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Page 9
Now, with this selfish individualism which we call naturalism we shall
have much to do, for it plays an increasing r�le in the modern
world; it is the neo-paganism which we may see spreading about us.
Sophistries of all kinds become the powerful allies of this sort of
moral and aesthetic anarchy. Its votaries are those sorts of
rebels who invariably make their minds not their friends but their
accomplices. They are ingenious in the art of letting themselves go
and at the same time thinking themselves controlled and praiseworthy.
The naturalist, then, ignores the group; he flaunts impartially
both the classic and the religious law. He is equally unwilling to
submit to a power imposed from above and without, or to accept those
restrictions of society, self-imposed by man's own codified and
corrected observations of the natural world and his own impulses. He
jeers at the one as hypocrisy and superstition and at the other as
mere "middle-class respectability." He himself is the perpetual Ajax
standing defiant upon the headland of his own inflamed desires,
and scoffing at the lightnings either of heaven or society. Neither
devoutness nor progress but mere personal expansion is his goal. The
humanist curbs both the flesh and the imagination by a high doctrine
of expediency. Natural values are always critically appraised in the
light of humane values, which is nearly, if not quite, the same as
saying that the individual desires and delights must be conformed
to the standards of the group. There can be no anarchy of the
imagination, no license of the mind, no unbridled will. Humanism,
no less than religion, is nobly, though not so deeply, traditional.
But there is no tradition to the naturalist; not the normal and
representative, but the unique and spectacular is his goal. Novelty
and expansion, not form and proportion, are his goddesses. Not truth
and duty, but instinct and appetite, are in the saddle. He will try
any horrid experiment from which he may derive a new sensation.
Over against them both stands the man of religion with his vision of
the whole and his consequent law of proud humility. The next three
chapters will try to discuss in detail these several attitudes toward
life and their respective manifestations in contemporary society.
CHAPTER TWO
THE CHILDREN OF ZION AND THE SONS OF GREECE
We are not using the term "humanism" in this chapter in its strictly
technical sense. Because we are not concerned with the history of
thought merely, but also with its practical embodiments in various
social organizations as well. So we mean by "humanism" not only those
modes and systems of thought in which human interests predominate but
also the present economic, political and ecclesiastical institutions
which more or less consistently express them. Hence, the term as
used will include concepts not always agreeing with each other, and
sometimes only semi-related to the main stream of the movement. This
need not trouble us. Strict intellectual consistency is a fascinating
and impossible goal of probably dubious value. Moreover, it is
this whole expression of the time spirit which bathes the sensitive
personality of the preacher, persuading and moulding him quite as much
by its derived and concrete manifestations in contemporary society as
by its essential and abstract principles.
There are then two sets of media through which humanism has affected
preaching. The first are philosophical and find their expression in a
large body of literature which has been moulding thought and feeling
for nearly four centuries. Humanism begins with the general abstract
assumption that all which men can know, or need to know, are "natural"
and human values; that they have no means of getting outside the
inexorable circle of their own experience.
Much, of course, depends here upon the sense in which the word
"experience" is used. The assumption need not necessarily be
challenged except where, as is very often the case, an arbitrarily
limited definition of experience is intended. From this general
assumption flows the subjective theory of morals; from it is derived
the conviction that the rationalistic values in religion are the only
real, or at least demonstrable, ones; and hence from this comes the
shifting of the seat of religious authority from "revelation" to
experience. In so far as this is a correction of emphasis only, or the
abandonment of a misleading term rather than the denial of one of the
areas and modes of understanding, again we have no quarrel with it.
But if it means an exclusion of the supersensuous sources of knowledge
or the denial of the existence of absolute values as the source of our
relative and subjective understanding, then it strikes at the heart
of religion. Because the religious life is built on those factors of
experience that lie above the strictly rational realm of consciousness
just as the pagan view rests on primitive instincts that lie beneath
it. Of course, in asserting the importance of these "supersensuous"
values the religionist does not mean that they are beyond the reach
of human appraisal or unrelated by their nature to the rest of our
understanding. By the intuitive he does not mean the uncritical nor by
the supersensuous the supernatural in the old and discredited sense of
an arbitrary and miraculous revelation. Mysticism is not superstition,
nor are the insights of the poet the whimsies of the mere
impressionist. But he insists that the humanist, in his ordinary
definition of experience, ignores or denies these superrational
values. In opposition to him he rests his faith on that definition of
experience which underlies Aristotle's statement that "the intellect
is dependent upon intuition for knowledge both of what is below and
what is above itself."
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