Morality and Religion

THE old humanity,” writes an historian of Islam, “had been killed by the new religion.” This is what always happens. True morality, the adepts of each religion tell us, is dependent on their particular faith; the morality that may have preceded, or that may survive, can only be a false morality. If some unbelievers are virtuous it is by a fortunate inadvertence or kindliness on their part; they ought logically to indulge every passion, for if our faith is vain we are of all men the most wretched. This was said by Saint Paul in view of a young Christianity turning away from the world and watching for the second coming of Christ in the clouds; but the same segregation and the same risk are inseparable from any enthusiastic religion, even from the pantheism or romanticism of the enraptured unbeliever, He, too, is the most wretched of men if his faith is vain; because he has alienated almost all human sympathies, and become a hater of the real world, for the sake of some vain pose or empty fanaticism. And when he discovers his predicament he may think the bottom is knocked out of the world and may bitterly cry with Saint Paul — too late, alas, for his own person—that nothing remains but to eat, drink, and be merry.

This contention might seem singular, when we consider how much older human morality is than any of the religions on which it is said to be founded; and yet this contention is sincere, and in some sense justified by daily experience. Not only does the decay of religious faith let loose all sorts of moral license, but the inevitable rebellion of the passions, noble as well as base, against any external control is often the secret cause of infidelity, because people wish to be free to do as they like with a good conscience. People always do as they like; but while they are believers, they must confess that they have sinned; whereas by the easy method of discarding their faith, they can have their fun and call themselves virtuous.

Undoubtedly the principle of rational morality is utterly independent of each and of all religion, and rather inimical to any special gospel; because rational morality coördinates all interests and all types of value, whilst each new gospel attributes a unique and final authority to one type of value and to one passionate interest. Nevertheless each religion is the source and only sanction of a special morality, colored and heightened by that special enthusiasm; so that each religion, from the point of view of human reason, carries with it a moral heresy. To undermine that religion is to undermine this bias in morals; a bias which custom or ignorance or narrowness of temperament causes believers to identify with morality itself.

For instance, it would undermine Jewish morality to doubt that the Ten Commandments were written by the finger of God. For then there would be no harm in breaking the Sabbath, and everyone would soon do so, unless he happened to like the observance. Everyone would also commit adultery when tempted, if not deterred by prudence or by some contrary private allegiance. For a man on rational grounds may resist a weak temptation; but resistance becomes irrational when the temptation is stronger than the love of all other things, including life itself. The function of religious commands is precisely to load the dice, to load them with mystical authority and disproportionate fears, so that no temptation should overcome the force of the official precepts. The conformity thus secured is often more verbal than practical, more intellectual than moral; but even then a convention and a public conscience may be created coercing human nature in the individual and overawing his private reason.

Now it is a curious assumption of religious moralists that their precepts would never be adopted unless people were persuaded by external evidence that God had positively established them. Were it not for divine injunction and threats, everyone would like nothing better than to kill and to steal and to bear false witness. Undoubtedly, there is little integration or integrity in most men’s characters; there are only habit and a plodding limitation in life and mind; and if social pressure were not added to lack of opportunity, disorderly lives would be more common than they are. But decency, at least verbal decency or conventionality, establishes itself automatically in human society; a relative decency of course, according to the age and breeding of the circle concerned, but a decency very sharply enforced, since nothing is more intolerant than club opinion.

These spontaneous and local codes coerce the individual, but they claim no divine authority. On the contrary, one of the most powerful means of exercising moral pressure is to impose a very special code, avowedly that of only one class or country or profession. The contrast to legal and public standards is often a chief part of this private allegiance; the excitement and danger of being lawless are merged in a sense of superior privilege and enlightenment. Pride, vanity, esprit de corps, secret oaths, backed by the intense vigilance and quick vengeance proper to secret societies, can work up the special conscience and zeal of party men almost to madness; and isolation of the conspirator from the rest of society binds him the closer to his gang.

It has been in this atmosphere of mystic isolation, secret conspiracy, and fervid union that religion has sometimes taken shape; and perhaps the claim to divine revelation and divine sanctions has simply given mythical form to the absoluteness of the party conscience. Surely, without faith in the divinity of their inspiration, the propaganda of the early Christians, with the asceticism and martyrdoms ensuing, could never have been so prolonged; and the conventional but peculiar commandments of a religion, after it has been long established, may be nothing but the fossils of that living inspiration which filled it in the beginning. If a religious morality is to become that of society at large—which original Christian morality was never meant to be — it must adapt its maxims to a possible system of worldly economy; and the more successfully it does so and seems to become the inspiration of an entire nation or age, the more its specific organization will assume a worldly and formal character. An irrational, inspired, specific moral zeal will still glow at the center; but its light and heat will fade in diffusion, and be variously intercepted and refracted in the surrounding field. The orthodox morality of the Church will have become almost rational morality, or human orthodoxy; and the special inspiration of new moral heresies may attack it, as it attacks the ordinary morality of the world.

There will then be two sorts of religious morality invading human life and tending to transform it; first, the original special inspiration at the heart of the established religion, an inspiration still alive at the center, though hardly felt at the circumference; and secondly, any fresh inspirations descending upon individuals or upon sects, and tending to infuse a new special morality, at once into the world and into the Church.

This is what has happened in modern Christendom. Catholic mystics, from time to time, have renewed the original eschatological and ascetic morality of the early Christians, with new warnings to the world that the end, with a fearful judgment, is at hand; also that the salvation of mankind must come by supernatural means, transporting the elect into a supernatural celestial kingdom. At the same time Protestant reformers, transcendental idealists, revolutionary politicians, and humanitarians of all sorts have kindled each his fresh focus of moral illumination and propaganda, sometimes partly coinciding with the old slumbering Christian fire, but more often arising by spontaneous combustion in some entirely different quarter.

I need hardly say that Christian morality has never ruled the world. It could never do so unless it turned the world into a monastery; and the extreme interest and picturesqueness of Christendom come precisely from this perpetual interplay between a religion at once prophetic and mystical and the old and new secular passions of mankind.

Christian chivalry and Christian art were lovely but unstable and barren hybrids born of this union; and the moral chaos through which the world is now passing marks the efforts, perhaps ineffectual, of the invalid to dismiss his physician and to forage for himself again in the universe as if he were a free and healthy animal.

Health and freedom, however, if recovered against the lingering domination of Christianity, may reserve some surprises to the modern mind. The modern mind is liberal and romantic; but a state of society and a discipline of the will inspired by pure reason would he neither romantic nor liberal. It would he sternly organic, strictly and traditionally moral, military, and scientific. The literary enemies of Christianity might soon find reason to pine for that broad margin of liberty and folly by which Christianity, in merry Christian times, was always surrounded. They could have played the fool and the wit to better advantage under the shadow of the Church than in the social barracks of the future; and a divided public allegiance, half religious and half worldly, might have left more holes and cracks for fancy to peep through than would the serried economy of reason.

If it be impatience of restraint, as it often is, that prompts rebellion against religion, the result may prove disappointing. Religion after all is spontaneous; it is a free product of the imagination; it is a paradoxical hope or consolation eagerly cultivated when destiny seems too cruel. Those who reject religion must not expect to be freer: they will find themselves more inexorably bound. Undoubtedly. when any social convention is relaxed, there is a flutter of loose living, and human vices, before hidden, venture to come out into the open; yet the decay of a religion, or of any marked social discipline, far from undermining the general principle of morality, sets that principle free and permits human morality to become rational and normal. At least such would be the result if no new religion or special social constraint came presently to fill the room of the lost convention. It would hardly be fair to say, except perhaps in the single instance of Greek ethics (and even this had many shades from Athens to Sparta) that the new religion killed the old humanity, because there was never a sane and perfect humanity dominating the life of men: the new religion probably kills nothing but old superstitions or old conventions no less partial and perhaps less noble than itself. Public morality is always a more or less chaotic thing, with many a foolish custom and compulsion woven into its texture; and a new religion, or a new social enthusiasm, however extravagant, is at least something somebody has consciously chosen, and preferred to all other things: something capable of being loved, even if incapable of being attained or of producing happiness. Perhaps the rooted prejudices and vices of mankind can be overcome only by some prophetic reformer himself largely deluded; and we should never know the scope of our own nature, or its possible harmonies, if we did not yield to each of our passions in turn, and count the scars of those experiments. In this comparison and reflection, after the fray, we may draw the outlines of what would be, for us, a life of reason; it would be the art of satisfying our necessary inclinations in the midst of our inevitable circumstances. If special religions have disturbed this rational morality in its formation, they have done so by misrepresenting our real circumstances or ignoring our necessary inclinations; imposing instead some morose and windy passion or some false hope. Yet these passionate errors, since they are errors, have no firm roots or consistency, and float somewhat ambiguously, even when prevalent, over the hard realities of life: and meantime they may have served, by their first impact, to plow up the ground in some fertile spot and awaken the mind there to its true vocation.