What the Modern Man Can Believe

by RUFUS M. JONES

1

I THINK it is pretty well demonstrated, in the experience of the human race, that man cannot attain his full stature as a rightly fashioned person without the inspiration and guidance of Religion. Religious faith which springs out of the vision of transcendent Reality and an ultimate divine purpose is a stabilizing power of the first importance, for health of body as well as for peace of mind. It not only stabilizes one’s life; it beautifies and consecrates it. It infuses a marching power. It liberates and lifts. It opens the windows and doors of the person’s life for action and is essentially a dynamic of action. It enlarges perspective and it makes one feel himself to be a citizen of an enlarged universe — a two-storied world to which he belongs, the upper story as real as the basic material one.

If, as I believe, religious faith is an essential feature of life for the full culture of the individual person, it is even more important for the formation and stabilization of a rich and continuing civilization. There has never been any long-continuing civilization, in which a fully endowed man could live happily and confidently, which was not drawing upon unseen resources of life, and bearing witness in one way or another to the reality of the World beyond the world of things with which man has commerce. There have been short periods of stark unbelief, but they have not been good periods to live in. In the main the ongoing world has never quite lost its faith in the More beyond the margins of the here and now. There has always been at least a saving remnant that has kept the higher faith alive. It has sometimes been a single prophetic person who has done this and has transmitted it to his race, as Ezekiel did in the Exile, and as St. Augustine of Hippo did at the Fall of the Roman Empire.

We are, however, passing through an epoch which is proving to be a very critical time for all existing forms and types of religious faith. The Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries began the assaults on contemporary religious faiths, and the Renaissance spirit has gone on cumulatively expanding its scientific conquests and increasing its assaults on the faiths by which men used to live comfortably. The period of four and a half centuries — a very short span in the existence of man on this planet — has discovered more facts about the universe, has established more of the laws and principles of it, has verified more historical facts and scientific processes, than all the millenniums of man’s life on the earth before this birth of the scientific and historical spirit began its conquests.

The Copernican Revolution, which came in the dawn of the Renaissance, was one of the most staggering blows at the dominant faith of the Western world that has ever been leveled against it in the long undeclared warfare between science and religion. Slowly, through centuries of imaginative thinking and speculation, in Assyria, in Egypt, in Persia, in Palestine, in Greece, and everywhere else where men thought and imagined, it had become a settled conclusion that the earth was the center around which everything else in the visible universe revolved. This earth-center for which everything else was created was thus obviously the focus of interest and attention of whatever divine beings there were above it.

But even more important than this theory of a central earth was the slowly formed imaginative conception of crystalline concentric domes above the earth, making the sky a heavenly realm, the dwelling place of the major divinities and the prospective home of the rightly fashioned souls that had gained or might gain immortality. Here were “the many mansions.” Gradually through the imaginative coöperation of many minds, it came to be a settled faith that there were nine concentric domes, turned respectively by the nine orders of angelic beings — Spenser’s “trinal triplicities,” Tennyson’s “Great Intelligences.” Heaven, then, was not a vague, indefinite somewhere, nobody knows where. It was as real and as localized as Nineveh or Tyre.

This heavenly topography, with other loss desirable habitats, also specifically localized, had been built into the solid structure of the religious faith of the Western world. It was glorified in Christian art and architecture. It was woven into the seamless fiber of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. It was an indissoluble element of Dante’s “medieval miracle of song.” It was one of those faiths that were semper et ubique et ab omnibus. There never had been a time when something like this was not believed: it was presupposed in the Bible, which declared that the earth was “established and could not be moved”; it was preached in the Church; it was implicit in the thought even of heretics. And one day a man named Copernicus, on his dying bed, held in his trembling hand the book he had written which was in the end to prove that there was no solid substance to this slowly builded faith of the ages.

At first the book made little impression, almost no popular impression. It was only a hypothesis in a book. The Church condemned it and Luther scoffed at it. But Galileo and Kepler slowly worked out scientific demonstrations which made the hypothesis indubitable. Columbus found another “side” to the world, and Magellan — or at least his men — sailed around the world and proved that it was a globe. In the face of steady opposition on the part of the historic Church the “revolution” of thought became established, and came to be part of the natural air men and school children breathed.

Only very gradually did the full implications of this Copernican Revolution reach the popular mind of the world. Multitudes of persons are still unaware of the utter transformation of religious faith involved in this scientific revolution. The earth has become a tiny body of matter, revolving about a sun, itself the center of nothing but a cold dead moon. Our sun is just one of twenty thousand million countable stars, with nobody knows how many uncountable ones up there. There are no crystalline domes—just endless spaces. God is no more “up there” than He is “down here.”

Every aspect of our religious faith must be rethought, reconstructed, and adjusted to the demonstrated facts which this Copernican Revolution forces upon our minds. We still say that the sun “rises” and “sets,” but we know better. It is the earth that “whirls,” not the sun that “sets.” So, too, we “know,” when we seriously think about it, that heaven is not up in the sky, that that vast imaginative system of faith has gone, but we have not yet given the minds of men and little children a satisfying and equally sublime way of thinking about God, and the possibility of immortal life with Him. This is one reason why religious faith has declined. The Church too often goes on talking about things which have no significance whatever for minds adjusted to the facts of the actual universe, but supplied with no imaginative material by which their minds can live serenely and joyously in the realm of creative faith. The Church must meet this issue, reinterpret its faith in convincing fashion, or else face disaster.

2

OF COURSE this Copernican Revolution with its transforming effects on human thought, and so on religious faith, is only one of the vast successive series of thought-revolutions which the progress of science has produced, many of them in our own lifetime. But every revolution in thought has sooner or later produced a crisis, or at least a critical period, for religious faith. And almost invariably the Church has failed to help the multitude to get its religious outlook adjusted to the altered intellectual interpretation of facts. We have commissions to deal with atomic bombs, but no commissions to readjust faith to discovered facts.

Each time that scientific thought has undergone revolution, there has been a widespread collapse of religious faith on the part of those who have accepted the newly discovered facts but have too little help from the Church to fit the new facts into a religious faith that could satisfy enlightened minds. There can be no vivid and vital faith unless imagination can feel itself at home and is adjusted to the world the mind accepts as real. Wordsworth was a sound interpreter when he called imagination “Reason in its most exalted mood.” It is always imaginative dominion over thought-forms that gives faith its vitality and power.

It is one of the supreme functions of the Church to cultivate that imaginative dominion, and the medieval Church did it magnificently, but the Protestant Church has usually been too busy with doctrine and ritual to do this creative work, which is essential for adapting men’s minds to the completely changed world outlook which science successively produces. And men wander about between an old world dead as the dodo and a new world not yet born. They are homeless, for they have no new-born faith-world to live in.

The coming of evolution, first as a bare hypothesis, and gradually as a thoroughly established method of life on the planet, did not bring to men’s minds quite the transforming effect that the Copernican Revolution brought. But it seemed at once to lower the dignity and uniqueness of man, and what was more in evidence, it came violently into collision with the account of Creation in Genesis. The Church fought the new system of thought with vigor and many Christian sects still refuse to accept it, or to allow it to be taught in their educational institutions. But every reputable college and university in the world now is teaching this method of creation to its youth. It is as thoroughly a settled position in scientific thought as the revolution of the earth is, and practically all scientifically educated youth accept it; but the faithoutlook of religion has not been adjusted to fit it, and far too little has been done by the Church to enable persons committed to this scientific view to feel at home in the religious fold, and to reinterpret the life of man and the position of the Scriptures to fit the new revolution of thought.

One of the most unfortunate aspects of this new movement in thought has been its tendency, this time on the part of scientists, to interpret life in terms of materialism and mechanism. Biology, biochemistry, and even psychology have tended to explain the processes in their respective fields in terms of material processes, so that higher forms are apt to be “explained” in terms of lower and simpler origins. But this is certain eventually to be found to be a false method of “explaining” the facts of life, and it need not be, and it should not be, considered an inherent feature of evolution as a method of life. Evolution as a method of creation fits a divine and spiritual interpretation as completely as creation by fiat does.

Of course there are many Church leaders and constructive ministers who have bravely dealt with the altered world outlook, but religious faith is not yet completely at home in this evolutionary epoch, and the strain is very apparent in circles in which science is a dominant influence. Religious preaching in general has not caught up with the advances in scientific thought, and the essential spiritual dignity of man, without which religion always limps, has not been completely recaptured.

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PARALLEL with this march of evolutionary doctrine there came a new and searching method of historical study, which brought a revolution in thought hardly less significant than the two other revolutions I have reported. At first the new historical method was applied in the main to secular fields. The history of Greece and Rome was rewritten, and the Iliad and Odyssey were critically studied for their bearing on the history of the Trojan War. The old buried city of Troy which had been fought over was dug up, and Agamemnon’s capital and palace were found and identified beyond a doubt.

As was bound to happen — for nothing in the universe is safe from the march of thought — this searching method of studying origins and backgrounds and historical development at length began to be applied to the body of the literature known as Holy Scripture.

Every book of the Bible, of both the Old and the New Testament, has been subjected to a research such as no other literature of the human race has ever undergone. The results are tremendously farreaching and transforming. The social, intellectual, and religious backgrounds of each book have been penetratingly studied. The source of its ideas and conceptions has been carefully traced. The date of its composition and the probable authorship of it are worked out with scientific care. The human element in the style and contemporary thought is made perfectly evident — in fact, indubitable. The entire Book of the Scriptures has been reoriented and reinterpreted. It becomes a new Book.

To the person who has been through this process of research the Bible emerges as a much greater Book than it appeared to be on the old basis. It becomes to him a progressive revelation, not a dead level one. But unfortunately not very many persons have been able to gain or have succeeded in gaining this new insight. To feel the thrill of the discovery of the slow unfolding of divine purpose through the ages, and to see a Bible with a human element in it, with the temporal marks of the different periods upon it, is an immense experience and is precisely the type of revelation of divine purpose we should expect in this world. Hosts of persons suppose that the Bible has received a deadly blow. It seems to them no longer their mother’s Bible. Its “infallibility” appears to be gone. It is not in the old sense “God’s Word.” It is often badly taught — or not taught at all — and there is a generation on hand that is sadly ignorant of it. One large group of scientifically trained persons, ignorant of the new light that historical scholarship has brought to the Book, neglect the Bible because it seems to them to be antiquated and in collision with the conclusions of science. Another large group of persons, thoroughly hostile to the contributions of historical scholarship, go on teaching the Bible in the old-fashioned method, and usually produce a vigorous reaction against it in the minds of youth of the high school age.

Here again the Church has been afraid to face boldly and to accept joyfully what scholarship has proved to be facts, and to accept the Bible for the Book it really is, and to make it the possession of its members, as I possessed it in my youth. It is still, as of old, the supreme Book of the ages. It has formed the religious thought of the Western world as no other book has done. It is indissolubly woven into the greatest literature of Europe and America. And it is in every sense of the word a Book of Revelation. But it can be preserved and built into the lives of the new time only if it is read and studied in the light of the historical facts which scholarship has established.

Here are three “bloodless” revolutions, revolutions in the realm of thought which have produced, for those who know, a completely altered world outlook. The founders of our Protestant systems knew nothing of these tremendous shifts of thought. They laid their foundations in a world utterly unlike the world we are living in now. There is of course no single united Church in the world today that can speak with authority for the thought and ideals of Christianity in these modern times. There are not merely two, but many types of Christianity, especially here in America. Some of the branches of the Church are well adjusted to the changes in world outlook and some are not adjusted. But on the whole Christianity has fairly well weathered the storms I have described. There are signs of growing unity and the promise of increasing insight and spiritual power.

There has always been a vital spiritual group within the churches of Christendom. This inside group has always been dedicated to the truth and has gone forward with the light in every age of discovery. It has been in these difficult modern times a growing and expanding element. In spite, therefore, of the fact that many members of Christian bodies go on saying ancient creeds, written to fit the world-forms of earlier ages, and do not come awake to face and deal with the reconstructed world in which the youth of today live, there are many grounds for predicting an increase of wisdom and spiritual leadership within the churches of Christ, and there is a promise of a more creative and dynamic religion for the future.

4

I THINK perhaps the point at which to begin the reinterpretation of faith is with the spiritual significance of man in this world we now find to be the one we belong to. If man is not endowed with a transcendent spirit and is not furnished with a capacity for communion and union with an ultimate divine Reality of a spiritual order, there is no point in considering any further the issues of religious faith. If we were compelled by unmistakable facts to accept a materialistic and mechanistic view of man as a product of the push of natural forces, religion would become only a hollow, empty word. Faith would indeed be a way of fooling the mind, an “opiate for the people.”

Our Bible, and all other great books which claim to be books of revelation, treat man as a being nobly fashioned for a high destiny. He is created to be in the image of God. Perennial philosophy from Socrates to Emerson has maintained this lofty estimate of man’s divine possibilities. The supreme prophets of the race have joined the revealers and the philosophers in this exalted view, though they all unite in speaking very solemnly of man’s proverbial tendency to drop to lower levels, and to miss the high destiny for which he was fashioned.

The first effect of evolutionary doctrine was to lower the estimate of man, and the tendency to interpret higher forms of life in terms of lower origins has continued to count somewhat for a lowered scale of human worth. Then, too, there have been in our times some appalling examples of human depravity. There have come on the stage of human action specimens of the race which made the better animals seem dignified by comparison. But in spite of the solemnity of the reports concerning actual man — prone to sin, and exhibiting a tendency to revert to the lower status — I am nevertheless convinced that the lofty estimate of man’s spiritual endowment and his exalted destiny remain unshaken by all the assaults that have been made. There is an aspect in man that is unique.

He not only thinks, but he knows himself as thinking. He is not only conscious, but he is selfconscious. He makes use almost continually of universal ideas and principles, which no one of his senses, nor all of them together, ever report to him from the outside world. Universal ideas are not given from without. There is an inward creative operation here of major importance. More than that, man’s mind transcends any given experience that comes to him. He is always out beyond any fences which hem in his pasture. His very consciousness of limit means that he is already beyond the limit. He is always beyond his boundaries. A more yet attaches to every finite attainment he makes. He observes himself from above and approves or condemns himself and his acts, which means that he is essentially a moral being and carries a moral plumb line in his inmost structure. He feels himself to be conjunct with a social group, and he is never an isolated individual. More than that, many persons carry within themselves mystic yearnings for fellowship with a divine Companion. Man when he is fully himself is conjunct with a World above him. He is from his earliest years smitten with a homesickness, a nostalgia, for mutual and reciprocal correspondence beyond the margin of the seen and known. And there are occasions when that correspondence with the Beyond is more real to him than the scenes of earth and sky.

It is clearly evident that man is still in the process of being made. We are here in the world before the architectural plan has been carried very far. Who except the creative architect of York Minster could have guessed what that superb structure was to be when only the crypt was being formed! We get occasional intimations of what the higher stages may be like in the consummate beauty of the rightly fashioned lives that have been and are still sometimes open to our observation, even while we are down here on the ground level.

There has been a succession of saints, who are persons that have in a measure arrived — “born,”as St. Paul would say, “before the due time.” Some of them are canonized and some are not. The word “saint” stands for the chosen few who have arrived at an advanced stage of purity of life. The spirit has triumphed over the body in the saint, and over the things of the world. An inward beauty shines through. Nobody is fully a saint until the life has become consummately beautiful. Love is revealed through the life of a saint in a unique way and to an extraordinary degree. The person’s everyday life breathes a beauteous order of influence. From somewhere there has come into the life a capacity to do what has seemed impossible before. It is not necessarily a miraculous power, though something from Beyond breaks in, but it is a striking elevation of the normal forces of life. And the person to whom we would attach the word “saint” has learned how to live in this strange mysterious world with a thrill of joy and a touch of radiance. It is an anticipation of the rightly fashioned person.

A saint must be genuinely human. That is an essential condition, but it is also one of the difficulties in becoming a saint, because a saint must belong to two worlds, this world of Nature and the realm of the Spirit. These persons live by inward insight instead of argument; by experience of God instead of speculation about Him. It must be said at once that the saint is not, like the poet, born that way. There are no cradle saints. Some children are more saintly than others are. But in every case the saint is a saint not because of unique qualities of birth, but rather because somewhere along the pathway of life the inward spirit of the person has succeeded, with help from Above, in conquering the stubborn traits of nature, the drive of instinct, love of self, the eagerness to promote number one, and there has come into play a refining process, a purification of aim and motive, and the triumph of the spirit. The saint is always an “overcomer.” He has learned how to “turn the stubborn thistle into glossy purples.” The succession of saints is one of the major evidences that the Eternal Spirit is a continuing and present reality in this strange world which, to eyes and ears and to scientific researchers, seems to be just a world of matter. The saint knows that it is a two-story world and that the Above is as real as the below.

There are, of course, other types of persons (besides saints) who have arrived, and who have brought the architectural plan into full view. Socrates and Plato and Plotinus and Marcus Aurelius are unique specimens of the race. So, too, are Confucius and Motze and Buddha and Zoroaster; Michelangelo and Beethoven; Alfred the Great and Abraham Lincoln, to name only a few of the supremely great names.

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BUT what I insist upon is not merely that the saints and geniuses have been possessed with a unique quality, but that there is a unique spiritual endowment — at least potentially — in man as man, in the so-called “common man.” The capacity to think, to be self-conscious, to enjoy beauty and music, to rise to mathematical insight, to carry on a moral passion, to possess an aspect of freedom, to transcend all that is presented, to live by ideal vision, to be creative of what is not yet, to be smitten with homesickness for the Beyond, the Unattained, to love with an undying love that never lets go — all this is unique. We are the only known beings in the universe that have these traits, and they point to a higher origin and to a World beyond the world.

Instead of trying to “explain” man in terms of lower origins, we must admit unique creative events. Instead of leveling down, we must level up. Instead of endeavoring to trace an unbroken curve of human events, the future always equal to the sum of the past, we must admit that the line of ascent has the look of a “steeplechase.” There have been many crisis-events, shifts of level, novel exits and entrances, unique lifts of the gates of life. We can call these epoch-movements “mutations,” or “holism-processes,” or by any other term that avoids introducing the creative act of God; but all the way along the upward curve, something was coming into being that was not there before. And we are confronted with a mystery as great as that reported in Genesis i. 27: “God created man in His own image.” That is where at last we are bound to arrive. In spite of all the drops of level, the strayings and the sinnings, there is still something of that divine image in our inmost structure. There is something about us that the earth’s crust has not contributed.

It was Aristotle who first clearly and positively declared that Active Reason in man could not be traced to a natural origin, though he thought everything else could be, or that it could not be explained by anything outside itself. Active Reason, in Aristotle’s system of thought, includes just those aspects of mind which I have called unique, sui generis, which differentiate man’s mind from everything else in our world, the aspects which cannot be explained in terms of lower origins. I may add, in passing, that there is nothing whatever about this higher type of mind in man that can be explained in terms of physical origin. Our apprehension of external objects, our consciousness of a world out there,is and remains a supreme mystery, which no psychology in any true sense “explains.” Furthermore, how we pass from the mental idea of an action to the moved muscles, and how the changes occur as a result of the mental idea, are as mysterious as would be a train of cars with no couplings between the cars, but held together by an act of love between the engineer in the locomotive and a maiden in the rear car! Things that always happen are assumed to be normal and the mystery is discounted. We say, “Of course.”

But to return to Aristotle’s “Active Reason.” He glorified it as unique, but left it unexplained. His disciples, however, at a later time, convinced that it had no earthly origin, and was not selforiginated, came to the conclusion that it was the creative endowment of God in man. From the second century on, this divine endowment was generally accepted, and was named by a variety of names. Plotinus called it “ the Apex of the Soul ” — a point of contact in man that had never been sundered from its eternal Source. We never quite go out from the divine Fatherland. Early Eastern Christian writers used the word Synteresis for the unlost divine factor. This Greek word, often misspelled, had a great place in the thought of the medieval mystics and was used down to the seventeenth century. But the phrase “divine Spark,”and finally “inward Light" or “Light Within,” and sometimes “divine Seed” came to be the accepted term for the unlost connection of the soul of man with its divine Origin.

The interpretations of this endowment are often very vague, and there were always grave difficulties in making it fit into existing theological systems, built on the theory that man was a fallen, ruined, and spiritually stripped being. But the important point is that this suggestion of a divine endowment in man has never been lost since Aristotle’s day, and it is an absolutely essential feature for any genuine interpretation of a rightly fashioned man. If it had not been contributed to us out of the long experience of the race, we should be compelled to invent it to explain what we have on our hands when we face up to the unique aspects of this mysterious being we call man. He is not yet wholly made. He is prophetic of more. But even so, there is something about him — an Apex, a Spark, a Light, a Seed, a uniqueness of capacity — that sends us beyond him to a higher Source, without which he is as mysterious as a child would be without any parents, or a fact-event without any cause. Man to be man must be man plus MORE. As soon as he discovers the implications of his inmost structure as a person he is on the way to be religious, and has his own unique evidence of God.