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Page 10
Now it is this first set of factors which are the more important.
For the cause, as distinguished from the occasions, of our present
religious scale of values is, like all major causes, not practical but
ideal, and its roots are found far beneath the soil of the present
in the beginnings of the modern age in the fourteenth century. It was
then that our world was born; it is of the essence of that world that
it arose out of indifference toward speculative thinking and unfaith
in those concepts regarding the origin and destiny of mankind which
speculative philosophy tried to express and prove.
From the first, then, humanistic leaders have not only frankly
rejected the scholastic theologies, which had been the traditional
expression of those absolute values with which the religious
experience is chiefly concerned, but also ignored or rejected the
existence of those values themselves. Thus Petrarch is generally
considered the first of modern humanists. He not only speaks of
Rome--meaning the whole semi-political, semi-ecclesiastical structure
of dogmatic supernaturalism--as that "profane Babylon" but also
reveals his rejection of the distinctively religious experience itself
by characterizing as "an impudent wench" the Christian church. The
attack is partly therefore on the faith in transcendent values which
fixes man's relative position by projecting him upon the screen of an
infinite existence and which asserts that he has an absolute, that is,
an other-than-human guide. Again Erasmus, in his _Praise of Folly_,
denounces indiscriminately churches, priesthoods, dogmas, ethical
values, the whole structure of organized religion, calling it those
"foul smelling weeds of theology." It was inevitable that such men as
Erasmus and Thomas More should hold aloof from the Reformation, not,
as has been sometimes asserted, from any lack of moral courage but
because of intellectual conviction. They saw little to choose between
Lutheran, Calvinistic and Romish dogmatism. They had rejected not only
mediaeval ecclesiasticism but also that view of the world founded on
supersensuous values, whose persistent intimations had produced the
speculative and scholastic theologies. To them, in a quite literal
sense, the proper study of mankind was man.
It is hardly necessary to speak here of the attitude towards the old
"supernatural" religion taken by the English Deists of the last half
of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century. Here
was the first definite struggle of the English church with a group
of thinkers who, under the leadership of Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke
and others, attempted to adapt humanistic philosophy to theological
speculation, to establish the sufficiency of natural religion as
opposed to revelation, and to deny the unique significance of the
Old and New Testament Scriptures. The English Deists were not deep
or comprehensive thinkers, but they were typically humanistic in that
their interests were not mainly theological or religious but rather
those of a general culture. They were inconsistent with their humanism
in their doctrine of a personal God who was not only remote but
separated from his universe, a _deus ex machina_ who excluded the idea
of immanence. While less influential in England, they had a powerful
effect upon French and German thinking. Both Voltaire and Rousseau
were rationalists and Deists to the end of their days and both were
unwearied foes of any other-than-natural sources for our spiritual
knowledge and religious values.
In Germany the humanistic movement continued under Herder and his
younger contemporaries, Schiller and Goethe. Its historical horizon,
racial and literary sympathies, broadened under their direction,
moving farther and farther beyond the sources and areas of accepted
religious ideas and practices. They led the revival of study of the
Aryan languages and cultures; especially those of the Hellenes and the
inhabitants of the Indian peninsula. They originated that critical
and rather hostile scrutiny of Semitic ideas and values in present
civilization, which plays no small part in the dilettante naturalism
of the moment. Thus the nature and place of _man_, under the influence
of these "uninspired" literatures and cultures, became more and more
important as both his person and his position in the cosmos ceased
to be interpreted either in those terms of the moral transcendence
of deity, or of the helplessness and insignificance of his creatures,
which inform both the Jewish-Christian Scriptures and the philosophic
absolutism of the Catholic theologies.
But the humanism of the eighteenth century comes most closely to grips
with the classic statements and concepts of religion in the critical
philosophy of Kant. It is the intellectual current which rises in
him which is finding its last multifarious and minute rivulets in the
various doctrines of relativity, in pragmatism, the subjectivism of
the neo-realists, and in the superior place generally ascribed by
present thinking to value judgments as against existential ones. His
central insistence is upon the impossibility of any knowledge of God
as an objective reality. Speculative reason does indeed give us the
idea of God but he denies that we have in the idea itself any ground
for thinking that there is an objective reality corresponding to it.
The idea he admits as necessitated by "the very nature of reason" but
it serves a purely harmonizing office. It is here to give coherence
and unity to the objects of the understanding, "to finish and crown
the whole of human knowledge."[3] Experience of transcendence thus
becomes impossible. As Professor McGiffert in _The Modern Ideas of
God_ says: "Subjectively considered, religion is the recognition of
our duties as commands of God. When we do our duty we are virtuous;
when we recognize it as commanded by God we are religious. The notion
that there is anything we can do to please God except to live rightly
is superstition. Moreover, to think that we can distinguish works
of grace from works of nature, which is the essence of historic
Christianity, or that we can detect the activity of heavenly
influences is also superstition. All such supernaturalism lies beyond
our ken. There are three common forms of superstition, all promoted
by positive religion: the belief in miracles, the belief in mysteries,
and the belief in the means of grace."[4] So prayer is a confession of
weakness, not a source of strength.
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