interpreting them, are all from the Author of his nature.

Of this difference Tennyson takes note in applying the argument from adaptability to the immortality of the soul:

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust;
Thou madest man, he knows not why;
He thinks he was not made to die,
And Thou hast made him, Thou art just.

But so far as the argument presupposes theism it cannot be made to support or even confirm theism. If, then, we want to make the argument absolutely universal with regard to religious beliefs—theism included and not presupposed—and so to make it available for apologetic purposes in regard to those whose doubt is more deep-seated, we must inquire whether any basis can be found for it in non-theistic philosophy; whether, prescinding from Divine governance and from an intelligent purpose running through nature, the adaptability of a belief to the higher needs of mankind can be considered in any way to prove its truth. So far we have only shown that such a conclusion results from a clearer insight into the theistic conception. Can we show that it springs, co-ordinately with theism, from some conception prior to both?