Part 10

This truly catholic attitude, which is essential for modern humility, is not palatable to the pseudo-catholicity of the modern mind. We have fancied, especially in America, that expert reason aided by democratic tolerance could soon discover the underlying relationships between the different ways of salvation, thus federating these in a single “concern,” a sort of efficient successor and substitute for the universal infallible church of the Middle Ages. Behind this enterprise stands the overweening assumption of modern philosophy that the universe itself is a single organism with a large variety of inter-assimilable aspects, such as religion and science, love and morals, good and evil, God and Nature. Tennyson would not have been so shocked by his rediscovery of the perennial fact that God and Nature are at strife if he had not been so infected by the modern notion that they ought not to be,--that properly they belong in a universal banking trust whose members, however they may quarrel on the surface, never suffer a real severance of business relations. Nor would our current disillusionists feel so badly about the inevitable dissolution of that trust if their grandfathers had not credited it so heavily. Let us now recognise pride as the grand sponsor of that trust--the pride of unity and immediacy, or of universal “continuity” as the late T. E. Hulme would say. Let us humbly admit that the universe is faulted, geologically speaking, deeper and higher than our knowing. What of ultimate plan and unity its strata may have, God only knows.

Our youths who have learned to smile with a weary superior air at the traditional division of reality into God, Man, and Nature, would breathe more freely and begin again to taste the vital zest of the universal drama, if we would now teach them that this traditional division is _less naïve_ than the theory of universal continuity; is better grounded in universal human experience; and, above all, is more truly accordant with the profound division which any thinking man may find within himself to-day when he is sufficiently self-reliant and experimental to plumb beneath the surfaces where our ephemeral psycho-physicisms weave and flutter. Recently humanism, in its attempt to fulfil and deepen the experimentality of the modern spirit, has of necessity placed its chief emphasis upon that inward division. It has insisted that the _opposition_ between the higher and lower wills within us, whether they be called “divine” and “natural” or what not, is essentially inexplicable by expert reason and is nevertheless, from the present standpoint of human happiness, the most important feature of the universe arrived at by free and full experimentation.

This humane _dualism_ strikes at the very heart of modern pride, the pride of spiritual _monism_. It sets a true immediacy over against a false immediacy. It assigns a central value to the paradox established by the immediate experience of Everyman when he tries (in the terminology of common sense) to be “at one with himself” by keeping his “better self” above his “worser self.” It depreciates the expert reasonings and romantic emotions which, overriding that vital paradox of good sense, would leap immediately at spiritual unity and continuity. Consequently the humane dualism, more than any other doctrine of recent criticism, has met with angry rejection or obfuscating comment. A good example of the latter is afforded by a generous and intelligent reviewer who comments as follows upon the dualistic humanism of Milton: “Milton, after all, had not read Darwin; we have ... Milton’s energetic dualism was based on religious conceptions which are genuinely outlived; the power behind his allegory of the soul was his belief that the world was shaped and created for mankind; and, conceiving of ourselves now so much more humbly than he did, we cannot set our lives on such a stage.... We cannot invent an opposition we do not feel.”[35]

The above, in a representative modern fashion, confuses modesty and humility. The modern modest dogma that the world was not “shaped and created for mankind” has shown itself, when all its implications are considered, no less deficient in real humility than the conceited belief that the world was created for human comfortableness. This belief was far more radically repudiated by Milton than by us. Only with the aid of modern pride can we be sure that his _basic_ religious ideas have been “_genuinely_ outlived” and that we, having read Darwin, conceive of ourselves “much more _humbly_ than he did.” He, to be sure, was no adept either in Darwinian or in Emersonian modesty. As a man among men he had strong intellectual and even personal pride. But above it he had true spiritual humility; which may consist with, and derive support from, that virtue too much obscured by modern modesty, namely “self-esteem, founded on justice and right, well managed.” This kind of self-reliance enabled Milton to assign full value to the moral division he found within himself. His “energetic dualism,” as the reviewer calls it, his dramatic sense of the _real_ opposition between the nature of lust, pride, and Chaos and the nature of purity, humility, and Peace, was not “based on” transient religious concepts. It was “based on” the duality he found at the centre of himself as well as at the centre of European experience, Christian and pagan. He would have found it also at the centre of ancient Buddhism, if he had known this as we know it to-day. But, says my reviewer, “we cannot invent an opposition we do not feel.” Very true. Nevertheless, with the aid of right self-esteem and humility, with a patient critical reverence for what is best in ourselves and in accumulated tradition, European and Oriental, we may not only “feel” but realise, in thought and conduct, an opposition we did not invent.

Only thus can we proceed to a spiritual use of our scientific modesty. Over against the self-flattery of religious superstition, science has revealed the indifference of a vast physical universe. Here is wholesome seed for a fresh humility. But so far its growth in the modern spirit is blighted; blighted much less by the old superstitions which the modern religionist enjoys attacking than by the new superstition which he himself has fostered--the bastard ideal of love. This ideal, religiously derived from an illegitimate mixture of two fallibles, democracy and St. John, infects to-day the blood of many who, rejecting St. John and perhaps also democracy, believe loudly in Sex; or who, tired of Sex also, believe in nothing because it seems the sole alternative to the spurious all-immanent divinity of modern love. This love, though masquerading as powerful and strenuous, is essentially soft. It has succeeded in masking the Cross, not only the Christian but the universal Cross, in soft flummeries. The hard universe of science disowns it. And so does the severity of the divine Laws. If we learn again to revere these in their full severity as we find it in history (especially recent history) and in ourselves, to bow before their awful beauty with a love that fears to call itself worthy of casting out fear, then the outward laws can again become real images of the inward Laws.

Outward nature with her unfathomable self-subsistence, her rigorous detachment from the egoistic delusions of the human heart, and her firm satisfactions for those who seek only to know and follow her laws, can again be seen as a real though very distant representation of the Divine Nature itself. The dual nature of man, freed from the intervolving vapours of old metaphysical dualisms and new metaphysical monisms, guarded from insidious loves, and cultivated with renewed moral vigour, can be seen again as the isthmus between Time and Eternity: our firm and fruitful land between unfathomable, unmixing, but not unkindly seas.

FOOTNOTES

[25] Recently I attended on successive Sundays an extremely Catholic and an extremely Protestant celebration of the Holy Communion. The solemnity of the former was injured by the priest’s sermon, which evinced the pumping process, the “defence-mechanism,” referred to above. At the other service, the mound of bread-cubes that appeared on the table below the pulpit, alongside a pitcher of grape-juice, was suggestive, I fear, of the above mentioned junk-heaps. For the minister interrupted his readings from old sacramental liturgies to explain how much the ceremony rightly meant to his sect, and how much it wrongly meant to the Catholics.

[26] Luke IV, 9-13.

[27] This word is borrowed from the late Baron Friedrich von Hügel, in whose life and writings the truth of it is powerfully and beautifully illustrated.

[28] His crucial period in early maturity, his “temptation in the wilderness,” is examined in my article “On Emerson’s ‘Grace’ and ‘Self-Reliance’” in the _New England Quarterly_, Vol. II, No. 1, 1929.

[29] See the essays on Newman, Arnold, and Huxley in Robert Shafer’s _Christianity and Naturalism_, 1926.

[30] See the chapter on him in Norman Foerster’s _American Criticism_, 1928.

[31] An interesting critique bearing on this subject is “The Modern Distemper” by Professor Ralph Barton Perry in the _Saturday Review of Literature_, June 1, 1929.

[32] Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_, Book I, canto 4. This great poetic fable would be studied in our schools and colleges with deeper emotion if its application to modern pride were not screened off by modern pride itself.

[33] From _Parochial and Plain Sermons_, 1880, Vol. II, No. XXXI.

[34] _A Preface to Morals_, p. 326.

[35] From a review of my book _The Cycle of Modern Poetry_ in the _Times Literary Supplement_ (London), June 20, 1929.

_Religion Without Humanism_

T. S. ELIOT

I must rely, in these few pages, upon a brief summary of the limitations within which I believe humanism must work, which I published in the _Hound and Horn_, June, 1929. In that paper I stated my belief that humanism is in the end futile without religion. Here I wish to put forward briefly a view which seems to me equally important, the counterpart of the other, and one which ought to be more welcome to humanists. Having called attention to what I believe to be a danger, I am bound to call attention to the danger of the other extreme: the danger, a very real one, of _religion without humanism_.

I believe that the sceptic, even the pyrrhonist, but particularly the humanist-sceptic, is a very useful ingredient in a world which is no better than it is. In saying this I do not think that I am committing myself to any theological heresy. The ideal world would be the ideal Church. But very little knowledge of human nature is needed to convince us that hierarchy is liable to corruption, and certainly to stupidity; that religious belief, when unquestioned and uncriticised, is liable to degeneration into superstition; that the human mind is much lazier than the human body; and that the communion of saints in Tibet is of a very low order. If we cannot rely, and it seems that we can never rely, upon adequate criticism from within, it is better that there should be criticism from without. But here I wish to make a capital distinction: criticism, infidelity and agnosticism must, to be of value, be _original_ and not inherited. Orthodoxy must be traditional, heterodoxy must be original. The attitude of Voltaire has value, because of its place in time; the attitude of Renan has value, in its historical perspective; Anatole France I can only consider as a man who came at the most unfortunate date for his own reputation--too late to be a great sceptic, and too soon to be a great sceptic. There must be more orthodoxy before there can be another Voltaire. And precisely I fear lest humanism should make a tradition of dissent and agnosticism, and so cut itself off from the sphere of influence in which it is most needed.

For there is no doubt in my mind that contemporary religious institutions are in danger from themselves; that they have with few exceptions lost the “intellectual,” except that pernicious kind of intellectual who adopts dogma merely because doubt is out of date. Nowhere is this more obvious than in America. All the religious forms which have some ancestry, and many which have none, flourish there; but among persons whom I have known, there is hardly one who had any connection (not to say any conviction) with any of them.

But America is not isolated in this respect; it merely shows us under a magnifying glass what occurs everywhere. The two dangers to which religion is exposed are apparent everywhere--and they are both cases for which “humanism” or “culture” might be called in: _petrified ecclesiasticism_, and _modernism_.

The great merit of the Catholic Church, from the worldly point of view, is its catholicity. That is to say, it is obvious that every religion is effectively limited by the racial characters of the people who practise it, and that a strictly racial or national religion is certain to hold many irrelevances and impurities, from lack of an outside standard of criticism. When the Catholic Faith really is catholic, the aberrations of one race will be corrected by those of another. But it is obviously very difficult even for the Roman Church, nowadays, to be truly catholic. The embarrassment of temporal powers, the virulence of racial and national enthusiasms, are enormous centrifugal forces. The great majority of English speaking people, or at least the vast majority of persons of British descent; half of France, half of Germany, the whole of Scandinavia, are outside of the Roman communion: that is to say, the Roman Church has lost some organic parts of the body of modern civilisation. It is a recognition of this fact which makes some persons of British extraction hesitate to embrace the Roman communion; and which makes them feel that those of their race who have embraced it have done so only by the surrender of some essential part of their inheritance and by cutting themselves off from their family.

But if one feels that the culture of the Roman Catholic Church to-day is imperfect--and also in danger of splitting up into various local and national bigotries and political factions which will retain only the name and the observances of catholicism--one cannot get any satisfaction from what happens outside of that church either. The Roman Church in America has little contact with some of the most valuable elements in American culture; it not only lacks humanism, but is in danger of adding vulgarity. In England it is negligible. But both in England and America, Protestantism is in still worse case. It can be, and usually is, equally vulgar; it can be equally narrow and bigoted; with the alternative that when it is not narrow and bigoted it is liberal, sloppy, hypocritical and humanitarian. The Roman Church is dangerous in one direction; the Protestant Churches are dangerous in two directions.

I have already said what I think of humanism without religion; I respect it, but believe it to be sterile. Religion without humanism produces the vulgarities and the political compromises of Roman Catholicism; the vulgarities and the fanaticism of Tennessee; it produces Mrs. MacPherson; and it produces liberal uplift; and it produces the Bishop of Birmingham. For it is the chief point of this short paper, that religion without humanism produces the opposite and conflicting types of religious bigotry (liberalism in religion is a form of bigotry). We have Cardinal O’Connell; the late W. J. Bryan; and we have the cultivated divines of the most radical wing of Unitarianism. The sum of _disjecta membra_ is completed by the humanists.

I have examined several popular theological works by Anglican clergy of the liberal school.[36] It would I am sure be difficult to convince any of these worthy people that they were humanitarian without being humanist. Humanitarians (and among them we must include anti-humanitarians like Dean Inge, a sentimentalist _à rebours_) are often highly cultivated people who have read many books; some of them, in England at least, can read Latin and Greek; the Bishop of Birmingham took honours in mathematics. Yet in surrendering dogmatic faith they are at the same time surrendering their humanism. It is from such people that we hear most about “science and religion”; it is such people who pay, and lead the flock to pay, that exaggerated devotion to “science” which the true humanist deplores.

It is curious that whilst on the one hand the liberal theologian tends to pay homage to an illusory divinity called “science” the advanced scientist tends to pay homage to an equally vague “religion.” People seem to suppose that by science yielding points to religion, and religion yielding points to science, we shall quite soon arrive at a position of comfortable equilibrium. What will be “real” will be the technical progress of science, and the material organisation of the churches: we shall still have professors of physics and we shall still have clergy, and nobody will lose his job. Scientists and clergy alike seem to speak nowadays as if they were in terror of the spectre of unemployment: “I will not make exaggerated claims,” they both seem to say, “lest I may be discovered to be superfluous.”

But this apparent approximation of science and religion, which we discover in such theological works as those I have mentioned, and in such popular scientific works as those of Whitehead and Eddington, is a delusion. The meeting is a mere cancellation to zero. Nothing positive is attained by reciprocal surrender. The theologian says “of course dogma is not truth,” and the scientist says, “of course science is not truth.” Every one is happy together; and possibly both parties turn to _poetry_ (about which neither scientist nor theologian knows anything) and say “_there_ is truth, in the inspiration of the poet.” The poet himself, who perhaps knows more about his own inspiration than a psycho-analyst does, is not allowed to reply that poetry is poetry, and not science or religion--unless he or some of his mistaken friends produce a theory that Poetry is Pure Poetry, Pure Poetry turning out to be something else than poetry and thereby securing respect.

Both parties, the liberal theologian and the scientist, are deficient in humanism. But what is more serious, to my mind, is that the humanist is deficient in humanism too, and must take his responsibility with the others. What happens, in the general confusion, is not only that each party abdicates his proper part, but that he interferes with the proper part of the others. The theologian is terrified of science, and the scientist is becoming terrified of religion; whilst the humanist, endeavouring to pay proper, but not excessive due to both, reels from side to side. And the world reels with him.

On the following point I speak with diffidence, recognising my lack of qualification where qualification is severe and exact. Humanism has much to say of Discipline and Order and Control; and I have parroted these terms myself. I found no discipline in humanism; only a little intellectual discipline from a little study of philosophy. But the difficult discipline is the discipline and training of emotion; this the modern world has great need of; so great need that it hardly understands what the word means; and this I have found is only attainable through dogmatic religion. I do not say that dogmatic religion is justified because it supplies this need--that is just the psychologism and the anthropocentrism that I wish to avoid--but merely state my belief that in no other way can the need be supplied. There is much chatter about mysticism: for the modern world the word means some spattering indulgence of emotion, instead of the most terrible concentration and askesis. But it takes perhaps a lifetime merely to realise that men like the forest sages, and the desert sages, and finally the Victorines and John of the Cross and (in his fashion) Ignatius really _mean what they say_. Only those have the right to talk of discipline who have looked into the Abyss. The need of the modern world is the discipline and training of the emotions; which neither the intellectual training of philosophy or science, nor the wisdom of humanism, nor the negative instruction of psychology can give.

In short, we can use the term Humanism in two ways. In the narrower sense, which tends always under emphasis to become narrower still, it is an important part in a larger whole; and humanists, by offering this part as a substitute for the whole, are lessening, instead of increasing, its importance; they offer an excuse to the modern theologian and the modern scientist (only too ready to grasp it) for _not_ being humanistic themselves, and for leaving humanism to its own specialists. Humanism can offer neither the intellectual discipline of philosophy or of science (two different disciplines), nor the emotional discipline of religion. On the other hand, these other activities depend upon humanism to preserve their sanity. Without it, religion tends to become either a sentimental tune, or an emotional debauch; or in theology, a skeleton dance of fleshless dogmas, or in ecclesiasticism, a soulless political club. Without it, science can be merely a process of technical research, bursting out from time to time, and especially in our time, into sentimental monstrosities like the Life Force, or Professor Whitehead’s God.

But in the full and complete sense of the word, Humanism is something quite different from a part trying to pretend to be a whole, and something quite different from a “parasite” of religion. It can only be quite actual in the full realisation and balance of the disciplined intellectual and emotional life of man. For, as I have said, without humanism both religion and science tend to become other than themselves, and without religion and science--without emotional and intellectual discipline--humanism tends to shrink into an atrophied caricature of itself. It is the spirit of humanism which has operated to reconcile the mystic and the ecclesiastic in one church; having done this in the past, humanism should not set itself up now as another sect, but strive to continue and enlarge its task, labouring to reconcile and unite all the parts into a whole. It is the humanist who could point out to the theologian the absurdities of his repudiation, acceptance, or exploitation of “science,” and to the scientist the absurdities of his repudiation, acceptance, or exploitation of religion. For when I say “reconcile,” I mean something very different from the dangerous and essentially anti-humanistic adventures of the Bishop of Birmingham or Professor Whitehead. And let us leave Einstein alone, who has his own business to attend to.

As I believe I am writing chiefly for those who know or think they know, what “humanism” means, I have not in this paper attempted any definition of it. I take it that the reader thinks he knows what it means, and that he will understand that I am putting before him the difference between what I think he thinks it means and what I think I think it means.