It would help us little, in trying to understand these doctrines, to work over the dialectic of them, and to express the contradiction in somewhat veiled terms or according to new pictorial analogies. Good and evil, in the context of life, undoubtedly have common causes; but that system which involves both is for that very reason not an ideal system, and to represent it as such is simply to ignore the conscience and the upward effort of life. The contradiction can be avoided only by renouncing the meaning of one of the terms; either, that is, by no longer regarding the good as an absolute creator, but merely as a partial result or tendency in a living world whose life naturally involves values, or else by no longer conceiving God as the ideal term in man’s own existence. The latter is the solution adopted by metaphysicians generally, and by Saint Augustine himself when hard pressed by the exigencies of his double allegiance. God, he tells us, is just, although not just as man is, nor as man should be. In other words, God is to be called just even when he is unjust in the only sense in which the word justice has a meaning among men. We are forced, in fact, to obscure our moral concepts and make them equivocal in order to be able to apply them to the efficient forces and actual habits of this world. The essence of divinity is no longer moral excellence, but ontological and dynamic relations to the natural world, so that the love of God would have to become, not an exercise of reason and conscience, as it naturally was with Saint Augustine, but a mystical intoxication, as it was with Spinoza.
The sad effects of this degradation of God into a physical power are not hard to trace in Augustine’s own doctrine and feeling. He became a champion of arbitrary grace and arbitrary predestination to perdition. The eternal damnation of innocents gave him no qualms; and in this we must admire the strength of his logic, since if it is right that there should be wrong at all, there is no particular reason for stickling at the quantity or the enormity of it. And yet there are sentences which for their brutality and sycophancy cannot be read without pain—sentences inspired by this misguided desire to apologise for the crimes of the universe. “Why should God not create beings that he foreknew were to sin, when indeed in their persons and by their fates he could manifest both what punishment their guilt deserved and what free gifts he might bestow on them by his favour?” “Thinking it more lordly and better to do well even in the presence of evil than not to allow evil to exist at all.” Here the pitiful maxim of doing evil that good may come is robbed of the excuse it finds in human limitations and is made the first principle of divine morality. Repellent and contorted as these ultimate metaphysical theories may seem, we must not suppose that they destroyed in Saint Augustine that practical and devotional idealism which they contradicted: the region of Christian charity is fortunately far wider and far nearer home than that of Christian apologetics. The work of practical redemption went on, while the dialectics about the perfection of the universe were forgotten; and Saint Augustine never ceased, by a happy inconsistency, to bewail the sins and to combat the heresies which his God was stealthily nursing, so that in their melodramatic punishment his glory might be more beautifully manifested.
The problem among the protestants.
It was Saint Augustine, as we know, who, in spite of his fervid Catholicism, was the favourite master of both Luther and Calvin. They emphasised, however, his more fanatical side, and this very predestinarian and absolutist doctrine which he had prevailed on himself to accept. Here was the pantheistic leaven doing its work; and concentration of attention on the Old Testament, given the reformers’ controversial and metaphysical habit of thought, could only precipitate the inevitable. While popular piety bubbled up into all sorts of emotional and captious sects, each with its pathetic insistence on some text or on some whimsey, but all inwardly inspired by an earnest religious hunger, academic and cultivated Protestantism became every day more pale and rationalistic. Mediocre natures continued to rehearse the old platitudes and tread the slippery middle courses of one orthodoxy or another; but distinguished minds could no longer treat such survivals as more than allegories, historic or mythical illustrations of general spiritual truths. So Lessing, Goethe, and the idealists in Germany, and after them such lay prophets as Carlyle and Emerson, had for Christianity only an inessential respect. They drank their genuine inspiration directly from nature, from history, from the total personal apprehension they might have of life. In them speculative theology rediscovered its affinity to neo-Platonism; in other words, Christian philosophy was washed clean of its legendary alloy to become a pure cosmic speculation. It was Gnosticism come again in a very different age to men in an opposite phase of culture, but with its logic unchanged. The creation was the self-diremption of the infinite into finite expression, the fall was the self-discovery of this finitude, the incarnation was the awakening of the finite to its essential infinity; and here, a sufficient number of pages having been engrossed, the matter generally hastened to a conclusion; for the redemption with its means of application, once the central point in Christianity, was less pliable to the new pantheistic interpretation. Neo-Platonism had indeed cultivated asceticism, ecstasies, and a hope of reabsorption into the One; but these things a modern, and especially a Teutonic, temperament could hardly relish; and though absolutism in a sense must discountenance all finite interests and dissolve all experience, in theory, into a neutral whole, yet this inevitable mysticism remained, as with the Stoics, sternly optimistic, in order to respond to the vital social forces which Protestantism embodied. The ethical part of neo-Platonism and the corresponding Christian doctrine of salvation had accordingly to be discarded; for mystical as the northern soul may gladly be in speculation, to satisfy its sentimentality, it hardly can be mystical in action, since it has to satisfy also its interest in success and its fidelity to instinct.
Pantheism accepted.
An absolutism which thus encourages and sanctions the natural will is Stoical and pantheistic; it does not, like Indian and Platonic absolutism, seek to suspend the will in view of some supernatural destiny. Pantheism subordinates morally what it finds to be dependent in existence; its religion bids human reason and interest abdicate before cosmic forces, instead of standing out, like Buddhism and Christianity, for salvation, for spiritual extrication, from a world which they regard as delusive and fallen. The world of German absolutism, like the Stoic world, was not fallen. On the contrary, it was divinely inspired and altogether authoritative; he alone who did not find his place and function in it was unholy and perverse. This world-worship, despising heartily every finite and rational ideal, gives to impulse and fact, whatever they may be, liberty to flourish under a divine warrant. Were the people accepting such a system corrupt, it would sanction their corruption, and thereby, most probably, lead to its own abandonment, for it would bring on an ascetic and supernaturalistic reaction by which its convenient sycophancy would be repudiated. But reflection and piety, even if their object be material and their worship idolatrous, exalt the mind and raise it above vulgar impulse. If you fetch from contemplation a theoretic license to be base, your contemplative habit itself will have purified you more than your doctrine will have power to degrade you afresh, for training affects instinct much more than opinion can. Antinomian theory can flourish blamelessly in a puritan soil, for there it instinctively remains theoretical. And the Teutonic pantheists are for the most part uncontaminated souls, puritan by training, and only interested in furthering the political and intellectual efficiency of the society in which they live. Their pantheism under these circumstances makes them the more energetic and turns them into practical positivists, docile to their social medium and apologists for all its conventions. So that, while they write books to disprove naturalism in natural philosophy where it belongs, in morals where naturalism is treason they are themselves naturalists of the most uncritical description, forgetting that only the interests of the finite soul introduce such a thing as good and evil into the world, and that nature and society are so far from being authoritative and divine that they have no value whatever save by the services they may render to each spirit in its specific and genuine ambitions.
Plainer scorn for the ideal.
Indeed, this pantheistic subordination of conscience to what happens to exist, this optimism annulling every human ideal, betrays its immoral tendency very clearly so soon as it descends from theological seminaries into the lay world. Poets at first begin to justify, on its authority, their favourite passions and to sing the picturesqueness of a blood-stained world. “Practical” men follow, deprecating any reflection which may cast a doubt on the providential justification of their chosen activities, and on the invisible value of the same, however sordid, brutal, or inane they may visibly be. Finally, politicians learn to invoke destiny and the movement of the age to save themselves the trouble of discerning rational ends and to colour their secret indifference to the world’s happiness. The follies thus sanctioned theoretically, because they are involved in a perfect world, would doubtless be perpetrated none the less by the same persons had they absorbed in youth a different religion; for conduct is rooted in deep instincts which affect opinion more than opinion can avail to affect them in turn. Yet there is an added indignity in not preserving a clear and honest mind, and in quitting the world without having in some measure understood and appreciated it.
The price of mythology is superstition.
Pantheism is mythical and has, as we have just seen, all the subversive powers of ordinary superstition. It turns the natural world, man’s stamping-ground and system of opportunities, into a self-justifying and sacred life; it endows the blameless giant with an inhuman soul and then worships the monstrous divinity it has fabricated. It thereby encounters the same dilemma that defeats all mythology when it forgets its merely poetic office and trespasses upon moral ground. It must either interpret the natural world faithfully, attributing to the mythical deity the sort of life that dramatically suits its visible behaviour, or if it idealises and moralises the spectacle it must renounce the material reality and efficacy of its gods. Either the cosmic power must cover the actual goodness and badness in nature impartially, when to worship it would be idolatrous, or it must cover only the better side of nature, those aspects of it which support and resemble human virtue. In the latter case it is human virtue that mythology is formulating in a dramatic fiction, a human ideal that is being illustrated by a poet, who selects for the purpose certain phases of nature and experience. By this idealisation the affinity which things often have to man’s interests may be brought out in a striking manner; but their total and real mechanism is no better represented than that of animals in Æsop’s fables. To detect the divergence it suffices to open the eyes; and while nature may be rationally admired and cherished for so supporting the soul, it is her eventual ministry to man that makes her admirable, not her independent magnitude or antiquity. To worship nature as she really is, with all her innocent crimes made intentional by our mythology and her unfathomable constitution turned into a caricature of barbarian passions, is to subvert the order of values and to falsify natural philosophy. Yet this dislocation of reason, both in its conceptions and in its allegiance, is the natural outcome of thinking on mythical lines. A myth, by turning phenomena into expressions of thought and passion, teaches man to look for models and goals of action in that external world where reason can find nothing but instruments and materials.