Happiness: Essays on the meaning of life

by Karl Hilty

Here is the weakness of that pantheism which, from the time of Spinoza, has so largely controlled speculative thought, and, from the time of Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Goethe, has been the prevailing creed of cultivated people, so far as they concern themselves with philosophy. No form of philosophy is so demoralizing in its ethical consequences as this. It breeds contempt of moral activity; it forfeits the right of the will to oppose what is evil and to create what is good. Sooner or later the corollary of such a faith appears in some form of superstition, crude but compelling,—like hypnotism or spiritualism, or the vulgar and noisy substitutes for religion which are now so conspicuous. Thus the cycle of philosophical speculation fulfils itself, and returns after centuries to the same point at which it began. The final form of truth may come to be, not the systems of abstract philosophy or of speculative theology, which have proved so misleading and unsatisfying, but simply a summing-up of the experience of mankind, as it has affected human destiny through the history of the world; and in this experience we have a philosophy better than abstractions, and always within one’s reach.

And where do we find this philosophy which discovers the meaning of life not through speculative reasoning but through the interpretation of experience, and which observes in experience a spiritual power creating and maintaining both the world and the individual? This is the view of life which had its origin in Israel and was fulfilled in Christianity. It cannot indeed be called in the technical sense a philosophy, for philosophy would feel itself called upon to explain still further that Cause which it thus reached. Theology as a positive science meets the same fate as philosophy. It cannot prove its God, as philosophy cannot interpret the world or human life in or through themselves. What people call ontology, or the proofs of the being of God, is no real science, and convinces none but him who is already pledged. It is in the nature of God to be beyond our interpretations. A god who could be explained would not be God, and a man who could explain God would not be man. The legitimate aim of life is not to see God as He is, but to see the affairs of this world and of human life somewhat as God might see them. It is, therefore, no new thing to question whether theology can be fairly called a science at all. On this point, for instance, the evidence of Christ is in the negative, and the theological speculations of Christians are, in fact, not derived from him. They proceed, on the contrary, from the Apostle Paul, who applied to the proving of Christianity the subtlety of theological training which he had received under Judaism; and even in his case it must be remembered that his teaching was directed to convince those who had been, like him, trained in the theology of Israel.

It must not be imagined, therefore, that the final Cause of the world which we call God, can be philosophically proved. Faith in God is first of all a personal experience. Nothing should disguise this proposition, though it is the stone of offence where many stumble who are seeking an adequate meaning of life. Nothing can be done to help those who refuse this experience. No argument can convince them. There is no philosophical refutation of a determined atheism.

Here is an admission which must gravely affect not only our religious and philosophical relations with others, but even our practical and political life. Here is the fundamental difference between people of the same nation, or condition, or time, or even family. In other differences of opinion there may be found some common ground, but between faith and denial there is no common ground, because we are dealing with a question of the will and because the human will is free. The saying of Tertullian, that the human soul is naturally Christian, is in a literal sense quite untrue. Every man who reflects on his responsibilities recognizes that he is not naturally Christian. He is, at the most, only possibly Christian, as Tertullian perhaps meant to say. He is capable of becoming Christian through the experience of life. Atheism and Christianity are equally accessible to the nature of man.

Faith in God, then, is a form of experience, not a form of proof. If experience were as unfruitful as proof, then faith in God would be nothing more than a nervous condition, and the answer of Festus—“Paul, thou art beside thyself!”—would be the just estimate of a faith like that of Paul. Each period of history has in fact produced many a Festus, sedulously guarding his reason and conscience against all that cannot be proved. Other faith, however, than that which proceeds from experience is not expected by God from any man; while to every man, in his own experience and in the witness of history, this faith is abundantly offered. There is, therefore, in the refusal of faith a confession, not merely of intellectual error, but of moral neglect; and many a man who has surrendered his faith would be slow to confess to others how well aware he is that the fault is his own.

Here, then, is the first step toward the discovery of the meaning of life. It is an act of will, a moral venture, a listening to experience. No man can omit this initial step, and no man can teach another the lesson which lies in his own experience. The prophets of the Old Testament found an accurate expression for this act of will when they described it as a “turning,” and they went on to assure their people of the perfect inward peace and the sense of confidence which followed from this act. “Look unto me, and be ye saved,” says Isaiah; “Incline your ear, and come unto me: hear, and your soul shall live.” From that time to this, thousands of those who have thus changed the direction of their wills have entered into the same sense of peace; while no man who has thus given his will to God has ever felt himself permanently bewildered or forsaken.

Here, also, in this free act of the will, is attained that sense of liberty which in both the Old and New Testaments is described as “righteousness.” It is a sense of initiative and power, as though one were not wholly the subject of arbitrary grace, but had a certain positive companionship with God. It is what the Old Testament calls a “covenant,” involving mutual rights and obligations. No man, however, who accepts this relation is inclined to urge overmuch his own rights, knowing as he well does that his part in the covenant falls ever short and is even then made possible only through his steady confidence in God. Grace, unearned and undeserved, he still knows that he needs; yet behind this grace lies ever the initiative of personal “turning,” and the free assertion of the will as the first step toward complete redemption. To say with Paul that a man is “justified by faith,” or to emphasize as Luther does, even more strongly, the province of grace, is to run some risk of forgetting the constant demand for an initial step of one’s own.

This step once taken, both the world in which one lives and one’s own personal life get a clear and intelligible meaning. On the one hand stands the free will of God, creating and directing the world, not restricted by the so-called laws of nature, yet a God of order, whose desires are not arbitrary or lawless. On the other hand is the free will of man, with the free choice before it of obedience or refusal;—a will, therefore, which may choose the wrong though it may not thereby thwart the Divine purpose. The evil-doer, if impenitent, must suffer, but his evil is converted into good. In such a philosophy what is a wisely adjusted human life? It is a life of free obedience to the eternal and unchangeable laws of God; a life, therefore, which attains through self-discipline successive steps of spiritual power. Life on other terms brings on a progressive decline of spiritual power and with this a sense of self-condemnation. What is the happy life? It is a life of conscious harmony with this Divine order of the world, a sense, that is to say, of God’s companionship. And wherein is the profoundest unhappiness? It is in the sense of remoteness from God, issuing into incurable restlessness of heart, and finally into incapacity to make one’s life fruitful or effective.

If, then, we are at times tempted to fancy that all this undemonstrable experience is unreal, or metaphysical, or purposeless, or imaginary, it is best to deal with such returning scepticism much as we deal with the selfish or mean thoughts which we are trying to outgrow. Let all these hindrances to the higher life be quietly but firmly repelled. The better world we enter is indeed entered by faith and not by sight; but this faith grows more confident and more supporting, until it is like an inward faculty of sight itself. To substitute for this a world of the outward senses is to find no meaning in life which can convey confidence and peace. It is but to embitter every noble and thoughtful nature with restless doubts from which there is no escape.

Such was religion as it disclosed itself to the early Hebrews. Soon, indeed, that religion was overgrown by the formalism which converted its practical teaching into mere prohibitions or mere mechanism; but behind these abuses of later history lay the primitive simplicity of spiritual liberty and life. Such also was the historical beginning of the Christian religion. The mission of Christ, like that of each genuine reformer, was to recall men to their original consciousness of God; and it is perhaps the greatest tragedy of history, while at the same time the best proof of the free will of man, that the Hebrew people, to whom Christ announced that he was expressly sent, could not, as a whole, bring themselves to obey his call. They were held in bondage by their accumulated formalism, as many a man has been ever since. They could not rise to the thought of a worship which was in spirit and in truth. Had they, with their extraordinary gifts, been able to hear Christ’s message, they would have become the dominant nation of the world.