Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher

by Sir Henry Jones

are the last words which came from his pen.

Now, it may fairly be argued that these allusions to what death may mean, and what may lie beyond death, valuable as they may be as poetry, cannot help in philosophy. They do not solve the problem of the relation between morality and religion, but merely continue the antagonism between them into a life beyond, of which we have no experience. If the problem is to be solved, it must be solved as it is stated for us in the present world.

This objection is valid, so far as it goes. But Browning's treatment is valuable all the same, in so far as it indicates his unwillingness to limit or compromise the conflicting truths. He, by implication, rejects the view, ordinarily held without being examined, that the moral life is preliminary to the joy and rest of religion; a brief struggle, to be followed by a sudden lift out of it into some serene sphere, where man will lead an angel's life, which knows no imperfection and therefore no growth. He refuses to make morality an accident in man's history and "to put man in the place of God," by identifying the process with the ideal; he also refuses to make man's struggle, and God's achievement within man, mutually exclusive alternatives. As I shall show in the sequel, movement towards an ideal, actualizing but never actualized, is for the poet the very nature of man. And to speak about either God or man (or even the absolute philosopher) as "the last term of a development" has no meaning to him. We are not first moral and then religious, first struggling with evil and then conscious of overcoming it. God is with us in the battle, and the victory is in every blow.

But there lies a deeper difficulty than this in the way of reconciling morality and religion, or the presence of both God and man in human action. Morality, in so far as it is achievement, might conceivably be immediately identified with the process of an absolute good; but morality is always a consciousness of failure as well. Its very essence and verve is the conviction that the ideal is not actual. And the higher a man's spiritual attainment, the more impressive is his view of the evil of the world, and of the greatness of the work pressing to be done. "Say not ye, there are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? Behold I say unto you, 'Lift up your eyes and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.'" It looks like blasphemy against morality to say "that God lives in eternity and has, therefore, plenty of time." Morality destroys one's contentment with the world; and its language seems to be, "God is not here, but there; the kingdom is still to come."

Nor does it rest with condemning the world. It also finds flaws in its own highest achievement; so that we seem ever "To mock ourselves in all that's best of us." The beginning of the spiritual life seems just to consist in a consciousness of complete failure, and that consciousness ever grows deeper.

This is well illustrated in Browning's account of Caponsacchi; from the time when Pompilia's smile first "glowed" upon him, and set him—

"Thinking how my life

Had shaken under me—broken short indeed

And showed the gap 'twixt what is, what should be—