The Faith of the Millions Part 14

Hence, the writer concludes: "Materialism, when its defect is discovered and understood, points on to idealism. Idealism, when its defect is disclosed, points to Christian theism." For those who have not come to Christian theism by this th.o.r.n.y and circuitous path, the mode in which the idealist extricates himself from his self-wrought entanglement may seem of little interest; but inasmuch as they take for granted the existence of that same mult.i.tude of mutually impenetrable personalities which he, by a revolt of his common-sense against his philosophy is forced to confess, the problem of the ultimate unity exists for them also.

If in its endeavour to vindicate the spirituality of man against the materialist, idealism tumbles into the slough of solipsism and needs to be fetched out by the doctrine of the Trinity, it fares much the same way in its attempted defence of free-will against necessity. That freedom from determination by the "not-self" which idealism vindicates, can belong only to the all-inclusive Spirit, outside whose self nothing exists; it belongs to me only on the supposition that I am the all-inclusive; and this, as before, is the point at which common-sense revolts. "Free-will is based on man's consciousness of his moral nature.

It represents not any speculative theory, but one of the great facts which every theory of things must explain or perish." If we ascribe freedom to the Absolute and to other spirits (whose existence is forced on us in spite of Idealism), it is because we first find it in ourselves as the very essence of our spiritual nature. But if we accept our freedom as a fact which it is the business of philosophy to explain and not to deny; on just the same testimony we must accept the fact of the manifold limitations of our liberty of which we are continually conscious. Now here it is that the Idealist defence of liberty against materialism fails by a deplorable _nimis probat_. It can only save our liberty by denying our limitations; or at least it leaves us facing a problem which can be solved only by an a.s.sumption for which Idealism offers no philosophical warrant. Hence we are brought back to the world-old dilemma "between a freedom of G.o.d which annihilates man, and a freedom of man which annihilates G.o.d." Idealism has really contributed nothing to the solution of the difficulty which is persistent as long as G.o.d is known only as a Sovereign and Infinite Personality among a mult.i.tude of finite personalities, and until revelation hints at the possibility of a higher "unity which transcends personality, by which He is to be the reconciling principle and home of the mult.i.tude of self-determining agents." "Final reconciliation of the Divine and human personality is in fact beyond us."

Similarly, in dealing with problems of moral evil, Idealism leads to an _impa.s.se_. As long as we keep to the notion of one all-inclusive Spirit, the Subject of universal experience, it is easy to show that sin is but relatively evil, that it is, when viewed absolutely, as much a factor of the universal life as is righteousness; yet surely this is not to account for so large and obstinate a part of our experience, but to deny it. Nor can the ethical corollaries of such a view be tolerated for a moment. That sin is an absolute, eternal, in some sense, irreparable evil is a conception altogether fundamental to that morality with which Christianity and modern civilization have identified themselves. It is but another aspect of the doctrine of freedom and responsibility. Of physical and necessary evil it is possible to a.s.sert the merely negative or relative character; we can view it as the good in process of making; or as the good imperfectly comprehended; but if this optimism be extended to sin it can only be because sin is regarded as necessitated, _i.e._, as no longer sin. Hence the view in question does not account for, but implicitly denies the existence of sin.

Furthermore, the whole tendency of more recent idealism is to explain moral evil as an offence against man's social nature by which he is a member of an organism or community. It is the undue self-a.s.sertion of the part against the interests of the whole. Of course the idealist explains this organic conception with a respect for personality which is absent from socialistic and evolutionary doctrines of society. But the notion of sin as a rebellion of one member against all, is common to both. The latter consider the external life and activity of the unit as an element in the collective external life of the community--as part of a common work; the former considers the unity as a free spiritual agency, an end for itself--whose liberty is curtailed only by the claims of other like agencies, equal or greater. But by what process, apart from faith and practical postulates and regulative ideas, can subjectivism pa.s.s to belief in other free agencies outside the thinking and all-creating self? The result of Mr, D'Arcy's criticism of the matter is that "it is because the man exists as a member of a spiritual universe, and must therefore so exert his power of self-determination as to be in harmony or discord with G.o.d above him, and with other men around him, that the distinction between the good self and the bad self arises. But in this very conception of a universe of spirits we have pa.s.sed beyond the bounds of a purely rational philosophy. Such a universe is not explicable by reference to the vivifying principle of the self;" and accordingly we are driven back as before upon the alternative of philosophical chaos, or else of faith in such a superpersonal unity as is suggested by the doctrine of the Trinity.

We have but hinted at the barest outlines of Mr. D'Arcy's argument which, as against Idealism, is close-reasoned and subtle; and now we have left but little s.p.a.ce to deal with the more really interesting chapter on the "Ultimate Unity." It is not pretended that we can form any conception of the precise nature of that unity, but merely that some such unknown kind of unity is needed to deliver us from the antinomies of thought. As we could never rise to the intrinsic conception of personal unity from the consideration of some lower unity, material or mechanical; so neither can we pa.s.s from the notion of personal to that of superpersonal unity or being.

This is only a modern and Hegelian setting of the truth that "being" and "unity" are said a.n.a.logously and not univocally of G.o.d and creatures.

That there are grades of reality; that "substance is more real than quality and subject is more real than substance," that "the most real of all is the concrete totality, the all-inclusive universal"--the _Ens determinatissimum_, is not a modern discovery, but a re-discovery. That our own personality is the highest unity of which we have any proper non-a.n.a.logous notion; that it is the measure by which we spontaneously try to explain to ourselves other unities, higher or lower, by means of extensions or limitations; that our first impulse, prior to correction, is to conceive everything self-wise, be it super-human or infra-human, is of course profoundly true; but for this reason to make "self" the all-explaining and only category, to deny any higher order of reality because we can have no definite conception of its precise nature, is the narrowness which has brought Idealism into such difficulties. It is probably in his notion of Divine personality that Mr. D'Arcy comes most in conflict with the technicalities of later schools. If, as he says, modern theology oscillates between the poles of Sabellianism and Tritheism, he himself inclines to the latter pole. Father de Regnon, S.J., in his work on the Trinity, shows that the Greek Fathers and the Latin viewed the problem from opposite ends. "How three can be one," was the problem with the former; "How one can be three," with the latter.

These inclined to an emptier, those to a fuller notion of personality.

Mr. D'Arcy's Trinitarianism is decidedly more Greek than Latin. The more "content" he gives to Divine personality, the more he is in-danger of denying ident.i.ty of nature and operation; as appears later.

Plainly, the word "person," however a.n.a.logously applied to G.o.d, must contain something of what we mean when we call ourselves "persons," else "we are landed in the unmeaning." When Christ spoke of Himself as "I,"

the selfness implied by the p.r.o.noun must have had some kind of resemblance to our own; just as when He called G.o.d His Father He intended to convey something of what fatherhood meant for His then hearers. That He intended to convey what it might come to mean in other conditions and ages seems very doubtful; and so if the word "person" has acquired a fuller and different meaning in modern philosophy, we are not at once justified in applying this fuller conception to the Divine persons, unless we can show that it is a legitimate development of the older sense.

He argues that if the Trinity be the ultimate truth, the Unitarian suppositions and conclusions of the "natural theologian" are bound to lead to antinomies and confusions; and he sees in those harmonious interferences and variations of universal import (which are no less an essential factor in the evolution of the world than the groundwork of uniformity and law), evidence of a multi-personal Divine government, of a division of labour between co-operant agencies. This, of course, goes beyond the doctrine of "appropriation;" and amounts to a denial of the singleness of the Divine operation _ad extra_. It seems, in short, to imply a diversity of nature in each of the persons, over and above the principle of personal distinctness. Indeed, while it offers a plausible solution of some minor perplexities, it rather weakens the value of the general argument. For the notion of a superpersonal unity is needed chiefly as suggesting a mode in which many mutually exclusive personalities or "spheres of experience" or lives, may be welded together into a coherent whole. Even could I reproduce most exactly in myself the thoughts and feelings of another, it were but a reproduction or similarity. I can know and feel the like; but I cannot know his knowing and feel his feeling; for this were to be that other and not myself.

That G.o.d's knowledge of our thoughts and feelings should be of this external, inferential kind is as intolerable to our mental needs of unification as it is to our religious sense, our hope, our confidence, our love. In Him we live and move and think and feel; and He in us. That we can say this of no other personality is what const.i.tutes the burden of our separateness and loneliness. Our experience exists for no other; but at least it is in some mysterious way shared by That which lies behind all otherness, not destroying, but fulfilling. "We know not why it is," says St. Catherine of Genoa, "we feel an internal necessity of using the plural p.r.o.noun instead of the singular." Perhaps it was that she saw in a purer and clearer light what we only half feel in the obscurity of our grosser hearts.

But if G.o.d knows our knowing, and feels our feeling, not merely by a similitude but in itself, it is not because He is transcendent and "personal," as we understand the word, because He is immanent and "superpersonal," whatever that may mean. But it is just because revelation tells us that in G.o.d there are three selves or Egos, for each of whom the experience (i.e., the thought, love, and action) of the other two exists, not merely similar, but one and the same--the same thinking, loving, and doing, no less than the same thought, love, and deed--that we can believe in the possibility of our personal separateness being at once preserved and overcome in that mysterious unity.

That G.o.d is love; and that love, which as an affection, produces an affective unity between separate persons, can as the subsistent and primal unity produce a substantial and ineffable union of which the other is a shadow, is a view towards which revelation points. That the mere affection of love, the moral union of wills, is an insufficient unification of personalities is implied by the fact that love always tends to some sort of real union and communication; and still more, that it springs from a sense of inexplicable ident.i.ty.

It is almost a crime in criticism to deal with such a mult.i.tude of deep problems in so brief and hasty an essay. But if we have roughly indicated the main outlines of the author's position, we shall have done as much as can be reasonably expected of us; though it is with great reluctance that we pa.s.s over many points, and even whole chapters, bristling with interest.

Perhaps the most important feature of the book is the prominence it gives to the difficulties and insufficiencies of idealism. With those of realism we are all familiar enough, but so far, idealism has been looked at one-sidedly as evading, if not solving, some of the antinomies of the earlier philosophy, while its own embarra.s.sments have been condoned in hopes of future solution. The solution has not come, and now the hopes are dead or dying. What we need is a higher synthesis, if such be possible for the human mind, or else a frank admission that faith, in some sense or other, is a necessary complement of every philosophy. One thing is clear, that reconciliation can be effected, if at all, only by a fair-minded admission of difficulties inseparable from either system, and by a conscientious criticism of presuppositions. No one can deal effectually with the idealist position to whom it is simply "absurd" or "ridiculous;" who has not been to some degree intellectually entangled in it; whose realism is not more or less of an effort. Else he is dealing with some man of straw of his own fancy, and will be found, as so often happens, a.s.suming the truth of realism in every argument he brings forward. Plainly the best minds of modern times have not been victimized by a fallacy within the competence of a school-boy. And a like intellectual self-denial is needed on the part of the idealist, who is apt to dismiss all realism as crude, uncritical, or barbaric. We have all our antinomies, our blind alleys, our crudities; and we have all to fill up awkward interstices with a.s.sumptions and postulates.

However much we may dissent from Mr. D'Arcy's theology in certain details; however little we personally may labour under the difficulties of idealism, we cannot too strongly commend the endeavour to meet the modern mind on its own platform; to speak to the cultivated in their own language. Belief is caused by the wish to believe; but it is conditioned by the removal of intellectual obstacles, different for different grades of intelligence and education. To create the "wish to believe" is largely a matter of example, of letting Christianity appear attractive and desirable, and correspondent to the deeper needs of the soul. It is also to some extent a work of exposition. But when this all-important wish has been created, the intellect can hinder its effect. It is much to know and feel that Christianity is good and useful and beautiful; "But some time or other the question must be asked: _Is it true_?" And to liberate the will by satisfying the intellect is work of what alone is properly called apologetic. Unless we fall back into quietism which would tell us to read a Kempis and say our prayers and wait, we must address ourselves first of all to making Christianity attractive; and then to making it intelligible. And if we do not find it against Gospel simplicity to address ourselves, as we continually do, to the intelligence of the semi-educated, we cannot allege that scruple as a reason why we should not address ourselves to the fully educated,--to those who eventually form and guide the opinions of the many.

_Feb. 1901_.

Footnotes:

[Footnote 1: _Idealism and Theology_. By Charles D'Arcy, B.D. Hodder and Stoughton, 1900.]