CHAPTER II

NATURE AND CIVILIZATION AS FOES OF PERSONALITY

It would be extravagant to claim that the possibility of making the resources of religion available for the solution of social problems of modern civilization is absolutely determining for its future. Religion would continue to maintain itself in modern society even if it produced only the scarcest socio-ethical fruits. The problem of living together is not the only problem which men face, and civilization is not the only foe with which personality contends. At least two other fundamental problems engage the interest of every normal individual, that of developing the multifarious forces of his personality into some kind of harmony and unity and that of asserting the dignity and worth of human personality in defiance of nature’s indifference and contempt. If religion can render the human spirit a tolerably effective service in the solution of these two problems, its aid will not be scorned though it fail him in his social problem. It will not maintain itself with equal vitality in all strata of society, but it will continue some kind of existence in all of them, and a fairly vigorous life in those classes in which social problems are least urgent.

Psychiatry and the psychological sciences are encroaching upon one service to the perplexed spirit of man which was once an almost exclusive province of religion. They are offering him aid in the task of integrating the heterogeneous forces, with which ages of human and prehuman history have endowed him, into the unity of dependable character; and there are those who think that this service will obviate his need for religion in this field. Undoubtedly it will be to the advantage of any moral or religious discipline of the individual life to avail itself of a more precise knowledge of the intricacies of human personality; yet only the most mechanistic and naturalistic ethical theorist would maintain that the knowledge of self is the only prerequisite of self-mastery, and that the eternal conflict between the higher will and the immediate desires, about which the religious of every age have testified, may be composed by nothing more than a better understanding of the devious ways of human intelligence and emotion. The psychological sciences have undoubtedly saved men from some morbid fears and repressions, but the most modern school of psychological mechanists and determinists seems more anxious to destroy restraints which are the product of ages of moral experience than to correct the defects which reveal themselves inevitably on the fringe of every moral discipline. The reason mechanistic psychiatry and psycho-analysis run easily into a justification of license is because they labor under the illusion that the higher self (they would scorn that term) is able to put all internal forces in their proper place, if only it knows their previous history and actual direction. Under such an illusion the clamant desires of man’s physical life are bound to be closer to the center of character than any moral discipline would allow. Modern determinism is too naturalistic to see or to be willing to regard human personality as the incarnation of moral and spiritual values which did not have their origin in any immediate necessity and which no individual will maintain if his resolution is not strengthened by something more than his momentary and obvious experience. This is not to say that moral discipline in individual life can be maintained by religion alone. A humanistic ethical idealism, which makes the experience of the race the guide and inspiration of individual conduct, will not fail to aid men toward some higher integration of personality, though it will seldom go beyond the Greek ideal of a balanced life which knows how to escape sublime enthusiasms as well as crass excesses. The value of religion in composing the conflict with which the inner life of man is torn is that it identifies man’s highest values, about which he would center his life, with realities in the universe itself, and teaches him how to bring his momentary impulses under the dominion of his will by subjecting his will to the guidance of an absolute will. “Make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be free,” has ever been the prayer of religious people. “He who loses his life for my sake shall find it,” said Jesus. In such paradoxes the truth is revealed that the highest peace comes to men where their life is centered not in what is best in them but in that beyond them which is better than their best.

Obviously this function of religion in the life of the individual has its social implications; but it is not to be assumed that the integration of personality automatically solves man’s social problem. That assumption, which religion invariably makes, is one of its very defects in dealing with the social problem. A unified personality may still be anti-social in its dominant desires and the very self-respect which issues from its higher integration may become the screen for its unsocial attitudes.

Just as important as the problem of bringing peace to the warring factions within the soul of man is the task of giving human personality a sense of worth in the face of nature’s indifference and contempt; and of adjusting man’s highest values to nature’s sublimer moods. The significance of the religious inclinations of country people lies just here. The peasant is religious because man’s relation to the natural world about him is still the agrarian’s great interest. His ethical life is simple and develops in those primary or family relationships in which problems are comparatively few and a disturbance of the religious temper by unethical social facts rather infrequent. He is close enough to nature to be prompted to awe and reverence by her beauties and sublimities, to gratitude by her vast and perennial benevolences, and to fear by her occasional cruel caprices. He expresses his awe in worship, his gratitude in the spring and harvest festivals, which are traditional in all religions, and when her momentary atrocities overtake him he appeals from nature’s God to the God who is above nature and seeks the intervention of a supernatural ally in behalf of human personality. In a sense the religion of peasants remains the constant spring of religious sentiment in every class of society, which others may corrupt or refine but never quite destroy. Urban men suffer from an atrophy of the religious sense because they lose, as they are divorced from the soil, some of the reverence to which a view of the serene majesties of nature prompts and some of the fear occasioned by her elemental passions. Yet the most sophisticated and emancipated city dweller cannot finally escape the problem of the relation of the human spirit to the natural world in which it is at once child and rebel. Even the refinements and artificialities of urban life will not save man from facing nature’s last and most implacable servant—death, nor free him of the necessity of making some kind of appeal against the obvious victory which nature claims at the grave. The fight of personality against nature is religion’s first battle, and that is one reason why there is always a possibility that other struggles will be neglected for it. Traditional religion fails in its social tasks partly because men have suffered longer from the sins of nature than from the sins of man; and religious forms and traditions are therefore better adjusted to offer them comfort for these distresses than for any other from which they suffer. Religion is not yet fully oriented to the new perils to personality which are developed in civilization. But it may fail to meet these and yet not be totally discredited; for the new perils have not supplanted the old ones. At its best religion is both a sublimation and a qualification of the will to live. Defeated by nature the human spirit rises above nature through religious faith, discovering and creating a universe in which divine personality is the supreme power and human personality a cherished, protected and deathless reality. But this religious sublimation of the will to live must be balanced by a qualification of that will to live by which men are persuaded to sacrifice themselves for each other, that they may save themselves from each other and realize their highest self. Love is a natural fruit of religion but not an inevitable one. A high appreciation of personality ought to issue in a reverence for all personalities and in a qualification of the tendency to self-assertion for the sake of other personalities. But left to itself religion easily becomes a force which sublimates but does not qualify man’s desire for survival; in which case it may still function in simple societies but will be less useful in those which are highly complex and in which the problem of human relationships has become very important.

Next to the faith of agrarian classes the greatest stronghold of religion is in the life of the middle classes of the city. This phenomenon is due to several causes. Ideals of self-mastery and personal rectitude are always strongest in those classes in which physical resources are not so abundant as to tempt to sensual excesses and not so scant as to lead to an obsession with life’s externalities. For that reason the resources of religion for the solution of personal moral problems are particularly coveted by the middle classes. On the other hand the middle classes are also religious because they are comparatively unconscious of their responsibility for society’s sins and comparatively untouched by the evil consequences of an unethical civilization. They may therefore indulge in a religion which creates moral respectability, and reinforces self-respect, even though it does not force them to share their sense of worth with all their fellows. There is for this reason an element of hypocrisy in all middle-class religion of which it never becomes clearly conscious but which helps to create the corroding cynicism from which the lower classes of modern society suffer.

Since ideals of personal righteousness flourish in the genteel poverty of the countryside at least as well as in urban middle class conditions, the religion of peasants and the city’s middle classes have two characteristics in common: their preoccupation with problems of the individual life and their concern for the adjustment of the soul to nature’s realities. But while they share these elements the two types of religion are by no means identical. The simple expedient of claiming divine and supernatural intervention in the soul’s specific cases of distress does not appeal to the sophisticated intelligence of city people, particularly since higher learning has become so general and science has become the burden of this learning. They are anxious to correct the intellectual inadequacies of traditional religion; and if they are conscious of any moral defects in it, they have the easy faith that these will be eliminated with a proper adjustment of religious affirmations to the world of scientific fact.

The conflict between orthodoxy and liberalism, between fundamentalism and modernism, is essentially a conflict between city and countryside. Though the Protestant Reformation was used by the rising cities to assert the needs of the inner life against a too artificially elaborated institutional religion and to express an ethic of individualism against the traditional loyalties of the peasants rather than to make a readjustment of religion to the growing demands of intellectual life, the humanistic revival which preceded the Reformation was clearly determined by this latter interest and it contributed to the dissolution of the medieval religious structure. In the recent theological controversies within Protestantism, between Conservatism and Liberalism, the religious naïvete of the agrarian and the intellectual sophistication of the city are more obvious influences in the conflict.

The revision of ancient affirmations of faith in the light of modern learning was of course necessary from the point of view of the general needs of the age, and not required merely to satisfy the intellectual scruples of a particular class in society which has a preponderant influence in the Protestant church. It might be better to say therefore that the commercial middle classes appropriated as much as they prompted the revision of Protestant theology and religion.

By doing this they have indeed created a religion capable of maintaining itself in urban civilization, but it develops little power for the ethical reconstruction of industrial society. The same religionists who pride themselves upon the reasonableness of their faith generally use their very modern and revised religion to sanctify a very unmodern and unrevised ethical orthodoxy, an individualistic orthodoxy which makes much of self-realization and comparatively little of the social needs of modern life.

The kind of liberal religion which thrives among the privileged classes of the city gives them some guarantee of the worth of their personalities against the threats of a seemingly impersonal universe which science has revealed, but it does not help to make them aware of the perils to personality in society itself. The final test of any religion must be its ability to prompt ethical action upon the basis of reverence for personality. To create a world view which justifies a high appreciation of personality and fails to develop an ethic which guarantees the worth of personality in society, is the great hypocrisy. It is the hypocrisy which is corrupting almost all modern religion. In a sense hypocrisy is the inevitable by-product of every religion. Men are never as good as their ideals and never as conscious as the impartial observer of their divergence from them. Every religious person commits the error of solipsism in some form or other, the sin of claiming for himself what he will not grant to his brothers. The religion of modern men, particularly of the privileged classes, seems to be more than ordinarily insincere, partly because the social simplicity of another age obscured this inevitable hypocrisy and partly because the privilege of the religious classes is so great and its unethical basis in modern society, particularly from the perspective of the lowly, so patent and so destructive, that it is no longer possible to veil the immoral implications of a self-centered religion.

The question which we really face, therefore, is whether religion is constitutionally but a sublimation of man’s will to live or whether it can really qualify the will of the individual and restrain his expansive desires for the sake of society. If it is only the former, it will continue to be the peculiar possession either of those who have no urgent social problems or of those who are the beneficiaries and not the victims of social maladjustments. If religion is not now functioning in the solution of social and ethical problems, its impotence in this field may be due to constitutional weaknesses which may be corrected, once they are understood, or it may be due to certain specific historical influences of the past centuries of Western life which further experience will change and qualify. If religion has resources for the solution of social and ethical problems which have not been made available for the uses of society, it is the duty of modern teachers of religion and of all who still have confidence in its social efficacy or who benefit by its comforts to work for the elimination of its social limitations, whether they seem to be incidental and casual or basic and constitutional. Even constitutional limitations in the social task need not discredit religion as a social force; for a valuable resource may be closely related to a social limitation and a way may be discovered to detach the one from the other. Men always tend to be either uncritical devotees or merciless critics of the various values which emerge in human life. This is particularly true in regard to the values of religion, the limitations of which are always aggravated by its unreflective champions and made the occasion of sweeping abuse by its critics. Religious people have assumed too easily that a religious life must issue not only in private rectitude but in perfect social attitudes. This overestimate of its social usefulness easily creates a reaction of criticism which denies that there is any useful counsel in religion for the problems of society or any dynamic necessary for their solution.