A Preface to Morals > Chapter VII. The Drama of Destiny > Theocracy and Humanism
There is a revolution here in the realm of the spirit. We may describe it briefly by saying that whereas men once felt they were living under the eye of an all-powerful spectator, to-day they are watched only by their neighbors and their own consciences. A few, perhaps, act as if posterity were aware of them; the great number feel themselves accountable only to their own consciences or to the opinion of the society in which they live. Once men believed that they would be judged at the throne of God. They believed that he saw not only their deeds but their motives; there was no hole deep enough into which a man could crawl to hide himself from the sight of God; there was no mood, however fleeting, which escaped his notice.
The moral problem for each man, therefore, was to make his will conform to the will of God. There were differences of opinion as to how this could be done. There were differing conceptions of the nature of God, and of what he most desired. But there was no difference of opinion on the main point that it was imperative to obey him. Whether they thought they could serve God best by burnt offerings or a contrite heart, by slaying the infidel or by loving their neighbors, by vows of poverty or by the magnificence of their altars, they never doubted that the chief duty of man, and his ultimate chance of happiness, was to discover and then to cultivate a right relationship to a supreme being.
This was the major premise upon which all human choices hinged. There followed from it certain necessary conclusions. In determining what was a right relationship to God, the test of rightness lay in a revelation of the putative experience of God and not in the actual experience of His creatures. It was God alone, therefore, who really understood the reasons for righteousness and its nature. "The procedure of Divine Justice," said Calvin, "is too high to be scanned by human measure or comprehended by the feebleness of human intellect." That was good which man understood was good in the eyes of God, regardless of how it seemed to men.
Thus the distinction between good and evil, including not only all rules of personal conduct but the whole arrangement of rights and duties in society, were laws established not by the consent of the governed, but by a king in heaven. They were his commandments. By obedience men could obtain happiness. But they obtained it not because virtue is the cause of happiness but because God rewarded with happiness those who obeyed his commandments. Men did not really know why God preferred certain kinds of conduct; they merely professed to know what kind of conduct he preferred. They could not really ask themselves what the difference was between good and evil. That was a secret locked in the nature of a being whose choices were ultimately inscrutable. The only question was what he willed. Even Job had to be content without fathoming his reasons.
The moral commandments based upon divine authority were, in the nature of things, rather broad generalizations. Obviously there could not be special revelation as to the unique aspects of each human difficulty. The divine law, like our ordinary human law, was addressed to typical rather than to individual cases. Nevertheless, for much the greater part of recorded history men have accepted such law without questioning its validity. They could not have done so if the rules of morality had not, at least in some rough way, worked. It is not difficult to see why they worked. They were broad rules of conduct imposed upon people living close to the soil, upon people, therefore, whose ways of living changed little in the course of generations. The same situations were so nearly and so often repeated that a typical solution would on the whole be satisfactory.
These typical solutions, such as we find in the Mosaic law or the code of Hammurabi, were no doubt the deposits of custom. They had, therefore, become perfected in practice, and were solidly based upon human experience. In the society in which they originated, there was nothing arbitrary or alien about them. When, therefore, the lawgiver carried these immemorial usages up with him on to Sinai, and brought them down again graven on tablets of stone, the rationality of the revelation was self-evident. It appeared to be arbitrary only when a radical change in the way of life dissolved the premises and the usages upon which the authoritative code was established.
That dissolution has proceeded to great lengths within the centuries which we call modern. The crisis was reached, it seems, during the Eighteenth Century, and in the teaching of Immanuel Kant it was made manifest to the educated classes of the western world. Kant argued in the Critique of Pure Reason that the existence of God cannot be demonstrated. He then insisted that without belief in God, freedom, and immortality, there was no valid and true morality. So he insisted that God must exist to justify morality. This highly sophisticated doctrine marks the end of simple theism in modern thought. For Kant's proof of the existence of God was nothing but a plea that God ought to exist, and the whole temper of the modern intellect is to deny that what ought to be true necessarily is true.
Insofar as men have now lost their belief in a heavenly king, they have to find some other ground for their moral choices than the revelation of his will. It follows necessarily that they must find the tests of righteousness wholly within human experience. The difference between good and evil must be a difference which men themselves recognize and understand. Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue; it must be the intelligible consequence of it. It follows, too, that virtue cannot be commanded; it must be willed out of personal conviction and desire. Such a morality may properly be called humanism, for it is centered not in superhuman but in human nature. When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists. They must live by the premise that whatever is righteous is inherently desirable because experience will demonstrate its desirability. They must live, therefore, in the belief that the duty of man is not to make his will conform to the will of God but to the surest knowledge of the conditions of human happiness.
It is evident that a morality of humanism presents far greater difficulties than a morality premised on theism. For one thing, it is put immediately to a much severer test. When Kant, for example, argued that theism was necessary to morality, his chief reason was that since the good man is often defeated on earth, he must be permitted to believe in a superhuman power which is "able to connect happiness and morality in exact harmony with each other." Humanism is not provided with such reserves of moral credit; it cannot claim all eternity in which its promises may be fulfilled. Unless its wisdom in any sphere of life is demonstrated within a reasonable time in actual experience, there is nothing to commend it.
A morality of humanism labors under even greater difficulties. It appears in a complex and changing society; it is an attitude toward life to which rational men necessarily turn whenever their circumstances have rendered a theistic view incredible. It is just because the simpler rules no longer work that the subtler choices of humanism present themselves. These choices have to be made under conditions, like those which prevail in modern urban societies, where the extreme complexity of rapidly changing human relations makes it very difficult to foresee all the consequences of any moral decision. The men who must make their decisions are skeptical by habit and unsettled amidst the novelties of their surroundings.
The teachers of a theistic morality, when the audience is devout, have only to fortify the impression that the rules of conduct are certified by God the invisible King. The ethical problem for the common man is to recognize the well-known credentials of his teachers. In practice he has merely to decide whether the priest, the prince, and the elders, are what they claim to be. When he has done that, there are no radical questions to be asked. But the teachers of humanism have no credentials. Their teaching is not certified. They have to prove their case by the test of mundane experience. They speak with no authority, which can be scrutinized once and for all, and then forever accepted. They can proclaim no rule of conduct with certainty, for they have no inherent personal authority and they cannot be altogether sure they are right. They cannot command. They cannot truly exhort. They can only inquire, infer, and persuade. They have only human insight to guide them and those to whom they speak must in the end themselves accept the full responsibility for the consequences of any advice they choose to accept.
Yet with all its difficulties, it is to a morality of humanism that men must turn when the ancient order of things dissolves. When they find that they no longer believe seriously and deeply that they are governed from heaven, there is anarchy in their souls until by conscious effort they find ways of governing themselves.