Chapter XIII: Religion and Ethics

What was the exact relation between religion and morality in the past? Does morality any longer need the sanctions and supernatural setting which helped to support it in other days? These are questions of primary importance whose discussion should throw light upon both religion and human morality. Have human values become self-supporting and self-justifying? Do the decencies of life find sufficient ground in human nature for their continuance and increase? Or is the rescuing hand of a supernatural grace necessary to prevent deterioration? Such questions are peculiarly proper to-day when ethics is seeking to build itself upon a broad study of human instincts. Let us try to penetrate below the surface of the traditional contrasts between flesh and spirit--contrasts which hindered rather than furthered clear analysis--and note the actual basis of the spiritual life in man. In order to do so, we must read human nature as it manifests itself in organized society, sanely and calmly, expecting neither too much nor too little, and not being intimidated by the assertions of men who have built their lives around the traditional theological outlook. Those who have learned to lean upon a crutch or who have cast their spiritual experiences in a certain mold naturally feel at a loss when this is threatened. This is to put it too {170} mildly, perhaps, for the _odium theologicum_ has a reputation which cannot be all unearned. Yet, comprehensible as the protest of the conservative is, it must be viewed in the light of the psychological habits which it expresses. It may well be that new times and new points of view will bring new habits and new molds for spiritual experience. It may well be that the traditional religious sanctions will gradually lose their meaning in the new generation, born into a more social, humane and scientific atmosphere. Let us see what indications there are for this prediction.

In early times, religion was mainly a community affair. The tribe or state had its gods who protected it against its enemies in return for homage and sacrifice. The tribal god was inseparable from his worshipers. A god without a nation was almost as badly off as a nation without a divine protector. As members of the community, the individuals, separately and collectively, were required to perform established ceremonies which were pleasing in the eyes of the gods, and to refrain from acting in ways displeasing to them. Gods and men formed, as it were, one society; and so customs and rituals always received the fearful sanctions of these divine powers. How naturally this outlook developed can readily be understood. And there can be little doubt that the double sanction of social group and divine witnesses was of advantage in those early days when man was more impulsive and less rational than he is to-day. A crime was, at one and the same time, a crime and a sin or act of impiety; and so close was thought to be the responsible connection of the individual and the group that the tribe was held to be in danger because of the deeds of its members. {171} The gods were living agents quick to anger and ready to punish in the direst ways. Warned by this knowledge of the jealousy of the gods, the fellow tribesmen hastened to punish the offender in order to ward off the divine anger. Thus the sanctions enforcing the customs were both social and religious.

This situation had its bad side as well as its good. While it helped to enforce the tribal laws by means of the awe of the divine witness who could not be escaped, it tended to merge valuable with trivial things. Society was quite irrational as yet, and was as likely to punish the violation of accidental taboos as really serious attacks upon society. It is a commonplace of history that religions have stressed ritual observances more than vital phases of conduct. The greater Hebrew prophets stand out just because of their emphasis upon human morality, upon justice and righteousness and love. Amos and Hosea are social reformers who conceive their national god as a god of righteousness who will turn his face away from the doers of evil. They threaten their compatriots with his wrath if they continue in their evil ways. "Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the Lord, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye say. Hate the evil and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate." Thus the setting of religion was used as the leverage for an attempted ethical reformation, the exalted reformer conceiving himself as the mouthpiece of his god. But the prophets were exceptions. The priestly class, the class that has always held closely to traditional ways of thinking, brought the usual multitude of non-moral acts under this impressive sanction.

The struggle between priest and prophet, {172} traditionalist and ethical reformer, took place within the religious view of the world, but the conflict was, after all, a purely human process. The prophets loved righteousness because they knew that it was good, because they fell repelled by unmerited poverty and by careless wealth, because they admired the decencies of life. They could not have given the justification of their sentiments as well as a theorist of to-day, but they had these sentiments as keenly as to-day's prophet has them. When we read their wonderful discourses, we are thrilled by the depth and intensity of their ethical life. But we are too apt to forget that the social situation in Palestine was the stimulus to their denunciations. They were noble enough to feel that conditions were intolerable, and it was not a far step to believe that Yahweh would not tolerate them. A noble man has always a noble god. That is the reason why the god of Amos is noble. The theological view reverses the true causal relation. Morality is always human morality, expressive of human nature and human conditions. Man may assign his ideals to some superhuman source because he is convinced that this source has selected him as its interpreter; but the fact that he has thought and judged in this moral way is indubitable, while his theory that Yahweh is speaking through him is merely an expression of the religious view of the world common to the time. When we stop a moment to think, we realize that Amos and Hosea were certain to put their views under the sanction of their national god. Not to have done so would have been far stranger psychologically than the ideals which they championed.

Did the prophetic claim that social justice was {173} sanctioned by Yahweh help its advance? Probably. I see no reason to doubt that it did somewhat--how much it is impossible to say. So far as the claim was accepted by the nation, it would assist the forces working for reform. But religious sanctions are far more powerful when they are explicit and detailed, as the history of Christianity has shown. And we must remember that the prophetic claims were not always accepted. Religion is usually conservative and more or less conventional. The ritual element plays a considerable part in religious morality. It is as hard to change the people's ideas of God as it is to change their conceptions of justice and goodness. For this reason, I am not convinced that the religious sanction was of much advantage in the evolution of morality. The old has even more of the use of the sanction than has the new. Moral forces need to be vigorously based upon human nature and human relations if they are to dominate society and control the ethical standards which public opinion demands. The presence of religious sanctions simply beclouds the real factors at work. Morality can never, in the long run, be something pressed upon man from outside; it must express his life and its needs.

It cannot be denied that supernatural sanctions have often been very effective for certain types of people in certain anarchic periods. The robber baron of the Middle Ages, credulous and superstitious, was restrained at times by his fear of the penalties threatened by Mother Church. But so is a burglar by a pistol pointed at him, even if it is not loaded. In the past, a code of morality much in advance of the times has, no doubt, often been aided by religious sanctions. But {174} it is foolish to base one's theories upon exceptional conditions. We must remember that the situation confronted by the Christian tradition after the breakdown of the political and social life of the Roman Empire was abnormal. A turbulent mass of barbarians faced the ethics and theology of an overthrown civilization. It cannot too often be pointed out that this situation was unhealthy in many ways. It is not good for a people to have codes of morality thrust upon it from outside. Especially is it bad when the code is in many ways untrue to human nature under normal conditions. Ascetic, other-worldly Christianity distorted the impulses of mediaeval man. And it is certain that religious sanctions, alone, enabled it to control society.

We have seen that religion and morality marched together as long as the evolution of the society was healthy and natural. Often there was a struggle over the ritual and mythical elements in religious morality; but, as a rule, the civic type of morality gained the upper hand. Religious sanctions were called in because of the faith in divine powers interested in the welfare of the community, but these sanctions soon ceased to be creative. While the gods remained, these sanctions would necessarily remain; yet they tended to become benevolent and secondary.

But Christianity, by reason of the forces at work at the time of its origin, nourished vicious interpretations of morality. The despair of human nature which we note in the writings of St. Paul tinged the outlook of Christian ethics. Man is by nature evil; only the working in his soul of a supernatural grace can lead him to value the things which are pure and of good {175} repute. This pessimism cannot be too sharply spurned. Man is neither angel nor devil; he is just man. And the modern thinker is pretty well convinced that morality is a purely human affair growing out of the instinctive tendencies which man has inherited in the course of evolution as these find themselves in various situations. Moral problems are meaningless apart from their setting on this earth. Man is moral because he can pass judgments upon courses of behavior and decide what best conduces to his welfare. He is moral because he can build up standards of social and personal conduct and adhere to them more or less completely. The assumption that man is immoral is psychologically untrue. The asceticism and pessimism of mediaeval Christianity was a reflection of false ideals and of an unhealthy social system. There was an element of strain in the demands held up before the individual. The spiritual life was a task which he had to accomplish because it possessed a supernatural sanction.

But the inherent pessimism of much of Christianity was not its only fault. It taught men to suppose that morality was not something which paid for itself. So much did it stress the necessity of supernatural sanctions that it led the majority to believe that no man would be good unless he had to, unless he was afraid of the external consequences which would be meted out to him at the bar of judgment. But how false such a view is. We know to-day that morality pays here and now, in the specie of a happy, healthy, well-developed life. Any other view makes morality irrational and unnatural and, consequently, dependent upon sanctions which rest upon the will of some agent apart from {176} this concrete life of act and fact. To put this criticism in the technical language of ethics, Christianity has tended to think of conduct in terms of heteronomous ethics, _i.e._, in terms of precepts and laws coming from outside of human life and pressed upon it by authority, rather than in terms of autonomous ethics for which ideals and customs are wise adjustments to the natural relations in which man finds himself.

This assumption that morality is a hardship played into the hands of a juridical notion of the sanctions of conduct, for which the conception of immortality furnished the grandiose opportunity. The arm of society is eluded at death, but death offers no escape for the wicked from the outraged deity they have offended. It is the motive of fear which is here employed. Human beings are to be scared into being good. Morality is on the defensive because it has no real charm and natural loveliness, because it does not grow out of a rational study of human relations.

How tragically false this view was! Its existence can be explained only as an expression of an ill-organized society in which impulsive violence was not enough held in check. Supernatural sanctions could be used to restrain malefactors of great power in less happy times. Society has grown beyond this need. Courts of law and outraged public opinion are quite able to deal with criminals. If the reason for punishment is prevention, it is certainly true that punishment by society is more likely to be effective than the postponed pains of an hereafter, because of its immediacy and power of being repeated. But it is very doubtful whether fear is a moral motive or whether it is a very effective deterrent. Social thinkers are agreed that punishment is a very {177} bungling method at the best. It does not show the presence of a very constructive imagination.

Hell has always been a magnified torture chamber. It has been the reflection on the gigantic background of the next world of the penal ideas of the time. That is why it has always been more interesting than heaven. Man feared to make a social utopia out of heaven because he conceived it as a kingdom in which he was to play a very minor role, while he was quite certain of his importance in hell. But the morbid results of his imaginings were tragic in their effects when connected with such damnable doctrines as infant damnation and eternal punishment for lack of belief in a particular creed. What distorted ethical notions, what mixture of horrible fear before a world-tyrant and callous delight in the punishment of others are revealed in these pictures of a place of eternal torment! Thank goodness, the civilized world is outgrowing the whole savage set of ideas.

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 {178} 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 {179} 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 mediaeval 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 Mediaevalism 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 {180} 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 a 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 a 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 {181} 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 {182} 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.

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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 {184} 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 {185} 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 {186} 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.

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