The Next Step in Religion: An Essay toward the Coming Renaissance

by Roy Wood Sellars

Before we leave these juridical religious sanctions, it may be well to call attention to the fact that theories of punishment have radically changed during the last century. The purpose of modern justice is less to uphold the majesty of an outraged law than to protect the citizens of a state and reform the character of the criminal. Crime is studied genetically and its conditions determined so far as possible. It is well known that criminals are products of biological and social conditions over which they have little control. The modern ideal is coming to be prevention by means of the betterment of social organization and negative eugenics. Healthy and capable persons in a decent society would be unlikely to turn out criminals. I do not see how we can escape the conclusion that the saner penology of the present has completely undermined the whole juristic basis of the next world. Human ethics and a supernatural ethics of an eschatological sort cannot be dovetailed together. The scene and motives of a crime cannot be laid in one world with that world's peculiar conditions, and the punishment dispensed in another. And a final punishment is a veritable absurdity. Is punishment an end in itself? Are the wicked such hopeless creatures? Or does it simply mean that men have never before thought of such things as indeterminate sentences and reformation? Prisoners were hustled away and never seen afterwards. Punishment and reward were easy matters in the old days when justice was external and terroristic; we see to-day that they are the most difficult of problems. Final judgments by omniscient judges strike us as romantic and even melodramatic. Again, we doubt such facile divisions of our mixed humanity as that between saints and sinners. We have a keener and more democratic eye for the good in the most unprepossessing of our fellow creatures. We know what he has been up against from his babyhood days, what his chances, temptations, joys and sorrows have been. And we have the deep conviction that ghostly judgment after death would be absolutely meaningless.

In an earlier chapter, we pointed out that the belief in, and desire for, immortality is stronger in periods of social disorganization than in periods of marked social unity and happy creativeness. Christianity arose in just such a time of pessimism and stifled social life. The Roman Empire had become barren of joyous hopefulness and spirited endeavor. The citizen was only a unit in a dreary and monotonous whole ruled from above. All through the Middle Ages, something of this suspicion of the world, this longing for release from earthly things tinged the interests and judgments of the more spiritually-minded men and women. The inevitable ethical result was a disregard of genuine human problems and a tense exaltation of attitudes of self-control and negation. Disciplines became ends in themselves, which rejected all relation to the life of every day. The direction of ethical life was away from creative activity and concern with the more homely things, and toward an abstract contemplation of ideals seldom put to the test of positive application. The religious setting of life withdrew human energies from their rightful and fruitful sphere of activity and applied them to tasks of self-analysis and never-ceasing self-criticism. Such an approach to life produced men who were saints, men who were unselfish and admirable in almost every way; but this saintliness grew at the expense of significant human achievement. It was as though men forged splendid instruments and did not know how to use them. The pity of it all is, that this mediæval world-view stimulated men to devotions of soul which looked away from the arena of human life rather than into it.

But religion only revealed what human nature, itself, possessed. These capacities for sympathy, love, persistent self-discipline, and devotion to ideals were natural to man. The primary fault with Mediævalism was the inability to see the worth of human things and the hypnotic fixation of the mind upon unreal relations and demands. The modern man admires these cloistered saints and, at the same time, feels the tragedy and futility of this goodness which wearied itself out in vigil and prayer. The human cost of this virtue was so high and its objective use so small. It is only as an artist that I can enjoy reading the Prayers and Meditations of Thomas à Kempis. When this mood is not upon me, I am repelled by the picture of this white-faced monk in his cell, holding in restraint all his natural impulses by means of the thought of a reward in paradise after death. Virtue was the winning of a goal set by his Maker, for reasons which he did not dream of questioning. "When I weary of the long night vigils, or of the Lessons, longer perhaps than usual, give me grace to remember how great are the rewards in heaven which I have now a chance of gaining. When the days of abstinence from food and drink are many, give me the power to fast, and good health to enable me to carry on my work; give me pardon for the sins which I have committed, keep me from falling into them again, relieve me from the punishment they have deserved, and give me a good hope of everlasting happiness with the elect in the Kingdom of God." We feel that this ethical energy should have been used otherwise and in the service of human beings. Better Thomas à Kempis than the man who is mad for wealth and the lusts of the flesh; but far better than either is the sane worker for things of good repute. His goodness is a social goodness which makes life happier and fuller of activities and things worth while.

The traditional religion has not only been, frequently enough, anti-social, but it has also been morally inefficient. Why? Because it has made too much of tension and too little of intelligence. Instead of pointing out that morality paid because it was only the application of intelligence to human needs, it set a standard of moral discipline before people and then sought to drive them to its attainment by sheer force of will and subjectively aroused emotion. The modern ethical thinker is convinced that morality is but the harmonious adjustment of an individual to his social group; it is the sensible foresight which selects the active values which attract and express man's nature.

This rather blind tension of traditional religion appears quite clearly in the conception of sin. The setting of this idea has been monarchic and terroristic. It has exhaled an atmosphere of sharp, mystic contrasts which were as unreal as they were vicious. To set a goal too high is almost as bad psychologically as to set it too low. Christianity vaguely felt this flaw in its dramatic ethical scheme and was led to bring the doctrine of God's saving grace to the front to bridge the fearful gulf caused by the opposition of God's perfection to man's imperfection. But the man of to-day who is sincere with himself knows that this religious world-ethics is a meaningless fiction. He can understand why it arose in the olden days, with its supernaturalism and juridical ethics, yet he feels that this absolutism is a product of monarchism and pre-evolutionary thinking. Goodness is a human ideal whose content is always undergoing change, while it hovers just beyond man's reach. I must confess, then, that I have little sympathy with the gross exaggerations associated with this word sin. I know that I often fall short of my better moral judgment and, at such moments of moral insight, I experience a keen regret and try to strengthen those tendencies and activities which will aid me to do better next time. But I know too much of personality on its biological, psychological and social sides, too much of its complexity and its foundations to retain the old notion of the self as an entity which, having the ability to be godlike, chooses evil. Paul's God was an oriental monarch; to the modern, he is a cad. Why, no sensible teacher asks the impossible of his pupils! Yet this strange relation conceived to exist between an omnipotent deity and his frail creatures, when intensified by the horizon of another and eternal world, was bound to develop the tensest and most paralyzing of attitudes. No novel has been able to unfold a plot which has such psychological possibilities. And the morbid and exalted religious imagination has done more than justice to them. While I do not for a moment deny the strength and leverage this ensemble of ideas possesses when faith is present, I do contend that the whole creation is unhealthy and blinding and involves inefficiency as regards the real and pressing problems of personal and social development. The ecclesiastic seldom has a normal perspective. Take Cardinal Newman, for instance. Can one deny that this subtle personality, for all his gifts, brought distorting values into the current of life? Such a man is certain to misread movements and activities and to magnify the subjective at the expense of the social. The individual who identifies himself with social projects, able to elicit his energy and enthusiasm, is more apt to forget the pettier interests of the moment in the broad sweep of creative endeavor than is the person who morbidly catechizes his conscience. A formal morality which looks inward and never outward is bound to be inefficient. Tension is no fit substitute for intelligent insight.

Many theologians assume that ethics has a choice only between reliance upon some supernatural power for its sanctions, and a sort of harsh and haughty stoicism, in which the individual stands alone and by sheer force of will establishes and maintains ideals which are alien to his nature. The fallacy in such an assumption is not hard to detect. By his training in the ascetic traditions of Christianity with its acquiescence in the doctrine of original sin, the theologian is initiated into a distorted conception of human nature and of human relations. While man is a complex being with many instincts and possibilities to adjust and organize in an efficient and progressive way, it is slanderous to assert that these instincts are evil or that man, on the whole, does not relate them quite satisfactorily to a plan of life. Human nature is a sweeter, saner thing than the ascetic admits; man is capable of heroic idealisms and of far-reaching sympathies which express themselves in the mold of society. As a matter of fact, the haughty stoicism of which the religious writer speaks with so much pity, as the only alternative to supernatural relations and sanctions, is a product of times of social disruption when the high-strung individual is thrown back upon himself. To-day, people live and think in groups, with common hopes, standards and plans. Their conscience is a social conscience which finds its supporting echo in the deeds and sentiments of their companions and fellow workers. It is the supernaturalist who is an egoist at heart. Even Mr. Wells is so dominated by this anti-social point of view that he falsifies both psychology and fact in his tirade upon the sane worker for human values. No one who knew the elements of modern ethical thought based, as it is, upon an evolutionary social psychology would subscribe to the following nonsense: "The benevolent atheist stands alone upon his own good will, without a reference, without a standard, trusting to his own impulse to goodness, relying upon his own moral strength. A certain immodesty, a certain self-righteousness, hangs like a precipice above him.... He has no one to whom he can give himself. He has no source of strength beyond his own amiable sentiments, his conscience speaks with an unsupported voice, and no one watches while he sleeps. He cannot pray; he can but ejaculate. He has no real and living link with other men of good will." Of course, one can write such things if one wishes to. But the social reformer knows that his problems are human problems whose solution rests upon sentiments of sympathy, enlightened and directed by intelligence. They who seek for the advent of a better day for humanity band together as naturally and loyally as ever did the believers in the second coming of Christ.

The remark is frequently made that the modern world is tending to return to the Greek view of life. If by the Greek view of life is meant the outlook characteristic of the Greeks of the classic period—the era of Plato, Pericles, and Sophocles,—there is much truth in the judgment. Human values are again coming uppermost in men's minds. This life is not a sojourn in a vale of tears, but the scene of the attempts of socially-minded, conscious organisms to achieve a temperate and fairly happy existence. But the centuries intervening have not been without their effect; man's moral horizon has been both deepened and enlarged. Since those halcyon days, man has eaten of the tree of good and evil, he has fought with shadowy monsters and wandered for years in the wilderness of helplessness and pessimism, he has worshiped at the shrine of strange gods and prostrated himself before the terrors of his own imagination. Slowly he has come to stand erect and look about him and see the world and himself as they actually are. Knowledge has become his most trusted instrument, and democratic sympathy with human life his most cherished guide. With such a guide and with such an instrument, he will before long set about to mold his life in accordance with those mellower ideals which have grown in his heart during his long pilgrimage. At last, man is becoming an adult able to stand upon his feet and to look keenly around with a measuring glance at things as they are. Will he not work for the sweet fruition of those human values which are dear to his very soul—home, children, kindly social intercourse, work which gives self-expression, art, knowledge, contentment, all suffused with the vigor of healthy bodies and the sleep of quiet nights? Man will surely come to desire greatly, and achieve magnificently, and live courageously.

Now that the ethical degradation of the industrial revolution has been stayed and society has turned its face from the clatter of mass-production for its own sake, now that ethical reflection has been united with reason and science in a sane realism, now that sympathy is abroad in the land, now that democracy with its conception of human brotherhood is astir throughout the world, ethics has secured a firm foundation in the free aspirations of free men. If noble character and rational conduct cannot maintain themselves in such a society, then the theologian can rightly say that man is by nature corrupt. But the present is a time of growing loyalties to the common good and of vigorous search for the efficient means to attain it in greater measure. The great spiritual adventures of the future will surely be human and humane.