DAWSON, Christopher. Christianity and The New Age

ESSAYS IN ORDER
GENERAL EDITORS
CHRISTOPHER DAWSON
T. F. BURNS
No. 1. RELIGION AND CULTURE

By JACQUES MARITAIN. With a General
Introduction to Essays in Order by
CHRISTOPHER DAWSON.
No. 2. CRISIS IN THE WEST

By PETER WUST. With an Introduction
by E. I. WATKIN
No. 3. CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE
B y CHRISTOPHER DAWSON
OTHER VOLUMES IN PREPARATION BY

M. C. D'ARCY, S.J., CHARLES DU BOS, ERIC G I L L ,
THEODOR HAECKER, RONALD KNOX, GABRIEL
MARCEL, JOHN-BAPTIST REEVES, O.P., CARL
SCHMITT, E. I. WATKIN, DOUGLAS W O O D R U F F ,
E T C . , ETC.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR:
T H E AGE OF THE GODS

PROGRESS AND RELIGION
CHRISTIANITY AND SEX
ESSAYS IN ORDER: NO. 3
C H R I S T I A N I T Y AND
THE NEW AGE
BY
C H R I S T O P H E R DAWSON
LONDON
SHEED & WARD
1 93 1
FIRST PUBLISHED MARCH, 1931
BY SHEED AND WARD
FROM 3 1 , PATERNOSTER ROW
LONDON, E.C. 4
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY THE WHITEFRIARS PRESS, LTD.
LONDON AND TONBRIDGE
SECOND IMPRESSION JUNE, 1931
The author desires to express his thanks to the editors and

publishers of the Criterion and the Dublin Review for their kind-
ness in allowing him to reprint, in the first two chapters of this
essay, portions of articles which originally appeared in the pages
of those reviews.
CONTENTS
FACE
1. HUMANISM AND THE NEW ORDER . 9
II. HUMANISM AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE . 26
I I I . THE CLAIM OF CHRISTIANITY . . 58
I V . CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW ORDER . . 92

CHRISTIANITY AND THE
NEW AGE
I. HUMANISM AND THE NEW ORDER
FOR centuries a civilisation will follow the

same path, worshipping the same gods, cherish-
ing the same ideals, acknowledging the same
moral and intellectual standards. And then all
at once a change will come, the springs of the
old life run dry, and men suddenly awake to a
new world, in which the ruling principles of the
former age seem to lose their validity and to
become inapplicable or meaningless.
This is what occurred in the time of the
Roman Empire, when the ancient world, which
had lived for centuries on the inherited capital
of the Hellenistic culture, seemed suddenly to
come to the end of its resources and to realise its
need of something entirely new. For four hun-
dred years the civilised world had been reading
the same books, admiring the same works of art,
and cultivating the same types of social and
personal expression. Then came the change
of the third and fourth centuries, A.D., when the
9
CHRISTIANITY AND T H E N E W AGE
forms of the Hellenistic culture suddenly lost

their vitality and men turned to a new art, a
new thought and a new way of life—from philo-
sophy to theology, from the Greek statue to the
Byzantine mosaic, from the gymnasium to the
monastery.
This species of cultural discontinuity is not
unknown in other civilisations—for example in
China in the third and fourth centuries A.D.—
but it seems specially characteristic of the West.
It took place once more in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries at the close of the Middle
Ages, and we seem to be experiencing some-
thing of the kind in Europe to-day. During the
last period of the nineteenth century and the
first years of the twentieth century a further
phase of Western civilisation came to an end.
The old capital was exhausted and there was
nothing to take its place. Liberalism and
Nationalism had won their long fight with the
old order, but they had lost their own ideals.
In Italy the Risorgimento had given place to
the age of Crispi and the Triple Alliance, and
in France the centenary of the Republic was
being celebrated by the Panama scandals. It
was a dark age—dark not as in the early Middle
Ages with the honest night of barbarism, but
with the close uneasy gloom that comes before
a storm. In the past, the periods of climax, as
10
HUMANISM AND T H E N E W O R D E R
a rule, have been ages of material distress and

economic decline, but the terrifying thing about
that age was its prosperity, its confidence, its
material success. " There has never," wrote
Peguy, " been an age in which money was to
such a degree the only master and god. And
never have the rich been so protected against
the poor and the poor so unprotected against
the rich. . . .
"And never has the temporal been so protected
against the spiritual; and never has the spiritual
been so unprotected against the temporal." *
The goal of the Liberal Enlightenment and
Revolution had been reached, and Europe at
last possessed a completely secularised culture.
The old religion had not been destroyed ; in fact
throughout Protestant Europe the churches still
possessed a position of established privilege.
But they held this position only on the condi-
tion that they did not interfere with the reign
of Mammon. In reality they had been pushed
aside into a backwater where they were free to
stagnate in peace and to brood over the memory
of dead controversies which had moved the
mind of Europe three centuries before.
On the other hand the intellectuals who had
contributed so much to the victory of the new
order of things were in a somewhat similar
* C. Péguy, L'argent Suite, p p . 170-171.
11
plight. They found themselves powerless to

influence the movement of civilisation, which
had cut itself free, not only from tradition, but
also from art and thought. The spiritual
leadership that was possessed by Voltaire and
Rousseau, by Goethe and Fichte, was now a
thing of the past. The men of letters were
expected to follow society, not to lead it. And
this is what many of them did, whether with
the professional servility of the journalist or with
the disinterested fanaticism of the realist, who
affirmed his artistic integrity by the creation of
an imaginary world no less devoid of spiritual
significance than was the social world in which
he lived. But a large number, probably the
majority, found neither of these alternatives
satisfactory. They turned to literature and art
as a means of escape from reality. That was
the meaning to- many of the catchword, " Art
for Art's sake."* Symbolism and aestheticism,
the Ivory Tower and the Celtic Twilight,
Satanism and the cult of " Evil," hashish and
absinthe ; all of them were ways by which the
last survivors of Romanticism made their escape,
leaving the enemy in possession of the field.
There was, however, one exception, one man
who refused to surrender.
* Its true meaning, however, is to be found rather in
the dilettantism of Oscar Wilde.
12
HUMANISM AND T H E N E W ORDER
Whatever his weaknesses Friedrich Nietzsche

was neither a time-server nor a coward. He at
least stood for the supremacy of spirit, when so
many of those whose office it was to defend it
had fallen asleep or had gone over to the enemy.
He remained faithful to the old ideals of the
Renaissance culture, the ideals of creative genius
and of the self-affirmation of the free personality,
and he revolted against the blasphemies of an
age which degraded the personality and denied
the power of the spirit in the name of humanity
and liberty.
Nevertheless, Nietzsche himself was far from
being a humanist. Humanism is essentially a
via media, and in the nineteenth century the via
media had become identical with mediocrity. In
Nietzsche's eyes humanity had become some-
thing either ridiculous or shameful, and the
attempt to pass beyond humanity led him to
the negation of humanism and the destruction
of his own personality ; as he said, the way of
the creator is to burn himself in his own fire.
Yet the tragedy of Nietzsche is the tragedy of
the end of humanism, since it only reveals with
exceptional clearness the ultimate consequences
of the antinomy that was inherent in the
humanist tradition from the beginning.
The essentially transitory character of the
humanist culture has been obscured by the
13
CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE
dominance of the belief in Progress and by the

shallow and dogmatic optimism which charac-
terised nineteenth-century Liberalism. It was
only an exceptionally original mind, like that
of the late T. E. Hulme, that could free itself
from the influence of Liberal dogma and could
recognise the signs of the times—the passing of the
ideals that had dominated European civilisa-
tion for four centuries, and the dawn of a new
order.
In the years that followed the war this con-
sciousness has become general, at least on the
Continent, owing largely to the popularity of
Spengler's well-known book, The Decline of the
West. But Spengler's arbitrary and subjective
theorising threw no light upon the inner mean-
ing of the change. A much more profound
analysis of the modern situation is to be found
in the works of the modern Russian thinkers of
the school of Solovyov, above all Nicholas Berd-
yaev. In his book Der Sinn der Geschichte and in
his later essays on " The New Middle Ages,"
Berdyaev has dealt with the passing of human-
ism not as an instance of historical fatality, but
in its ultimate significance for the spiritual life
of humanity, and has shown how the disintegra-
tion of the Renaissance culture was the result of
a spiritual disunity and conflict which it was
never able to overcome.
14
HUMANISM AND THE N E W ORDER
In spite of its ideal of a purely human per-

fection and its cult of classical form, there was
in humanism something excessive, a kind of
hubris which led it to destruction. We see this
already in the brilliant culture of fifteenth-cen-
tury Italy, where the unbridled individualism of
princes and cities led to the loss of national inde-
pendence. But that is only a superficial instance
of the instability of the new order. It is not in
any obvious material failure, but in its very
triumphs and successes, that the real weakness of
the movement is to be found. For each fresh
victory of the humanistic spirit undermined the
foundations of its own vitality.
The Renaissance has its beginning in the self-
discovery, the self-realisation and the self-exalta-
tion of Man. Mediaeval man had attempted to
base his life on the supernatural. His ideal of
knowledge was not the adventurous quest of the
human mind exploring its own kingdom ; it was
an intuition of the eternal verities which is
itself an emanation from the Divine Intellect—
irradiatio et participatio primae lucis. The men of
the Renaissance, on the other hand, turned away
from the eternal and the absolute to the world
of nature and human experience. They rejected
their dependence on the supernatural, and vindi-
cated their independence and supremacy in
the temporal order. But thereby they were
15
CHRISTIANITY A N D T H E N E W AGE
gradually led by an internal process of logic to

criticise the principles of their own knowledge
and to lose confidence in their own freedom.
The self-affirmation of man gradually led to the
denial of the spiritual foundations of his free-
dom and knowledge. This tendency shows
itself in every department of modern thought.
In philosophy, it leads from the dogmatic
rationalism of Descartes and the dogmatic
empiricism of Locke to the radical scepticism
of Hume and the subjectivism of later German
thought. Reason is gradually stripped of its
prerogatives until nothing is left to it but the
bare " a s if" of Vaihinger.
In science, the growth of man's knowledge
and his control over nature is accompanied by
a growing sense of man's dependence on
material forces. He gradually loses his posi-
tion of exception and superiority and sinks back
into nature. He becomes a subordinate part of
the great mechanical system that his scientific
genius has created. In the same way, the
economic process, which led to the exploitation
of the world by man and the vast increase of
his material resources, ends in the subjection of
man to the rule of the machine and the
mechanisation of human life. Finally, in the
political and social sphere, the revolt against
the mediaeval principle of hierarchy and the
16
reassertion of the rights of the secular power

led to the absolutism of the modern national
state. This again was followed by a second
revolt—the assertion of the rights of man
against secular authority which culminated in
the French Revolution. But this second revolt
also led to disillusion. It led, on the one hand,
to the disintegration of the organic principle
in society into an individualistic atomism, which
leaves the individual isolated and helpless before
the new economic forces, and, on the other, to
the growth of the new bureaucratic state, that
" coldest of cold monsters," which exerts a
more irresistible and far-reaching control over
the individual life than was ever possessed by
the absolute monarchies of the old regime.
So we have the paradox that at the beginning
of the Renaissance, when the conquest of nature
and the creation of modern science are still
unrealised, man appears in godlike freedom with
a sense of unbounded power and greatness ;
while at the end of the nineteenth century,
when nature has been conquered and there
seem no limits to the powers of science, man is
once more conscious of his misery and weak-
ness as the slave of material circumstance and
physical appetite and death. Instead of the
heroic exaltation of humanity which was
characteristic of the naturalism of the Renais-
C.N.A. 17 i!
sance, we see the humiliation of humanity in

the anti-human naturalism of Zola. Man is
stripped of his glory and freedom and left as a
naked human animal shivering in an inhuman
universe.
Thus humanism by its own inner develop-
ment is eventually brought to deny itself and to
pass away into its opposite. For Nietzsche, who
refused to surrender the spiritual element in the
Renaissance tradition, humanism is transcended
in an effort to attain to the superhuman without
abandoning the self-assertion and the rebellious
freedom of the individual will—an attempt
which inevitably ends in self-destruction. But
modern civilisation as a whole could not follow
this path. It naturally chose to live as best it
could, rather than to commit a spectacular
suicide. And so, in order to adapt itself to the
new conditions, it was forced to throw over the
humanist tradition.
Hence the increasing acceptance of the
mechanisation of life that has characterised
the last thirty years. Above all, in the period
since the war there has been a growing tendency
towards the de-intellectualisation and exteriori-
sation of European life. The old fixed canons of
social and moral conduct have been abandoned,
and society has given itself up to the current of
external change without any attempt towards
18
HUMANISM AND THE NEW ORDER
self-direction or the preservation of spiritual

continuity. But this acceptance of new condi-
tions is in itself negative, and possesses no
creative quality. It points to the dying-down
and stagnation of culture rather than its
renewal. Nor is this surprising. For centuries,
Western civilisation has received its impetus
from the humanist tradition, and the dying-
away of that tradition naturally involves the
temporary cessation of cultural creativeness.
From this point of view it is very significant
that almost the only original element in the
thought of the new age should be the work of
Jews. In physical science the dominant figure
is Einstein, in psychology it is Freud, in
economics and sociology it is Marx—and each of
them has exerted an influence on the thought of
the age that far transcends the limits of his
particular subject. And it is easy to understand
the reasons of this. The Jewish mind alone
in the West has its own sources of life which are
independent of the Hellenic and the Renais-
sance traditions. It has seen too many civilisa-
tions rise and fall to be discouraged by the
failure of humanism. On the contrary it thrives
in an atmosphere of determinism and historical
destiny, which seems fatal to the humanist spirit.
This holds good especially of the Marxian
attitude, which is characteristic of the new
19 B2
conditions, although it originated at a time

when liberalism and romanticism were still
flourishing. But Marx addressed himself to
those elements in the modern world which were
already deprived of any share in the heritage of
humanist culture. He found the proletariat
enslaved to the machine, and he sought, not
to destroy this servitude, but to equalise and
rationalise it by extending it to the whole social
organism.
Thus, in Marx, the cult of equality and social
justice led to the sacrifice of human freedom and
spiritual creativeness to an inhuman economic
whole. He condemned the whole humanistic
morality and culture as bourgeois, and accepted
the machine, not only as the basis of economic
activity, but as the explanation of the mystery
of life itself. The mechanical processes of
economic life are the ultimate realities of history
and human life. All other things—religion,
art, philosophy, spiritual life—stand on a lower
plane of reality; they are a dream world of
shadows cast on the sleeping mind by the
physical processes of the real world of matter
and mechanism. Hence Marxism may be seen
as the culminating point of the modern ten-
dency to explain that which is specifically
human in terms of something else. For the
Marxian interpretation of history is in fact
20
nothing but an explaining away of history. It

professes to guide us to the heart of the prob-
lem, and it merely unveils a void. And thus,
according to Berdyaev, the essential importance
of Marxism is to be found not in its constructive
proposals, but in its negations, its sweeping
away of the semi-ideological constructions of
nineteenth-century thought. For the optimistic
rationalism of the nineteenth century tended to
hide the true significance of the conflict between
materialism and spiritualism. Just as behind
all religion and all spiritual philosophy there is a
metaphysical assent—the affirmation of Being—
so behind materialism and the materialist
explaining away of history there is a meta-
physical negation—the denial of Being—which
is the ultimate and quasi-mystical ground of the
materialistic position. In Berdyaev's words,
" Man must either incorporate himself in this
mystery of Not-being, and sink in the abyss of
Not-being, or he must return to the inner
mystery of human destiny and unite himself
once again with the sacred traditions " that are
the true basis of the historical process.*
The western observer will probably question
the metaphysical importance which Berdyaev
attributes to the Marxian doctrine. It is, how-
ever, impossible to deny the connection between
* Berdyaev, Der Sinn der Geschichte, pp. 34-35.
21
Communism and historical materialism, and

the former actually derives much of its moral
driving force from a quasi-religious devotion
to the materialistic theory. There is no mistak-
ing the note of sombre religious enthusiasm
that characterises, for example, Lenin's atti-
tude to the metaphysical side of the Marxian
creed. When he attacks Mach for having
" betrayed materialism with a kiss," he is not
speaking in jest. He is condemning what he
regards as an act of spiritual apostasy.
But this attitude finds a much more congenial
atmosphere in Russia, where the religious
impulse has always had a tendency towards
Nihilism, than in the West. In Western
Europe the decadence of the humanist tradition
has left the European mind so weak that it is no
longer capable of any metaphysical conviction.
The greatest danger here is not that we should
actively adopt the Bolshevik cult of Marxian
materialism, but rather that we should yield
ourselves passively to a practical materialisation
of culture after the American pattern. The
Communists may have deified mechanism in
theory, but it is the Americans who have
realised it in practice. They have adapted
themselves to the conditions of the new age
earlier and more completely than the peoples of
the Old World, partly because the external
22
HUMANISM A N D THE N E W ORDER
circumstances of American life were more

favourable, but most of all because they were
spiritually more independent of the humanist
tradition. The Renaissance culture that had
its centre in the courts and capitals of Europe
left America almost untouched. The American
tradition is founded on Calvinism, which
governed the social life of the Northern States
down to the nineteenth century, and which
possessed an almost complete monopoly of higher
education ; while in the new lands outside the
old colonial territory, the churches, whether
Calvinist or Baptist or Methodist, were still
all-important, and humanist education, which
was still so powerful in Europe, was practically
non-existent.
Now the social effect of Calvinism and of
American Protestantism in general is to create
an immensely strong moral motive for action
without any corresponding intellectual ideal.
It is a culture of the will rather than of the un-
derstanding—a purely ethical discipline which
neglects intellectual and aesthetic values. This
attitude remains characteristic of American
civilisation even in its secular development.
Thus the ideals of humanist democracy, which
were received from France in the revolutionary
period, were stripped of their intellectual
element and moralised as a justification for the
23
unregulated activity of the ordinary man. This

led, on the one hand, to the individualistic
cult of material success and, on the other, to
a humanitarian idealism that is in reality
nothing else but the same ideal in a socialised
form. No doubt these ideals still preserved
some of the moral inspiration that derives from
the Puritan tradition, just as European liberal-
ism retained something of the humanist tradi-
tion. But when this religious inspiration has
evaporated, American civilisation without Cal-
vinism, like modern European civilisation
without humanism, becomes a body without a
soul. And it is this dead civilisation which is
apotheosised in the mythology of Hollywood
and which is invading the Old World with
all the prestige of its vast material achieve-
ment. It possesses a kind of pseudo-humanist
appeal since it offers the ordinary man and
woman the vision of a wider and richer life.
The new machine-made civilisation may be
destructive of the finer pleasures in life, but
under the old conditions these were only
accessible to a small number. The ordinary
man gets more satisfaction from his cinema and
his daily paper than from grand opera or
classical literature. If modern civilisation is
able to pay its way, if it is not upset by some
unexpected economic or military catastrophe,
24
HUMANISM AND T H E N E W ORDER
we have no reason to suppose that it will be

undermined by any movement of popular
dissatisfaction. On the contrary, the whole
tendency of democratic politics and social
reform and economic progress is to extend the
sway of this standardised industrial mass-
civilisation. Nor can education improve mat-
ters, since if the teacher himself is without a
humanist tradition or a spiritual discipline he
cannot impart them to others. And science is
equally unhelpful, since, when it is once sepa-
rated from the humanist tradition, it becomes
as utilitarian and materialistic as industrialism.
The ordinary man knows and cares nothing
for it, and the leader of industry and the
politician value it only as the servant of the
machine. The only remedy is to be found in
man himself—in the renewal of the human
image which was once impressed so clearly on
our Western civilisation, but which has now
become disfigured and effaced.
25
II. HUMANISM AND RELIGIOUS
EXPERIENCE
T H E realisation of the decline of the humanist

tradition and the prospect of the complete
mechanisation of our civilisation have produced
a striking change in the modern intellectual
attitude towards religion. The last generation
—the generation of H. G. Wells and Bernard
Shaw—was still prepared to idealise the machine
and to place its hopes in a mechanised Utopia.
The present generation has lost this confidence
and is beginning to feel the need for a return
to religion and a recovery of the religious atti-
tude to life which the European mind has lost
during the last two or three centuries.
And this feeling is no longer confined to the
Conservatives and the supporters of the tradi-
tional intellectual order, as was largely the case
in the last century. On the contrary, it is
especially characteristic of the most modern of
the moderns and of those who are in revolt
against the existing order of things—of men like
the late D. H. Lawrence and Mr. Middleton
Murry and Mr. T. S. Eliot in this country, of
26
HUMANISM AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Hugo Ball and Stefan Georg in Germany,

and of Jacques Riviere, Charles du Bos and
François Mauriac in France.
In the latter country alone it has taken the
form of a complete acceptance of orthodox
Catholicism. Elsewhere, and especially in
England, it still retains to a great extent the
ideals of humanism and of the Enlightenment,
for it is found most of all among those who have
remained faithful to the humanist tradition,
while at the same time they feel the necessity
of finding a new spiritual basis which may pro-
tect it against the standardised mass-civilisation
of the new age. Consequently they retain the
old rationalist hostility to the idea of the super-
natural and the transcendent. They have come
to realise the dangers that a thorough-going
scientific materialism or even a rationalism of
the eighteenth-century type involves from the
point of view of humanism. They are prepared
to admit spiritual values and even the validity
of mystical experience, but they still hold fast
to the fundamental dogmas of naturalism—the
denial of the transcendent and the conception of
the universe as a closed order ruled by uniform
scientific law. They seek a natural religion in
the sense of a religion without metaphysic or
dogma or revelation—a religion without God.
Now a religion of this kind would certainly
27
possess the advantage of being easily reconcil-

able on the one hand with the ethical tradition
of humanism and on the other with the world-
view of scientific naturalism, but it does not
follow that it would solve our religious problems
or provide modern civilisation with the spiritual
dynamic of which it stands in need. For there
are two factors to be considered. Just as it is
possible to conceive of a religion which will
satisfy man's religious needs without being
applicable to the social situation of modern
Europe—as, for example, in Buddhism—so we
can construct, at least in theory, a religion which
would be adapted to the social needs of modern
civilisation, but which would be incapable of
satisfying the purely religious demands of the
human spirit. Such a religion was constructed
with admirable ingenuity and sociological
knowledge by Comte in the nineteenth century,
and it proved utterly lacking in religious vitality,
and consequently also in human appeal. And
a similar experiment which is being carried out
with far less knowledge and greater passion by
the modern Communists in Russia threatens to
be even more sterile and inimical to man's
spiritual personality.
It is useless to judge a religion from the point
of view of the politician or the social reformer.
We shall never create a living religion merely as
28
HUMANISM AND RELIGIOUS E X P E R I E N C E
a means to an end, a way out of our practical

difficulties. For the religious view of life is the
opposite to the utilitarian. It regards the world
and human life sub specie aternitatis. It is only
by accepting the religious point of view, by
regarding religion as an end in itself and not as
a means to something else, that we can discuss
religious problems profitably. It may be said
that this point of view belongs to the past, and
that we cannot return to it. But neither can we
escape from it. The past is simply the record of
the experience of humanity, and if that experi-
ence testifies to the existence of a permanent
human need, that need must manifest itself in
the future no less than in the past.
What, then, is man's essential religious need,
judging by the experience of the past ? There
is an extraordinary degree of unanimity in the
response, although, of course, it is not complete.
One answer is God, the supernatural, the tran-
scendent ; the other answer is deliverance, sal-
vation, eternal life. And both these two ele-
ments are represented in some form or other
in any given religion. The religion of ancient
Israel, for example, may seem to concentrate
entirely on the first of these two elements—the
reality of God—and to have nothing to say about
the immortality of the soul and the idea of
eternal life. Yet the teaching of the prophets
29
is essentially a doctrine of salvation—a social

and earthly salvation, it is true, but neverthe-
less a salvation which is essentially religious and
related to the eternal life of God. Again,
Buddhism seems to leave no room for God and
to put the whole emphasis of its teaching on the
second element—deliverance. Nevertheless, it
is based, as much as any religion can be, on the
idea of Transcendence. Indeed, it was an exag-
gerated sense of Transcendence that led to its
negative attitude towards the ideas of God and
the Soul. " We affirm something of God, in
order not to affirm nothing," says the Catholic
theologian. The Buddhist went a step further
on the via negativa and preferred to say
nothing.
Now, a concentration on these two specifically
religious needs produces an attitude to life
totally opposed to the practical utilitarian out-
look of the ordinary man. The latter regards
the world of man—the world of sensible experi-
ence and social activity—as the one reality, and
is sceptical of anything that lies beyond, whether
in the region of pure thought or of spiritual
experience, not to speak of religious faith. The
religious man, on the contrary, turns his scepti-
cism against the world of man. He is conscious
of the existence of another and greater world of
spiritual reality in which we live and move and
30
have our being, though it is hidden from us by

the veil of sensible things. He may even think,
like Newman, that the knowledge of the senses
has a merely symbolic value ; that " the whole
series of impressions made on us by the senses
may be but a Divine economy suited to our
need, and the token of realities distinct from
them, and such as might be revealed to us, nay,
more perfectly, by other senses as different
from our existing ones as they are from one
another." *
The one ultimate reality is the Being of God,
and the world of man and nature itself are only
real in so far as they have their ground and
principle of being in that supreme reality. In
the words of a French writer of the seventeenth
century : " It is the presence of God that,
without cessation, draws the creation from the
abyss of its own nothingness above which His
omnipotence holds it suspended, lest of its own
weight it should fall back therein ; and serves
as the mortar and bond of connection which
holds it together in order that all that it has of
its Creator should not waste and flow away like
water that is not kept in its channel."
* University Sermons, p. 350. In this remarkable passage

he develops a parallelism between the symbolic character
of sensible knowledge and that of mathematical calculi
and musical notation.
31
CHRISTIANITY AND T H E NEW AGE
Thus, although God is not myself, nor a part

of my being, " yet the relation of dependence
that my life, my powers, and my operations
bear to His Presence is more absolute, more
essential, and more intimate than any relation
I can have to the natural principles without
which I could not exist . . . I draw my life
from His Living Life . . . ; I am, I under-
stand, I will, I act, I imagine, I smell, I taste,
I touch, I see, I walk, and I love in the Infinite
Being of God, within the Divine Essence and
substance. . . .
" God in the heavens is more my heaven
than the heavens themselves; in the sun He
is more my light than the sun ; in the air He
is more my air than the air that I breathe
sensibly. . . . He works in me all that I am,
all that I see, all that I do or can do, as most
intimate, most present, and most immanent in
me, as the super-essential Author and Principle
of my works, without whom we should melt
away and disappear from ourselves and from
our own activities." *
Or again, to quote Cardinal Bona, God is
" the Ocean of all essence and existence, the
very Being itself which contains all being.
* Chardon, la Croix de Jesus, p p . 422, 4 2 3 , in B r e m o n d ,
Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, viii, pp.
32
From Him all things depend ; they flow out

from Him and flow back to Him and are in so
far as they participate in His Being." *
Thus the whole universe is, as it were, the
shadow of God, and has its being in the con-
templation or reflection of the Being of God.
The spiritual nature reflects the Divine con-
sciously, while the animal nature is a passive
and unconscious mirror. Nevertheless, even
the life of the animal is a living manifestation of
the Divine, and the flight of the hawk or the
power of the bull is an unconscious prayer. Man
alone stands between these two kingdoms in the
strange twilight world of rational consciousness.
He possesses a kind of knowledge which tran-
scends the sensible without reaching the
intuition of the Divine.
It is only the mystic who can escape from this
twilight world ; who, in Sterry's words, can
" descry a glorious eternity in a winged moment
of Time—a bright Infinite in the narrow point
of an object, who knows what Spirit means—
that spire-top whither all things ascend har-
moniously, where they meet and sit connected
in an unfathomed Depth of Life." But the
mystic is not the normal man ; he is one who
has transcended, at least momentarily, the
natural limits of human knowledge. The
* Bona. Via Compendii ad Deum.
C.N.A. 33 c
ordinary man is by his nature immersed in the

world of sense, and uses his reason in order to
subjugate the material world to his own ends,
to satisfy his appetites and to assert his will. He
lives on the animal plane with a more than
animal consciousness and purpose, and in so
far, he is less religious than the animal. The
life of pure spirit is religious, and the life of the
animal is also religious, since it is wholly united
with the life-force that is its highest capacity of
being. Only man is capable of separating him-
self alike from God and from nature, of making
himself his last end and living a purely self-
regarding and irreligious existence.
And yet the man who deliberately regards
self-assertion and sensual enjoyment as his sole
ends, and finds complete satisfaction in them—
the pure materialist—is not typical; he is almost
as rare as the mystic. The normal man has an
obscure sense of the existence of a spiritual
reality and a consciousness of the evil and
misery of an existence which is the slave of
sensual impulse and self-interest and which
must inevitably end in physical suffering and
death. But how is he to escape from this wheel
to which he is bound by the accumulated weight
of his own acts and desires ? How is he to bring
his life into vital relation with that spiritual
reality of which he is but dimly conscious and
34
which transcends all the categories of his

thought and the conditions of human experi-
ence ? This is the fundamental religious prob-
lem which has perplexed and baffled the mind
of man from the beginning and is, in a sense,
inherent in his nature.
I have intentionally stated the problem in its
fullest and most classical form, as it has been
formulated by the great minds of our own
civilisation, since the highest expression of an
idea is usually also the most explicit and the
most intelligible. But, as the writers whom I
have quoted would themselves maintain, there
is nothing specifically Christian about it. It is
common to Christianity and to Platonism, and
to the religious traditions of the ancient East.
It is the universal attitude of the anima naturaliter
Christiana, of that nature which the mediaeval
mystics term " noble," because it is incapable
of resting satisfied with a finite or sensible good.
It is " natural religion " not, indeed, after the
manner of the religion of naturalism that we
have already mentioned, but in the true sense
of the word.
It is, of course, obvious that such conceptions
of spiritual reality presuppose a high level of
intellectual development and that we cannot
expect to find them in a pre-philosophic stage
of civilisation. Nevertheless, however far back
35
we go in history, and however primitive is the

type of culture, we do find evidence for the
existence of specifically religious needs and ideas
of the supernatural which are the primitive
prototypes or analogues of the conceptions
which we have just described.
Primitive man believes no less firmly than the
religious man of the higher civilisations in the
existence of a spiritual world upon which the
visible world and the life of man are dependent.
Indeed, this spiritual world is often more
intensely realised and more constantly present
to his mind than is the case with civilised man.
He has not attained to the conception of an
autonomous natural order, and consequently
supernatural forces are liable to interpose
themselves at every moment of his existence.
At first sight the natural and the supernatural,
the material and the spiritual, seem inextricably
confused. Nevertheless, even in primitive nature-
worship, the object of religious emotion and
worship is never the natural phenomenon as
such, but always the supernatural power which
is obscurely felt to be present in and working
through the natural object.
The essential difference between the religion
of the primitive and that of civilised man is
that for the latter the spiritual world has
became a cosmos, rendered intelligible by
36
philosophy a n d ethical by the tradition of the

world religions, whereas to the primitive it is a
spiritual chaos in which good and evil, high a n d
low, rational a n d irrational elements are con-
fusedly mingled. Writers on primitive religion
have continually gone astray through their
attempts to reduce the spiritual world of the
primitive to a single principle, to find a single
cause from which the whole development m a y
be explained a n d rendered intelligible. T h u s
Tylor finds the key in the belief in ghosts,
Durkheim in the theory of an impersonal mana
which is the exteriorisation of the collective
mind, and Frazer in the technique of magic.
But in reality there is no single aspect of
primitive religion that can be isolated a n d
regarded as the origin of all the rest. T h e
spiritual world of the primitive is far less unified
t h a n that of civilised m a n . High gods, nature
spirits, the ghosts of the dead, malevolent
demons, and impersonal supernatural forces
a n d substances m a y all co-exist in it without
forming any kind of spiritual system or hier-
archy. Every primitive culture will tend to lay
the religious emphasis on some particular point.
In Central Africa witchcraft a n d the cult of
ghosts m a y overshadow everything else ; among
the hunters of N o r t h America the emphasis
may be laid on the visionary experience of the
37
CHRISTIANITY AND T H E NEW AGE
individual, and the cult of animal guardians ;

and among the Hamitic peoples the sky-god
takes the foremost place. But it is dangerous
to conclude that the point on which attention
is focussed is the whole field of consciousness.
The high gods are often conceived as too far
from man to pay much attention to his doings,
and it is lesser powers—the spirits of the field
and the forest, or the ghosts of the dead—who
come into closest relation with human life, and
whose malevolence is most to be feared.
Consequently primitive religion is apt to
appear wholly utilitarian and concerned with
purely material ends. But here also the con-
fusion of primitive thought is apt to mislead us.
The ethical aspect of religion is not consciously
recognised and cultivated as it is by civilised
man, but it is none the less present in an
obscure way. Primitive religion is essentially
an attempt to bring man's life into relation
with, and under the sanctions of, that other
world of mysterious and sacred powers, whose
action is always conceived as the ultimate and
fundamental law of life. Moreover, the sense
of sin and of the need for purification or
catharsis is very real to primitive man. No
doubt sin appears to him as a kind of
physical contagion that seems to us of little
moral value. Nevertheless, as we can see from
38
the history of Greek religion, the sense of ritual

defilement and that of moral guilt are very
closely linked with one another, and the idea of
an essential connection between moral and
physical evil—between sin and death, for
example—is found in the higher religions no less
than among the primitives. Libera nos a malo
is a universal prayer which answers to one of the
oldest needs of human nature.
But the existence of this specifically religious
need in primitive man—in other words, the
naturalness of the religious attitude—is widely
denied at the present day. It is maintained
that primitive man is a materialist and that the
attempt to find in primitive religion an obscure
sense of the reality of spirit, or, indeed, anything
remotely analogous to the religious experience
of civilised man, is sheer metaphysical theorising.
This criticism is partly due to a tendency to
identify any recognition of the religious element
in primitive thought and culture with the
particular theories of religious origins which
have been put forward by Tylor and Durkheim.
In reality, however, the theories of the latter
have much more in common with those of the
modern writers whom I have mentioned than
any of them have with the point of view of
writers who recognise the objective and autono-
mous character of religion. All of them show
39
that anti-metaphysical prejudice which has

been so general during the last generation or
two, and which rejects on a priori grounds any
objective interpretation of religious experience.
On the Continent there is already a reaction
against the idea of a " science of religion "
which, unlike the other sciences, destroys its
own object and leaves us with a residuum of
facts that belong to a totally different order.
In fact, recent German writers such as Otto,
Heiler, and Karl Beth tend rather to exag-
gerate the mystical and intuitive character of
religious experience, whether in its primitive
or advanced manifestations. But in this country
the anti-metaphysical prejudice is still dominant.
A theory is not regarded as " scientific " unless it
explains religion in terms of something else—
as an artificial construction from non-religious
elements.
Thus Professor Perry writes : " The idea of
deity has grown up with civilisation itself, and
in its beginnings it was constructed out of
the most homely materials." He holds that
religion was derived not from primitive specula-
tion or symbolism nor from spiritual experience,
but from a practical observation of the pheno-
mena of life. Its origins are to be found in the
association of certain substances, such as red
earth, shells, crystals, etc., with the ideas of life
40
and fertility and their use as amulets or fetishes

in order to prolong life or to increase the sexual
powers. From these beginnings religion was
developed as a purely empirical system of
ensuring material prosperity by the archaic
culture in Egypt and was thence gradually
diffused throughout the world by Egyptian
treasure-seekers and megalith-builders. The
leaders of these expeditions became the first
gods, while the Egyptian practices of mum-
mification and tomb-building were the source
of all those ideas concerning the nature of the
soul and the existence of a spiritual world that
are found among primitive peoples.
It is needless for us to discuss the archaeological
aspects of this pan-Egyptian hypothesis of
cultural origins. From our present point of
view the main objection to the theory lies in the
naive Euhemerism of its attitude to religion.
For even if we grant that the whole develop-
ment of higher civilisation has proceeded from
a single centre, that is a very different thing
from admitting that a fundamental type of
human experience could ever find its origin in a
process of cultural diffusion. It is not as though
Professor Perry maintained that primitive man
lived a completely animal existence before the
coming of the higher culture. On the contrary,
the whole tendency of his thought has been to
41
vindicate the essential humanity of the primitive.

It is the claim of " the new anthropology "
that it rehabilitates human nature itself and
disentangles the original nature of man from
the systems, tradition, and machinery of
civilisation which have modified it." * If,
then, primitive man is non-religious, the con-
clusion follows that human nature itself is non-
religious, and religion, like war, is an artificial
product of later development.
But this conclusion has been reached only
by the forced construction that has been
arbitrarily put upon the evidence. Because
the primitive fetish has no more religious value
for us than the mascot that we put on our
motor-cars, we assume that it can have meant
nothing more to primitive man. This, however,
is to fall into the same error for which Mr.
Massingham rightly condemns the older anthro-
pology—the neglect of the factor of degeneration.
Our mascot is a kind of fetish, but it is a
degenerate fetish, and it is degenerate precisely
because it has lost its religious meaning. The
religious man no longer uses mascots, though if
he is a Catholic he may use the image of a saint.
To the primitive man his fetish is more than the
one and less than the other. It has the sanctity
of a relic and the irrationality of a mascot.
* H . J . Massingham, The Heritage of Man, p. 142.
42
Professor Lowie has described how an Indian

offered to show him " the greatest thing in the
world " ; how he reverently uncovered one
cloth wrapper after another ; and how at length
there lay exposed a simple bunch of feathers—a
mere nothing to the alien onlooker, but to the
owner a badge of his covenant with the super-
natural world. " It is easy," he says, " to
speak of the veneration extended to such badges
. . . as fetishism, but that label with its popular
meaning is monstrously inadequate to express
the psychology of the situation. For to the
Indian the material object is nothing apart
from its sacred associations." *
So, too, when Mr. Massingham speaks of
primitive religion as "a purely supernatural
machinery, controlled by man, for insuring the
material welfare of the community," he is
right in his description of facts, but wrong in his
appreciation of values. To us, agriculture is
merely a depressed industry which provides the
raw material of our dinners, and so we assume
that a religion that is largely concerned with
agriculture must have been a sordid materialistic
business. But this is entirely to misconceive
primitive man's attitude to nature. To him,
agriculture was not a sordid occupation ; it was
one of the supreme mysteries of life, and he
* R. H. Lowie, Primitive Religion, p. 19.
43
surrounded it with religious rites because he

believed that the fertility of the soil and the
mystery of generation could only be ensured
through the co-operation of higher powers.
Primitive agriculture was in fact a kind of
liturgy.
For us nature has lost this religious atmo-
sphere because the latter has been transferred
elsewhere. Civilisation did not create the reli-
gious attitude or the essential nature of the
religious experience, but it gave them new
modes of expression and a new intellectual
interpretation. This was the achievement of
the great religions or religious philosophies
that arose in all the main centres of ancient
civilisation about the middle of the first millen-
nium B.C.* They attained to the two funda-
mental concepts of metaphysical being and
ethical order, which have been the foundation of
religious thought and the framework of religious
experience ever since. Some of these movements
of thought, such as Brahmanism, Taoism, and
the Eleatic philosophy, concentrated their atten-
tion on the idea of Being, while others, such as
Buddhism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, and
the philosophy of Heraclitus, emphasised the
idea of moral order; but all of them agreed in
* I h a v e discussed this m o v e m e n t at g r e a t e r l e n g t h in
Progress and Religion, ch. vi.
44
identifying the cosmic principle, the power

behind the world, with a spiritual principle,
conceived either as the source of being or as the
source of ethical order.* Primitive man had
already found the Transcendent immanent in
and working through nature as the supernatural.
The new religions found it in thought as the
supreme Reality and in ethics as the Eternal
Law. And consequently, while the former still
saw the spiritual world diffused and confused
with the world of matter, the latter isolated it
and set it over against the world of human
experience, as Eternity against Time, as the
Absolute against the Contingent, as Reality
against Appearance, and as the Spiritual against
the Sensible.
This was indeed the discovery of a new world
for the religious consciousness. It was thereby
liberated from the power of the nature daimons
and the dark forces of magic and translated to
a higher sphere—to the Brahma-world—" where
there is not darkness, nor day nor night, not
being nor not-being, but the Eternal alone, the
source of the ancient wisdom," to the Kingdom
of Ahura and the Six Immortal Holy Ones, to
the world of the Eternal Forms, the true home
* This may not appear obvious in the case of Bud-
dhism. It is, however, implicit in the doctrine of Karma
as the ground of the world process.
45
Of the soul. And this involved a corresponding

change in the religious attitude. The religious
life was no longer bound up with irrational
myths and non-moral tabus; it was a process
of spiritual discipline directed towards the
purification of the mind and the will—a con-
version of the soul from the life of the senses to
spiritual reality. The religious experience of
primitive man had become obscured by magic
and diabolism, and the visions and trances of
the Shaman belong rather to the phenomena of
Spiritualism than of mysticism. The new type
of religious experience, on the other hand, had
reached a higher plane. It consisted in an
intuition that was essentially spiritual and
found its highest realisation in the vision of the
mystic.
Thus each of the new religio-philosophic tra-
ditions—Brahmanism, Buddhism, Taoism, and
Platonism—ultimately transcends philosophy
and culminates in mysticism. They are not
satisfied with the demonstration of the Absolute ;
they demand the experience of the Absolute
also, whether it be the vision of the Essential
Good and the Essential Beauty, through which
the soul is made deiform, or that intuition of
the nothingness and illusion inherent in all con-
tingent being which renders a man jivana mukti,
" delivered alive." But how is such an experi-
46
ence conceivable ? It seems to be a contradic-

tion in terms—to know the Unknowable, to
grasp the Incomprehensible, to receive the
Infinite. Certainly it transcends the categories
of human thought and the normal conditions of
human experience. Yet it has remained for
thousands of years as the goal—whether attain-
able or unattainable—of the religious life ; and
no religion which ignores this aspiration can
prove permanently satisfying to man's spiritual
needs. The whole religious experience of man-
kind—indeed, the very existence of religion
itself—testifies, not only to a sense of the Tran-
scendent, but to an appetite for the Transcen-
dent that can only be satisfied by immediate
contact—by a vision of the supreme Reality. It
is the goal of the intellect as well as of the will,
for, as a Belgian philosopher has said, " The
h u m a n mind is a faculty in quest of its intuition,
that is to say, of assimilation with Being," and
it is " perpetually chased from the movable,
manifold and deficient towards the Absolute,
the One and the Infinite, that is, towards Being
pure and simple." *
A religion that remains on the rational level
and denies the possibility of any real relation
with a higher order of spiritual reality, fails in
* J. Marechal, Studies in the Psychology of the Mystics ;
trans. Algar Thorold. 1927, pp. 101, 133.
47
its most essential function, and ultimately, like

Deism, ceases to be a religion at all. It may
perhaps be objected that this view involves the
identification of religion with mysticism, and
that it would place a philosophy of intuition
like that of the Vedanta higher than a religion
of faith and supernatural revelation, like Chris-
tianity. In reality, however, the Christian in-
sistence on the necessity of faith and revelation
implies an even higher conception of transcend-
ence than that of the oriental religions. Faith
transcends the sphere of rational knowledge
even more than metaphysical intuition, and
brings the mind into close contact with super-
intelligible reality. Yet faith also, at least when
it is joined with spiritual intelligence, is itself a
kind of obscure intuition—a foretaste of the
unseen—* and it also has its culmination in the
mystical experience by which these obscure
spiritual realities are realised experimentally
and intuitively.
Thus Christianity is in agreement with the
great oriental religions and with Platonism in
its goal of spiritual intuition, though it places
the full realisation of that goal at a further and
higher stage of spiritual development than the
rest. For all of them religion is not an affair of
the emotions, but of the intelligence. Religious
* Cf. Rousselot, Les Yeux de la Foi.
48
knowledge is the highest kind of knowledge, the

end and coronation of the whole process of
man's intellectual development. Herein they
all differ profoundly from the conceptions of
religion and religious experience that have
been developed by modern European thinkers.
For the modern mind no longer admits the
possibility or the objective value of spiritual
knowledge. The whole tendency of Western
thought since the Renaissance, and still more
since the eighteenth century, has been to deny
the existence of any real knowledge except that
of rational demonstration founded upon sensible
experience. Intuition, whether metaphysical or
mystical, is regarded as an irrational emotional
conviction, and religion is reduced to subjective
feeling and moral activity. Such a religion,
however, can have no intellectual authority,
and in consequence it also loses its social autho-
rity and even its moral influence. Civilisation
becomes completely rationalised and secularised,
as may be seen from the last two centuries of
European history.
Nevertheless, man cannot live by reason alone.
His spiritual life, and even his physical instincts,
are starved in the narrow and arid territory of
purely rational consciousness. He is driven to
take refuge in the non-rational, whether it be the
irrational blend of spirituality and emotionalism
C.N.A. 49 D
that is termed romanticism, or, as is increasingly

the case to-day, in the frankly sub-rational sphere
of pure sensationalism and sexual impulse.
To-day we are faced with the bankruptcy of
rationalism and with the necessity of finding
some principle of the religious order which can
rescue us from the resultant confusion. One
alternative is that of the late D. H. Lawrence,
who accepts the failure of reason, and who seeks
to find a basis for the religious consciousness
not in spiritual intuition, but in that lower
intuition of the senses and the physical life, the
reality of which cannot be denied even by the
rationalist. He writes :
" Come down from your pre-eminence, O mind, O

lofty spirit !
Your hour has struck,
Your unique day is over,
Absolutism is finished in the human consciousness too.
" A man is many things : he is not only a mind.

But in his consciousness he is twofold at least :
He is cerebral, intellectual, mental, spiritual,
But also he is instinctive, intuitive, and in touch.
" The blood knows in darkness, and forever dark,

In touch, by intuition, instinctively.
The blood also knows religiously,
And of this the mind is incapable.
The mind is non-religious.
" To my dark heart gods ore.

In my dark heart love is and is not.
50
But to my white mind

Gods and love alike are but an idea,
A kind of fiction." *
This is, so it seems to me, the inevitable con-

clusion of the religious mind that no longer
conceives the possibility of spiritual intuition or
supernatural revelation. It is driven back upon
the lower type of religious experience, which
primitive man possessed when he worshipped
the daimonic powers that seemed to rule his
life. And yet, even so, Lawrence's position is
not wholly consistent, for even the lower type
of religious experience is in a real sense spiritual.
It is the result of a spiritual intuition, even
though that intuition is, as St. Paul says, in
bondage to " the weak and beggarly elements "
of nature. The religion of the blood of which
Lawrence writes, the religion of pure sense and
animal instinct, can only be attained by the
unreflecting animal soul. If we were conscious
of it, we should not have it. It is a true spiritual
instinct which prompted Lawrence to revolt
against the tyranny of " the white mind " and
to seek a deeper wisdom than that of the rational
consciousness; but, owing to the denial and
repression of true spiritual intuition, it has been
deflected into a false cult of the primitive and
* Pansies, pp. 65-66.

51 D2
the physical which can afford no true solution

of his problem.
This is fully realised by another writer, who
has considerable sympathy with his point of
view and who also seeks escape from the pre-
sent impasse in a religious experience. Mr. J.
Middleton Murry not only admits the possi-
bility of a spiritual intuition, but makes it the
centre of his whole theory of life.
He recognises the insufficiency of the modern
scientific point of view that identifies reality
with the physical and biological world. The
human mind can only achieve unity with itself
and harmony with the universe on the higher
" metabiological" plane, in an experience which
transcends both sensible and rational know-
ledge. This experience finds its highest expres-
sion in the life of Jesus, and thereby Jesus was
the creator of a new series of values and the
starting-point of a new phase in the evolution
of humanity.
Nevertheless, Mr. Murry holds that the
reality that is apprehended in this way is not
metaphysical or transcendent; it is simply the
organic unity of nature, the unity of biological
being There is no eternal and transcendent
being which we can think of as divine, but only
the natural organism which is the product of
the evolutionary process. For Mr. Murry is
52
an adherent of the dogma of " emergence," a

worshipper of the God that we create as we
go along.* God is a useful fiction, a creature
of the human mind, not the ultimate ground of
reality. This relativism, however, ill accords
with the absolutism of his theory of knowledge.
It is difficult to see how we can attain to a meta¬
biological plane of consciousness and activity if
there is no corresponding metabiological stage
of being. For metabiological activity implies
metaphysical being, no less than biological
activity involves physical being. We must
either accept the reality and autonomy of
spiritual being or abandon the possibility of
spiritual knowledge. It is true that the intui-
tion of unity of which Mr. Murry speaks does
not necessarily involve the belief in the transcen-
dent personal God of Christian doctrine. It
has more affinity with the monism of the
Vedanta, or still more with that of Taoism.
But it does necessitate, no less than Taoism, the
idea of an eternal transcendental principle
which is the source and not the product of the
cosmic process.
It may be objected that Mr. Murry's philo-
sophy has in fact arisen directly from his spiritual
* It is true that he does not term this concept God.

Unlike Professor Alexander, he reserves that tide to the
transcendent God of the old religions.
53
experience, and, consequently, that it cannot be

inconsistent with it. But this is not exactly the
case. Certainly Mr. Murry's theory of the
existence of metabiological values and of a
higher form of knowledge than the purely
rational springs directly from his experience.
But this is not so with regard to his denial of the
transcendent and the supernatural. That was
due not to his mysticism, but to his adherence to
the dogmas of scientific naturalism, and he has
interpreted his experience to accord with these
preconceived ideas.
He himself points out that his first reaction
to his experience was purely religious—a con-
viction of spiritual reality and spiritual regenera-
tion—and that his mature philosophy is not so
much a logical consequence of his mystical
experience as the means by which he succeeded
in " disintoxicating " himself from it. It is
conditioned throughout by his fundamental
hostility to any form of supernaturalism—by his
conviction that the introduction of the category
of the supernatural involves " mental and
spiritual suicide." *
* This dogmatic acceptance of naturalism has entered
so deeply into Mr. Murry's mind that the very idea of the
supernatural is rejected with a kind of sacred horror as a
blasphemous impiety. He writes : " To introduce, or to
be prepared to introduce, the category of the supernatural
into my thinking would be mental and spiritual suicide.
54
This prejudice has been firmly implanted in

the modern mind by two centuries of dogmatic
naturalism, but it is difficult to understand its
rational justification in the present instance.
From the point of view of scientific mechanism
there is certainly no room for the supernatural,
but on that assumption Mr. Murry's category
of the metabiological must also be excluded.
The anti-supernaturalist view rests funda-
mentally on the hypothesis of a universe in
which quality and value have no meaning and
where everything is reducible to matter and
energy. If we once admit the possibility of a
mode of spiritual consciousness or being which
transcends the biological, there seems no reason
to regard the human mind as its only field of
manifestation.
It is no less reasonable to suppose that the
metabiological plane is the point at which a
higher order of being has inserted itself into the
life of humanity than to suppose that it is a
completely new order which has " emerged "
from below. Even in the sensible world we
have an example of the way in which a higher
A world which at a certain point . . . ceased to belong

to the natural order is no world for me, a man of the
twentieth century, to contemplate or live in ; it would be
a cheap and vulgar world from which it would be my duty
as a man to escape immediately."—God, p. 112.
55
order of being can intervene to modify the

natural development of a lower order. From
the animals' standpoint, man himself is a super-
natural being whose action governs their life in a
mysterious way and who even creates, as it were,
new creatures like the setter and the racehorse,
and admits them to a certain participation in
his own life. And why, then, is it irrational to
believe that, as Plato says, mankind is " the
flock of the Gods," that human life is susceptible
to the influence of a higher power which fosters
in it those new capacities and modes of being
which we call spiritual and metabiological ?
Such a belief may seem to us incredible, but it
is not really irrational. It would indeed be
strange if reality did not transcend man's
comprehension qualitatively as well as quanti¬
tively. The refusal to admit this possibility
rests not so much on reason as on the humanist
prejudice which insists that the human mind
is the highest of all possible forms of existence
and the only standard of reality. It is this
prejudice which prevents Mr. Murry from
developing the full implications of his religious
experience. He has recognised one truth that
is vital for religion—that the path of human
development must lie in the spiritual, not the
physical, world, and that his nature is not
wholly earthbound—that it has a window that
56
is open to the infinite. But, on the other hand,

he rejects the other truth that is equally vital—
the transcendence and absoluteness of spiritual
reality. The religious attitude is only possible
in the presence of the eternal and the transcen-
dent. Any object that falls short of this fails to
inspire the sense of awe and self-surrender,
which is essential to true religion. Man cannot
worship himself, nor can he adore a Time God
that is the creation of his own mind. As soon
as he recognises its fictitious character such an
idea loses all its religious power. And for the
same reason every attempt to create a new
religion on purely rational and human founda-
tions is inevitably doomed to failure.
57
III. THE CLAIM OF CHRISTIANITY
IF we accept the necessity of an absolute

and metaphysical foundation for religion and
religious experience, we still have to face the
other aspect of the problem—namely, how this
spiritual experience is to be brought into living
relation with human life and with the social
order. The ecstasy of the solitary mind in the
presence of absolute reality seems to offer no
solution to the actual sufferings and perplexities
of humanity. And yet the religious mind
cannot dissociate itself from this need, for it
can never rest content with a purely individual
and self-regarding ideal of deliverance. The
more religious a man is, the more is he sensitive
to the common need of humanity. All the
founders of the world religions—even those,
like Buddha, who were the most uncompromis-
ing in their religious absolutism—were con-
cerned not merely with their private religious
experience, but with the common need of
humanity. They aspired to be the saviours
and path-finders—ford-makers, as the Indians
termed them—who should rescue their people
58
THE CLAIM OF CHRISTIANITY
from the darkness and suffering of human

life.
Nowhere is this social preoccupation more
insistent than in the religious tradition of the
West, and it is to be found even in the most
abstract and intellectualist type of religious
thought. It is to be seen above all in Plato, the
perfect example of the pure metaphysician,
who, nevertheless, made his metaphysics the
basis of a programme of political and social
reform. Indeed, according to his own descrip-
tion in the Seventh Epistle it was his political
interests and his realisation of the injustice and
moral confusion of the existing state which were
the starting point of his metaphysical quest.
But though Plato realised as fully as any purely
religious teacher the need for bringing social
life into contact with spiritual reality and for
relating man's rational activity to the higher
intuitive knowledge, he failed to show how this
could be accomplished by means of a purely
intellectual discipline. He saw that it was
necessary on the one hand to drag humanity
out of the shadow world of appearances and
false moral standards into the pure white light
of spiritual reality, and, on the other hand,
that the contemplative must be forced to leave
his mountain of vision and " to descend again
to these prisoners and to partake in their toils
59
and honours." * But, as he says, the spiritual

man is at a disadvantage in the world of
politics and business. The eyes that have
looked upon the sun can no longer distinguish
the shadows of the cave. The man who cares
only for eternal things, who seeks to fly hence
and to become assimilated to God by holiness
and justice and wisdom, is unable to strive for
political power with the mean cunning of the
ordinary " man of affairs." § In fact nothing
could show the impossibility of curing the ills
of humanity by pure intelligence more com-
pletely than Plato's own attempt to reform the
state of Sicily by giving a young tyrant lessons
in mathematics. The political problems of the
Greek world were solved not by the philosopher-
king, but by condottieri and Macedonian
generals, and the gulf between the spiritual
world and human life grew steadily wider
until the coming of Christianity.
In the East, however, the religious conception
of life was victorious and dominated the whole
field of culture. In India, above all, the ideal
of spiritual intuition was not confined to a few
philosophers and mystics, but became the goal
of the whole religious development. It was, as
Professor de la Vallée Poussin has said, " the
* Republic, 519.
§ Theatetus, 176.
60
T H E CLAIM OF CHRISTIANITY
great discovery that has remained for at

least twenty-five centuries the capital and most
cherished truth of the Indian people." The man
who cannot understand this cannot understand
the religion of India or the civilisation with
which it is so intimately connected. It is,
however, only too easy for the Western mind to
misconceive the whole tendency of Indian
thought. It is apt to interpret the teaching
of the Upanishads on the lines of Western
idealist philosophy, and to see in the Indian
doctrine of contemplation a philosophic pan-
theism that is intellectualist rather than
religious. In reality it is in Western mystics
such as Eckart or Angelus Silesius rather than
in philosophers such as Hegel or even Spinoza
that the true parallel to the thought of the
Vedanta is to be found. It leads not to pan-
theism in our sense of the word, but to an
extreme theory of transcendence which may be
termed super-theism. Western pantheism is
a kind of spiritual democracy in which all
things are equally God ; but the " non-
dualism " of the Vedanta is a spiritual abso-
lutism in which God is the only reality. At
first sight there may seem to be little practical
difference between the statement that every-
thing that exists is divine and the statement
that nothing but the divine exists. But from
61
the religious point of view there is all the

difference in the world. For " i f this transitory
world be the Real," says a mediaeval Vedantist,
" then there is no liberation through the
Atman, the holy scriptures are without authority
and the Lord speaks untruth. . . . The Lord
who knows the reality of things has declared
' I am not contained in these things, nor do
beings dwell in Me.' " *
God is the one Reality. Apart from Him,
nothing exists. In comparison with Him,
nothing is real. The universe only exists in so
far as it is rooted and grounded in His Being.
He is the Self of our selves and the Soul of our
souls. So far the Vedanta does not differ
essentially from the teaching of Christian
theology. The one vital distinction consists
in the fact that Indian religion ignores the idea
of creation and that in consequence it is faced
with the dilemma that either the whole universe
is an illusion—Maya—a dream that vanishes
when the soul awakens to the intuition of
spiritual reality, or else that the world is the
self-manifestation of the Divine Mind, a con-
ditional embodiment of the absolute Being.
Hence there is no room for a real intervention
of the spiritual principle in human life. The
* Vivekachudamani (attributed to Sankara), trans. C
Johnston, p. 41.
62
Indian ethic is, above all, an ethic of flight—of

deliverance from conditional existence and
from the chain of re-birth. Human life is an
object of compassion to the wise man, but it is
also an object of scorn. " As the hog to the
trough, goes the fool to the womb," says the
Buddhist verse ; and the Hindu attitude, if less
harsh, is not essentially different. " Men are
held by the manifold snares of the desires in
the world of sense, and they fall away without
winning to their end like dykes of sand in
water. Like sesame-grains for their oil, all
things are ground out in the mill-wheel of
creation by the oil-grinders, to wit, the taints
arising from ignorance that fasten upon them.
The husband gathers to himself evil works on
account of his wife ; but he alone is therefore
afflicted with taints, which cling to man alike
in the world beyond and in this. All men are
attached to children, wives and kin ; they sink
down in the slimy sea of sorrows, like age-worn
forest-elephants." *
It is true that orthodox Hinduism inculcates
the fulfilment of social duties, and the need for
outward activity, but this principle does not
lead to the transformation of life by moral
action, but simply to the fatalistic acceptance
of the established order of things. This is the
* Mahabharata, xii, ch. 174, trans. L. D. Barnett.
63
theme of the greatest work of Indian literature,

the Bhagavad-Gita, and it involves a moral
attitude diametrically opposed to that of the
Western mind. When Arjuna shrinks from the
evils of war and declares that he would rather
die than shed the blood of his kinsfolk, the god
does not commend him. He uses the doctrine
of the transcendence and impassibility of true
being to justify the ruthlessness of the warrior.
" Know that that which pervades this
universe is imperishable ; there is none can
make to perish that changeless being.
" . . . This Body's Tenant for all time may not
be wounded, O Thou of Bharata's stock, in the
bodies of any beings. Therefore thou dost not
well to sorrow for any born beings. Looking
likewise in thine own Law, thou shouldst not be
dismayed ; for to a knight there is no thing
more blest than a lawful strife." *
The sacred order that is the basis of Indian
culture is no true spiritualisation of human life ;
it is merely the natural order seen through a
veil of metaphysical idealism. It can incorpo-
rate the most barbaric and non-ethical elements
equally with the most profound metaphysical
truths; since in the presence of the absolute
and the unconditioned all distinctions and
degrees of value lose their validity.
* Bhagavad-Gita, ii., pp. 17, 30-31, trans. L. D. Barnett.
64
The experience of India is sufficient to show

that it is impossible to construct a dynamic
religion on metaphysical principles alone, since
pure intuition affords no real basis for social
action. On the other hand, if we abandon
the metaphysical element and content our-
selves with purely ethical and social ideals, we
are still further from a solution, since there is no
longer any basis for a spiritual order. The
unity of the inner world dissolves in subjectivism
and scepticism, and society is threatened with
anarchy and dissolution. And since social life
is impossible without order, it is necessary to
resort to some external principle of compulsion,
whether political or economic. In the ancient
world this principle was found in the military
despotism of the Roman Empire, and in the
modern world we have the even more complete
and far-reaching organisation of the economic
machine. Here indeed we have an order, but
it is an order that is far more inhuman and
indifferent to moral values than the static
theocratic order of the Oriental religion-
cultures.
But is there no alternative between Ameri-
canism and Orientalism, between a spiritual
order that takes no account of human needs
and a material order that has no regard for
spiritual values ? There still remains the
E
C.N.A. 65
traditional religion of our own civilisation ;

Christianity, a religion that is neither wholly
metaphysical nor merely ethical, but one that
brings the spiritual world into vital and fruitful
communion with the life of man.
The whole spiritual inheritance of European
civilisation is based upon Christianity, and even
to-day whatever there is of religious life and
spiritual aspiration in the West still draws its
vitality from Christian sources.
Nevertheless it must be admitted that for
centuries Christianity has been progressively
losing its hold on Western culture, and both its
doctrines and its moral ideals have fallen into
discredit.' The causes of this state of things
lie deep in that process of the humanisation
and rationalising of Western culture which I
described in the earlier part of this essay. Ever
since the Renaissance the centrifugal tendencies
in our civilisation have destroyed its spiritual
unity and divided its spiritual forces. The
Western mind has turned away from the con-
templation of the absolute and the eternal to the
knowledge of the particular and the contingent.
It has made man the measure of all things and
has sought to emancipate human life from its
dependence on the supernatural. Instead of the
whole intellectual and social order being sub-
ordinated to spiritual principles, every activity
66
has declared its independence, and we see

politics, economics, science and art organising
themselves as autonomous kingdoms which owe
no allegiance to any higher power.
And these tendencies were not confined to
the secular side of life; they made themselves
felt in religion also. Religion came to be
regarded as one among a number of competing
interests—a limited department of life, which
had no jurisdiction over the rest. And as it lost
its universal authority, it lost its universal vision ;
it became sectionalised and rationalised with the
rest of European life. The ancient unity of
Christendom fell asunder into a mass of warring
sects, which were so absorbed in their inter-
necine feuds that they were hardly conscious of
their loss of spiritual vision and social authority.
In Catholic Europe, it is true, the Church main-
tained its universal claims and its absolute meta-
physical principles, but there also it was gradu-
ally extruded from the control of social and
intellectual life, and forced to concentrate itself
on the inner defences of the altar and the cloister.
By the nineteenth century the forces of secu-
larism and " anti-clericalism " were everywhere
triumphant, and the new Latin democracies
seemed bent on the creation of a purely " lay "
culture, which should eliminate the last traces of
religious influence from the national life.
67 E 2
But it is in Northern Europe that we can most

clearly trace the disintegrating effects of modern
culture within Christianity itself. Here Catho-
licism was replaced by a new conception of
Christianity that gave free scope to the centri-
fugal tendencies of the Western mind. Protes-
tantism eliminated the metaphysical element in
the Christian tradition. It abolished asceticism
and monasticism ; it subordinated contempla-
tion to action and the intelligence to the will.
God was no longer conceived as the Super-
essential Being, from Whom the created universe
receives all that it has of reality and intelligi-
bility, but as a " magnified non-natural man,
who likes and dislikes, knows and decrees, just
as a man, only on a scale immensely transcend-
ing anything of which we have experience." *
It is true that Luther's own religious experi-
ence was both genuine and profound, but it was
not the positive intuition of the contemplative; it
was a dark and tormented sense of man's utter
helplessness and of the otherness of the Divine
Power. For his discarding of the intellectual
element in religion had brought his mind back,
as it were, to the religious attitude of primitive
man who sees the Divine as an unknown and
hostile power from which he recoils in terror.
" Yea," he writes, " God is more terrible and
* Matthew Arnold, St. Paul and Protestantism, p. 14.
68
frightful than the Devil, for He dealeth with us

and bringeth us to ruin with power, smiteth and
hammereth us and payeth no heed to us. ' In
His majesty He is a consuming fire.' For there-
from can no man refrain ; if he thinketh on God
aright his heart in his body is stricken with
terror. . . . Yea, as soon as he heareth God
named he is filled with trepidation and fear."
" For He assaileth a man and has such a delight
therein that He is of His Jealousy and Wrath
impelled to consume the wicked." *
But Luther's personal attitude is decidedly
abnormal and non-representative; the norma
Protestant religious experience is of the milder
and more emotional type represented by pietism
and revivalism. Here faith is no longer conceived
as a super-rational knowledge founded on the
Divine Reason, but as a subjective conviction
of one's own conversion and justification, and
in place of the spiritual ecstasy of the mystic,
who realises his own nothingness, we have the
self-conscious attitude of the pietist, who is
intensely preoccupied with his own feelings and
with the moral state of his neighbour. And this
substitution of the ideal of pietism for those of
asceticism and mysticism eventually led to the
weakening and discrediting of the ethical ideals
* Quoted by R. Otto in The Idea of the Holy
p p . 102-103.
69
of Christianity, just as sectarianism undermined

its social authority. However unjust may be
the popular caricature of the pietist as a snuffling
hypocrite of the type of Tribulation Whole-
some or Zeal-of-the-Land Busy or Mr. Chad-
band, there can be no doubt that Puritan and
Evangelical pietism succeeded in making reli-
gion supremely unattractive in a way that
mediaeval asceticism had never done.
And, at the same time, the divorce of dogma
at once from ecclesiastical tradition and from
philosophy eventually left it helpless before
rationalist criticism. It is true that nothing
could have been further from the intention of
the Reformers. In fact, it was the very vehe-
mence of their conviction of the absolute
transcendence and incomprehensibility of the
Divine action that led them to reject alike the
supernatural authority of the Church and the
natural rights of human intelligence, and to fall
back on the testimony of personal experience
and the infallible authority of Scripture. But,
though they succeeded in erecting on these
foundations a system of dogma more rigid and
more exclusive than that which it replaced, the
whole dogmatic edifice rested on an arbitrary
subjective basis and had no internal coherence
or consistency. It incorporated a great part of
the traditional patristic and scholastic theology,
70
which really formed an organic element of the

Catholic tradition that it professed to reject.
Hence, as Harnack has shown, the work of the
Reformation was confused and incomplete, and
produced at first merely an impoverished ver-
sion of traditional Catholicism. It required a
long process of criticism and historical inquiry
before the kernel of Protestant doctrine could be
freed from its husk of traditional dogma.
With the advance of historical scholarship in
the nineteenth century, it finally became clear
that the dogmatic tradition of Christianity
could not be separated from its ecclesiastical
and sacramental elements. Catholicism was
not, as the Reformers believed, the result of the
apostasy of the mediaeval Papacy; it was a con-
tinuous process of organic development which
is as old as Christianity itself. And so the
modern Protestant scholar, who admitted that
Christianity and Catholicism were identical
down to the age of the Reformation, that " the
Christianity of the apostolic age is itself incipient
Catholicism, and that the Catholicising of Chris-
tianity begins immediately after the death of
Jesus," was forced to reject the Reformation
compromise. He was left with the choice of
two alternatives—either to deny the organic
unity of the whole development and to view
Christianity as mere syncretism—" a varying
71
compound of some of the best and some of the

worst elements of Paganism and Judaism,
moulded in practice by the innate character of
certain peoples of the Western world," * as
Huxley puts it—or else to go back behind the
early Church, behind even the New Testament,
to the original purity of the gospel of Jesus.
This second alternative is the Liberal Protes-
tant solution, and it is the logical conclusion of
the appeal of the Reformers from the Church to
the Bible and of their attempt to set up an
abstract ideal of primitive Christianity against
the historic reality of the Catholic Church. In
the moral teaching of the Gospel and in the per-
sonality of " the historical Jesus " the Liberal
Protestants believed that they had at last found
a firm basis for a faith that should be purely
ethical and religious without any contamination
of metaphysics or theological speculation. This
is what Harnack means when he says that the
work of the Reformation is only completed
when faith cancels dogma, and that the Reforma-
tion is the end of dogma as the Gospel was
the end of the Law. The divorce of dogma
from intelligence that was inaugurated by the
Reformers consummates itself in the dissolution
of dogma itself in the interests of that moral
pragmatism which is the essence of modern Pro-
* T. H. Huxley, Essays, v., p. 142.
72
testantism. Christianity, it is said, is not a creed

but a life ; its sole criterion is the moral and
social activity that it generates. And thus reli-
gion loses all contact with absolute truth and
becomes merely an emotional justification for a
certain standard of behaviour.
But this intensely subjective attitude to reli-
gion is no less inconsistent with a genuinely his-
torical understanding of the Gospels than it is
with theology or metaphysics. Liberal Protes-
tantism selects those elements in the Gospel
which appeal to the modern liberal mind, and
disregards or rejects the uncompromising super-
naturalism on which the ethical teaching of
Jesus rests. It condemned the Catholic tradi-
tion for replacing the historical Jesus by a
metaphysical abstraction—the incarnation of a
Divine hypostasis—while its own interpretation
was nothing but an ethical abstraction—the
incarnation of the ideals of liberal humani¬
tarianism.*
* The following passage from Mr. C. E. M. Joad's
Present and Future of Religion (p. 34) is a typical if somewhat
extreme example of this attitude. " For many men of
advanced ideas, to-day, Christ is primarily a great
preacher and teacher of conduct, expounding doctrines of
compelling force and originality. As such he despises
ritual and ceremony, and lays stress upon what men do.
He is a communist and an internationalist, advocating
the widening of the private family to include the whole
family of mankind. He is a humanitarian, denouncing
73
It was inevitable that the one-sidedness of the

Liberal Protestant solution should produce a
corresponding reaction, and at the beginning of
this century advanced criticism turned abruptly
to the opposite extreme. The eschatological
school was inspired by a justifiable distrust of
the Liberal tendency to interpret the life of Jesus
in terms of modern thought and sentiment, and
they were consequently led to depreciate the
ethical element in the Gospel and to accentuate
its catastrophic and apocalyptic character. In
Dean Inge's words, " They stripped the figure
of Jesus of all the attributes with which the
devotion of centuries had invested it and have
left us with a mild specimen of the Mahdi type,
an apocalyptic dreamer whose message con-
sisted essentially of predictions about the
approaching catastrophic ' end of the age,' pre-
dictions which of course came to nothing."
Thus we are left with two contradictory
solutions, neither of which affords any basis for
punishment, crying for mercy instead of vengeance, and
insisting, if only as a utilitarian measure, on counteracting
evil, not with a contrary evil, but with good. Above all,
he is a socialist, insisting on the organic conception of
society, and affirming that we are members of one
another in so intimate a sense that the misery and
degradation of one are the misery and degradation of all."
But " we realise regretfully that Christ's dream of a
regenerated world is too lovely for the little minds that
run the machine of instituted religion."
74
an explanation of the emergence of Christianity

in the form in which it is known to history.
Hence it is not surprising that those, like Loisy,
who have followed the path of criticism to its
extreme conclusion, should have ended in the
despairing scepticism of a completely negative
theory of religious syncretism. But even in this
final stage there is no finality. All the resources
of comparative religion are at the disposal of the
critic, and the figure of the historical Jesus dis-
appears in an ever-changing mist of Oriental
myths and Hellenistic mystery religions. Neo¬
Pythagoreanism, Orphism, Iranian soteriology,
the mystery religions, Mandaeanism: in each
of them some scholar has found the key to
the origins of Christianity, and each succes-
sive solution is equally convincing or uncon-
vincing, for in this phantom world all things
are shadows, and the shadows change their
shape as the spectator changes his position.
We may well ask how it is that the relatively
simple story of the birth of Christianity, con-
cerning which, moreover, we possess fuller and
more authentic documents than in the case of
any other of the world religions, should have
become involved in such a web of sophistication
and misplaced ingenuity. And it would be
incomprehensible were it not that the whole
development has been conditioned from the
75
outset by a series of a priori prejudices. The

most obvious of them is the anti-metaphysical
prejudice to which I referred in the last chapter
—the refusal to admit the objective and auto-
nomous character of religion and of spiritual
reality, and the affirmation that everything in
the world is of the same colour, as Renan puts it,
and that there is no free spiritual principle in
the universe apart from the will of man. Hence
it becomes necessary not only to eliminate every
supernatural element in the Gospel and in the
history of the Church, but, furthermore, to deny
the essential originality and spontaneity of
Christianity and to explain it away as a com-
posite development derived from elements that
were already in existence.
This prejudice has had an incalculable in-
fluence on the modern mind, since it could in-
voke the prestige of " science," that is to say, the
dogmatic conception of scientific materialism.
But its influence might have been limited to
rationalist circles had it not been reinforced by
a second prejudice, which was based on religious
preconceptions. This was the Protestant con-
viction that a vital breach had intervened
between the Gospel of Jesus and the Faith of the
Church. The Reformers, it is true, placed this
breach as late as the Middle Ages, but, as we
have seen, the growth of historical knowledge
76
gradually increased the antiquity of the Catholic

development until its origins became actually
coterminous with the foundation of Chris-
tianity as an organised religion. Thus the way
is laid open for the acceptance of the rationalist
explanation of Christian origins, excluding only
the person of Jesus and an ethical abstraction
of His teaching, which are preserved as an
isolated and unrelated ideal of spiritual religion
that is to inspire the religious life of modern
men.
The moral earnestness and erudition of the
advocates of this view have caused its funda-
mental illogicality and its unhistorical character
to be overlooked, and even at the present day
it enjoys enormous prestige, for it offers a via
media between traditional Christianity and pure
rationalism that appeals both to the Christian
who has lost his faith in the dogmatic teaching
of the Church and to the rationalist who has
preserved a sense of religious values. It has
recently found a distinguished adherent in
Mr. Middleton Murry, who bases his own theory
of religious naturalism on the personality and
the religious ideal of Jesus. But Mr. Murry, at
least, is more logical or more honest than his
predecessors in that he does not claim the name
of Christianity for his new religious ideal. On
the contrary, he explicitly recognises the in-
77
separable connection between the Christian

religion and the Christian Church. " There is
not," he writes, " and never will be any recon-
ciliation between Christianity and the experi-
mental method. Christianity is the great
Church and nothing else is Christianity. To
call anything else Christianity is to plunge into
confusion and chaos ; and it is an insult to
Christianity. Christianity is a great thing, not
a little one ; one thing not many things ; a
rich thing not a poor thing ; a majestic thing
not a thing of shreds and patches. Christianity
is Christianity at its noblest, truest and most
comprehensive, and that is the Catholic Church.
If you desire to be a Christian, join it. It will
make no demands upon you that are more
fearful than the demands made upon you by
any peddling form of Christianity. It asks no
greater sacrifice than Little Bethel or the Church
of England ; and it does not insult your intelli-
gence by inviting you to become a member of a
contradiction in terms." *
But when we have reached this point there is
no longer any reason for one who is not under
the influence of rationalist or Protestant pre-
judices to refuse to admit that the historic faith
and life of the Church were founded on the life
and gospel of the historic Jesus. It is, in fact,
* J. Middleton Murry, God, p. 229.
78
only so that we can account for the creative

originality of the Christian religion. A great
spiritual unity like Christianity cannot be the
accidental product of a series of misunderstand-
ings. It must have had its origin in some great
spiritual force; and where is this to be found if
not in the life of that Person whom even the
rationalist admits to have been the greatest and
most original religious genius in the history of
humanity ?
And as soon as we set aside these a priori con-
ceptions and approach the study of Christian
origins with an open mind, the vital relation
between the Church and the teaching of Jesus
at once becomes manifest. Christianity did not
arise in vacuo as an abstract theory of salvation,
like Buddhism or the Gnostic sects ; it was
organically and consciously linked with a pre-
existing historic religion ; and this religion alone
among the great faiths of the world was essen-
tially based on the belief in a Holy Society. The
One God had chosen for Himself one people
and had bound it to Him by an eternal cove-
nant. Israel was a theophoric community; not
only a witness to the Divine unity but the
bearer of the Divine purpose to mankind ; for
this little people " despised by man, the servant
of rulers," was to be the source of a universal
Kingdom of God, which should embrace all
79
nations, and in which the creative purpose of

God should find its ultimate fulfilment. Thus
Israel was not a nation in the ordinary sense so
much as a church, and the loss of political inde-
pendence under the Roman Empire tended
still further to accentuate its religious aspect.
Faced by the universalism of the Roman world-
power, the spiritual universalism of Israel
acquired yet clearer consciousness, and the
mind of the people was pre-occupied, as never
before, by the hope of the coming of a Messianic
deliverer who would break the power of the
nations and set up the eternal kingdom of
prophecy.
It was to those who lived in the expectation
of this hope and " waited for the consolation of
Israel " that the preaching of Jesus was ad-
dressed. His gospel consisted essentially in the
announcement of the coming of the Kingdom ;
and this was not, as so many moderns hold,
merely a figurative expression for an abstract
ethical ideal ; it was an absolutely realist con-
ception of the coming of a new supernatural
order—the culminating event in the history of
Israel and of the world. So far the eschato¬
logical school is right; their error consists in their
tendency to interpret this teaching in the spirit
of the apocryphal apocalypses rather than in
that of the prophets, and in their depreciation
80
of its spiritual and universal character. For the

Kingdom of the gospels is not a national
triumph of Israel over his foes ; it is the mystical
and spiritual reign of God in humanity. It is
already immanent in the present order, which
it is destined to transform and supersede—it is
a leaven and a seed and a hidden treasure. It
is open not to the Jews as such—the children of
Abraham—nor to the Scribes and Pharisees,
who observe meticulously all the outward pre-
scriptions of the Mosaic law, but to the poor and
the meek, the seekers after justice and those who
follow the Son of Man in his sufferings and
humiliation.
Nevertheless, the spirituality of the Kingdom
does not imply that it was purely internal and
individual. It retained the objective social
character that it possessed in the prophetic
tradition. It was to find its realisation in and
through a community. But this community
was no longer the national church-state of
Jewish history; it was a new Messianic society—
the " little flock " of which the Gospels speak.*
The mission of Jesus consisted essentially in the
foundation of this society, not by doctrine alone,
but by an act of creative power. Nothing can
be further from the colourless Liberal picture of
Jesus as a great moral idealist than the figure of
* Luke xii. 32.
C.N.A. 8l F
the Son of Man in the Gospels, filled with the con-

sciousness of his Messianic office and inaugurat-
ing a new supernatural dispensation by the New
Covenant of his voluntary sacrifice. All the
mythological parallels invoked by rationalist
critics from the vegetation cults of primitive
peoples and the mystery religions of the Hel-
lenistic world sink into significance by the side
of the profound spiritual reality of the words of
Jesus, " I have a baptism wherewith I am to be
baptised and how am I straitened until it be
accomplished ? ", or of that great scene in the
Upper Chamber, which only the most arbitrary
preconceptions can remove from its place in the
most ancient and authenticated documents of
primitive Christianity.
Nor is it possible to deny that the actual
beginnings of the historic Christian Church
were rooted in this doctrine of a new order
inaugurated by the Death and Resurrection of
Jesus and incorporated in a spiritual society.
The outpouring of the Spirit on the disciples at
Pentecost was regarded as the fulfilment of
prophecy and of the promises of Jesus to His
apostles. For the possession of the Holy Spirit
was the essential characteristic of the new
society. It was, even more than Israel, a
theophoric community, since it was the external
organ of the Holy Spirit and enjoyed super-
82
natural powers and authority. And at the

same time the early Christians preserved the
historical associations and the social self-
consciousness of the Jewish tradition ; they felt
themselves to be a true people, " a chosen race,
a royal priesthood, a holy nation." Such a
conception is almost incomprehensible to the
modern mind, which has become accustomed to
treat religion as a matter for the individual
conscience, and it is not surprising that Protes-
tant thinkers, such as Dean Inge, should re-
pudiate the very idea of the existence of an
objective supernatural society.* But there is
not the shadow of a doubt that the early
Christians believed in it with an intense con-
viction and devotion as the very centre and
ground of their faith. To Hermas, the Roman
prophet, the Church is the first-born of creatures,
and it is for her sake that the world itself was
made.+ As Christ is the New Adam the
Church is the New Eve, the mother of the new
humanity. And this mystical conception of
* In Christian Ethics and Modern Problems, p. 138, he

quotes a passage from Landor, which perfectly expresses
this modern idea of religion as essentially a private
matter. " Religion," says Landor, " is too pure for
corporations. It is best meditated on in our privacy and
best acted on in our ordinary intercourse with mankind."
But Landor is a Deist rather than a Christian.
+ Hermas, Vision iv., p. 1 ; cf. I I . Clement, xiv., 1, 2.
83 v 2
the Church was in no way inconsistent with a

strict insistence on its corporate authority and
discipline. Although the eyes of the Christian
were fixed on the future glory of the Kingdom
of Christ rather than on the present order of
things, this future kingdom was organically
connected with the visible hierarchical Church,
in the same way that the Messianic kingdom of
prophecy was associated with the historic
Israel. Indeed the Church was itself the future
kingdom in embryo. In the vision of Hernias it
is a tower, which is being built of living stones
brought from every quarter of the earth and
thus the process of its construction is, in New-
man's phrase, the measure of the duration of the
world.
This faith in a holy society and in a his-
torical process of redemption distinguished
Christianity from all its religious rivals in the
ancient world, and gave it the militant and
unyielding quality that enabled it to triumph
in its struggle with secular civilisation. But
this is not sufficient to explain its religious
appeal. If it had been nothing more than this,
it would have merely a Jewish heresy or an
apocalyptic sect of the type that we actually
find in Ebionism or Montanism. But in
addition to the social and historical side of its
teaching, Christianity also brought a new
84
doctrine of God and a new relation of the

human soul to Him. Judaism had been the
least mystical and the least metaphysical of
religions. It revealed God as the Creator, the
Lawgiver and the Judge, and it was by obedience
to His Law and by the ritual observances of
sacrifice and ceremonial purity that man
entered into relations with Him. But the
transformation by Jesus of the national com-
munity into a new universal spiritual society
brought with it a corresponding change in the
doctrine of God. God was no longer the
national deity of the Jewish people, localised,
so to speak, at Sinai and Jerusalem. He was the
Father of the human race, the Universal Ground
of existence " in Whom we live and move and
are." And when St. Paul appealed to the
testimony of the Stoic poet, he recognised that
Christianity was prepared to accept the meta-
physical inheritance of Hellenic thought as well
as the historic revelation of Jewish prophecy.
This is shown still more clearly in St. John's
identification of the Logos and the Messiah in
the prologue to the Fourth Gospel. Jesus of
Nazareth was not only the Christ, the Son of
the Living God; He was also the Divine
Intelligence, the Principle of the order and
intelligibility of the created world. Thus the
opposition between the Greek ideal of spiritual
85
intuition and the Living God of Jewish revela-

tion—an opposition that Philo had vainly
attempted to surmount by an artificial philo-
sophical synthesis—finally disappeared before
the new revelation of the Incarnate Word.
As St. Augustine has said, the Fourth Gospel
is essentially the Gospel of contemplation, for
while the first three evangelists are concerned
with the external mission of Jesus as Messianic
King and Saviour and teach the active virtues
of Christian life, St. John is, above all, " the
theologian " who declares the mysteries of the
Divine Nature and teaches the way of con-
templation.* Jesus is the bridge between
Humanity and Divinity. In Him God is not
only manifested to man, but vitally participated.
He is the Divine Light, which illuminates men's
minds, and the Divine Life, which transforms
human nature and makes it the partaker of Its
own supernatural activity.
Hence the insistence of the Fourth Gospel on
the sacramental element in Christ's teaching,§
since it is through the sacraments that the
Incarnation of the Divine Word is no longer
merely a historical fact, but is brought into
vital and sensible contact with the life of the
believer. So far from being an alien magical
* de Consensu Evangelistarum i., cap 3-5.
§ E.g., John iii., 5; vi., 32-58.
86
conception superimposed from without upon

the religion of the Gospel, it forms the very
heart of Christianity, since it is only through
the sacramental principle that the Jewish ideal
of an external ritual cult becomes transformed
into a worship of spiritual communion. The
modern idea that sacramentalism is inconsistent
with the " spiritual " or mystical element in
religion, is as lacking in foundation as the
allied belief in an opposition between religion
and theology. It is only when we reduce
theology to religious rationalism and spiritual
religion to a blend of ethics and emotion that
there is no place left for sacramentalism; but
under these conditions genuine mysticism and
metaphysical truth equally disappear. Each of
them forms an essential element in the historical
development of Christianity. In the great age
of creative theological thought, the develop-
ment of dogma was organically linked with
sacramentalism and mysticism. They were
three aspects of a single reality—the great
mystery of the restoration, illumination and
deification of humanity by the Incarnation of
the Divine Word. This is clearly recognised by
Ritschl and his followers such as Harnack,
although they involve mysticism, sacramen-
talism and scientific theology in a common
condemnation.
87
Nevertheless, their criticism of the develop-

ment of Greek Christianity is not entirely un-
justified, for the historical and social elements,
on which Ritschl laid so exclusive an emphasis,
form an integral part of the Christian tradition,
and apart from them the mystical or meta-
physical side of religion becomes sterile or
distorted. The tendency of the Byzantine
mind to concentrate itself on this aspect of
Christianity did actually lead to a decline in
moral energy and in the spiritual freedom and
initiative of the Church, and Eastern Chris-
tianity has tended to become an absolute static
religion of the Oriental type.
It is true that this ideal, since it is a purely
religious one, has much more in common with
Catholic Christianity than have the secularised
ideals of modern European culture. Catholi-
cism and Orientalism stand together against
the denial of metaphysical reality and of the
primacy of the spiritual, which is the funda-
mental Western error. As Sir Charles Eliot
has truly said, " The opposition is not so much
between Indian thought and the New Testa-
ment. . . . the fundamental contrast is rather
between both India and the New Testament,
on the one hand, and, on the other, the rooted
conviction of European races, however much
orthodox Christianity may disguise their expres-
88
sion of it, that this world is all-important. The

conviction finds expression not only in the
avowed pursuit of pleasure and ambition, but
in such sayings as that the best religion is the
one that does most good, and in such ideals as
self-realisation or the full development of one's
motive and powers. Though monasteries and
monks still exist, the great majority of Europeans
instinctively disbelieve in asceticism, the con-
templative life and contempt of the world." *
And yet, for all this, there is no getting over
the profound differences that separate Chris-
tianity from the purely metaphysical and
intuitive type of religion.
Against the Oriental religions of pure spirit,
which denied the value and even the reality of
the material universe, the Church has un-
deviatingly maintained its faith in a historical
revelation that involved the consecration not
only of humanity but even of the body itself.
This was the great stumbling-block to the
Oriental mind, which readily accepted the idea
of an Avatar or of the theophany of a divine Aeon,
but could not face the consequences of the
Catholic doctrine of the Two Natures and the
full humanity of the Logos made flesh. This
conception of the Incarnation as the bridge
between God and Man, the marriage of Heaven
* C. Eliot, Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol. I., p. ix.
89
and Earth, the channel through which the

material world is spiritualised and brought
back to unity, distinguishes Christianity from
all the other Oriental religions, and involves a
completely new attitude to life. Deliverance is
to be obtained not by a sheer disregard of
physical existence and a concentration of the
higher intellect on the contemplation of pure
Being, but by a creative activity that affects
every part of the composite nature of man.
And this activity is embodied in a definite
society, which shares in the divine life of the
Spirit, while at the same time it belongs to the
visible order of social and historical reality.
Thus Catholic Christianity occupies an inter-
mediate position between the two spiritual
ideals and the two conceptions of reality which
have divided the civilised world and the
experience of humanity. To the West its ideals
appear mystical and otherworldly, while in
comparison with the Oriental religions it stands
for historical reality and moral activity. It is a
stranger in both camps and its home is every-
where and nowhere, like man himself, whose
nature maintains a perilous balance between
the worlds of spiritual and sensible reality, to
neither of which it altogether belongs. Yet by
reason of this ambiguous position the Catholic
Church stands as the one mediator between
90
East and West, between the ideal of spiritual

intuition and that of moral and social activity.
She alone possesses a tradition that is capable
of satisfying the whole of human nature and
that brings the transcendent reality of spiritual
Being into relation with human experience and
the realities of social life.
91
IV. CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW
ORDER
IT is clear from what has gone before that

Christianity is not to be identified either with
ethical idealism or with metaphysical intuition.
It is a creative spiritual force, which has for its
end nothing less than the recreation of humanity.
The Church is no sect or human organisation,
but a new creation—the seed of the new order
which is ultimately destined to transform the
world. Such, at least, is the Catholic belief,
and though the non-Catholic may deny the
reality of this faith and the supernatural
character of this life, he cannot shut his eyes to
the fact that they have actually had a profound
influence on the course of history and have been
one of the main sources of the spiritual achieve-
ment of European civilisation. For, notwith-
standing the materialism and secularism that
have always been present in our culture, and
which to-day seem everywhere triumphant, that
achievement has been perhaps the most remark-
able that the world has ever known. Europe
is not a true racial or geographical unity ; it
92
CHRISTIANITY AND T H E N E W ORDER
is, in its essence, a spiritual community, and

even its vast material expansion in modern
times would have been impossible without the
moral force and spiritual inspiration that it
owes ultimately to the Christian faith.
However secularised a civilisation may be-
come, it can never entirely escape from the
burden of its spiritual inheritance. Péguy has
said of the Jews that they are a people which has
no natural love of spiritual adventures. They
ask only to be left alone, like other peoples, to
dwell in their own land, to grow rich and to
enjoy the good things of life. But the prophetic
destiny with which their religion has charged
them has forced them time after time against
their will to leave their comfortable security and
to go out into exile and the wilderness. And
the same thing is true of Christendom : it can-
not escape from the contagion of the divine fire
that has been kindled in its midst.
Why is it that Europe alone among the
civilisations of the world has been continually
shaken and transformed by an energy of spiri-
tual unrest that refuses to be content with the
unchanging law of social tradition which rules
the Oriental cultures ? It is because its religious
ideal has not been the worship of timeless and
changeless perfection, but a spirit that strives
to incorporate itself in humanity and to change
93
the world. In the West the spiritual power has

not been immobilised in a sacred social order
like the Confucian State in China or the Indian
caste system. It has acquired social freedom
and autonomy, and consequently its activity has
not been limited to the religious sphere but has
had far-reaching effects on every aspect of
social and intellectual life.
These secondary results are not necessarily of
religious or moral value from the Christian
point of view, for they may be deflected and
distorted by the social medium through which
they pass or contaminated by materialism and
selfishness. But the fact remains that they are
secondary and dependent on the existence of a
spiritual force, without which they either would
not have been or would have been utterly
different.
For example, the Industrial Revolution,
which appears at first sight one of the most
materialistic aspects of Western civilisation,
would have been impossible without the moral
earnestness and sense of duty that were
generated by the Puritan ideal—an ideal far
removed from that of Catholic Christianity, but
one that owed its existence to a one-sided and
sectarian interpretation of the Christian tra-
dition.
And this is true also of the Renaissance and
94
CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW ORDER
the humanist culture, in spite of the secularism

and naturalism which seem so characteristic of
them. The more one studies the origin of
humanism the more one is brought to recognise
the importance of an element which is not only
spiritual, but definitely Christian. The old con-
ception of the Renaissance as a revival of
paganism—an idea which was popularised by
nineteenth century writers such as Burckhardt
and J. A. Symonds—is to-day rejected not only
by philosophers like Berdyaev, but by historians
and critics, such as Karl Burdach and Giuseppe
Toffanin. The Renaissance had its origin not
only in the recovery of classical antiquity, but
in the mystical humanism of St. Francis and
Dante. The element survives in the later
Renaissance in such representative figures as
Francesco Pico and Marsilio Ficino, Botticelli
and Michelangelo, Sadoleto and Tasso ; and
it finds a clear expression in the poems of Cam¬
panella, above all in his great canzone " Delia
possanza dell' uomo," in which the purely
humanist ideal of man's power and glory is
united with the Christian conception of the
Divine Humanity.
It may be said that this is only one aspect and
that not the most important of the humanist
movement. But even the purely naturalistic
achievements of the Renaissance were depen-
95
CHRlSTIANlTY AND THE NEW AGE
dent on its Christian antecedents. Humanism

was, it is true, a return to nature, the rediscovery
of man and the natural world. But the author
of the discovery, the active principle in the
change, was not the natural man ; it was Chris-
tian man, the human type that had been
produced by ten centuries of ascetic discipline
and intensive cultivation of the inner life. The
great men of the Renaissance were spiritual
men, even when they were most deeply im-
mersed in the temporal order. It was from the
accumulated resources of their Christian past
that they acquired the spiritual energy to con-
quer the material world and to create the new
secular culture. It is true that the disparity
between the source and the object of their
activity tended to produce a sense of strain and
spiritual tension, which is perceptible in the
work of typical Renaissance geniuses such as
Shakespeare and Cervantes, as well as in
definitely religious characters like Michel-
angelo or Campanella. But, at least in Catholic
Europe, the two elements had attained to a
relatively stable equilibrium by the end of
the sixteenth century, and had an equal share
in the development of the later Renaissance
culture. The spirit of Christian humanism
dominated the whole of the seventeenth cen-
tury and manifested itself alike in the Baroque
96
art of Spain and Italy and Central Europe, in

the Jacobean and Caroline literature of England
and in the classical culture of France. This
religious current which runs through seven-
teenth-century culture cannot be set aside as a
reactionary or negative phenomenon, for it lies
at the heart of the higher civilisation of the time
and is responsible for some of its greatest
achievements. Indeed, when in the eighteenth
century this equilibrium was destroyed by the
final victory of the naturalistic and rationalist
tendencies, it involved the fall of the Renaissance
culture itself. The new humanism of the En-
lightenment was lacking in the vitality and
spiritual depth of the earlier type. The one-
sided rationalism of the Encyclopaedists pro-
voked the one-sided subjective emotionalism of
Rousseau and the Romantics. And though
both rationalism and romanticism were in a
sense the heirs of the Renaissance tradition,
neither of them was the true representative of the
earlier humanism. Rationalism had lost its
spiritual inspiration and romanticism lacked its
intellectual order and its sense of form.
Thus the disappearance of the Christian ele-
ment in humanism has involved the loss of its
vital quality. If we attempt to resuscitate it
on a purely naturalistic foundation, we may get
something like the humanism of Anatole France,
C.N.A. 97 G
but we shall certainly not recover the creative

humanism of the Renaissance period. This is
admitted by the protagonist of the new
humanism, Professor Babbitt, who fully realises
that every culture is a spiritual order and that
humanism is only possible if we throw over
naturalism and return to spiritual principles.
But, while he recognises that the very survival
of Western civilisation depends " on the appear-
ance of leaders who have re-discovered in some
form the truths of the inner life and repudiated
the errors of naturalism," he is unwilling to
make a complete return to the metaphysical
and religious foundations. He prefers a kind
of spiritual positivism based on the accumulated
moral wisdom of the great historic traditions-
Greek, Buddhist and Confucian. His desire to
be " modern and individualistic and critical "
causes him to shrink from committing himself
absolutely to that which is eternal and universal.
Yet without such an affirmation, no true spiri-
tual order is possible. Each of the great spiri-
tual traditions to which he appeals rested on a
metaphysical foundation, and if this is removed
their moral order falls with it. Even Epicurus
himself had to pass beyond the " flammantia
moenia mundi " before he could bring peace to
the minds of his disciples. By his insistence on
the critical and individualistic attitude, Pro-
98
CHRISTIANITY AND T H E N E W O R D E R
fessor Babbitt is taking his stand on the weakest

point in his position. The tradition of critical
individualism still survives ; indeed the modern
intellectual has carried it to its extreme limits.
But this excess is a last desperate reaction
against the all-pervading pressure of a collec¬
tivist civilisation. In the days of Voltaire the
critic was leading a victorious advance against
the routed forces of the old order; today he is
fighting for his very existence against the ruling
tendencies of the age. It is easier to restore a
spiritual purpose to civilisation than to reverse
its tendency towards collectivism and solidarity.
To a critic like Babbitt, Christianity is unaccept-
able on account of its weakness during the last
two centuries against the dissolvent forces of
rationalist criticism ; but this type of criticism is
already losing its power. The modern criticism
of organised religion is in part the survival on a
lower cultural plane of the rationalist thought
of a past age, and in part a reaction against
the romantic and individualist forms of religion
that were characteristic of the nineteenth cen-
tury or at least of the post-Reformation period.
But Christianity in itself is in no way bound up
with the individualist culture that is passing
away. It was in origin a religion of order and
solidarity which throve in an atmosphere of
anonymity and collectivism. It was not itself
99 G2
responsible for the dying down of classical

culture, the loss of civic liberty and the inaugura-
tion of the regime of compulsion and state
socialism, which were, on the contrary, the
necessary consequences of the inherent incon-
sistencies and weakness of the later classical
culture itself. But it was able to accommodate
itself to conditions in which a purely secular
type of individual culture must inevitably perish.
And it seems possible that Christianity may
survive modern humanism in the same way
that it survived ancient Hellenism. However
seriously Christianity is threatened by the
materialism and mechanicism of modern civi-
lisation, it is in a much stronger position man
the tradition of critical intellectualism, which
can find neither a material nor a spiritual basis
in the new conditions of life. The latter belongs
essentially to the culture of a leisured class—not
the new plutocracy of millionaires and leaders
of industry, but the privileged classes of the old
Europe, whether bourgeois or aristocratic, who
stood outside the economic arena. This class has
already practically disappeared, and its civili-
sation and ideals of life are bound to disappear
in like manner. The choice that is actually
before us is not between an individualistic
humanism and some form of collectivism,
but between a collectivism that is purely
100
mechanistic and one that is spiritual. Spiri-

tual individualism is incapable of standing out
against the collectivism and standardisation of
modern life : it is only by a return to spiritual
solidarity that modern civilisation can recover
the spiritual principle of which it stands so
greatly in need.
It will no doubt be objected, by the modernist
and the medievalist alike, that there is a
fundamental and insurmountable contradiction
between the Christian ideal of spiritual freedom
and the scientific determinism and materialism
that are inherent in the new order. But we
must make a distinction between the meta-
physical determinism of the dogmatic materialist
or " naturalist " and the physical determinism
of the scientist, which is nothing but a recogni-
tion of the uniformity of physical laws within
their proper limits. And what is this but the
Hellenic belief in the existence of a universal
cosmic order, which was accepted by the
Christian Fathers as a necessary consequence of
the creative activity of the Divine Word, which
orders and disposes all things in number and
weight and measure ?
Consequently the material organisation of
the world by science and invention is in no
sense to be refused or despised by the Catholic
tradition, for to the Catholic philosopher no less
101
than to the scientist the progressive rationalisation

of matter by the work of scientific intelligence
is the natural vocation of the human mind.
This must seem a hard saying when we con-
sider that science and discovery, like a second
eating of the forbidden fruit of knowledge, have
proved a curse rather than a blessing to
humanity. But the disease of modern civilisa-
tion lies neither in science nor in machinery,
but in the false philosophy with which they
have been associated. At the very moment
that man was at last acquiring control over his
material environment, he was abandoning the
ideal of spiritual order and leaving the new
economic forces to develop uncontrolled with-
out any higher social direction. Economic
activity was no longer regarded as a function
of society as a whole, but as an independent
world in which the only laws were the purely
economic ones of supply and demand, and of
the relations between population and capital.
Money and commodities were not considered
in relation to social life, but became hyposta¬
tised into abstract principles on which social
life was dependent.
But though these ideas accompanied the rise
of the machine order, they are in reality
profoundly inconsistent with that order and
with the scientific genius, and to-day they are
102
either dead or in the process of dissolution. It

is now generally recognised—even by those who
attach no importance to spiritual values—that
the machine order involves social direction and
that it is absurd to build up an elaborate
artificial mechanism of production and to
leave society itself at the mercy of private
acquisitiveness. This was first clearly realised
by the Socialists, and to-day Communism
claims to be the only social theory that is
consistent with the new scientific order. But
Communism is itself a result of the same
pseudo-scientific rationalism which produced
the doctrine of Ricardo, and it gained consis-
tency only by carrying the false principles of
the older theory to their extreme conclusion.
The old economists had excluded human
values from economic life, but they had not
attempted to deny them entirely. Outside
business hours " the economic man " was free
to behave as a human being. But to the
Communist no such dualism is possible. The
economic life absorbs the whole man and the
whole society. The political, intellectual and
spiritual aspects of life are all subordinated to
the economic end, which alone is absolute
and consequently is the only ethical criterion.
Thus man becomes the servant and not the
master of the machine, since society exists for
103
economic production and man exists for

society.
But the history of Communism is itself
sufficient to disprove this materialistic concep-
tion of history. For Communism was not the
spontaneous product of impersonal economic
forces. It had its origin in the mind of that
atrabilious arch-individualist, Karl Marx, and
the forces that inspired him were neither of
the economic nor the material order. It was
the instinct of spiritual self-assertion, the revo-
lutionary ideal of abstract justice, and perhaps
more than all the ineradicable Jewish faith in
an apocalyptic deliverance that drove him
from his own country and the interests of his
bourgeois career to a life of exile and privation.
Thus Communism, like every other living
power in the world of men, owes its existence to
spiritual forces. If it were possible to eliminate
these, as the Communist theory demands, and
to reduce human life to a purely economic
activity, mankind would sink back into bar-
barism and animality. For the creative element
in human culture is spiritual, and it triumphs
only by mortifying and conquering the natural
conservatism of man's animal instincts. This is
true above all of science, for the path of the
scientist leads him further from the animal than
the rest of men. He lives not in the concrete
104
reality of sensible experience, like the animal

or the savage, but in a rarefied atmosphere of
mathematical abstraction in which the ordinary
man cannot breathe. If the materialist inter-
pretation of history were true, the scientific
intellectualisation of nature could no more have
arisen than could the metaphysical intuition
of reality, and without science there could be
no machine order. The true Marxian Com-
munism is not that of a machine order which is
the work of the creative scientific spirit, but
rather that of the Eskimo, which is the direct pro-
duct of economic necessity. For the machine is
a proof not of the subordination of mind to
matter, but of the subordination of matter to
mind. So far from necessitating the substitu-
tion of material for spiritual order, it is itself a
vindication of spiritual order, since it frees man
from his age-long animal condition of depend-
ence on nature and material circumstance.
But if the scientific order is to realise this
ideal, it must be related to spiritual ends and
must form part of a wider spiritual order.
Material organisation alone is incapable of
saving civilisation. Left to itself it may easily
become a destructive force which is hostile
alike to spiritual values and to human freedom.
True civilisation is essentially a spiritual order,
and its criterion is not material wealth, but
105
spiritual vision. It seeks a Theoria—an intuition

of reality which is expressed in metaphysical
thought and bears fruit in artistic creation and
moral action. Thus Chinese civilisation culmi-
nates in the metaphysical vision of cosmic law
and in the ethical ideal of the Confucian just
m a n ; Indian civilisation in the metaphysical
vision of absolute being and in the moral ideal
of the Sadhu; and Hellenic civilisation in the
vision of the intelligible world and in the
ethical ideal of the philosopher.
In Christianity the idea of spiritual order
acquires a yet wider and more profound
significance. It is based upon the belief in a
divine society which transcends all states and
cultures and is the final goal of humanity.
For as a modern Thomist has written, " The
human personality is not entirely contained in
political society; it belongs above all by its
innermost and truest being, by its spiritual
element, to another and more perfect society,
to the universality of being, the World-Whole
which includes the living Infinite, God Himself,
as its Universal Good and Sovereign Head ;
and political society, however wide and
numerous it may be, is but a minute section
of this immense and innumerable Republic," *
* T. Bésiade, La Justice générale, in Mélanges thiomistes,
1923, p. 334
106
this city of God of which St. Augustine and

St. Thomas speak. This society exists in the
nature of things as " the republic of all men
under the law of God," * although the actual
disorder of human nature prevented its effective
realisation by man. It has therefore been re-
constituted on a higher plane by the Incarna-
tion, through which mankind is united in a
direct and personal relation with the Divine
Word. And this new unity is something more
than a society; it is an organism, a living body
whose head is Christ the Word and whose vital
principle is the Divine Spirit. " But this great
society is not yet made; it is in the making—
in process of becoming—it grows under the
guidance of Christ, Whose mystical Body has
not yet attained its full stature, to its immanent
perfection, that is to say, to the perfect posses-
sion of God; it is a universal gravitation
towards God ' Who turns all things to the love
of Himself.' . . .
" And it depends on us to push the universe
with all our powers towards its sublime destiny,
to contribute in our degree and for our part to
the promotion and perfection of the kingdom of
God." §
If this is the idea that should inspire
* St. Thomas, Sum. Th. i-ii, q. 100, a. 5.
§ Besiade, op. cit., p. 340.
107
Christian culture, it may well be asked whether

a Christian civilisation has ever existed. It is
surely not to be found in the theocratic abso-
lutism of the Byzantine East, nor in the feudal
barbarism of the mediaeval West, nor in the
humanism of the Renaissance. Yet through
all their manifold imperfections each of them
has aspired to it in their fashion, and if our own
civilisation is to recover a spiritual principle, it
is here that we must seek it. The essential
achievement of our culture—the conquest of
material order—is not, as we have seen, incon-
sistent w i t h this ideal. In fact it may be
regarded as its natural complement, for the
restoration of man to his true position as the
master of nature and the organiser of the
material world, which is the function of science,
corresponds in the natural order to the spiritual
restoration of human nature in itself, which is
the work of Christianity in the supernatural
order.
In a Christian civilisation the scientific order
would no longer offer, as it does at present, the
tragic spectacle of vast resources of power and
intelligence devoted to producing unsightly and
unnecessary objects and to endowing mankind
with new means of self-destruction; it would
become an instrument for the realisation of
man's true destiny as the orderer of material
108
things to spiritual ends. And so, too, with

regard to the international aspects of our
civilisation. Without spiritual order the cosmo-
politanism of modern culture does not make for
peace ; it merely increases the opportunities of
strife. It destroys all that is best and most
distinctive in the local and national cultures,
while leaving the instincts of national and
racial hostility to develop unchecked. It unites
mankind in the common enjoyment of the
cinema and the Ford car and the machine gun
without creating any spiritual unity. The
recovery of the Christian idea of order would
give a spiritual expression to the universality
of modern culture. Its material unification
would become subservient to the ideal of the
spiritual unity of mankind in justice and
charity, an ideal that has a very real attraction
for the modern mind, but which secular idealism
is powerless to achieve.
We must make our choice between the
material organisation of the world—based either
on economic exploitation or on an economic
absolutism, which absorbs the whole of life and
leaves no room for human values—and the
Christian ideal of a spiritual order based on
spiritual faith and animated by charity, which
is the spiritual will. The triumph of such an
ideal in a world that seems governed only by
109
material forces and distracted by hatred and

greed may seem a fantastic dream, but is it any
more hopeless than the enterprise of that
handful of unknown and uneducated men
from a remote Oriental province who set out
to conquer the imperial power of Rome and
the intellectual culture of Hellenism ? In
history it is often the incredible that happens—
credo quia impossibile has been justified again and
again. Sooner or later it is inevitable that
men's minds should turn once more in search of
spiritual reality, and when once the tide begins
to flow all the sand-castles that we have built
during the ebb disappear.
Every Christian mind is a seed of change so
long as it is a living mind, not enervated by
custom or ossified by prejudice. A Christian
has only to be in order to change the world, for
in that act of being there is contained all the
mystery of supernatural life. It is the function
of the Church to sow this divine seed, to pro-
duce not merely good men, but spiritual men—
that is to say, supermen. In so far as the
Church fulfils this function it transmits to the
world a continuous stream of spiritual energy.
If the salt itself loses its savour, then indeed the
world sinks back into disorder and death, for
a despiritualised Christianity is powerless to
change anything; it is the most abject of
110
failures, since it serves neither the natural nor

the spiritual order. But the life of the Church
never fails, since it possesses an infinite capacity
for regeneration. It is the external organ
through which the Spirit enters the social
process and builds up a new humanity—
populus qui nascetur quern fecit Dominus. The
spirit breathes and they are created and the
face of the earth is renewed.
THE END
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE WHITEFRIARS PRESS, LTD.,

LONDON AND TONBRIDGE.
BY
CHRISTOPHER DAWSON
PROGRESS
AND RELIGION
AN HISTORICAL ENQUIRY
New, Cheaper, Edition
Cr. 8vo. 254 pp. 3s. 6d. net.
DEAN INGE :
" I am sure that it is a great work, one
of the best that we have had in recent
years."
EVELYN UNDERHILL :
"A profound, stimulating, and some-
times provocative book which must be
studied by all who desire to see in
their wider context the problems of the
modern world."
A. E. GARVIE (Journ. of Phil. Studies) :
" It is seldom I have read a book which
I have found of so great interest and
importance, for the wide range of know-
ledge is accompanied by a mastery of
thought."
%

DAWSON, Christopher. Christianity and The New Age

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

DAWSON, Christopher. Christianity and The New Age

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

DAWSON, Christopher. Christianity and The New Age

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

ESSAYS IN ORDER

No. 1. RELIGION AND CULTURE

No. 2. CRISIS IN THE WEST

OTHER VOLUMES IN PREPARATION BY

T H E AGE OF THE GODS

The author desires to express his thanks to the editors and

II. HUMANISM AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE . 26

I I I . THE CLAIM OF CHRISTIANITY . . 58

I V . CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW ORDER . . 92

FOR centuries a civilisation will follow the

forms of the Hellenistic culture suddenly lost

a rule, have been ages of material distress and

plight. They found themselves powerless to

Whatever his weaknesses Friedrich Nietzsche

dominance of the belief in Progress and by the

In spite of its ideal of a purely human per-

gradually led by an internal process of logic to

reassertion of the rights of the secular power

sance, we see the humiliation of humanity in

self-direction or the preservation of spiritual

conditions, although it originated at a time

nothing but an explaining away of history. It

Communism and historical materialism, and

circumstances of American life were more

unregulated activity of the ordinary man. This

we have no reason to suppose that it will be

T H E realisation of the decline of the humanist

Hugo Ball and Stefan Georg in Germany,

possess the advantage of being easily reconcil-

a means to an end, a way out of our practical

is essentially a doctrine of salvation—a social

have our being, though it is hidden from us by

* University Sermons, p. 350. In this remarkable passage

Thus, although God is not myself, nor a part

From Him all things depend ; they flow out

ordinary man is by his nature immersed in the

which transcends all the categories of his

we go in history, and however primitive is the

philosophy a n d ethical by the tradition of the

individual, and the cult of animal guardians ;

the history of Greek religion, the sense of ritual

that anti-metaphysical prejudice which has

and fertility and their use as amulets or fetishes

vindicate the essential humanity of the primitive.

Professor Lowie has described how an Indian

surrounded it with religious rites because he

identifying the cosmic principle, the power

Of the soul. And this involved a corresponding

ence conceivable ? It seems to be a contradic-

its most essential function, and ultimately, like

knowledge is the highest kind of knowledge, the

that is termed romanticism, or, as is increasingly

" Come down from your pre-eminence, O mind, O

" A man is many things : he is not only a mind.

" The blood knows in darkness, and forever dark,

" To my dark heart gods ore.

But to my white mind

This is, so it seems to me, the inevitable con-

* Pansies, pp. 65-66.