Religion and Civilization
by NORMAN THOMAS
1
UTNQUESTIONABLY a return to religion is one of the significant phenomena of our confused and troubled times. It is a phenomenon of many and contradictory aspects but it is definitely characterized by an awareness of, or search after, God.
By no means has this return to religion produced or revivified what Arnold Toynbee would call a universal church. It has not even reached such popular dimensions as the Great Revival in the early nineteenth century, with its widespread influence on American life and thinking. It is not — again to use the language of Toynbee — a creation of the “internal proletariat.” On the contrary, there is no evidence, at least in the United States, of great popular gains by organized religious bodies. The authoritative study of the Twentieth Century Fund shows that by proper statistical standards the American churches, Roman Catholic as well as Protestant, are barely holding their own in terms of membership and active support.
At present the return to religion is an intellectual phenomenon. It is evidenced by such facts as the quality of certain recent converts to Roman Catholicism and the growing popularity of such different writers with such divergent views of religion as Toynbee, du Noüy, Kafka, and C. S. Lewis, and by the “discovery” of that religious existentialist, Kierkegaard, dead almost a hundred years.
It is easy to see in this return to religion a reaction from the failure of man to solve his problems by his own reason. In war, especially in the discovery and release of the atom bomb, the science which was the hope of the turn of the century has revealed its potentialities for the destruction of the race. Frankenstein’s monster has become a myth grimly appropriate to our times.
It is worth comment that the immediate reaction to the First World War, in so far as it had a religious quality, was of a very different order. It expressed itself in humanism, which was given a certain quality of religious intensity. It organized, or tried to organize, community churches without theology. In my own experience it was common to find young Protestant clergymen and Jewish rabbis who were rather apologetic about any sort of faith in God. The creeds and rituals of the churches were socially useful myths. I remember an Episcopalian clergyman who, after he had said a conventional grace in a hotel, turned to me and remarked: “Of course when I pray to God I am really thinking of Lenin and Trotsky and all the workers of the world.” That clergyman was Bishop Brown, later expelled from the Episcopal Church as a heretic. He wholeheartedly transferred his religious zeal to Communism. His was an extreme case but not so atypical as many believed. Indeed, in those days Communist opposition to organized religion was the stronger because in a very real sense Communism was itself a religion. If the Marxist materialist dialectic was an inversion of Hegel’s idealist dialectic, so was the Leninist pattern of revolution an inversion of a Christian plan of salvation for mankind, with the working class as Messiah and the revolution a kind of secular apocalypse. After its violence would come an earthly millennium.
Communism has gained enormously in organizational strength since its earlier days and there is still a religious rather than a scientific quality to its creed. But already, like churches which have gone before it, it has lost much of its flaming quality of religious devotion.
There is a tendency in some quarters to hail this modem return to God as guaranteeing our social salvation from hate and hunger and war. It is an optimistic belief concerning which I should like to raise certain questions.
2
To BEGIN with, by no means all of the present interest in a religious interpretation of life is vitally concerned with the salvation of society, much less with the Christian doctrine of God. Much of the current religious interest is frankly escapist. It is little concerned with social ethics. Some writers who are not escapists offer no particular social guidance or power to achieve any good society.
Let us consider two recent and very dissimilar writers, du Noüy and Kafka.
Du Noüy makes an impressive case, through his examination of the long evolutionary process, for a God who is Mind and Purpose. He is anxious about ethics. But his argument does not establish the existence of the Christian God, who is Love. If Love is all-wise and all-powerful, it is difficult to understand the waste and cruelties of the evolutionary process. It is more difficult to accept the justice of a God who exacts from man, his creature, so slowly and painfully developed, a standard of conduct as absolute and lofty as that implicit in the JudeoChristian ethic.
To the degree that Kafka, many years after his untimely death, may be a leader in a modern search after God, the being he discovered can by no means be described in terms of love. There is no hope for a solution of our human problems in Kafka’s doctrine of what Time calls the “incompatibility of God and Man.” Nor will a human society be preserved by a realization “that man’s fate is also divine comedy.” Kafka’s biographer, Max Brod, illustrates what Thomas Mann calls “a very deep-rooted and involved humor” by telling us that when Kafka read to friends the opening chapters of The Trial (the story of a man crucified by inches), they laughed till the tears ran down their cheeks and Kafka himself laughed so hard that he could not go on reading. If The Trial is a twentieth-century Book of Job, there is about its God a complete lack of the magnificence of the Creator of heaven and earth whose justice, but not his greatness, Job in his suffering was led to question.
The God whom Kafka reveals or suggests in both The Castle and The Trial might be the inspiration for the dictator of a totalitarian state but never for a fellowship of free men. Have we not been told something of the sort again and again by fascists and Communists concerning the justice and the grace of a Hitler or a Stalin? It would be far nobler for men to curse God and die rather than to seek for themselves any inspiration from One who deserves “eternal misunderstanding” — or worse — by the incomprehensibility of his ways towards men.
It is, however, scarcely fair to judge religion and its social effects in terms of an acceptance of the extraordinary loneliness of man created by a Cosmic Jester to live in an alien world. Rather, it is the function in general of the modern return to religion to provide men with consolation. A given religion may not assure our civilization, or humanity itself, of salvation in the world, but rather of redemption for its believers out of the world. Its value to its disciples does not rest necessarily, much less exclusively, on the contribution it makes directly to the problems of race relations, preventable poverty, and the threatening wars of the atomic age. Yet these are the challenges which must be met if our civilization is to endure. And Toynbee is everlastingly right when he insists that civilizations which cannot progressively meet challenges are doomed to eventual death.
Notwithstanding the numerous exceptions, most religious believers, with varying degrees of emphasis and confidence, would insist that in a return to their God will be found strength for meeting these challenges. That may prove true, but unfortunately it is a truth by no means clearly established by the historic record of religion or by its present leadership in the solution of social problems.
In a world which profoundly needs a sense of unity and brotherhood, the historic effect of the great religions, whenever and wherever they have been firmly held, has been divisive. That this is true, let the blood shed by martyrs and soldiers under the banners of warring religions bear sorry testimony. The possessors of absolute truth derived from divine revelation or from the infallibility of Communist Marxism of necessity find tolerance a dubious virtue.
The legal abolition of untouchability in ancient India was a triumph of the human spirit. It was no triumph at all for the Hindu religion as that religion has been received by its devout believers. It was logically opposed by the most orthodox Hindus as an interference with Karma, the divine justice which orders that each man’s lot in life is the result of his own conduct in a former existence the good and evil of which he himself has completely forgotten. Surely in this case what matters is not religion or belief in God but the kind of God in whom men believe.
There is today an emphasis on the revolutionary effects of vital religion. Donald Attwater has included a thoughtful essay by Melville ChaningPearce on Sören Kierkegaard in his book, Modern Christian Revolutionaries. It requires considerable explanation to justify a description of Kierkegaard as a revolutionary in the field of politics or economics, to which the term is usually applied. That, I suspect, would be a title better claimed for his Danish contemporary, Bishop Grundtvig, a less rebellious churchman, who through folk schools did so much to stimulate the processes by which Denmark, with its meager resources, became the happiest of countries for the common man. Paradox has its place in philosophy. The liberal constitutions of the nineteenth century which Kierkegaard disliked had their limitations, but it goes beyond the bounds of permissible paradox for a revolutionary philosopher to declare, as did Kierkegaard, that such constitutions arouse “longing for an Eastern despotism as something more fortunate to live under.”
Even in the realm of philosophy it is significant that the existentialism of which, by common consent, he was the originator and which, for him, necessarily rested on a faith-knowledge of the existence of God is, under its modern prophet Sartre, completely irreligious. Its leading German exponents, agreeing largely in philosophy, differed so widely in the application of their belief that one of them, Heidegger, was an open supporter of Nazism, and the other, Jaspers, a courageous critic of it. And this is another bit of evidence that social conduct cannot be deduced infallibly from a knowledge of a man’s theological or philosophical beliefs.
3
THERE was a moment recently in European history when some well-informed observers found hope, as against totalitarian Communism or reaction, in the emergence of Catholic or Christian parties in Western Europe. That hope may yet be justified, but at present those parties in Italy, France, and Germany have tended to become catchalls united only by opposition to Communism and without constructive political and economic programs. Unfortunately, the influence of the church or the hierarchies in the church has been mainly directed towards maintaining or winning power and prestige. The chief triumph of the Catholic Party in Italy has been the legal establishment of the Catholic Church in the new Italian state. This very dubious interpretation of the freedom of conscience for which supposedly a great war was won was achieved with the cynical help of the Communists, who immediately profited thereby in the Sicilian elections.
In the United States the churches, both Catholic and Protestant, have issued statements on social problems which should command respect. But they have had no quality of the trumpet to arouse men out of their apathy, bewilderment, and confusion.
Most preaching of what a little while ago was called the social gospel consists in the preacher’s presentation of a warmed-over article from his favorite liberal journal sparingly seasoned with Scriptural quotations. At an hour when new total war threatens the destruction of our race and makes certain the doom of our civilization, there have been no strong demands for an effective renunciation of armaments, no determination to prosecute conflict on other terms than the wholesale destruction of war. In so far as the church is Christian it represents a “reaction of gentleness,” as opposed to the “reaction of violence” for which Communism stands. In practice, however, the church has so compromised itself that it is estopped from making clear this fundamental difference. The question, What contribution is religion making, or can religion make, to save our civilization from doom? is not merely a question of the meaning of religion, which in human experience has such diverse meanings; it is also a question of the adequacy of the highest religion we know to the task.
Here one naturally turns for light to Toynbee’s brilliant religious interpretation of history. A complete judgment on Toynbee’s magnificent work would require a degree of historical knowledge which I lack. Rather humbly I venture the statement that I am not sure whether Toynbee’s work is essentially great history or great poetry. In either case it embodies great truth.
I find his explanation of the rise of civilization in response to challenge more completely satisfactory than his description of its disintegration with its mechanical “normal rhythm” of “rout-rally-routrally-rout-rally-rout: three and a half beats.” In what Toynbee has already written there is, I think, an inadequate recognition of two facts: the first is that our immense technical progress has made or could soon make bitter poverty and economic insecurity for masses of people unnecessary and inexcusable. Here is a challenge whose potential significance is spiritual as well as practical.
A second and even more immediate challenge lies in the fact, made evident by the Second World War, that a repetition of total war might well leave its miserable survivors completely destitute of strength for rally and reconstruction. This reflection would have been in order had there been no atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The possibilities of bacteriological and atomic warfare for the physical and spiritual destruction of men make it inescapable.
It is somewhat unfair to deduce Toynbee’s essentially religious message for our time or to criticize it without access to volumes as yet unwritten. He has himself told us that they will deal with problems raised by his study of disintegration. In the meantime Toynbee, like other great thinkers, is being variously interpreted on the basis of selected sentences and paragraphs. One extreme was indicated by the woman who said: “Since Toynbee is so certain of the doom of our civilization there is nothing that folks like us can do about it. It is a real relief.” That, I think, is scarcely Toynbee’s position.
But I find myself left in doubt concerning the meaning and application of his definitely Christian hope for mankind. How far must the universal or particularist state and the universal church remain in opposition? Granting that the universal church of Christianity was a major factor in remolding civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire, it certainly has not made the “ kingdoms of this world” the “kingdoms of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” In its relations with the state, the church itself has found corruption. On the other hand, I accept W. E. H. Lecky’s well-known argument that the orthdox Christian doctrine of hell, with its eternal tortures, heightened man’s inhumanity to man and the cruelty of states. Why should we be kinder than God to his enemies?
Toynbee comes out definitely for Christ rather than Caesar, and for the reaction of gentleness rather than violence, yet he felt compelled to interrupt his own great work and, like most of the rest of mankind, to give active service to his government in total war. In 1939 men had little but a choice between evils in the carrying on of organized society. Not on these terms will our civilization be saved or a better one established.
The salvation of society requires a rapid abolition of the ethical dualism implicit in the command that we “render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” And this ought to be a far greater concern to the propagandists who have returned to religion than is now apparent. Otherwise the somewhat indiscriminate praise of religion in all its forms, from medieval faith in a God more surely of Wrath than of Love, to Kafka’s profound sense of human alienation, will do little to meet the desperate challenge of our times. And the new religious attitude, the new sense of human inadequacy, will fail as badly as did Catholic medievalism, the Protestant Reformation, or yesterday’s humanistic rationalism to save an unfratemal civilization from the disintegration of social injustice and the destruction of war.