The Life of Reason Part 31

Nothing could be clearer than the grounds on which pious men in the beginning recognise divine agencies. We see, they say, the hand of G.o.d in our lives. He has saved us from dangers, he has comforted us in sorrow. He has blessed us with the treasures of life, of intelligence, of affection. He has set around us a beautiful world, and one still more beautiful within us. Pondering all these blessings, we are convinced that he is mighty in the world and will know how to make all things good to those who trust in him. In other words, pious men discern G.o.d in the excellence of things. If all were well, as they hope it may some day be, G.o.d would henceforth be present in everything. While good is mixed with evil, he is active in the good alone. The pleasantness of life, the preciousness of human possessions, the beauty and promise of the world, are proof of G.o.d's power; so is the stilling of tempests and the forgiveness of sins. But the sin itself and the tempest, which optimistic theology has to attribute just as much to G.o.d's purposes, are not attributed to him at all by pious feeling, but rather to his enemies. In spite of centuries wasted in preaching G.o.d's omnipotence, his omnipotence is contradicted by every Christian judgment and every Christian prayer. If the most pious of nations is engaged in war, and suffers a great accidental disaster, such as it might expect to be safe from, _Te deums_ are sung for those that were saved and _Requiems_ for those that perished. G.o.d's office, in both cases, is to save only. No one seriously imagines that Providence does more than _govern_--that is, watch over and incidentally modify the natural course of affairs--not even in the other world, if fortunes are still changeable there.

[Sidenote: Need of an opposing principle.]

The criterion of divine activity could not be placed more squarely and unequivocally in the good. Plato and Aristotle are not in this respect better moralists than is an unsophisticated piety. G.o.d is the ideal, and what manifests the ideal manifests G.o.d. Are you confident of the permanence and triumph of the things you prize? Then you trust in G.o.d, you live in the consciousness of his presence. The proof and measure of rationality in the world, and of G.o.d's power over it, is the extent of human satisfactions. In h.e.l.l, good people would disbelieve in G.o.d, and it is impious of the trembling devils to believe in him there. The existence of any evil--and if evil is felt it exists, for experience is its locus--is a proof that some accident has intruded into G.o.d's works.

If that loyalty to the good, which is the prerequisite of rationality, is to remain standing, we must admit into the world, while it contains anything practically evil, a principle, however minimised, which is not rational. This irrational principle may be inertia in matter, accidental perversity in the will, or ultimate conflict of interests. Somehow an element of resistance to the rational order must be introduced somewhere. And immediately, in order to distinguish the part furnished by reason from its irrational alloy, we must find some practical test; for if we are to show that there is a great and triumphant rationality in the world, in spite of irrational accidents and brute opposition, we must frame an idea of rationality different from that of being. It will no longer do to say, with the optimists, the rational is the real, the real is the rational. For we wish to make a distinction, in order to maintain our loyalty to the good, and not to eviscerate the idea of reason by emptying it of its essential meaning, which is action addressed to the good and thought envisaging the ideal. To pious feeling, the free-will of creatures, their power, active or pa.s.sive, of independent origination, is the explanation of all defects; and everything which is not helpful to men's purposes must be a.s.signed to their own irrationality as its cause. Herein lies the explanation of that paradox in religious feeling which attributes sin to the free will, but repentance and every good work to divine grace. Physically considered--as theology must consider the matter--both acts and both volitions are equally necessary and involved in the universal order; but practical religion calls divine only what makes for the good. Whence it follows at once that, both within and without us, what is done well is G.o.d's doing, and what is done ill is not.

[Sidenote: The standard of value is human.]

Thus what we may call the practical or Hebrew theory of cosmic rationality betrays in plainest possible manner that reason is primarily a function of human nature. Reason dwells in the world in so far as the world is good, and the world is good in so far as it supports the wills it generates--the excellence of each creature, the value of its life, and the satisfaction of its ultimate desires. Thus Hebrew optimism could be moral because, although it a.s.serted in a sense the morality of the universe, it a.s.serted this only by virtue of a belief that the universe supported human ideals. Undoubtedly much insistence on the greatness of that power which made for righteousness was in danger of pa.s.sing over into idolatry of greatness and power, for whatever they may make. Yet these relapses into Nature-worship are the more rare in that the Jews were not a speculative people, and had in the end to endow even Job with his worldly goods in order to rationalise his constancy. It was only by a scandalous heresy that Spinoza could so change the idea of G.o.d as to make him indifferent to his creatures; and this transformation, in spite of the mystic and stoical piety of its author, pa.s.sed very justly for atheism; for that divine government and policy had been denied by which alone G.o.d was made manifest to the Hebrews.

If Job's reward seems to us unworthy, we must remember that we have since pa.s.sed through the discipline of an extreme moral idealism, through a religion of sacrifice and sorrow. We should not confuse the principle that virtue must somehow secure the highest good (for what should not secure it would not be virtue) with the gross symbols by which the highest good might be expressed at Jerusalem. That Job should recover a thousand she-a.s.ses may seem to us a poor sop for his long anguish of mind and body, and we may hardly agree with him in finding his new set of children just as good as the old. Yet if fidelity had led to no good end, if it had not somehow brought happiness to somebody, that fidelity would have been folly. There is a n.o.ble folly which consists in pushing a principle usually beneficent to such lengths as to render it pernicious; and the pertinacity of Job would have been a case of such n.o.ble folly if we were not somehow a.s.sured of its ultimate fruits. In Christianity we have the same principle, save that the fruits of virtue are more spiritually conceived; they are inward peace, the silence of the pa.s.sions, the possession of truth, and the love of G.o.d and of our fellows. This is a different conception of happiness, incomplete, perhaps, in a different direction. But were even this attenuated happiness impossible to realise, all rationality would vanish not merely from Christian charity and discipline, but from the whole Christian theory of creation, redemption, and judgment. Without some window open to heaven, religion would be more fantastic than worldliness without being less irrational and vain.

[Sidenote: Hope for happiness makes belief in G.o.d.]

Revelation has intervened to bring about a conception of the highest good which never could have been derived from an impartial synthesis of human interests. The influence of great personalities and the fanaticism of peculiar times and races have joined in imposing such variations from the natural ideal. The rationality of the world, as Christianity conceived it, is due to the plan of salvation; and the satisfaction of human nature, however purified and developed, is what salvation means.

If an ascetic ideal could for a moment seem acceptable, it was because the decadence and sophistication of the world had produced a great despair in all n.o.ble minds; and they thought it better that an eye or a hand which had offended should perish, and that they should enter blind and maimed into the kingdom of heaven, than that, whole and seeing, they should remain for ever in h.e.l.l-fire. Supernatural, then, as the ideal might seem, and imposed on human nature from above, it was yet accepted only because nothing else, in that state of conscience and imagination, could revive hope; nothing else seemed to offer an escape from the heart's corruption and weariness into a new existence.

CHAPTER IX

THE CHRISTIAN COMPROMISE

The human spirit has not pa.s.sed in historical times through a more critical situation or a greater revulsion than that involved in accepting Christianity. Was this event favourable to the life of Reason?

Was it a progress in competence, understanding, and happiness? Any absolute answer would be misleading. Christianity did not come to destroy; the ancient springs were dry already, and for two or three centuries unmistakable signs of decadence had appeared in every sphere, not least in that of religion and philosophy. Christianity was a reconstruction out of ruins. In the new world competence could only be indirect, understanding mythical, happiness surrept.i.tious; but all three subsisted, and it was Christianity that gave them their necessary disguises.

[Sidenote: Suspense between hope and disillusion.]

The young West had failed in its first great experiment, for, though cla.s.sic virtue and beauty and a great cla.s.sic state subsisted, the force that had created them was spent. Was it possible to try again? Was it necessary to sit down, like the Orient, in perpetual flux and eternal apathy? This question was answered by Christianity in a way, under the circ.u.mstances, extremely happy. The Gospel, on which Christianity was founded, had drawn a very sharp contrast between this world and the kingdom of heaven--a phrase admitting many interpretations. From the Jewish millennium or a celestial paradise it could shift its sense to mean the invisible Church, or even the inner life of each mystical spirit. Platonic philosophy, to which patristic theology was allied, had made a contrast not less extreme between sense and spirit, between life in time and absorption in eternity. Armed with this double dualism, Christianity could preach both renunciation and hope, both asceticism and action, both the misery of life and the blessing of creation. It even enshrined the two att.i.tudes in its dogma, uniting the Jewish doctrine of a divine Creator and Governor of this world with that of a divine Redeemer to lead us into another. Persons were not lacking to perceive the contradiction inherent in such an eclecticism; and it was the Gnostic or neo-Platonic party, which denied creation and taught a pure asceticism, that had the best of the argument. The West, however, would not yield to their logic. It might, in an hour of trouble and weakness, make concessions to quietism and accept the cross, but it would not suffer the naturalistic note to die out altogether. It preferred an inconsistency, which it hardly perceived, to a complete surrender of its instincts. It settled down to the conviction that G.o.d created the world _and_ redeemed it; that the soul is naturally good _and_ needs salvation.

[Sidenote: Superficial solution.]

This contradiction can be explained exoterically by saying that time and changed circ.u.mstances separate the two situations: having made the world perfect, G.o.d redeems it after it has become corrupt; and whereas all things are naturally good, they may by accident lose their excellence, and need to have it restored. There is, however, an esoteric side to the matter. A soul that may be redeemed, a will that may look forward to a situation in which its action will not be vain or sinful, is one that in truth has never sinned; it has merely been thwarted. Its ambition is rational, and what its heart desires is essentially good and ideal. So that the whole cla.s.sic att.i.tude, the faith in action, art, and intellect, is preserved under this protecting cuticle of dogma; nothing was needed but a little courage, and circ.u.mstances somewhat more favourable, for the natural man to a.s.sert himself again. A people believing in the resurrection of the flesh in heaven will not be averse to a reawakening of the mind on earth.

[Sidenote: But from what shall we be redeemed?]

Another pitfall, however, opens here. These contrasted doctrines may change roles. So long as by redemption we understand, in the mystic way, exaltation above finitude and existence, because all particularity is sin, to be redeemed is to abandon the Life of Reason; but redemption might mean extrication from untoward accidents, so that a rational life might be led under right conditions. Instead of being like Buddha, the redeemer might be like Prometheus. In that case, however, the creator would become like Zeus--a tyrant will responsible for our conditions rather than expressive of our ideal. The doctrine of creation would become pantheism and that of redemption, formerly ascetic, would represent struggling humanity.

[Sidenote: Typical att.i.tude of St. Augustine.]

The seething of these potent and ambiguous elements can be studied nowhere better than in Saint Augustine. He is a more genial and complete representative of Christianity than any of the Greek Fathers, in whom the Hebraic and Roman vitality was comparatively absent. Philosophy was only one phase of Augustine's genius; with him it was an instrument of zeal and a stepping-stone to salvation. Scarcely had it been born out of rhetoric when it was smothered in authority. Yet even in that precarious and episodic form it acquired a wonderful sweep, depth, and technical elaboration. He stands at the watershed of history, looking over either land; his invectives teach us almost as much of paganism and heresy as his exhortations do of Catholicism. To Greek subtlety he joins Hebrew fervour and monkish intolerance; he has a Latin amplitude and (it must be confessed) coa.r.s.eness of feeling; but above all he is the illumined, enraptured, forgiven saint. In him theology, however speculative, remains a vehicle for living piety; and while he has, perhaps, done more than any other man to materialise Christianity, no one was ever more truly filled with its spirit.

[Sidenote: He achieves Platonism.]

Saint Augustine was a thorough Platonist, but to reach that position he had to pa.s.s in his youth through severe mental struggles. The difficult triumph over the sensuous imagination by which he attained the conception of intelligible objects was won only after long discipline and much reading of Platonising philosophers. Every reality seemed to him at first an object of sense: G.o.d, if he existed, must be perceptible, for to Saint Augustine's mind also, at this early and sensuous stage of its development, _esse_ was _percipi_. He might never have worked himself loose from these limitations, with which his vivid fancy and not too delicate eloquence might easily have been satisfied, had it not been for his preoccupation with theology. G.o.d must somehow be conceived; for no one in that age of religious need and of theological pa.s.sion felt both more intensely than Saint Augustine. If sensible objects alone were real, G.o.d must be somewhere discoverable in s.p.a.ce; he must either have a body like the human, or be the body of the universe, or some subtler body permeating and moving all the rest.

These conceptions all offered serious dialectical difficulties, and, what was more to the point, they did not satisfy the religious and idealistic instinct which the whole movement of Saint Augustine's mind obeyed. So he pressed his inquiries farther. At length meditation, and more, perhaps, that experience of the flux and vanity of natural things on which Plato himself had built his heaven of ideas, persuaded him that reality and substantiality, in any eulogistic sense, must belong rather to the imperceptible and eternal. Only that which is never an object of sense or experience can be the root and principle of experience and sense. Only the invisible and changeless can be the substance of a moving show. G.o.d could now be apprehended and believed in precisely because he was essentially invisible: had he anywhere appeared he could not be the principle of all appearance; had he had a body and a _locus_ in the universe, he could not have been its spiritual creator. The ultimate objects of human knowledge were accordingly ideas, not things; principles reached by the intellect, not objects by any possibility offered to sense. The methodological concepts of science, by which we pa.s.s from fact to fact and from past perception to future, did not attract Augustine's attention. He admitted, it is true, that there was a subordinate, and to him apparently uninteresting, region governed by "_certissima ratione vel experientia_," and he even wished science to be allowed a free hand within that empirical and logical sphere. A mystic and allegorical interpretation of Scripture was to be invoked to avoid the puerilities into which any literal interpretation--of the creation in six days, for instance--would be sure to run. Unbelievers would thus not be scandalised by mythical dogmas "concerning things which they might have actually experienced, or discovered by sure calculation."

Science was to have its way in the field of calculable experience; that region could be the more readily surrendered by Augustine because his attention was henceforth held by those ideal objects which he had so laboriously come to conceive. These were concepts of the contemplative reason or imagination, which envisages natures and eternal essences behind the variations of experience, essences which at first receive names, becoming thus the centres of rational discourse, then acquire values, becoming guides to action and measures of achievement, and finally attract unconditional worship, being regarded as the first causes and ultimate goals of all existence and aspiration.

[Sidenote: He identifies it with Christianity.]

This purely Platonic philosophy, however, was not to stand alone. Like every phase of Saint Augustine's speculation, it came, as we have said, to b.u.t.tress or express some religious belief. But it is a proof of his depth and purity of soul that his searching philosophic intuition did more to spiritualise the dogmas he accepted from others than these dogmas could do to denaturalise his spontaneous philosophy. Platonic ideas had by that time long lost their moral and representative value, their Socratic significance. They had become ontological ent.i.ties, whereas originally they had represented the rational functions of life.

This hypostasis of the rational, by which the rational abdicates its meaning in the effort to acquire a metaphysical existence, had already been carried to its extreme by the Neo-Platonists. But Saint Augustine, while helpless as a philosopher to resist that speculative realism, was able as a Christian to infuse into those dead concepts some of the human blood which had originally quickened them. Metaphysics had turned all human interests into mythical beings, and now religion, without at all condemning or understanding that transformation, was going to adopt those mythical beings and turn them again into moral influences. In Saint Augustine's mind, fed as it was by the Psalmist, the Platonic figments became the Christian G.o.d, the Christian Church, and the Christian soul, and thus acquired an even subtler moral fragrance than that which they had lost when they were uprooted by a visionary philosophy from the soil of Greek culture.

[Sidenote: G.o.d the good.]

Saint Augustine's way of conceiving G.o.d is an excellent ill.u.s.tration of the power, inherent in his religious genius and sincerity, of giving life and validity to ideas which he was obliged to borrow in part from a fabulous tradition and in part from a petrified metaphysics. G.o.d, to him, was simply the ideal eternal object of human thought and love. All ideation on an intellectual plane was a vague perception of the divine essence. "The rational soul understands G.o.d, for it understands what exists always unchanged." ... "G.o.d is happiness; and in him and from him and through him all things are happy which are happy at all. G.o.d is the good and the beautiful." He was never tired of telling us that G.o.d is not true but the truth _(i.e._, the ideal object of thought in any sphere), not good but the good _(i.e._, the ideal object of will in all its rational manifestations). In other words, whenever a man, reflecting on his experience, conceived the better or the best, the perfect and the eternal, he conceived G.o.d, inadequately, of course, yet essentially, because G.o.d signified the comprehensive ideal of all the perfections which the human spirit could behold in itself or in its objects. Of this divine essence, accordingly, every interesting thing was a manifestation; all virtue and beauty were parcels of it, tokens of its superabundant grace. Hence the inexhaustible pa.s.sion of Saint Augustine toward his G.o.d; hence the sweetness of that endless colloquy in prayer into which he was continually relapsing, a pa.s.sion and a sweetness which no one will understand to whom G.o.d is primarily a natural power and only accidentally a moral ideal.

[Sidenote: Primary and secondary religion.]

Herein lies the chief difference between those in whom religion is spontaneous and primary--a very few--those in whom it is imitative and secondary. To the former, divine things are inward values, projected by chance into images furnished by poetic tradition or by external nature, while to the latter, divine things are in the first instance objective factors of nature or of social tradition, although they have come, perhaps, to possess some point of contact with the interests of the inner life on account of the supposed physical influence which those super-human ent.i.ties have over human fortunes. In a word, theology, for those whose religion is secondary, is simply a false physics, a doctrine about eventual experience not founded on the experience of the past.

Such a false physics, however, is soon discredited by events; it does not require much experience or much shrewdness to discover that supernatural beings and laws are without the empirical efficacy which was attributed to them. True physics and true history must always tend, in enlightened minds, to supplant those misinterpreted religious traditions. Therefore, those whose reflection or sentiment does not furnish them with a key to the moral symbolism and poetic validity underlying theological ideas, if they apply their intelligence to the subject at all, and care to be sincere, will very soon come to regard religion as a delusion. Where religion is primary, however, all that worldly dread of fraud and illusion becomes irrelevant, as it is irrelevant to an artist's pleasure to be warned that the beauty he expresses has no objective existence, or as it would be irrelevant to a mathematician's reasoning to suspect that Pythagoras was a myth and his supposed philosophy an abracadabra. To the religious man religion is inwardly justified. G.o.d has no need of natural or logical witnesses, but speaks himself within the heart, being indeed that ineffable attraction which dwells in whatever is good and beautiful, and that persuasive visitation of the soul by the eternal and incorruptible by which she feels herself purified, rescued from mortality, and given an inheritance in the truth. This is precisely what Saint Augustine knew and felt with remarkable clearness and persistence, and what he expressed unmistakably by saying that every intellectual perception is knowledge of G.o.d or has G.o.d's nature for its object.

Proofs of the existence of G.o.d are therefore not needed, since his existence is in one sense obvious and in another of no religious interest. It is obvious in the sense that the ideal is a term of moral experience, and that truth, goodness, and beauty are inevitably envisaged by any one whose life has in some measure a rational quality.

It is of no religious interest in the sense that perhaps some physical or dynamic absolute might be scientifically discoverable in the dark entrails of nature or of mind. The great difference between religion and metaphysics is that religion looks for G.o.d at the top of life and metaphysics at the bottom; a fact which explains why metaphysics has such difficulty in finding G.o.d, while religion has never lost him.

This brings us to the grand characteristic and contradiction of Saint Augustine's philosophy, a characteristic which can be best studied, perhaps, in him, although it has been inherited by all Christian theology and was already present in Stoic and Platonic speculation, when the latter had lost its ethical moorings. This is the idea that the same G.o.d who is the ideal of human aspiration is also the creator of the universe and its only primary substance.

[Sidenote: Ambiguous efficacy of the good in Plato.]

If Plato, when he wrote that fine and profound pa.s.sage in the sixth book of the Republic, where he says that the good is the cause of all intelligence in the mind and of all intelligibility in the object, and indeed the principle of all essence and existence--if Plato could have foreseen what his oracular hyperbole was to breed in the world, we may well believe that he would have expunged it from his pages with the same severity with which he banished the poets from his State. In the lips of Socrates, and at that juncture in the argument of the Republic, those sentences have a legitimate meaning. The good is the principle of benefit, and the philosophers who are to rule the state will not be alienated by their contemplations from practical wisdom, seeing that the idea of the good--_i.e._, of the advantageous, profitable, and beneficial--is the highest concept of the whole dialectic, that in reference to which all other ideas have place and significance. If we ventured to extend the interpretation of the pa.s.sage, retaining its spirit, into fields where we have more knowledge than Plato could have, we might say that the principle of the good generates essence and existence, in the sense that all natural organs have functions and utilities by which they establish themselves in the world, and that the system of these useful functions is the true essence or idea of any living thing. But the Socratic origin and sense of such a pa.s.sage as this, and of others (in the Timaeus, for instance) allied to it, was soon lost in the headlong idolatry which took possession of the neo-Platonic school; and it was through this medium that Saint Augustine received his Platonic inspiration. The good no longer meant, as it did to Plato, the principle of benefit everywhere, but it meant the good Being; and this, for a Christian, could naturally be none other than G.o.d; so that the idea that the good was the creator of all essence and existence now a.s.sumed a marvellously Mosaic significance. Here was one of those bits of primeval revelation which, it was explained, had survived in the heathen world. The hypostasis of moral conceptions, then, and of the idea of the good in particular, led up from the Platonic side to the doctrine of creation.

[Sidenote: Ambiguous goodness of the creator in Job.]

The history of the conception among the Jews was entirely different, the element of goodness in the creator being there advent.i.tious and the element of power original. Jehovah for Job was a universal force, justified primarily by his omnipotence; but this physical authority would in the end, he hoped, be partly rationalised and made to clash less scandalously with the authority of justice. Among the Greeks, as was to be expected, the idea of justice was more independent and entire; but once named and enshrined, that divinity, too, tended to absoluteness, and could be confused with the physical basis of existence. In the Stoic philosophy the latter actually gained the upper hand, and the problem of Job reappeared on the horizon. It did not rise into painful prominence, however, until Christian times, when absolute moral perfection and absolute physical efficacy were predicated of G.o.d with equal emphasis, if not among the people who never have conceived G.o.d as either perfectly good or entirely omnipotent, at least among the theologians. If not all felt the contradiction with equal acuteness, the reason doubtless was that a large part of their thought was perfunctory and merely apologetic: they did not quite mean what they said when they spoke of perfect goodness; and we shall see how Saint Augustine himself, when reduced to extremities, surrendered his loyalty to the moral ideal rather than reconsider his traditional premisses.

[Sidenote: The Manicheans.]

How tenaciously, however, he clung to the moral in the religious, we can see by the difficulty he had in separating himself from the Manicheans.

The Manicheans admitted two absolutes, the essence of the one being goodness and of the other badness. This system was logically weak, because these absolutes were in the first place two, which is one contradiction, and in the second place relative, which is another. But in spite of the pitfalls into which the Manicheans were betrayed by their pursuit of metaphysical absolutes, they were supported by a moral intuition of great truth and importance. They saw that an essentially good principle could not have essential evil for its effect. These moral terms are, we may ourselves feel sure, relative to existence and to actual impulse, and it may accordingly be always misleading to make them the essence of metaphysical realities: good and bad may be not existences but qualities which existences have only in relation to demands in themselves or in one another. Yet if we once launch, as many metaphysicians would have us do, into the hypostasis of qualities and relations, it is certainly better and more honest to make contradictory qualities into opposed ent.i.ties, and not to render our metaphysical world unmeaning as well as fict.i.tious by peopling it with concepts in which the most important categories of life are submerged and invalidated. Evil may be no more a metaphysical existence than good is; both are undoubtedly mere terms for vital utilities and impediments; but if we are to indulge in mythology at all, it is better that our mythology should do symbolic justice to experience and should represent by contrasted figures the ineradicable practical difference between the better and the worse, the beautiful and the ugly, the trustworthy and the fallacious. To discriminate between these things in practice is wisdom, and it should be the part of wisdom to discriminate between them in theory.

The Manicheans accordingly attributed what is good in the world to one power and what is bad to another. The fable is transparent enough, and we, who have only just learned to smile at a personal devil, may affect to wonder that any one should ever have taken it literally. But in an age when the a.s.sertive imagination was unchecked by any critical sense, such a device at least avoided the scandal of attributing all the evils and sins of this world to a principle essentially inviolate and pure. By avoiding what must have seemed a blasphemy to Saint Augustine, as to every one whose speculation was still relevant to his conscience and to his practical idealism, the Manicheans thus prevailed on many to overlook the contradictions which their system developed so soon as its figments were projected into the sphere of absolute existences.

[Sidenote: All things good by nature.]

The horror with which an idealistic youth at first views the truculence of nature and the turpitude of worldly life is capable of being softened by experience. Time subdues our initial preferences by showing us the complexity of moral relations in this world, and by extending our imaginative sympathy to forms of existence and pa.s.sion at first repulsive, which from new and ultra-personal points of view may have their natural sweetness and value. In this way, Saint Augustine was ultimately brought to appreciate the catholicity and scope of those Greek sages who had taught that all being was to itself good, that evil was but the impediment of natural function, and that therefore the conception of anything totally or essentially evil was only a petulance or exaggeration in moral judgment that took, as it were, the bit in its teeth, and turned an incidental conflict of interests into a metaphysical opposition of natures. All definite being is in itself congruous with the true and the good, since its const.i.tution is intelligible and its operation is creative of values. Were it not for the limitations of matter and the accidental crowding and conflict of life, all existing natures might subsist and prosper in peace and concord, just as their various ideas live without contradiction in the realm of conceptual truth. We may say of all things, in the words of the Gospel, that their angels see the face of G.o.d. Their ideals are no less cases of the good, no less instances of perfection, than is the ideal locked in our private bosom. It is the part of justice and charity to recognise this situation, in view of which we may justly say that evil is always relative and subordinate to some const.i.tuted nature in itself a standard of worth, a point of departure for the moral valuation of eventual changes and of surrounding things. Evil is accordingly accidental and unnatural; it follows upon the maladaptation of actions to natures and of natures to one another. It can be no just ground for the condemnation of any of those natural essences which only give rise to it by their imperfect realisation.

The Semitic idea of creation could now receive that philosophical interpretation which it so sadly needed. Primordially, and in respect to what was positive in them, all things might he expressions of the good; in their essence and ideal state they might be said to be created by G.o.d. For G.o.d was the supreme ideal, to which all other goods were subordinate and instrumental; and if we agree to make a cosmogony out of morals and to hypostasise the series of rational ideals, taken in the inverse order, into a series of efficient causes, it is clear that the highest good, which is at the end of the moral scale, will now figure as a first cause at the beginning of the physical sequence. This operation is what is recorded and demanded in the doctrine of creation: a doctrine which would lose its dogmatic force if we allowed either the moral ideality or the physical efficacy of the creator to drop out of sight.

If the moral ideality is sacrificed, we pa.s.s to an ordinary pantheism, while if the physical efficacy is surrendered, we take refuge in a naturalistic idealism of the Aristotelian type, where the good is a function of things and neither their substance nor their cause.

[Sidenote: The doctrine of creation demands that of the fall.]

To accept the doctrine of creation, after it had become familiar, was not very hard, because the contradiction it contains could then be set down to our imperfect apprehension. The unintelligibility of matters of fact does not lead us to deny them, but merely to study them; and when the creation was accepted as a fact, its unintelligibility became merely a theological problem and a religious mystery, such as no mortal philosophy can be without. But for Saint Augustine the situation was wholly different. A doctrine of the creation had to be constructed: the disparate ideas had to be synthesised which posterity was afterward to regard as the obvious, if not wholly reconcilable, attributes of the deity. The mystery could not then be recognised; it had to be made. And Saint Augustine, with his vital religion, with his spontaneous adoration of G.o.d the ideal, could not attribute to that ideal unimpeded efficacy in the world. To admit that all natures were essentially good might dispel the Manichean fancy about an Evil Absolute engaged in single combat with an Absolute Good; but insight into the meaning and the natural conditions of evil could only make its presence more obvious and its origin more intimately bound up with the general const.i.tution of the world. Evil is only imperfection; but everything is imperfect. Conflict is only maladaptation, but there is maladaptation everywhere. If we a.s.sume, then, what the doctrine of creation requires, that all things at first proceeded out of the potency of the good--their matter and form, their distribution and their energies, being wholly attributable to the attraction of the ultimately best--it is clear that some calamity must have immediately supervened by which the fountains of life were defiled, the strength of the ideal principle in living things weakened, and the mortal conflict inst.i.tuted which not only condemns all existent things ultimately to perish, but hardly allows them, even while they painfully endure, to be truly and adequately themselves.

Original sin, with the fall of the angels and of man for its mythical ground, thus enters into the inmost web of Augustinian philosophy. This fact cannot be too much insisted upon, for only by the immediate introduction of original sin into the history of the world could a man to whom G.o.d was still a moral term believe at all in the natural and fundamental efficacy of G.o.d in the cosmos. The doctrine of the fall made it possible for Saint Augustine to accept the doctrine of the creation.

Both belonged to the same mythical region in which the moral values of life were made to figure as metaphysical agents; but when once the metaphysical agency of the highest good was admitted into a poetic cosmogony, it became imperative to admit also the metaphysical agency of sin into it; for otherwise the highest good would be deprived of its ideal and moral character, would cease to be the entelechy of rational life, and be degraded into a flat principle of description or synthesis for experience and nature as they actually are. G.o.d would thus become a natural agent, like the fire of Herac.l.i.tus, in which human piety could take an interest only by force of traditional inertia and unintelligence, while the continued muttering of the ritual prevented men from awaking to the disappearance of the G.o.d. The essence of deity, as Augustine was inwardly convinced, was correspondence to human aspiration, moral perfection, and ideality. G.o.d, therefore, as the Manicheans, with Plato and Aristotle before them, had taught, could be the author of good only; or, to express the same thing in less figurative and misleading language, it was only the good in things that could contribute to our idea of divinity. What was evil must, therefore, be carried up into another concept, must be referred, if you will, to another mythical agent; and this mythical agent in Saint Augustine's theology was named sin.