A Short History of Christianity / Second Edition, Revised, With Additions

by J. M. Robertson

The recent history of the near East conveys a similar lesson. For generations the Turkish autocracy was able to keep down the Christian peoples under its rule by means of their mutual hates. It was not community of religion that brought about the Balkan and Greek combination of 1912: it was military and political calculation; and the overthrow of Turkey was no sooner completed than the Christian combatants were on the verge of war with each other. Between Greek and Bulgarian there seems to be to-day the same animosity as existed in the Dark Ages; and Greek orthodoxy declaims against the “irreligion” of educated Bulgaria, while the mass of the Bulgarian people remains as superstitious as that of Greece. As regards standards of conduct, the former seem to have capped every savagery of which Turkish irregulars have ever been guilty. Whatever may be the outcome of freedom for self-development in the light of western civilization, there is plainly nothing to choose as between Christian and Moslem moral material in those regions after two thousand years of Christianity. Such facts bring out once for all the sociological truth as to the part played by Christianity in civilization. The progress of the more advanced States has not been caused by creed. If that were the lifting factor, Abyssinia should be on the same plane with the leading European States. Once more, it is not Christianity that has civilized modern Europe, but the variously caused and conditioned progress of Europe that has civilized Christianity; even as the conditions and forces of ancient Hellas civilized its paganism.

Such tests are of course not those that will be first put by a scrupulous mind seeking to know whether the Christian creed be true. Rather they are forced on such a mind by the tactics of believers, who as a rule seek to evade the fundamental issue. It is not unlikely, therefore, in view of present painful experience, that for some time to come the stress of defence will shift to the attempt, never entirely abandoned, to defend the faith on evidential or philosophic grounds. We have thus to consider finally the apparent effects of Christian credences and institutions on the intellectual life of the time.

§ 2. Intellectual Influence

So far as it can be historically traced, the intellectual influence of Christianity was relatively at its best when it began to be propounded as a creed in critical relation to Judaism. Intellectual gain was checked as soon as it became a substantive creed, demanding submissive acceptance. From that point forward it becomes a restraint on intellectual freedom, save insofar as it stirred believers to a one-sided criticism of pagan beliefs, a process of which the educational effect was promptly annulled by a veto on its extension to the beliefs of the critics. It has been argued indeed that modern science has been signally advanced by the mental bias that goes with monotheism; but the historical fact is that Jewish monotheism was much less friendly to science than Babylonian polytheism; that the beginnings of Greek science were among polytheists and, perhaps, atheists; that Saracen monotheism owed its scientific stimulus to the recovered thought of polytheistic Greece; and that, whatever impulse a truly monotheistic philosophy may have given to modern science, the usual influence of Christian belief has been to override the idea of invariable causation in nature. Even after the belief in recurrent miracles is disavowed, the doctrine and practice of prayer remain to represent the old concept.

On the other hand, the kind of violence done to the instinct for concrete or historical truth by the frauds and delusions of the early and medieval Church, though greatly attenuated in modern times, has never ended. Critical judgment has only slowly recovered the strength and stature it had in the pre-Christian world; and wherever faith has plenary rule such judgment is liable to arbitrary interdict. It is true that even in the nineteenth century some great servants of science have been either orthodox Christians or devout theists. Faraday and Joule, Pasteur and Kelvin, are cases in point. But instead of the religious creed having in such cases furnished the cue or the motive to the scientific work done, it is found to be out of all logical relation to it, and to be a mere obstruction to the scientific use of the reason on the religious problem itself.

To a considerable extent the rigid adherence to religious beliefs or professions in defiance of evidence is on all fours with any other form of conservatism, as the social and the political. Inasmuch, however, as religion proffers both a specific comfort in this life and a specific reward in another, it has a power of intellectual fixation with which no other can compare; and there is something unique in the spectacle of religious doctrines kept in an unchanged form by means of an economic basis consecrated to them. It has been seen in the foregoing history that for two thousand years no creed with such a basis has been overthrown either wholly or locally save by a force which confiscated its endowments or suppressed its worship. Thus, and thus only, did Christianity triumph over southern and northern paganism; thus did Islam triumph over Christianity in parts of its world, and fall again before it in others; and thus did Protestantism expel Catholicism from many countries and suffer expulsion in turn from some of them. Where endowments can subsist, with freedom of worship, no form of doctrine that is wedded to the endowments ever yields directly to criticism.

Christianity has thus had in the modern world a relatively more sinister influence on the intellectual life than was wrought by any phase of paganism even in periods when the intelligence of the ancient world was divorced from its established religion. The divorce is now more complete than ever before; but the bribe to conformity is greater than ever, relatively at least to the light of the time. The result is a maximum of insincerity, whether or not the bribe is given by a standing endowment. Dissenting or voluntary churches in the Protestant countries offer an income to more or less educated men on condition of propounding the creed of the past; and the more intelligent minority within the churches are weighed down in every effort at a modification of doctrine by the orthodoxy of the uncritical or fanatical many, who control the endowments. Social and commercial life conform to the conditions, and everywhere the profession of belief is far in excess of the actuality—a state of things unfavourable to all morality. The very attempt to adjust the system to the pressure of modern thought exhibits the process of demoralization. From the clergy we have neither straightforward defence nor straightforward avowal of old error. Christianity is defended not as being true but as being socially useful and privately comforting; and a general pretence is made of maintaining the continuity of a historic creed whose central and fundamental dogmas are no longer held save by the most uncritical.

It is not only in religion and ethics that the influence of endowed and organized Christianity is thus intellectually baneful. Every science in turn, from the days of Galileo, has had to fight for its life against the sanctified ignorance of all the churches; and while the physical sciences, which can be taught without open reference to traditional error, have carried their point and received endowment in turn, happily without being tied down to any documents, the moral sciences are either kept in tutelage to theology in the universities of many countries, our own included, or forced to leave out of their scope the phenomena of religion itself, and in particular the sociological problem of Christian history. At the beginning of the present century there was not a single chair of sociology in a British university[2]; and even in the United States, where such chairs are common, they and the historical chairs alike are barred from any free treatment of religious evolution. Ethical teaching is similarly limited; and a science which on that side threatened to turn the flank of religious doctrine—to wit, phrenology—was at an early stage of its progress in the first half of the nineteenth century successfully ostracized, so that, lacking the expert handling without which no science can be kept sound, it has been relegated even for most naturalists to the limbo of exploded error, without ever having been scientifically developed or confuted.

In fine, the science of society, the most momentous of all, is by reason of the very nature of organized religion kept in trammels, lest it should undermine the reign of faith. It makes its way in virtue of the whole scientific movement of the age, and is perhaps most progressive in the countries where, as in France and Italy, an official Catholicism has prevented the academic compromise between faith and science which is effected in the Protestant world, but is powerless to keep independent science out of the universities. In those countries, however, there are compromises of other kinds; and in modern France there has been seen, in the case of Captain Dreyfus, the spectacle of the clerical influence combining with that of the army to enforce an insensate act of injustice, less from any intelligent motive of a direct bearing than for the sake of a general alliance in which each of the two great conservative and anti-progressive institutions backs the other for general reactionary ends. Thus religious feeling abets social and political malice; and such movements as that of anti-Semitism, fostered by Christian organizations, can secure support from others as the price of clerical support.