The Next Development in Man, page 13
We have already examined the conflict which was developing between the deliberate and the spontaneous life, and the tendency of the organizing processes to develop universal integrating ideas. This tendency was experienced as the appeal of simple, general ideas, and the tendency for the new conceptions to dominate the organization of life was experienced as the need for faith in a personal God, since at that stage the authority which man could most easily conceive was a father or person. The increasing control over behavior of the integrating principle was experienced as the need to act in conformity with God's wishes, and the process whereby instinctive or traditional tendencies came under this new central control was known as the surrender of the person to God.
In certain circumstances this process of surrender might be innocuous. There is no a priori reason why the symbol of an ideal person might not provide the most effective dominant form for the organization of behavior and thought. If the idea of a "person" were at once simple and universal in application, monotheism might have offered a permanent organizing principle. But the idea of a personal God lacks any universal standard of validity, and surrender to such a god left the way open for religious and temporal interests to misuse divine authority for their own ends. This has been and will remain the failing of every theistic church; there is no guarantee against the abuse of faith by those who have either a different faith, or none at all, and in its place the ambition for power.
But monotheism, in its characteristic European form, displayed another more serious defect. As we have seen, the religious life, being an integration of deliberate, long-delayed responses, conflicted with the instinctive tendencies, and the development of the religious consciousness was accompanied by the appearance of that state of uneasy tension which is called the sense of guilt. The appearance of the sense of guilt in the monotheistic religions, though it was absent in primitive and ancient man, is evidence of a state of conflict between the spontaneous instinctive tendencies and the deliberate behavior expected of the individual in accordance with the prevalent social ideals. The transformation from innocence to guilt is the result of the exploitation of instinctive satisfactions in a materially rich community, which is then condemned by the new social conscience since it conflicts with the proper balance of individual and social life. In extreme cases this conflict and tension may lead to a state of exhaustion in which the instinctive tendencies which seem to be the cause of so much pain cease to dominate behavior, never appear openly in the field of attention, and leave the person apparently dominated by the new devotion to God. This transition from guilt to faith is known as conversion, and it can only happen to a previously unintegrated individual. Conversion, in this form, changes a morbid state of conflict on which the attention of the individual is focused, into a superficially harmonious condition which nevertheless conceals a dissociation so painful as to be permanently withdrawn from attention.
"Religion," in the European sense, is the operation of an incomplete substitute for complete organic integration. The individual exchanges a conflict of which he is partly aware for a dissociation of which he is unaware. This at least is the nature of complete conversion to an absolute Christian faith; in most persons the change is incomplete and the struggle to overcome the spontaneous desires may continue without respite or success. There is also the possibility of the conversion of conflict into whole-hearted harmony, but that is not a religious process and here we are only concerned with the influence of the European tradition which did not facilitate any such complete integration. The load of guilt may have been conscious in some and unconscious in others but it has sometimes lain so heavily on European man that he believed it to be inherent in his manhood, though an elementary knowledge of other human types is sufficient to disprove this.
There are two main aspects to the new self-awareness which appeared at the opening of the third period, both of which are reflected in the structure of monotheism. The individual became aware of himself as a thinking person with freedom of choice, and also aware of his own separation from the rest of nature. Monotheism met this situation by personalizing God, and by treating the personal God as a mediator between man and nature. In the age of magic, man, not being self-aware or separated from nature in his own thought, believed that through magic he could control nature directly. But in the self-conscious age of theism, man places God between himself and nature, and seeks to influence nature through the mediation of God. At the same time he seeks to use God as a protection against his own instinctive nature. Thus on both sides of the double separation of the conscious subject, from external nature and from his own instinctive nature, God is introduced as a controlling link. The idea of God helped to maintain this double separation which was the origin of man's need of God. Muscles atrophy where a splint takes the strain. The power of God the Father compensated for the weakness of his children, and tended to maintain that weakness. The European religious consciousness cast a veil between man and the unprejudiced recognition of the forms both of external nature and of internal human nature.
But this self-awareness led also to a more vivid sense of the precariousness of the individual life. To become self-aware is to become conscious of the perpetual threat of nature to the security of the self, and of the inescapable fact of death. So long as man is fully part of the whole, no demand for permanence can arise, but once alone and afraid, man fears to return within the action of the whole, and instead desires eternal life. God denies him escape from the sense of separation, but as recompense promises immortality.
To be made content with so spurious a substitute was the inevitable price of man's misunderstanding of his own nature and of his part in the whole of nature. But it is interesting to note that all great religions have not made this frivolous promise of personal immortality. The Jewish people, for example, emphasized the spiritual value of the community tradition rather than of the individual person, and demanded from their God a guarantee of their survival not as individuals but as a people. In place of the Christian hope of joining God in heaven, he was to descend and live within their tradition on this earth. This was a more reasonable expectation, because capable of partial fulfillment, but also a more dangerous one, for the same reason. The illusion of personal survival is relatively harmless, because meaningless in a unitary world, but the permanent distinction from all other peoples which was an essential element in the Jewish faith has been granted to them as a curse which will continue until the Jewish and Christian attempts to monopolize the truth have dissolved within a broader vision.
The relation of Jewry to Christendom is of special importance in the interpretation of the European tradition. Here we reach a point so sore, and so subject to misinterpretation, that if safety were the aim, silence would be proper. But the Jews have never been safe. Let those who are too proud of their past to wish to learn condemn themselves. Unitary thought cannot hesitate to subject the Jewish tradition, where it is relevant, to the same radical scrutiny as it applies here to the European. Indeed the two are inseparable. In its structure, the Jewish tradition is an exaggeration of the European; the orthodox Jew is a more intense European, different only in so far as he has deliberately separated himself from other influences. We are concerned here only with the impress of a given tradition on the individual, and generalization is therefore legitimate. The unitary world can learn not only from the failure of Europe but also from the fate of Jewry.
The debt of Europe and the world to the Jewish people needs no emphasis. Jewry achieved the first stable monotheism, at a time when that represented a unique advance. Indeed the Jew can only be understood as a premature monotheist: all his characteristics follow from that. Akhenaton had shown the world the possibility of faith in one universal God shared by man and nature. In a moment of splendor he revealed that the future may anticipate itself in the vision and will of a single individual. In originality he surpassed Jesus. But his god Aton, being socially premature, fell with him, and when the Hebrews entered Palestine and absorbed the Egyptian and Babylonian culture they set out to create a monotheism which would last, because they would defend it with their whole being against the alien world. Measured by their own absolute standards that was a mistake; universality cannot be defended, for it can admit no enemies and must transcend all divisions. Akhenaton had known this and refused to fight for his God. The time was not ripe for a stable monotheism, but the Jewish people prepared the way. In a decadent world grown brutal they had no choice but to defend their faith by methods which must lead to disaster. There is no monopoly of the spirit. An exclusive God must be a false God.
Early Jewry, seeking what Europe sought later in more favorable circumstances, was bound to develop in more intense form the same characteristics as subsequently marked the European. Revolting from the instinctive excesses of decadent ancient man, the orthodox Jew became the man of deliberation, ever under the eye of God; rejecting the senses and their flattering images, he proclaimed the prior truth of the word; denouncing all other gods, he announced "the Lord is One"; repudiating the ancient hierarchies, since men of the faith are equal before God; converting all his reactions from the alien world around into a stubborn defense of his privileged truth: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God." The unlimited radiance of Akhenaton, transient as all intense beauty, has become the stable defensive discipline of Moses and the prophets.
Fear of God, and of other religions and peoples, fear of the loss of his own religion, and fear of spontaneous vitality, are expressed in the unique institution of a ban on intermarriage fusing continuity of descent with the claim to a unique religious privilege. In the dread isolation of a people separating itself from cross-fertilization, in the intransigent suppression of spontaneity, the orthodox faith repudiated the unity of process and so determined its own doom. In the species as a whole the intellect was developing as part of the organic processes; within the European tradition it grew in the formal separation of static concepts abstracted from process forms; but in the Jewish tradition the separation was aggravated and projected as a social division from the rest of the race.
The Jew has been the conscience of the European, and conscience is negative. His sense of moral superiority was necessary to conceal a division that lay even deeper than the European, just as his aspiration is more intense. From this conflict there was no redemption, not even the illusion of conversion, and he must await the Messiah. Tribulation led him to divorce fact and idea earlier than Plato; since he could have no worldly dominion, he would at least be supreme in the world of the spirit.
The European, as I have described him, is a particular distortion of the universal form of man, which displays certain distinguishing characteristics. The Jew carries these further, as a polarization of European man. Thus the Jew stands beside the European Christian as a sister type, rather than beside any individual European nation or people. This is the historical anomaly: the Jew, having separated himself as a polarized European type, has no home and must fit in somewhere beside Europe. Having achieved continuity in time by an extreme device, he has forfeited stability in space, and is driven from place to place. Only outside Europe and beyond the dominance of its tradition, that is in Asia, can he escape his separation, for there he no longer needs to defend his faith. The Jewish tradition began in the centuries after 1400 B.C. as a response to the situation which also created the European, and the two must collapse together. When the European idea is exhausted, the Jewish books will also lose their inspiration. The common features and mutual polarity of European and Jew will disappear when they transform their traditions and accept new roles within a unitary world. When the European develops a hatred of the Jew he is releasing his dislike of his own tradition against an exaggerated form of it. Widespread anti-Semitism is thus an inevitable accompaniment of either a temporary or a permanent decline of the European tradition. When the Jew finally renounces his tradition it will be a sign that a unitary society is already in sight, for then he need no longer defend his spiritual mission. Integrity supersedes conscience.
To observe what is incomplete in the achievements of the past implies no lack of appreciation. Development means that broader aspects of experience become evident, and failure to take them into account would be a poor tribute to those who, by their own development, created the past which we have inherited. The tendency in man which enabled him to create monotheism now gives him the sanction to recognize that all particular forms of religion are conditioned by their time. We have to overcome two thousand years of European monotheism by the same love of unity as enabled Akhenaton to transcend the two thousand years of Egyptian pagan civilization. The personal god of the European dissociation fades before the unitary principle of an even more splendid emancipation.
The demand for that unitary principle of life and thought is now inescapable. But during the period under consideration it was monotheistic religion, and Christianity above all, which expressed the supreme aspiration in its richest form and allowed Europe to develop. The quality of European endeavor was nourished by the religious component in the make-up of European man. We shall identify the source of that quality in a moment, when we have considered the intellectual and political components of the tradition. But the religious component was primary, being not only the ultimate sanction of the social order but also at once the original inspiration and the expression of the search for harmony. This is true of the past, though in the wider vista which is today opening before man, and which he cannot deny, monotheism has nothing further to offer.
We now turn to the second component of the tradition, the development of universal ideas. It is convenient to treat these components separately, though they are responses to a single situation which differ only in emphasis. As a result of his new self-awareness, man had begun to project into nature different aspects of the processes which he discovered in himself. So far we have considered mainly the ethical monotheism, of which the Jewish tradition provides the clearest example, in which man seeks to overcome an emotional conflict by projecting his need for an integrating emotion in the form of a personal or father-god. God is here the righteous ruler; mankind are his sinful people. In India, the emphasis was not on conflict and sin, but on the unreality of the world. Man here projected his failure to cope with nature in a mystical faith in the higher reality of another world.
But in favored Greece, in an environment where man was relatively well adapted and inherited the fruits of two thousand years of Egyptian and Near Eastern civilization, he was more concerned with the contemplation of the variety of nature, and with the attempt to find order in this variety. The Greek mind sought neither the discipline of a universal father, nor blind escape in a mystical intuition of another world, but the Logos, or universal reason, which inspired the order of nature. The formative tendency in the mental processes of the Greeks led them to seek universal ideas, and these they projected into a transcendental world, more real because conceived to be more permanent than the world of process and appearance.
The Hindu denied the reality of this world in a vague emotional pantheism which was anti-intellectual in tendency; Plato, and his followers, respected the concrete detail of this world, and sought only the higher reality of an intellectual clarity which would interpret and master it. This Platonic doctrine expressed the tendency of thought to establish clear, static ideas even at the cost of their separation from and neglect of the universality of process. This tendency is seen both in Greek philosophic speculation and in Greek mathematics. The Pythagorean numbers and the Platonic ideas together constituted an important factor facilitating the development of the European tradition together with its accompanying dissociation.
But we are mainly concerned with a broader tendency which emphasized the importance of conscious thought, and isolated it as an order of reality sui generis. I shall call this doctrine rationalism. By this term I mean the view that experience is to be interpreted and behavior organized by the deliberate use of the conscious and autonomous faculty of reason. Rationalism seeks the clarity of static ideas as the basis both of knowledge and of the deliberate control of behavior. It assumes that reasoned analysis of fact is the true basis of knowledge, and that an adequate critique of reason can be supplied by the subjective or introspective application of reason itself. Rational, conscious thought necessarily leads to truth -- so it is assumed. Rationalism has a subjective bias; it is interested in the mastery of nature by conscious thought. This subjectivism is common to Christianity and rationalism and expresses an important feature of the situation at the time of their development: the social tradition was ready for an integrating principle, but man could then only conceive an organizing power in the two forms known to him in his own experience, a Supreme person or a supreme idea. Rationalism also has a static bias, for in seeking clarity it abstracts permanent elements from the general process.
During the period when monotheism and rationalism represented the two main methods whereby consciousness supplemented the traditional organization of thought and life, it was natural that the differences between them were emphasized rather than their underlying similarity. We are accustomed to thinking of rationalism as meaning the explanation in terms of reason of what has previously been regarded as supernatural. But this interpretation is inadequate.
