Intellectual Death and Spiritual Life

I

As the Dayton controversy of a past summer went on its way, wakening laughter among the thoughtful of the earth from London to Peking, one could not help being aware, in spite of the frequent use of the word ‘religion’ in the reports of the trial, how far removed from any consideration of religion in its deeper meaning was all that heated interchange of opinion regarding the genesis of earth and the origin of man. Equally remote seem the issues of the FundamentalistModernist controversy, which we have ever with us, regarding various points of formal doctrine, but centring in the discussion of the virgin birth. Thinking of religion as one has known it in consecrated lives, as one has known it in one’s profounder experience, one begins to wonder how, for the many, religion ceased to be an individual consciousness of living reality, and came, mistakenly, to be regarded as a mere matter of abstract opinion, mere intellectual assent.

Puzzling over this, I turned with open mind to the Gospels. This idea, held by many, of religion as acceptance of a statable formula or a series of such formulas was not there. The words of Christ concern not attitude of mind wholly, nor even primarily, but altitude of being. ‘I am in the Father, and the Father in me.’ One cannot by any stretch of the imagination conceive him pausing in his admonitions regarding showing mercy, loving God, loving one’s neighbor, and doing justice, to discuss as a matter of religion any major point in the Dayton controversy, or in the Fundamentalist debates, so wasting precious moments of life in a world of need. One cannot imagine him interpreting after the flesh the idea of his being the Son of God, he who was the Son of God by the spirit that spoke through him. Christ made no demand for assent to complex intellectual affirmations: he asked only that life should be conceived as spirit, not matter, and, specifically, as love, with practical outcome.

‘This seems to me like religion,’ I said wistfully, turning over the pages of the Gospels.

In delving further into the words and lives of the disciples, the one outstanding fact was that they, living, had known the Master; that they went to touch other lives to that vital contact with holiness.

I went to Saint Paul, thinker, something of a philosopher, organizer of the early Church. I found in him a burning sense of the personality of Christ, a burning desire to make this sense a band of union between man and man, in search of perfection of thought and of conduct. Here was an utter consecration of mind, of spirit, of body; endeavor for entire control, lest the light that came from God should be blurred; a longing to be translucent to the divine.

‘This seems to me like religion,’ I said, and, encouraged, went further, searching out lives of the saints, — we have authentic records of many, from Saint Benedict and Saint Cuthbert down to Cardinal Mercier, — and so passed the autumn and winter pleasantly in the company of those to whom religion has been the whole of life, saints of different countries, different periods, different religions.

To one and all, whether those whose minds turned inward to find God, the mystics, those of the contemplative life, the Friends of God; or those whose minds turned outward, sharing with their fellows, active, busy in good works, Brethren of the Common Life; or those who are greatest, in whom these two tendencies are balanced, in perfect adjustment, such as Saint Francis of Assisi and Bernard of Clairvaux — to one and all religion was no mere matter of opinion, but a live contact with something vital, bearing out the statement made by William James: ‘By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality, at the only points at which reality is given us to grasp.’ Life is heightened even by brief glimpses of lives like these, across the centuries, across theologies; there is something quickening in coming into contact with them. In all was a great simplicity of feeling, of intellect, of being. As, saint after saint, they passed before me, — devotion after devotion, self-sacrifice, utter consecration, — they made me newly aware that the basis of their sanctity was something far deeper than any matter of mere opinion, of intellectual assent.

While, with the din of modern controversy in my ears, I followed these lives whose one pursuit was holiness, with the question ever in mind as to why rationalistic conceptions had, for the vast majority, been substituted for the sense of immediate communion with the divine, I was driven back to study some of the early stages of church history. They who hold special dogmas to be the allimportant part of religion should read those who have traced their history, found their origin, — going back to the Greek Apologists, to Clement, to Origen, — and have followed the influence of the Greek Sophists upon the early Church. A growing intellectuality where there had been the touch of spirit on spirit marked the struggle, in the second and third centuries, to adapt Christianity to the conditions of the Greek world, to make it meet the thought of the time, and some of its formulated doctrines bear the imprint rather of pagan philosophy than of the words of Christ — noble philosophy, but philosophy that fell from human lips rather than from immediate dictation of the Almighty, as many who hold it now apparently believe. ‘The line from Plato to Origen, and, we may add, to the present day, is unbroken. . . . Greek philosophy furnished the general plan for a statement of Christianity which should be intelligible, attractive, and convincing to the learned and the simple alike,’ writes Professor C. H. Moore, in his Religious Thought of the Greeks.

But that early intellectualization was in its day a something vital, growing, an attempt to set forth Christianity in terms that the thinkers of the time would understand, learning to speak their language, that of philosophy. Though the departure from primitive simplicity meant the loss of something that has never been regained, except by individuals and by small groups in different ages, that thought in that day was alive, searching out truth, not petrified into formulas, never to be changed.

II

The deepest tragedy in the history of the churches is the tragedy of conceiving religion as primarily a matter of intellect, and yet ruling that thought shall stop. Here is the dilemma in which the modern Church finds itself at a time when new knowledge is pouring in upon the world, and the need of alert and vigorous thought is greater than it has ever been since the day when Christianity was born. One would think that, the principle of interpreting Christian truth in the light of advanced thought having been accepted in practice by the early Church, it would have been accepted once for all, that succeeding generations would recognize active thought as a duty, even more fully a sacred heritage from the past than were the special doctrines then formulated. We could honor our religious forbears more deeply by doing as they did than by taking unquestioningly the results of their thought, which have come to be held by many, especially certain Southern legislators, as one holds tangible heirlooms, such as mahogany chair or sofa, the one solicitude being to keep the article exactly as in the father’s, grandfather’s, great-grandfather’s day. If church leaders might think in those early centuries when the Church came into existence, why may they not think now? ‘Surely it is unreasonable to make intellectual death the condition of spiritual life.’

Later landmarks in the history of theology are marked by free use of the intellect in the light of the thought of the day, and represent effort to meet some crisis, some special danger of the time. Even Calvin — whose tenets, most rigid of all known systems, were most rigidly held by succeeding generations — was, in part at least, thinking in terms of the thought of his day: legal thought, unfortunately, with overstress upon code and statute. Leader at a decisive moment, he attempted to create a wall of definite dogma, firm, aggressive, to separate the new Church of the Reformation from the Roman Catholic Church; the new faith must be buttressed and built up on a solid foundation of doctrine which he felt himself called upon to construct for all time.

Calvin’s mind was alert and working when, in 1536, alive to a special danger, he wrote the first draft of his Institutes; are the minds of his followers, who still are many, alert and working when they say over by rote his conclusions — monstrous conclusions, some of them? There is little in the history of human thought more discouraging than the hold still upon many of the boy Calvin, full of the overassurance of youth, who laid down the law at twenty-six, with dogmatic assertiveness which he never outgrew, and who thereby determined the measure of mind of many in each succeeding generation. That in certain ways he rendered great service is undoubted, especially in his demand for high rectitude of conduct, but it is a pity, great beyond all computation, that the man whose dictates have left a stronger stamp than that of any other single theologian should, as an interpreter of Christianity, have missed the significance of the New Testament; that the utter simplicity and directness of Christianity as taught by Christ should disappear in terms of law; that that which is sublime in his statements about God should have been overshadowed by his presentation of Him as the jealous God of the Hebrews, magnified and perverted into a spectre terrible beyond all imagining, foreordaining Adam’s fall, yet holding Adam and his descendants wholly responsible; electing, out of his mere good pleasure, some to everlasting life, and damning others to everlasting death, yet claiming that that doom and that salvation were both acts of choice of the individual.

Again, that group of divines who, in 1563, in the reign of Elizabeth, set the stamp of their approval upon the Thirty-nine Articles, that group of laymen and divines who, at the bidding of the Long Parliament, drew up and published in 1648 the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Westminster Catechism, were still fighting the battle of the Reformation, with their own weapons, in their own way. Their dicta bear the stamp of thought of their respective periods, and are uttered with the authority of those who believe that it is possible to settle all points of doctrine definitely and for all time. It is not ours to judge how they served their purpose in their own day; ours only to recognize that their time is past. The glory and the challenge of our age is the discovery that no thought can be settled definitely and for all time. It is the nature of the human intellect to work, and work it must, even though obloquy and misunderstanding be its reward. The human spirit refuses to be bound.

Why accept as final the dicta of Calvin, abstract thinker, trained in law and in theology of the sixteenth century, with its cramped knowledge and its mediæval methods of thought, and eschew the philosophic thought and information of a later era, when knowledge is incomparably vaster than in his day, for knowledge grows ‘ from more to more’? Why accept as final the conclusions of those who formulated the Thirty-nine Articles or the Westminster Confession of Faith, who were human, like the rest of us, and, though they did not know it, merely groping their way toward truth? There is no other department of thought in which the intellectual methods of the sixteenth and the seventeenth century would be allowed to rule to-day, dogmatic assertion, based on the letter of the text, sometimes wresting the letter to prove the preconceived idea. The crux of the whole situation is, of course, the difference in regard to the Scriptures, whether to accept the old idea — of verbal inspiration from Genesis on: the lesser reverence that escapes thought by attaching magic value to the letter — or to show the deeper reverence of searching for the spirit. The thoughtful of the modern world know that their hope lies in the latter course.

Whose fiat was it — surely not God’s — that thought should stop in 1536, or in 1563, or in 1648 A.D.?

III

The unfortunate effect of overelaborated stationary dogma is that it has meant, and means, excluding from the Church hosts of the strongest, of the most genuinely religious, in Christ’s interpretation of the term, whose only sin is a refusal to part with their intellectual integrity. There are unnumbered people, of devout ancestry, of deeply religious instincts, who yet cannot affirm as fact that which they do not know, or presume to put into words that which is beyond words, beyond thought, who, because of inability to subscribe in full to theological creed held by family and friends, enact the age-long Tantalus of religion, the water of life so fenced in by dogma that they who are athirst may not drink. Doubtless many of them are convinced that religion is more than a matter of mere knowledge, that much that should be left to faith, to hope, is, in overformulated dogma, forced down into the lesser world of the understanding; perhaps they shrink from ‘perverting the idea of God,’ making it the ‘foundation of a science, dogmatic theology, which applies the categories of substance, cause, and the rest, to a Supreme Being, as if he were an object presented in sense experience.’

There are hosts of those now doing the will of God, but not recognized as the sons of God, in a world where men have taken it upon themselves to narrow His greatness to the petty limits of their own thought, to circumscribe the illimitable into definition. Organizers of movements protecting the weak and helpless of the earth, many a modern surgeon, many a nurse, battling with disease and with pain, many a social worker, profoundly Christian at heart, think themselves irreligious because the orthodox think them so. And indeed they may have denial on their lips, not of the words of Christ, but of the words of Calvin, or of later formalists. Many of these unnamed Christians are perhaps nearer the heart of the Master than many who call themselves by his name; at least they are remarkably like the saints in act, and deeply religious in the true sense, after the best definition of religion ever made: ‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.’

What is to be done with the great army of those doing the Father’s bidding yet not bearing the stamp of any sect, nor even called Christians, though Christian in feeling and in deed? Lonely, they suffer from a sense of lack of fellowship, of that élan, impetus to step, that comes from a sense of many marching together, to the same music. The Church must beware of longer excluding those who make brief profession in words, but whose acts reveal their lofty creed, for the Church needs these people, even more than they need the Church. The world has no greater hope to-day than the silent Christianity of the unsectarian. Christianity is here to stay; it has sunk too far into the inner consciousness of the race to be eradicated or forgotten, is too deeply imbedded in the minds and souls of men to vanish; spoken or unspoken, it is imperishably ours. The question is not whether Christianity will live; it is living. The question is as to whether the churches will live, and this is for them to say. If they could become simply Christian, there is no question that their vast organizing power could work greater beneficence than the world has ever known.

IV

The hour has struck for change. If the Church is to live, it would seem as if two ways were open to it, and only two, one of which must be chosen. One is to return to the primitive simplicity of Christianity as taught by its Founder, dogmaless, spiritual, and practical, as men from time to time have attempted to do, trying to recover that sense of immediate contact with the divine known to Christ and to the disciples, trying to live selfsacrifice. Hosts would rally about the banner if only Christ’s demands were upon it, if belief in him as the way, the truth, the life, were accepted as a full confession of faith.

The very thought of real Christianity, the thought of reviving it throughout the land in its simplicity and immediacy of belief, its selflessness, its scorn of earthly possessions, leaves one breathless with sorrowful hope that dare not quite be hope. There are faint strivings, questionings as to a truer way of swearing allegiance to the Master: Episcopalian suggestions of relaxing the hold of the Thirty-nine Articles; even Presbyterian qualms about the wisdom of worshiping their own dictates; and there are practical efforts toward uniting different sects, but they are tentative and timid. The churches dare not go far enough to meet.

The records of the saints bespeak the truth of how little in their deeper lives depended on special dogma, how much on insight into Christ’s personality, and developed will to follow him. Both the great opposing organizations, Protestant and Catholic, have had, and have, great saints. It is perhaps impossible that these churches, with their vested interests, their stubborn pride of dogma, could ever combine to enter the kingdom of heaven of preaching, teaching, practising a gospel as simple as Christ’s, as devoted; to vitalize, touch to the quick the souls of human beings, sting to desire for holiness, devoting their vast material resources to caring for the poor, the suffering. It is inconceivable, of course, that the religion of Christ should be revived and taught in its simplicity, as he taught it — and yet?

V

But if, — and this is the other alternative, — as many of the wise say, dogma is necessary to hold the host together, and organic relationship cannot exist without it, then let the leaders of the Church to-day show the pluck of the leaders of the early Church in wrestling with the advanced thought and knowledge of the time. To flinch from this is to repudiate the early history of the Church, and to deny the processes by which Christian dogma first came into existence, keeping abreast with Greek philosophy, influenced by some of its doctrines.

Minds were yet seeking truth when those early doctrines were formulated, not merely repeating, and the mind that seeks is alive, vital. Those later landmarks in the history of the Church — Calvin’s Institutes, the Thirty-nine Articles, the Westminster Confession of Faith — represent active intellectual effort; they served the need of their respective centuries; why should not our formulas serve ours? If our belief is to have intellectual content, we must bear the burden of thought of our day, must keep pace with ascertained knowledge. If we are to think, let us think. To try to hold back the centuries of growth and of new discovery is as hopeless an effort as that of King Canute in attempting to stop the incoming waves. Theologians must be permitted to share the thought of the age, must not be expected to dwell in a world walled about, apart from the main trend of human progress; yet persecution has too often awaited those who have attempted to make chinks in the wall to let in the light.

It is apparent as in no intervening century that some revision of Protestant articles of belief is necessary, now, when new discovery has compelled us to refashion our whole theory of the universe, when, in part at least because of lack of intellectual readjustment, the churches are emptying, and when hosts of the young cry out that they believe nothing because they find that the information given them in the pulpit and at home is false. Our age, like the ages most productive of theology, has its own crisis, its special danger. There is need of a Renaissance within the Church, for frank facing of the challenge of our time, lest we fall into the intellectual and spiritual blindness afflicting those who are content with formulas settled once and forever. An absolute formula is too often a place to sleep, relieved of thought, instead of making constant effort to refine and clarify thought, thus winning the way to higher levels of being. Dogma comes from a verb meaning to think; why may it not be used in the present as well as in the past tense?

If formulated religion must deal with the history of earth and of man, why should not this part of doctrine be stated in terms of the new knowledge of the day, — geology, biology, —as the earliest doctrines of the Church were stated in terms of the thought of that time? It is chiefly in this department of knowledge that our age has made progress, that concerning the physical constitution of man and of the universe. Brief statement of what has been found out, frank statement of the point at which knowledge stops, and even the expressed hope that more will some day be known, would mean throwing down barriers which many who should by good rights be within the Church cannot now conscientiously cross. It is, of course, the literal interpretation of the Bible that stands in the way; if we have now grown wise enough to accept as figurative much that has hitherto been interpreted as literal fact, we shall not, in all probability, err more greatly than those of our predecessors who looked upon all Scripture as divinely inspired, and all statements as equally authoritative in the revelation of spiritual truth. Earlier thinkers have interpreted the Bible in the light of the human thought of their day; why should not thinkers now, with their wiser sense of the relative values of Scripture texts? No modern scientist would be capable of misinterpreting more completely than does Calvin, in his Institutes, in building up the terrible doctrine of election, the foundation stones of which are Old Testament texts which plainly mean something quite different from that which he makes them mean in order to fit the preconceived idea.

VI

I doubt if formal theology would lose anything essential if the points regarding the physical history of earth and of man were phrased in terms of thought of the twentieth century, instead of those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There was nothing sacrosanct about the seventeenth century, with its conception of fixed, immobile laws, of nature as a mechanism, of God as demonstrable by the same laws of thought that govern mathematics. There is great advance in our time, a new and vital conception, a change from the static to the dynamic; the universe has come to life, and men’s minds with it, awed by new insight into the boundless possibilities of growth and change.

It would be well if, in the light of new thought and new knowledge, a restatement of creed could come, if the phraseology of dogma could reflect the ‘Copernican change’ from the anthropomorphic idea of a God outside manipulating the universe to the far more profound and more spiritual idea of a God within, working in and through all things, an idea fully in accord with the doctrine of evolution. A far deeper conception of God than the seventeenth century, still so dominant and authoritative in our formulated theology, was capable of conceiving lies at the heart of much of this modern study and investigation whose results have so terrified the Fundamentalists, especially those of the South: —

No one has suggested so fully in brief space, as Browning does here in the fifth scene of Paracelsus, the fact of all life as a matter of growth and change, of the organization of all life from lower to higher through the operation of indwelling spirit. John Fiske, of course, spent many of his years in expounding the application of the newly discovered law of evolution to the mind anti soul of man. Ages of physical growth and development, then the illimitable possibilities of growth of mind, of spirit; all life as a matter of growth and change — it is only since the doctrine of evolution was formulated that we have grasped this idea, with the full splendor of its spiritual challenge. It has set the human spirit free; it has brought untold stimulus, opening up vast possibilities for endless growth.

Hosts would flock to the Church if church doctrine would keep pace with the dominant thought of our day — evolution. The young would come; you cannot keep the young away from any currents of thought which are alive and vital. It is pity unspeakable that the Church does not accept this, and use it to gather them in, as the early Church used Greek philosophy. The young are going to think in terms of evolution, and they reckon ill who leave it out. In denying or ignoring it, in forgoing its energizing force, the Church loses a great source of power and leaves the young a prey to those who choose to interpret this law of life as a mechanistic determinism. It would be well to have it interpreted not merely in terms physical but in terms spiritual.

VII

There is nothing to fear, in regard to real religion, in any full, free activity of the mind. Thought which is honestly searching out truth cannot be wrong, cannot be mistaken; it is only when it claims to be the ultimate and puts an end to truth that it goes wholly astray. After all, the important questions are not questions of genesis, or origins, but of the destination of the human race. If the mental energy that now goes into abstract discussion of dogma could be brought to bear on the central, essential, inmost problem of holiness, the cause of religion would need no legislation to bolster it up, would triumph in our day. For our minds should be at work, not in splitting hairs about dogma, but in searching the ways of beauty and of holiness, finding the divine in the past and in the present, studying great personalities to whom the race may measure up, the saints and the sages on whose deeds and inspirations we can place hope for the future. We must penetrate the finer thought of the race, in great literature, in philosophy, striving to find the farthest reach of the human mind that we may be won to further effort. It is imaginative, sympathetic insight that needs to be cultivated, not mere logic chopping, in order to set free the resources of the human spirit, for religion is a life, and life requires the whole of you, intellect and emotion stimulating and sustaining each other, quickening the will, making for wholeness of being, for beauty of thought and beauty of action.

So religion becomes an inner vitality, a sting and sense of life as having greater significance than that which one touches, handles, sees, and an acting in the light of this insight. It must reckon not only with that which man knows, which is very little, but with that which he feels, that which he longs for, and his aspiration is very great. May it not permit holding the great central hopes of mankind as hopes, not as demonstrated certainties of the scientific mind? May not they who cannot think of immortality as proved hold it in that larger grasp, faith as the ‘substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’? The writer of these words understood far better than later generations the essence of religion.

For religion, in the deepest sense, is not a mere matter of intellectual assent or dissent, but something far beyond and above this, the way of the soul Godward, a groping in thought and finer deed toward that perfection fortunately made manifest in that greatest of personalities, Christ. Its sole sufficing need is a sense of the living presence of one who pointed the path of sacrifice as the only path that leads to God, one whose whole life went out in beneficent activity, one who had greater faith in the potential divinity of humankind than any other has had who has spoken on earth. The human race moved up to a higher level when he voiced this faith — a faith that has spurred it on ever since, in spite of overcodified religions, and religious wars, and worship of the body, and all powers dragging back. Not more important is our holding him divine than is his faith in the potential divinity of humanity.

And this is good evolutionary doctrine.