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AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY |
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by William Pepperell Montague
The moral ideal of Christian love is like a pillar of flaming light extending from earth to heaven, but the supernatural religion of freedom, solace, and joy that should have evolved from it was choked and poisoned. The successors of Christ, from St. Paul down to the censors, obscurantists, and tyrants of today have done their conscientious worst to hid the light from men. The long series of authoritarians and ascetics have changed the clear into the obscure, the beautiful into the ugly, and with what was most gentle and generous they have associated what was most cruel and mean. They have debauched a religion of liberty, service, tolerance, and progress to their own base ends of persecution, reaction, and gloom. Through all the world today there is an ominous muttering. Not only the small though growing army of scientists who view the efforts of religious fanatics to check the teachings of science with a contempt so deep and cold that they can hardly be brought to express it, and not only the men of letters and liberal authors who show a more voluble contempt for the spirit of censorious puritanism which is growing beyond the stage of an ugly American joke are significant; but far more meaningful than these is the sullen rage of the multitude of workers throughout the world who for the first time are really coming to hate the Christian scheme. If religion is to be saved from destruction from without, it must be revolutionized from within. And it is a Promethean revolution that is needed: no new prophet as substitute for Christ, but a great purging and cleansing of Christianity and of all religion as it exists today. What would a Prometheanized religion be like? Would there be left of Christianity, for example, anything more than a vague and worldly humanitarianism, a platitudinous philanthropy touched with inarticulate emotion? Many liberal and well-meaning people so believe, and, though aware of the anomalies of orthodoxy and of the growing dangers to the whole structure of religion, they fear that any breach in the ranks of authority would be more dangerous still. I think such fears are completely ungrounded, and by way of conclusion I will attempt to outline some of the principal characteristics of a religion transfigured by a Promethean revolution. First of all, there would be the welcome and luminous absence of sacrosanct authority. Such dogmas as remained, and they would be many, would be transformed into hypothesis. The most fantastic theory of the supernatural, if held as a hypothesis, is honorable, and belief in it is honest and to be respected. There would be no lack of propaganda and missionary zeal. Those who had faith in a theory would be proud to have it vindicated by criticism. For the irreligious freethinking would be optional, but for the religionists it would be compulsory. A church member who refused to allow his belief to be tested in the light of reason would be expelled as one of little faith. The various schools and sects would not persecute one another, for why should one seeker for truth hate another? Why should he not rather cooperate with him the better to realize their common end? If a theory is not true, no one would wish it to survive; it it is true, it will survive. How senseless and perverse not to test it! Not only would theists cease to hate another -- they would cease to hate atheists. They would love and respect them. For if you are walking comfortably in the light of a supernatural faith that the universe is on your side, why should you not love and respect the man who walks in darkness, crippled by the feat that the things we care for most are at the mercy of blind force -- deprived of your hope of God and another world, yet fighting bravely by your side for the same ideals for which you fight? A strange inversion of Christian charity to hate such a one. And in this Promethean religion, heaven would be no less free than earth of the hateful spirit of monarchical authority. We should not love goodness because it is commanded by God, but should love God because He is good. We should base our religion on our ethics; not as now, our ethics on a supernatural physics. And there would be no longer that curious double standard, according to which the same God who commands us to forgive our enemies no matter how many times they offend, reserves for Himself the right to wreak infinite vengeance on His enemies after one trial life on earth. That nightmare monster of authoritarian religion, veritable anti-Christ, would have been consigned to his own hell, the single one of all imagined beings who would really deserve it. As in our religion, so in our ethics. The principle of authority would be gone, and with it the great clutter of prohibitions and taboos -- rules taken as ends in themselves rather than as means to happiness. The one supreme and single purpose of morality would be the making of life more abundant, which means the developing to a maximum the potentialities of every creature. Love and work by all for the maximum well-being of all. All moral rules -- the oldest and most revered, like those established for marriage and property, no less than the newest and queerest proposals -- would be appraised without prejudice and in the cold light of intelligence, to be accepted or rejected only according to their efficiency in promoting the ideal of freer and more abundant living. The banishment of asceticism and authoritarianism would for the first time in history bring human ethics into active partnership with human science. Once clear away the morality of taboos, and all the forces of intelligence could be mobilized in the service of progress, and the vast energies of thought and will that have wasted in religious wars could be utilized for moral and religious work.
Excerpted from The Ways of Things, by William Pepperell Montague |
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