In the Matter of 'Faith'

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

READERS of the July Atlantic must have found excellent entertainment in Mr. Root’s little essay on ‘The Age of Faith.’ His subject is one that we are always interested in — the question of the real resemblances between seem- ingly contrasted periods of human history. By a series of ingenious comparisons, he leaves us with the impression that in spite of superficial differences — of language, of manners, of interests — one age is not so very different from another. The ‘Age of Reason’ was not very reasonable after all, the French Revolution differed ‘only in externals’ from the Crusades of old, and the ‘Ages of Faith,’ far from being past, find their counterpart in the age to which we now belong. It is very ingenious, very amusing, and almost convincing.

Almost, but not quite. Perhaps, where we have been so well amused, we ought not to ask to be convinced. Yet there is a serious aspect to this question — so serious that we cannot bring ourselves to set it aside. For the very essence of human history is here at issue, the essence of human life. And there are some of us, perhaps many, to whom Bergson comes as spokesman for all our deepest instincts when he insists that life is essentially change, that for conscious life, duration means unfolding, that each experience involves the total of preceding experience, and that therefore life, bearing along with it the cumulative values of its own past, can never, in any real sense, repeat itself.

It is this that makes us restive, even while we smile in genuine pleasure at Mr. Root’s cleverness. There must, we feel, be something wrong with his argument.

If there is, it lies in his use of a few key-words — words like Faith, Evidence, and the Unseen.

We live, he says, as truly in an age of faith as did our ancestors of Mediæval Europe. Only, whereas their faith fastened itself upon God, and the angels, and the holy relics of the saints, ours concerns itself with other things equally unseen, in whose truth we believe, just as the truth of those was once believed in, on the authority of others, on the most incomplete evidence, or on no evidence at all. He instances our ‘faith’in the doctrine of evolution, in the revolution of the earth upon its axis, and in the existence of specific bacteria of disease.

Now it is true that the word ‘faith’ may be used to denote men’s belief in these things, and it is also true that the same word has been used to denote men’s belief in God and the angels and the saints’ relics. But is it true that ‘faith’ is really the same word in both sets of cases? To be sure, in both the word implies belief in something not immediately obvious to the senses; in both it implies a certain confidence in the authority of some one else. But at this point the parallel ends. Indeed, before this point. For the phrase ‘confidence in authority’ may be used to cover many different things, and in this case it is so used. The confidence that men once felt in the authority of their priests is still to some extent paralleled in the confidence which we now feel in our spiritual leaders, whether we call them priests or not; but the confidence which we feel in the testimony of men like Darwin is something different—neither more nor less valuable, it may be, neither more nor less sure, but resting on a different basis. That it is possible to speak of both things under one name is merely an instance of the inaccuracy of language. A word is not a bullet, that will split a hair and leave the hair beside it untouched. It is more like a charge of fine shot, that hits scatteringly over the whole barn door.

Similarly, as he uses it, the word ‘faith’ covers many different states of feeling, which might be somewhat more particularly discriminated in the words certitude, faith, confidence, and credulity. Moreover, these states are not completely different. They are not marked off from one another by stiff fencing; they overlap, they merge into one another.

If then we agree to let ‘faith’ stand for all these mental states, we may very truly say that our own age, as well as other preceding ones, is an age of faith. But thus understood, this means very little. It goes without saying. For the real question is, what in different ages has been the relative importance, or prevalence, of these various states of mind. Can we check off our certitude against their certitude, our credulity against their credulity, and so on ? If so, the two ages are so far really alike. Or will an uncanceled residue remain, on one side or the other? If so, the two ages differ in this respect by just so much.

Now, of course, no such canceling process can be really applied, though some rough appraisals might be made if one went to work in the right way. But still less can the canceling process be carried out between unlike states; we cannot checkoff faith against credulity, certitude against confidence. Yet this is exactly what Mr. Root does: for example, he parallels our belief in disease-germs with the mediæval belief in foul fiends. Yet the belief in fiends is clearly a case of credulity, the belief in disease-producing bacteria is, in spite of errors and exaggerations and all manner of mistakes in its details, well on the road toward certitude. The fact that the germs are, for most of us, unseen, and the fiends were also unseen, is a mere accidental parallelism of phrasing.

The logical error here is plain enough. Dissimilars cannot be thus compared. But perhaps even similars are not really such. Perhaps our certitude is not their certitude, our doubt their doubt.

For example: it may be said, that to the mind of the Middle Ages nothing appeared impossible. The modern thinker, we sometimes hear it remarked, is beginning also to say,‘Nothing is impossible.’ But does this mean that we have swung back to the earlier attitude? Not at all. To assume that the tolerance of the modern thinker for ‘the impossible,’springing from knowledge, — even knowledge of his own vast ignorance, — is the same thing as the tolerance of the Middle Ages for the impossible, springing from sheer ignorance and poor method — to do this would be to confuse things as unlike as the ‘sleep’ of a spinning top and the stillness of a dead one.

And if our attitude toward the great realm of the uncertain and the unknown is a different thing from the state of mind in former times, though it may be described in similar terms, so also is our knowledge of the certain and the known a different thing from the knowledge of earlier men. The thirteenthcentury man felt certain, because of the evidence of his senses, that the sun revolved round the earth. We feel certain, in spite of this evidence of the senses, but on account of other evidence, also coming to us ultimately through the senses, that the earth moves round the sun. But no one will seriously maintain that our certitude and his certitude are the same in quality. There have been, particularly since Bacon’s time, changes in the manner of our thinking, both in basis and method, which are gradually changing the quality of belief of every kind. The attitude of mind which made it possible for really good thinkers to say, ‘I doubt, therefore I believe,’ is obsolescent, if not obsolete. And if faith is, perhaps, changing, religion is certainly changing still more. If there really is, as Mr. Root suggests, a ‘ religion of evolution,’ — and the phrase seems a very doubtful one,—this means, not that religion is still the same only with its lingo altered, but that men are making for themselves a new religion to meet their new needs. Whether it does or does not meet these needs is beside the question.

As usual, it comes down to a question of the meaning of terms. All through Mr. Root’s article he seems to be indulging in a kind of tournament of language, in which the game is to see how many different ideas you can spear with the same word. The word ‘unseen’ is a wonder in this sort of contest. Bacteria are unseen, angels are unseen, demons are unseen, phagocytes are unseen, the ice age is unseen, God is unseen. Therefore they are all of a piece, — bacteria, angels, demons, phagocytes, the ice age and God,— spitted on the same lance and brandished before our somewhat astonished eyes.

And his best lance of all is Faith. Thrusting to right and left, he impales upon its shaft all manner of things — faith in scientists, faith in God, faith in doctors and health officers, faith in witches, faith in priests and in astrologers and medicine-men, faith in astronomical laws.

Success to such tilting! It is fun to watch, and does no harm so long as we remember that it is only a game. But suppose we forgot this, suppose we began to think that these strange spearmates of the tilting were really mates? That would, perhaps, be something of a pity, because it would mean the throwing away of such precision of thinking as we have yet attained, which is little enough.

It is just this lack of precise thinking, — this habit of comfortable believing that things on the whole are pretty much as they have always been, and will continue pretty much the same forever,—that is at the root of a good many of our troubles. It is, for example, what helps some of us to believe that there is no church problem, and no marriage problem, — that in these realms no real changes have occurred, and therefore no new adjustments are required.

This is the only excuse for any protest against so delightful a bit of entertainment as is furnished us in the little article in question. Perhaps, however, we have a private and particular grievance, in the fact that the treatment of ‘faith’ seems to spoil the word for us. We have always thought of it as ‘ the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ And it has often appeared to us that ‘faith’ in this sense is growing stronger and keener because more fully aware of its own realm and its own power. We know, as never before, the difference between the things hoped for and the things possessed. We know, as never before, the difference between the things that are seen — whether with the mind’s eye or the body’s is immaterial — and the things that are not seen. For this reason, and not at all for those given by Mr. Root, we might be willing to call our own age an age of faith. But if faith must be allowed to mean belief in bacteria and in gravity and in evolution very well. We must give up the word to these uses and find another to mean what we have thus far meant by faith — faith in the power of love, faith in all the things of the spirit.

And yet — St. Paul’s English translators have held the field a long time. Would it not be courteous to let them keep their word, and find another for bacteria and phagocytes?