Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook: Ten Lectures on Social Subjects

by Laurence Housman

For surely (put it thus), when across limited vision a thread passes, of which the eye can see neither the beginning nor the end, and when upon that thread, for the time being, the limited life hangs all its hopes, is it not quite natural for that clinging life to identify itself, through the closeness of its momentary contact, with the spiritually apprehended whole, and to identify with that concept of a general continuity its own present degree of individual consciousness. Moreover, in a world governed by cause and effect, it can hardly be predicated that the results either of love or hatred, individually indulged, are not, or may not be illimitable, even though the individual spirit be not there to preside consciously over their extended operations.

When, therefore, so much is true, when so many elements which pass through our lives have (by association), links and connections which to finite minds seem infinite, they may well impress us (by reason of the close identification established between us and them for the time being) with a sense that our own individual share and apprehension of them are addressed also to a universal goal.

“Universal,” for surely mere continuity—a stretching out of length without corresponding breadth—ought not to be the limit of our claim. Yet it is significant that, in their demand for personal immortality, so many thinkers have found sufficient satisfaction in the idea of an extended survival through time into eternity, without making a corresponding demand for extension into unity through space. They are willing, that is to say, to put up for all eternity with those limitations of personality which they enjoy—the relations of meum and tuum upon which the possessive life of the senses is based, but not with those limitations (the prospect of which they do not enjoy), the termination of those same relationships imposed by death. It seems rather a one-sided way of doing things—this narrowing of the claim in a two-dimensional direction (one might almost say in a one-dimensional), yet it has been very generally done—I shall presently hope to show why—and most of our Western theology has built up our future hopes for us entirely on those lines. Personality, the sort of personality we have learned to enjoy, is based upon limitations. Abolish limitations in your conception of future life, and for the majority of those pious minds which now clamour for it as their due you abolish personality also; it is swallowed up not in death but in a life from which the individual power to focus and to enjoy has disappeared.

It is true that there has now begun, in modern socialistic Christianity, a yeasting of desire for an all round, or expansive, as well as a forward, or extensive personality after death; that an all-embracing and not merely an all-surviving consciousness is more and more predicated for the full satisfaction of man’s spiritual need. But that was by no means the form of moral hunger which permeated primitive or mediæval Christianity, and sufficed, we are to suppose, to keep poor human nature from that depravity into which it will fall if belief in personal immortality is surrendered. Oregon, as we know, looked forward to finding in the nether groans of the damned a full completion of the orchestral harmonies of Heaven; and in the whole conception of immortality as it has illumined the path of the Church from its beginning down to quite modern times, individualism has been rampant. On that basis, so long as it satisfied his moral conscience, man did great things with it, making it shine as a great light by the unflinching witness which he bore to its efficacy through suffering and through martyrdom.

It is probably true that an individualistic form to the doctrine was then, and always will be, necessary to attract those whose lives have been run from a highly individualised standpoint; and that, for them, death-bed consolation would hardly be achieved in the presentation of a doctrine so defined as to threaten annihilation to all the fetish worship and social values of the past.

“God would think twice,” said a courtly French Abbé of the seventeenth century to a King’s mistress who, upon her death-bed, was seized by spiritual qualms—“God would think twice before damning a lady of your quality.” And no one who holds by class-distinctions really wishes to find in the New Jerusalem any abolition of that respect for persons or prejudices which has, in this world, been the main ground on which their self-esteem and their estimate of personality have been based.

To them the most “unthinkable” proposition would be not the contraction of the future world to narrower and more select limits than those of the one they know, but a future world conducted on any code of morals which had not their own entire approval and sanction.

We are told that the late Queen Victoria looked forward with very great interest to a future meeting with the Hebrew patriarchs, with Abraham, Moses, and Elijah, but hoped to be excused from any personal acquaintance with King David on account of his affair with Bathsheba. And when we realise how very often the hope of Heaven is really a species of self-love and self-applause, conditional on Heaven being what we ourselves want it to be, one is led to wonder whether the real condition for entry into that state of bliss may not prove to be the precise opposite, and whether the disciplinary motto upon its portal may not be those mystic words, hitherto attributed to another place, “All hope abandon ye who enter here.” That, after all, is only a more emphatic way of stating what Christ Himself laid down as the path by which man should attain; that only those namely who were ready to lose life should find it. And I rather question whether our Christian individualists have, up till now, been honestly prepared to “lose life” in the full sense, without condition or reserve, and whether, (if they have not), they have yet attained the spiritual standpoint necessary to bring them within the terms of the promise.

So far I have dealt with the doctrine of immortality as presented to us from the individualistic basis alone. But, in some form or another, the doctrine of immortality belongs to many religions and schools (indeed, one might almost say to all) and has, therefore, most varied and even contradictory meanings attached to it. In some schools, as we have seen, it sets great store on the survival of the individual; in others individuality is held to be of small account—a diminishing rather than a persistent factor in the ultimate ends of life viewed as a whole.

I remember in that connection discussing with the late Father George Tyrrell, in the days before Rome’s excommunication fell on him, the divergent views as to immortality of Christianity and Buddhism; and at that time he held that the superiority of the Christian faith lay in its insistence on the personal immortality, conscious and self-contained, of every human being. Some years later, a month before his death, we discussed the matter again; and I asked him then, in what degree, if at all, his view as to personal immortality had changed. His answer gave me a curious instance of those scientific analogies by which Modernism has been seeking to deliver the Roman Church from its mediæval entanglements.