A Preface to Morals > Chapter IV. The Acids of Modernity > The Kingly Pattern
What I have said thus far can be reduced to the statement that it is difficult for modern men to conceive a God whom they can worship. Yet it would be a crude misunderstanding of religious experience to assume that it depends upon a clear conception of God.
In truly religious men the experience of God is much more intensely convincing than any definition of his nature which they can put into words. They do not insist on understanding that which they believe, for their belief gives them a consciousness of divinity which transcends any conviction they could reach by the understanding. They are not oppressed by the conflict between reason and faith because the testimony of faith is irresistible. It may become so irresistible that any attempt to understand is finally held, as it was by John Chrysostom, to be an impertinence.
St. Chrysostom, who is described by the Catholic Encyclopedia as the most prominent doctor of the Greek Church and the greatest preacher ever heard in a Christian pulpit, is a striking example of how in other ages a man who was both learned and devout was able to surmount the intellectual difficulties which to-day cause so much trouble for modernists and fundamentalists alike. Chrysostom was born at Antioch in the middle of the Fourth Century and grew up in a time when the intellectual foundations of Christianity were intensely disputed. The Catholic theology had not yet emerged victoriously, and Antioch was the theatre of fierce struggles between Pagans, Manicheans, Gnostics, Arians, Jews, and others. These struggles turned in considerable measure upon just such attempts to define and comprehend God as now confuse the teaching of the Protestant Church. Among the sectarians there were some who claimed that it was possible "to know God exactly" and it was against them that Chrysostom preached that "he insults God who seeks to apprehend His essential being." For "the difference between the being of God and the being of man is of such a kind that no word can express it and no thought can appraise it … He dwells, says St. Paul, in an unapproachable light." Even the angels in heaven are stupefied by the glory and majesty of God: "Tell me," he says, "wherefore do they cover their faces and hide them with their wings? Why but that they cannot endure the dazzling radiance and its rays that pour from the Throne?"
Here in language so eloquent that the author became known as Chrysostom, "the golden-mouthed," we have the doctrine that "a comprehended God is no God," that "God is incomprehensible because He is blessed and blessed because He is incomprehensible." But if we look more closely at what Chrysostom actually says, it is apparent that he has a much clearer idea of God than he knows. He conceives of God as the creator, the ruler, and the judge of the universe. When he says that God is incomprehensible he means that it is impossible for a human being to imagine what it would be like to be God. But that does not prevent Chrysostom from knowing what it is like to be the creature of the incomprehensible God.
He is very definitely on his knees before the throne of a divine king whose radiance is so dazzling that he cannot look his Lord in the face.
There is thus a very solid intellectual conception embedded in the faith of this great teacher who staked everything on the assertion that it is impossible to conceive God. The conception is there but it has not been isolated and realized. It is unconsciously assumed. We find the same thing in Luther when he said: "I venture to put my trust in the one God alone, the invisible and incomprehensible, who hath created Heaven and Earth and is alone above all creatures." For in spite of the fact that Luther calls God incomprehensible, he is able to make a number of extremely important statements about him. He is able to say that God is the only God, that he created the earth, that there is a heaven, that God created heaven, and that God alone is above all his creatures. To know that much about God is to comprehend the function of God if not his nature.
Now if we examine the religious difficulty of modern men, we find, I think, that they do not lack the sense of mystery, of majesty, of terror, and of wonder which overwhelm Chrysostom and Luther. The emotional disposition is there. But it is somehow inhibited from possessing them utterly. The will to believe is checked by something in their experience which Chrysostom did not have. That something is the sense that the testimony of faith is not wholly credible, that the feeling of sanctity is no assurance of the existence of sacred powers, that awe and wonder and terror in the breast of the believer are not guarantees that there exist real objects that are awful and wonderful. The modern man is not incapable of faith, but he has within him a contrary passion, as instinctive and often as intense as faith, which makes incredible the testimony of his faith.
It is that contrary passion, and not the thin argumentation of atheists and agnostics, which lies, I think, at the root of what churchmen call modern irreligion. It is that passion which they must understand if they are ever to understand the modern religious difficulty. For just as men could surmount any intellectual difficulty when their passion to believe was whole-hearted, so to-day, when the passion to disbelieve is so strong, they are unable to believe no matter how perfectly their theological dilemmas are resolved.
We must ask ourselves, then, what there is in modern men which makes the testimony of faith seem more or less incredible to them. We have seen in the citations from Chrysostom and Luther that the testimony of faith really contains a large number of unconscious statements of fact about the universe and how it is governed. It is these statements of fact which we are no longer able to assume unconsciously, and having become conscious of them they are rather incredible. But why are they no longer unconsciously assumed and why are they incredible? The answer is, I think, that they have ceased to be consistent with our normal experience in ordinary affairs.
The faith of Chrysostom and Luther is entangled with, and supported upon, the assumption that the universe was created and is governed by a father and king. They had projected upon the universe an imaginary picture which reflected their own daily experience of government among men. These pictures of how the universe is governed change with men's political experience. Thus it would not have been easy for an Asiatic people to imagine the divine government in any other way but as a despotism, and Yahveh, as he appears in many famous portraits in the Old Testament, is very evidently an Oriental monarch inclined to be somewhat moody and very vain. He governs as he chooses, constrained by no law, and often without mercy, justice, or righteousness. The God of mediaeval Christianity, on the other hand, is more like a great feudal lord, supreme and yet bound by covenants to treat his vassals on earth according to a well-established system of reciprocal rights and duties. The God of the Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century is a constitutional monarch who reigns but does not govern. And the God of Modernism, who is variously pictured as the ?lan vital within the evolutionary process, or as the sum total of the laws of nature, is really a kind of constitutionalism deified.
Provided that the picture is so consistent with experience that it is taken utterly for granted, it will serve as a background for the religious experience. But when daily experience for one reason or another provides no credible analogy by which men can imagine that the universe is governed by a supernatural king and father, then the disposition to believe, however strong it may be at the roots, is like a vine that reaches out and can find nothing solid upon which to grow. It cannot support itself. If faith is to flourish, there must be a conception of how the universe is governed to support it.
It is these supporting conceptions--the unconscious assumption that we are related to God as creatures to creator, as vassals to a king, as children to a father--that the acids of modernity have eaten away. The modern man's daily experience of modernity makes instinctively incredible to him these unconscious ideas which are at the core of the great traditional and popular religions. He does not wantonly reject belief, as so many churchmen assert. His predicament is much more serious. With the best will in the world, he finds himself not quite believing.
In the last four hundred years many influences have conspired to make incredible the idea that the universe is governed by a kingly person. An account of all of these influences would be a history of the growth of modern civilization. I am attempting nothing so comprehensive or so ambitious. I should like merely to note certain aspects of that revolutionary change which, as Lord Acton says, came "unheralded" and "founded a new order of things … sapping the ancient reign of continuity." For that new order of things has made it impossible for us to believe, as plainly and literally as our forefathers did, that the universe is a monarchy administered on this planet through divinely commissioned, and, therefore, unimpeachably authoritative ministers.