Chapter 2
We may glance at the mediaeval religion in its culmination in the three figures of Dante, Francis of Assisi, and Thomas à Kempis. À Kempis shows religion fled from the active world with its strifes and temptations, sedulously cultivating a pure, devout, unworldly virtue; feeding on the contemplation of heavenly splendors and infernal horrors; self-centred and inglorious. The opposite type is Frances, a joyful prophet of glad tidings to the poor; ardent, sympathetic, heroic; touched with the beauty of nature and the appeal of the animal creation; exalting simplicity and poverty like an ancient philosopher; seeking the needy and sorrowful like Jesus of Nazareth; but with no spiritual originality like Jesus, no power to create a new religion; strong only to revive the best elements of the traditional faith, and to organize a society which erelong sank back to the general level of the church.
Dante is an embodiment of mediaeval belief in its most sublime and intense phase. He has much of the temper of the Hebrew psalmist, in his tremendous love and hate, his patriotism, his sorrow, his quest for the highest. This vast spiritual passion finds its expression and satisfaction in an invisible world, which promises in a future existence the supreme triumph and reign of a divine justice, wrath, and pity, and for which the visible world is but antechamber and probation. Dante shows the culmination of supernatural Christianity, but he has something further. The guide of his pilgrimage, the star of his hope, the inspiration of his life, is a woman,--loved with sublimation and tenderness, loved better after her death, and felt as the living link between the seen and unseen worlds. Thus at the heart of the old supernaturalism is the germ of a new conception, in which human love sanctified by death becomes the revealer.
In Dante we feel that the projection of human interest to an unseen and future world has reached its furthest limit. The mind of man must needs revert to some nearer home and sphere. And closely following Dante we see in England a group of figures who betoken the return. There is Chaucer, displaying the various energy and joy and humor of earthly life. There is Piers Plowman, showing the grim obverse of the medal, the hardship and woe of the poor. Wyclif insists on a personal religion, whose austere edge turns against ecclesiastical pretense and social wrong; and he applies reason so daringly that it cuts at the very centre of the church's dogma, in denying Transubstantiation. A little earlier we see Roger Bacon making a fresh beginning in the experimental philosophy which had been slighted for centuries. These four are the precursors respectively of the purely human view, as in Shakspere, of the elevation of the poor, of Protestantism, and of natural science.
As pagan mythology, Stoicism, and Judaism all were superseded by early Christianity, as that in turn was succeeded by mediaeval Catholicism, so another stage has brought us to the religion of to-day. The leading features of this last transition may be summarily sketched, we may then glance at certain groups of figures illustrating the advance in its successive periods, and so we shall come to the ideal of the present.
The religious transition of the last four centuries is in one aspect marked by the waning of authority and the growth of individual freedom; and in another aspect it is the substitution for a supernatural of a natural conception, or, we may say, in place of a divided and warring universe, a harmonious universe.
In this double progress toward individual liberty and toward a new way of thought, a conspicuous agency has been the advance of knowledge. Connected with the advance of knowledge has been an improvement of the actual conditions of human life. Meantime the ethical sense and the spiritual aspiration of mankind have asserted themselves, sometimes as slow-working, permanent forces, sometimes in revolutionary upheaval. With change both of material condition and of ways of thought, new forms of sentiment and aspiration have appeared,--a wider and tenderer humanity; a reverence for the order of nature and dependence upon the study of that order for human progress; a consciousness of the sublimity and beauty of nature as a divine revelation; a reliance upon the powers and intuitions of the human spirit as its only and sufficient guides; a rediscovery under natural and universal forms of the faith and hope which were once supposed inseparably bound up with ritual, dogma, and miracle, but which now when given freer wing find firmer support and loftier scope.
Along with these forces has gone the steady push of human nature for enjoyment, for ease, for power; the grasp of man for all he can get of whatever seems to him the highest good. There have been mutual injuries, degradations, retrogressions, such as darken all the pages of human history; the manifest evil which often defies all interpretation, and which only a profound faith can regard as "good in the making."
Together with these influences we must also reckon the special action of strong personalities.
No sharp line can be drawn between these various powers,--their interplay is constant. The main argument of the drama, from the mediaeval to the present phase, may be briefly shown.
Into the world as Dante knew it came Knowledge on three great lines,--opening the material universe, rediscovering a lost interpretation of life, and diffusing the secrets of the few among the many. The astronomers, voyagers, and geographers found out a new heaven and a new earth. The revival of Greek literature gave to the cultivated class a "renaissance," a rebirth, of speculative thought, of intellectual beauty, of delight in human activities for their own sake. It was a new birth in some of the old pagan sensuality, skeptical of heaven or hell; worse than the old sensuality because it trampled down the finer purity which Christianity had bred. In others it was a new birth to the pursuit of moral and social good, inspired by the master spirits of Judaism and early Christianity. Then came the invention of printing, and the aristocracy of intelligence widened rapidly toward democracy.
The foremost men of the new knowledge supported the Catholic church, either as a covert for indulgence or as a spiritual agency to be maintained and purified. The successful rebel against the church was a peasant-priest, who revolted because the moral unsoundness which long had sapped the hierarchy ran at last into open countenance of vice. It was originally a moral revolt, and it was led by a man who knew in his own experience that not only the ethical but the emotional life of the spirit was possible without dependence on the church of Rome. But neither Luther nor any of the reformers were men of spiritual originality. Driven to construct a new creed, they simply worked over the old dogmas, divesting them of the keys of priestly power--the Mass, the confessional, absolution, Purgatory, and the like; and giving infallible authority to the Bible only. A war of creeds followed, mingled with a strife of ambitions and a struggle between the powers of the secular state and of the hierarchy. To men of piety and peace like Erasmus and Melanchthon it seemed as if religion were only a loser by the long period of bloodshed and bitterness that followed. The gain, as we see it, was that half of Europe was wrested from the dominion of the Catholic church; that that church was driven to purify its morals; and that in the Protestant states the liberty which at first was only a change of masters spread gradually, as one sect after another established its foothold, and as the secular temper in the state rose above the ecclesiastical, until the religious freedom of the individual is at last becoming generally and securely established.
Only by this overthrow of ecclesiastical authority was rendered possible that unchecked freedom of intellectual inquiry which has been the great positive factor in modern advance. Step by step men have learned to know the condition, the history, the natural laws of the material world in which they live and the social world of which they are a part. The bearing of this growing knowledge on the conception of the spiritual life has been various,--seeming for a while to lie wholly apart from it; then at times menacing its existence or contracting its scope; again arming it with powerful weapons and enlarging its ideals. Of the latest chapters in the story of science, one has retold the origin of Christianity, divested it of miracle and revelation, and translated it into purely natural and human terms. Another chapter has fixed the general trend of the universe known to man as an ever advancing and broadening movement, under the name of Evolution.
Amid all these changes the Christian church has continued to present its ideals, precepts, incitements; partly affirming them in contradiction of all denial, partly adapting them to the changes of time and thought. The moral and spiritual interpretation of life has not been confined to the church, but has been voiced in each generation by poets, moralists, reformers, statesmen, each after his thought. Out of the conflict and confusion a substantial agreement and harmonious ideal is at last appearing. More clearly and confidently in our day than ever before the universe may be seen and felt by man as a Cosmos,--a beautiful order.
This bird's-eye view will grow more distinct and vivid if we study certain typical figures which group themselves as the representatives of succeeding generations. Our conventional division of centuries will serve as a convenient framework for four groups.
In the sixteenth century we have Sir Thomas More, uniting the highest virtue of the church with the clearest intelligence of the new thought, and setting forth in Utopia the ideal to be sought,--not mere individual salvation, not an ecclesiastical fold, but a human commonwealth of free, happy, and virtuous citizens.
Instead of the peaceful growth of such a society,--made impossible by selfishness, ignorance, and passion,--comes social upheaval and religious revolution, its central figure the burly, heroic, great-hearted Luther; by turns a rebel and a conservative; leading the successful revolt of Teutonic Europe against Rome, but leaving reconstruction to other hands.
Then we have Calvin, the builder of the creed of Protestantism; in its substance little but a symmetrical statement of mediaeval ideas, but resting its appeal not on authority, but logic; or, more exactly, on the authority of a book, which, having no longer an infallible interpreter, must be judged by human reason as to its contents and at last as to its nature and origin. Thus, unconsciously, Calvin initiated a religious democracy and ultimately a religion of reason; while for the time he established a creed more austere and grim than the Catholic. Opposite him stands Loyola, the reviver of Catholicism, infusing it with a new heroism and self-sacrifice; reaffirming and intensifying its authority; scornful of speculation, powerful in organization; zealot, missionary, educator; giving to ecclesiastical obedience an added emphasis, to organization a new force.
For a typical group in the next century, let us take Francis Bacon, leading the human intellect away from abstractions and from other worlds to the close, intelligent study of the material world in which men live. Beside him stands Shakspere, reading the world of humanity with eyes neither biased by creed nor sublimed by faith; portraying with marvelous range the joys, sorrows, humors of mankind; showing on his impartial canvas a true humanity, far different from the fictitious saint and fictitious sinner of the theologian; showing, as with the truth of nature, "virtue in her shape how lovely;" but with no consolation beside the grave, no satisfying ideal for man's pursuit nor rule for man's guidance. Near him we see "the Shakspere of divines," Jeremy Taylor; he, too, is close to the realities of life, but he is planted firm on the belief in a supernatural revelation of God, Christ, and a hereafter, and for those who so believe offers a simple, noble way of "Holy Living and Dying."
In Cromwell is embodied the attempt of extreme Protestantism to mould society and the state by the authority of a supernatural religion. The Puritan creed for which he stands is a mixture of Hebraic and Calvinistic elements; the Puritan temper is at its best heroic and austere, made despotic by its confidence of divine authority, and by its supernaturalism made indifferent to the new science and to the various elements of human nature on which statesmanship must build. Its political sway is brief, its effects on English and American character are lasting.
In the next century the master minds stand outside of Christianity. Voltaire assails the whole ecclesiastical and supernatural fabric with terrible weapons of hard sense and derision. For the target of his arrows he has a church at once corrupt, tyrannical, and weak, and a creed which the best intelligence has outgrown. He heartily scouts the church, dogma, miracle; admits a vague Deity and a possible hereafter, but cares little for them; is fearless, jovial, generous,--a rollicking, comfortable, formidable apostle of negations.
Into the vacuum he creates comes Rousseau, and at his touch there well up again deep fountains of feeling, belief, desire. Rousseau, too, has left behind him the church and its dogmas; but he craves love, joy, action, and finds scope for them. He delights in nature's beauty, and it is the symbol to him of a God in whom there remains of the Christian Deity only the element of beneficence. He exhorts men to return to nature, but it is a somewhat unreal nature, a dream of primeval innocence and simplicity. He idealizes the family relation, and brings wisdom and gentleness to the training of the child. He lacks the Hebraic and Puritan stress on conscience; the mild benevolence of his Deity is somewhat remote from the ethical need of man and from the actual procedure or the universe; Rousseau himself is tainted with sensuality,--a diseased, suffering, pathetic nature, with "sweet strings jangled," worthy of pity and of gratitude.
In France, the highest intelligence was at war with established institutions,--the Encyclopaedists, Voltaire, Rousseau, against the Catholic church and the reigning authorities: on the one side persecution, but growing feeble; on the other side derision or evasion or attack. In England, a large measure of civil and religious freedom gave the intellectual combatants a fairer field and a milder temper. The English genius showed itself as practical, matter-of-fact, and moderate. Supernatural Christianity was attacked and defended; against the assault on the miracles the defense was really a shifting of the ground, and an insistence as by Butler on an ethical order in the observed workings of the world, which gives a sort of analogue and support to the Christian scheme of future retribution. In speculative thought the prevailing school, as in Locke, approached reality from the side of sense-knowledge, till Hume showed how this road led to a denial of miracle and in philosophy to a fundamental skepticism. Berkeley reverted to the ideal philosophy, and there seemed but a continuance of the eternal seesaw of metaphysics.
In Germany, Kant sank his plummet deeper. He found indeed in the working of the pure intellect an outcome of self-contradiction. But he recognized, as the most certain guide to reality which man's inner world affords, the commanding sense of duty,--the "moral imperative;" and through this he found the presence and the authoritative voice of a moral deity.
Goethe lived through a rich and various experience, of book-culture, emotion, conversance with men and affairs, in the attitude of an explorer and observer, unbound by creeds, but open to all teaching from past records or present impressions. The projection of this experience was an ideal of life which gave large scope to all human faculties,--to knowledge, pleasure, passion, service,--under a wise self-control, and with theoretical allegiance to a moral law and a future hope not unlike the law and the hope of Christianity. It was an ideal which appealed only to the man of intellectual habit, and which lacked the note of heroism and self-sacrifice.
It was the opposite quality, the passion of self-forgetful service, which won for Christianity its most notable triumph in this century, in the movement led by John Wesley. In Wesley, Protestantism came back to the rescue of the poor, as Catholicism came back in Francis of Assisi. Among the peasants and colliers of England, among the backwoodsmen of America, swept an uplifting wave of love, joy, and hope.
Jonathan Edwards did Christianity the service of carrying Calvinism to its logical extreme, and showing what it really meant. He started in the New England ministry a strenuous speculation, which was not to rest till it destroyed the foundation from which he worked. The hell as to which comfortable churchmen were getting silent, he painted in such lurid colors that reaction and ultimate revolt were necessities of human nature. The life of holiness and love--in himself a most genuine reality--he defined in such terms of introspection and self-consciousness, that there opened a wide gulf between the forms of religion and the most sturdy and natural virtue of the time.
That sturdy and natural virtue was embodied in Benjamin Franklin,--in all this eighteenth century the best type and herald of the coming development of man. Franklin inherited the characteristic virtue of the Englishman and the Puritan; he started in ground which Puritan and Quaker had fertilized, and when the fire of the early zeal had cooled; he worked out the problem of life for himself with great independence and entire good sense. After a few vagaries and some wholesome buffeting, he determined that "moral perfection" was the only satisfying aim. But instead of proclaiming his discovery as a gospel, he quietly utilized it for his personal guidance. He had a keen eye for all utility; he carved out his own fortune; he early identified his own happiness with that of the people around him, and served the community with disinterested faithfulness through a long life. That unselfish beneficence, of which Goethe thought a single instance was enough to save his hero from the fiend to whom he had fairly forfeited his selfish soul, was the habit of Franklin's lifetime. He found the ample sanctions and rewards of virtue in the present world, though he held a cheerful hope of something beyond. In the study of this world's laws, he saw, lay the best road to human success. He recognized the homely virtues of industry and thrift, on which the young American society had worked out its real strength, and assigned to them the fundamental place, instead of that mystic and introspective piety which the Calvinist made his corner-stone. He took the lead in penetrating the secrets of nature, and not less in moulding and guiding the infant nation. If his virtue was prudential rather than heroic, his prudence was close to that large wisdom which is a right apprehension of all the facts of life. Only the realm of the poet, the mystic, the ardent lover, lay beyond his ken. He stands side by side with the grand and magnanimous figure of Washington,--the twin founders of the American republic.
The complexity and onrush of the nineteenth century may be in some degree made clear if we fix our eyes on certain typical groups of men whom we may classify under the aspects of Knowledge, Philosophy, Literature, Protestantism, Catholicism, Social Ideals, Personal Ideals.
Regarding under Knowledge what may fairly be considered as solid and irreversible acquisition,--the general movement of humanity has received conspicuous interpretation by Darwin, who by most patient investigation discovered at least approximately the path by which man has been developed out of the lower animal forms. Spencer has shown, by a vast generalization of facts, the working throughout all realms of existence known to man of certain common tendencies--of variation and new and specialized formation. Apart from all debatable theories of psychology and metaphysics, he and a host of other students in the same direction have discovered clews by which the growth of human societies and their individual members can be in some degree traced under general laws.
In another department of knowledge the sacred histories of Christianity have been given a new reading by scholars, among whom Strauss, Baur, and Renan are conspicuous. The general result has been to show that these scriptures are purely human documents, and the personages they describe are purely human. Through the gospel histories Strauss ran his critical theory like a plowshare through a field of daisies. He showed especially the genesis of many of these stories by imagination working creations out of Old Testament texts. Baur led the way in discovering by marvelous analysis the composite influences which helped to shape the apostolic histories in the interest of party or of piety. Renan reillumined the scene which his predecessors seemed to convert into a dreary waste, by reconceiving, with erudition illumined by genius and sympathy, the personality of Jesus of Nazareth as a human character, nowise infallible, but a sublime leader of the race. While Christianity has thus been brought to the level of a natural religion, its old-time adversaries, the other world-religions such as Buddhism, Brahmanism, Islamism, have been shown by sympathetic students to be vast upward essays of mankind toward truth and goodness. That no religion is handed down complete from heaven, and that all religions are expressions of human aspiration and effort, is coming to be accepted as axiomatic.
Turning from well-established knowledge to theoretical schemes of the universe, the three typical names in this century are Hegel, Comte, and Spencer. Hegel stood for the interpretation of all existence in terms of man's inner world--thought and being are regarded as identical, and the movement of thought, expressed by a new kind of logic, becomes interpreter of the development of the universe. In absolute revulsion from this tendency, Comte in his world-scheme rejected metaphysics and theology alike as belonging to the infantile stage of man, and recognized as legitimate only the "positive" knowledge which science affords. For the emotional and ethical needs of man, he offered "the religion of humanity," with the service of mankind as its worship and woman as its priestess. Spencer, equally discarding the supernatural as matter of knowledge, relegates the distinctively religious emotion to awe before a supreme power wholly inscrutable to man. He sets himself to formulate so far as possible the observed workings of the universe in which man is a part; he makes Evolution the central principle; he finds in Heredity and Environment the great formative influences upon the individual; and he reaffirms as of supreme importance the familiar ethical principles which mankind has discovered in its experiences.