The Uses of the Comic Spirit in Religion
THE author of Sandra Belloni, in one of his delightful moments of taking his readers into his philosophic confidence, remarks: —
‘Man is a laughing animal, and at the end of infinite search the philosopher finds himself clinging to laughter as the best of human fruit, purely human and sane and comforting.’
Certainly we are all of us more real if, in laughing with the author through his charming pages of ‘unreason and sentimentalism exposed,’ we have heard his sermon aright. Who, after the Egoist, can attitudinize before life without a blush at finding the Comic Muse looking over his shoulder with a quizzical smile on her sparkling countenance.
If laughter be among the lesser spiritual graces as compared with faith, it is none the less of honorable lineage as an instrument of reform. Not till a ripple of ‘thoughtful laughter’ has been evoked, can any reform get far along its healing way. New epochs have always been ushered in in the tingling atmosphere of wit. Cervantes, Erasmus, Rabelais, each has laughed at his generation to its lasting benefit. The age of sluggish wit is likely to be an age of shallow religion, sentimentalism, and sham.
It has been remarked that the gods of the Romans were eminently respectable but very dull and prosaic persons. It might at the risk of irreverence be said that in general the gods of the world have been made to appear too austere. We have tried to endow Divinity with our own best behavior, and in our solemn moments of defining Deity, have quite overlooked that cosiest, corner of the heart, into which the oblique rays of the Comic, slanting over our high altars, come freighted with matter for laughter. Because we are very grave of countenance when we speak of God, we imagine that there can be nothing about us that may seem comic to Him. But the omniscient heart in which the reverent have found, blended with pity and love, the eloquent scorn of the Gospels, must see in us queer beings, along with the tears and the tragedy: comic incongruities upon which humor may beneficently flash and play. The ominous thought that God may laugh, would, had it occurred to us, have long since added an infinite touch of reverence to our prayers, and have purged us of our egoism. The moment that an age suspects that its manners may seem a bit ridiculous to God, an epoch hails its end.
Reformers are skilled in using every other weapon except the nimble one which the Comic Muse graciously offers. We have had irony and satire, burning indignation and withering contempt. We have had humor with velvet touch coddling the offender, and graciously apologetic for venturing within detached and holy precincts. But keen laughter, straight from the brain, at the sheer drollness of our little unreasons and sentimentalisms, — the intelligence quivering to discern our absurdities and pretensions, our hypocrisies and affectations, our pomposities and acquired solemnities,
— this, alas, only too rarely.
The true religious liberal has this distinction of spirit, — a gift of the comic intelligence; he keeps his temper in controversy. Any man who loses his temper over religion has at once become helplessly orthodox. In his fervor of defense he has pitched backward into the enemy’s camp, and has forfeited his usefulness as a member of the society for the prevention of bigotry. There is something tragically ludicrous in two religions hating each other for the love of God.
When Kingsley lost his temper over the devious progress of Newman’s faith, Newman with calculated restraint wrote the Apologia. Tyrrell’s well-tempered reply to the ponderous rebuke of Cardinal Mercier is the Medievalism. Scorn is best answered in the civil vein. Had Kingsley set the Comic Muse on the trail of Tract 90 we might have been the poorer without our Apologia, but the confusion would not have been Kingsley’s. The amenities of religious controversy must be dictated by the Comic Muse. Only kindly, illuminating laughter can keep order when impassioned convictions contend for the mastery.
Every piece of religious bigotry or sham has its comic side. Reality in its ‘shapeliness and honesty’ precludes laughter. Unreality limps, squints, or drawls, wears cap and bells, without knowing it. We may make up our minds that we have not found the essence of unreality till we have found something which excites merriment, solemn merriment though it be. Reform moves at so laggard a pace because a sense of the ridiculous is not one of the common graces. Outworn, dilapidated formulas or articles of religion are the meekest combatants. They crumble and shrink before a discerning smile. The Comic Spirit has argued down Calvin by mere refusal to attend, and by nodding during his harangues. Logic is no match for an awakened sense of the ludicrous. Cervantes never could have persuaded his generation by denunciation and tears that its literature was getting ridiculous, but the idea translated into terms of Don Quixote and his Squire made an admirable campaign document. One must have noted that by and by the season of argument in reform movements is past. The Comic has done her cleansing work, and with quizzical smile the combatants renounce the battle. Boredom has discredited many a false god.
Here is the joy of Erasmus, — an efficient type of the religious reformer. He widened measurably the capacity of his age for the comic perception. When Erasmus, or an anonymous disciple, proposed to enlighten the Papacy touching its shortcomings, he let St. Peter and the Pope in for a dialogue at the gate of heaven, and the showers of ridicule upon current controversy were tonic, like Alpine breezes.
When we read The Praise of Folly, we perceive what, well-tempered weapon the sixteenth century brought into the service of reform, and in what a bracing intellectual climate controversy moved. The Comic Muse ushered in modernity with a smile. ‘ Ritualism and ceremony, dogmatic theology and philosophy and personal character,’ were all thrown into the crucible of Erasmus’s keen comic intelligence. His edition of the New Testament became the ‘best seller’ of the week, with one hundred thousand copies hot from the press, going through the heart of Europe like a ‘polished rapier.’ The ponderous solemnities winced, and the audience held its sides. The joy of it was — the Holy Father gave his blessing, and members of the Sacred College were Erasmus’s patrons. And he never lost his temper. He was as much at his ease exposing priestly foibles and hypocrisy as when writing those delightful letters to his patron Warham, or nudging some illustrious friend for a benefice or pension for his distinguished talents to repose upon. We shall not understand the processes of the Protestant Reformation, or of any reformation, till we have considered the function of the Comic in the battle for spiritual directness and honesty. Wit seizes on sham as birds on prey.
Perhaps no vocations need the vigilant eye of the Comic Muse more than those which have undertaken the weighty business of administering the solemnities of life, for sentimentality hovers with claw and beak to do them injury. ‘Our souls must be on fire when we wear solemnity,’ says the writer on Comedy, ‘if we would not press upon his shrewdest nerve.’ Every Divinity School might well have in its senior year, along with courses in systematic divinity and homiletics, a course in the great masters of comedy; and, to arouse our sluggish wits and keep us on our guard, it might not be amiss to carve upon our pulpits, side by side with the lean Gothic saints, the figure of Aristophanes or Molière with warning finger. How one loves those laughing, indecorous imps one spies in Gothic cathedrals, — safety valves of the comic perception of those bohemian journeymen-builders, signaling to posterity their conviction that piety at high Gothic tension needs always the vigilant eye of the Comic Muse. Close beside the tragic and the sublime there is ever lurking in the affairs of men such stuff as comedy is made of.
Children are never ridiculous. The Comic finds in them no vulnerable point; which may help us to understand why Christ chose them as the favorite symbol of Christian attainment. The child thinks himself neither good nor bad. The false solemnities of his elders, their egoisms and pretensions, are foreign matters to him. He must become full grown before he would hide his poverty or expose his wealth. His grief is real and thoroughgoing, and he weeps without affectation.
The Comic is ever sensitive about giving the devil his due, and is a firm believer in the democratic doctrine that even fools have their rights. Few of us are really converted to the evil opinion of ourselves to which the liturgy commits us upon our solemn feasts and fasts. The Comic Muse understands the situation perfectly. While she outstrips even the clergy in probing our weaknesses and ‘pinking’ us when we are off guard, she secretly admires us for being as good as we are. Some of our most disturbing faults require no heavier charge than laughter to wing them in their flight.
Where the Comic becomes an innovator in morals and religion is in her mellow conviction that men need not so much the prophet as the comedian; not to be scolded so much as to be laughed into a state of grace. Religion, now, is usually pitched at too high a key to undertake these humbler spiritual tasks. If takes us so seriously upon all occasions that we are likely to reflect its solemn visage and take ourselves more seriously than we ought. Even the more intimate concerns of the heart, our joys and sorrows, need the chastening of the comic presence.
Here are meaner offices for the Comic Muse. She begs to be allowed ‘to straighten up’ our minds a bit before we open our weighty controversies over religion. Without becoming personal — she is too sophisticated for that — she attempts some preliminary repairs on manners and morals, by pointing out our egoisms, vanities, and self-delusions, revealing beneath a respectable veneer our weak underpinnings of character and the rotten rafters in our dispositions. She even intrudes upon some of the ‘hazy regions’ of religion, and is impudent enough to ask just what we mean, confessing her obtuseness in such lofty matters, yet stubbornly claiming the right to police the precinct just the same.
She is fond of probing our exalted moods, and is merciless in touching the quick of any unreality or sham, — courteously begging our pardon for interrupting our confession of faith. To have received her absolution before we venture to expose our souls to a more searching Presence, is no mean preparation for the reception of higher benefits. The chamber is swept and garnished, but not empty.
Not that the Comic Spirit may not find a vocation, humbler though it may be, in the mundane region of science and philosophy. The pursuit of TRUTH is a serious calling, and when, like that of religion, it threads its perilous path circumspectly, it soars into the empyrean well out of reach of the Comic; but when, presuming upon his high calling, the truth-keeper becomes arrogant, Comedy is hot on the trail. The late ‘scientific era’ was solemn as an owl and pompous as a prelate. The ages when men have ‘pursued truth’ have generally been too self-conscious to be keen of wit. It requires exquisite modulation of soul to walk with truth ‘ unostentatiously, and choose to whisper not shout our creeds.’
Hitherto it has been supposed that orthodoxy had monopolized complacent assurance, but of late heterodoxy and liberalism have been imitating their opponent’s least admirable mood. The Comic is the only safe medium in which to apply ‘pure reason’ to religion, for the reason needs constantly to be laughed out of its placid pretensions. Alone it is the bluntest weapon of reform. The most flagrant fault of the heretic is his lack of humor. He takes his intellect too seriously. Often heresy is truth merely under-exposed, and it is the function of common sense to perceive just when it is developed sufficiently to be presentable. We should do well to take on the Comic Muse, if we would pilot a safe course between orthodoxy and heresy.
The clergy and the whole company of idealists have always been easy prey for the Comic, because they handle explosive matter, — the eternal discrepancy between ‘the aspirations and the occupations of men.’ In the collision of incompatible ideals—for civilization and the Gospel are in perpetual clash — fire is struck which may illumine for us, if we possess comic appreciation, many a sentimentalism and moral incongruity. We are most vulnerable when we soar, for then we cut loose from our base of supplies, —common sense. The land of enthusiasm is always uncharted, and we venture there at the risk of making fools of ourselves.
Religion pays for her idealism in ever bordering perilously upon the comic. Her most resourceful but dangerous gift is to touch the brain of man with a heavenly madness. It was not ‘much learning’ which made Paul mad, but much Christianity. But the chasm between the glorious madness of Paul and that of Don Quixote is partly a question of comic perception. The Knight of La Mancha went forth with the vision unalloyed, spear in hand, only to have the windmills get the better of him. Paul contrived while earning a living to write a volume of immortal letters, make a missionary tour of the world, upset the Roman Empire, and ‘ to do good unto all men.’
The facile moods of sanity, balance, and common sense, are not the idealist’s most efficient capital, but somewhere in his train, if he shall get on at all with the existing order, he needs his Sancho Panza and the Comic Muse.
One of the sacred uses of Comedy is to relieve the tension in this highly charged atmosphere, where the earthly and transcendent orders overlap, and where religion and the other sublimities thrive.
To see the vision and yet to be patient with imperfection; to feel the tragic breach between the City of God and the cities in which we live, and still to go on as hopeful workers with our awkward tools; to have our “conversation in heaven,’ and yet contrive to speak a dialect understood of men; to know that common sense is only common, of the earth, earthy, with no jurisdiction in heaven, and yet not to despise its use; to accept, without emasculating religion or despairing of culture, the blazing paradox of the Gospels, which seek while despising civilization to regenerate the world,— to thread these perilous paths between earth and sky, one needs, along with glowing convictions, the lambent light of the Comic to guide his feet.
The founders of systems have for the most part succeeded in keeping their balance on these giddy heights while their followers have floundered helplessly in the absurd. Brook Farm was comic, but Emerson, who set going the spiritual impulse, was the first to see the joke, Tolstoï, with all reverence, was at times tragically, sublimely comic; but Jesus, whom he sought to pattern, carved his path through contemporary Judæa so graciously as to open among us, age by age, new mines of awe and reverence for his attainment. God’s idealism, we suspect, is patient.
There are infinite depths of comic appreciation in the Master’s retort to the Pharisee regarding Cæsar’s image on the coin. That was one of the tense moments in history in which enthusiasm and necessity conflict, the encounter bordering upon the tragic. Jesus relieved the pressure by opening the comic valve. Throwing logic and consistency to the winds, He fell back on civilization as offering just then the more amiable solution of a gratuitous problem. A grain less of humor would have entangled Him in noxious particulars,— a constitution and a platform. A typical reformer similarly involved might have risked a pamphlet on Christian currency. Many a delicate but profitless issue can be avoided by the comic perception.
But by no means does the Comic preclude our reverence for the glorious failures in this tragic struggle, our John the Baptists and our Tolstois. They are punctuation-marks in progress, interpretative pauses in civilization, to bring out the meaning of life. Without these austere symbols of the irreconcilable conflict between the world and the Gospel, life would be measurably meaner. But the minor prophets, whose souls are not on fire, may be grateful while pursuing the higher and more audacious loyalties, if the Comic Spirit, testing their exalted moods, puts them on their guard. It is the eternal wonder of the character of Jesus, that He undertook the tragic task of living by the Gospels and yet gave no cause for pity or for laughter.
We have narrowly interpreted the office of the Comic Muse if we think her cynically indifferent to zeal and impassioned prayer; supercilious with the crude, impervious to pathos, tragedy, and grandeur in life. All this she reverently leaves untouched. It is charmed ground, before which she stands with finger on lips and masks the eye. She is ever keen to recognize the heroic vein, and is genially indulgent of superstitions, if rooted in the heart. There is nothing comic in the rude peasant kneeling before a shrine at the cross-roads, or awestruck before a Madonna in Spain. Millet found it sublime. But there is something inexpressibly funny in the American mother refusing to teach her child the Lord’s Prayer before he should ‘ be old enough to choose for himself.’ There is nothing comic in superstition, when, like a peasant or a cardinal, one is to the manor born; but as an acquired taste among Protestant reactionaries it is likely to be ludicrous. The recent convert from Puritanism must not tell his beads ostentatiously. The luxuriant faith of a Saint Theresa is not comic, but a militant or languid liberalism subsisting on spiritual essences made in Germany and warranted pure, in its complacency gives matter often for laughter. One does not laugh at the ancient Publican beating his breast outside the Temple, but the modern Pharisee, boasting that he is too intelligent to go in, is a bit ridiculous.
Man is least reverent when ‘mined with conceit, over-blown,’ affected, or spiritually fantastic. We can well be laughed out of our egoism if we live in a zone where the Comic Spirit thrives. But religion in its spiritual loftiness is fitted to neglect these humbler tasks relating to the mind. It is the proper office of Comedy, as she flashes and plays upon the surface of life, to reveal in her lucent medium false values which cripple the efficiency of institutions and mar the loveliness of men.
It is an awful affirmation of faith that God sees all. If the conviction be thorough-going it ought to sharpen our comic perception and put us on the alert. That the Soul at the heart of things may laugh need not keep us on our good behavior, — for that we must remember that He loves, — but certainly it may accomplish the meaner task of informing us wherein life ceases to ring quite true. There is a state of grace which is an affair of the comic intelligence. Religion needs this ‘sunlight of the mind’ to keep her enthusiasms fruitful and the heart sweet.