The upshot of the discussion to this point is that modernity destroys the disposition to believe that behind the visible world of physical objects and human institutions there is a supernatural kingdom from which ultimately all laws, all judgments, all rewards, all punishments, and all compensations are derived. To those who believe that this kingdom exists the modern spirit is nothing less than treason to God.
The popular religion rests on the belief that the kingdom is an objective fact, as certain, as definite, and as real, in spite of its invisibility, as the British Empire; it holds that this faith is justified by overwhelming evidence supplied by revelation, unimpeachable testimony, and incontrovertible signs. To the modern spirit, on the other hand, the belief in this kingdom must necessarily seem a grandiose fiction projected by human needs and desires. The humanistic view is that the popular faith does not prove the existence of its objects, but only the presence of a desire that such objects should exist. The popular religion, in short, rests on a theory which, if true, is an extension of physics and of history; the humanistic view rests on human psychology and an interpretation of human experience.
It follows, then, that in exploring the modern problem it is necessary consciously and clearly to make a choice between these diametrically opposite points of view. The choice is fundamental and exclusive, and it determines all the conclusions which follow. For obviously to one who believes that the world is a theocracy, the problem is how to bring the strayed and rebellious masses of mankind back to their obedience, how to restore the lost provinces of God the invisible King. But to one who takes the humanistic view the problem is how mankind, deprived of the great fictions, is to come to terms with the needs which created those fictions.
In this book I take the humanistic view because, in the kind of world I happen to live in, I can do no other.
It will be granted, I suppose, that there would be no need for certainty about the plan and government of the universe if, as a matter of course, all our desires were regularly fulfilled. In a world where no man desired what he could not have, there would be no need to regulate human conduct and therefore no need for morality. In a world where each man could have what he desired, there would be no need for consolation and for reassuring guarantees that justice, mercy, and love will ultimately prevail. In a world where there was perfect adjustment between human desires and their environment, there would be no problem of evil: we should not know the meaning of sin, sorrow, crime, fear, frustration, pain, and emptiness. We do not live in such a well-ordered world. But we can imagine it by making either of two assumptions: that we have ceased to desire anything which causes evil, or that omnipotence fulfills all our desires. The first of these assumptions leads to the Nirvana of the Buddhists, where all craving has ceased and there is perfect peace. The second leads to the heaven of all popular religions, to some paradise like that of Mohammed perhaps where, as Mr. Santayana says, men may "sit in well-watered gardens, clad in green silks, drinking delicious sherbets, and transfixed by the gazelle-like glance of some young girl, all innocence and fire."
Among educated men it has always been difficult to imagine a heaven of fulfilled desires. For since no two persons have exactly the same desires, one man's imagination of heaven may not suit another man's. In general, the attempts which have been made to picture the Christian heaven reflect the temperaments of highly contemplative spirits, and it is customary nowadays to say that this heaven would be a most uninteresting place. No doubt it would be to those who are not contemplative. But the objectors have missed the main point, which is that no one is supposed to pass through the pearly gates who is not suited to dwell in Paradise. That is what St. Peter is there for, to see that the unfit do not enter; the other places, Purgatory and the Inferno, are available to those spirits who could not be happy in Heaven. There are, by definition, no uncongenial spirits in Heaven. There were once, but Satan and his followers were thrown out headlong, and they now live in places which are suited to their temperaments. A devout man may quite properly, therefore, advise those who do not think they would enjoy Heaven to go to Hell.
The attempt to imagine a heaven is an attempt to conceive a world in which the disorders of human desire no longer exist. Now it is in their prayers that men have sought to come to terms with their disorders, and their prayers reveal most concretely how much the hunger for certainty and for help is a hunger for the fulfillment of desire. For prayer, says Father Wynne, is "the expression of our desires to God whether for ourselves or for others." In the higher reaches of religion "the expression is not intended to instruct or direct God what to do, but to appeal to His goodness for the things we need; and the appeal is necessary, not because He is ignorant of our needs or sentiments, but to give definite form to our desires, to concentrate our whole attention on what we have to recommend to Him, to help us appreciate our close personal relation with Him." But in order to know what to pray for, we need grace, that is to say, God Himself must teach us what to ask Him for. We can be sure that we should pray for salvation, but in particular we need guidance from God "to know the special means that will most help us in any particular need." But besides the spiritual objects of prayer "we are to ask also for temporal things, our daily bread and all that it implies, health, strength, and other worldly or temporal goods . . ."; we are to pray also for escape from evils, "the penalty of our sins, the dangers of temptation, and every manner of physical or spiritual affliction."
There has, however, always been a logical difficulty about offering petitions to an all-wise and all-powerful Providence. Thus in the Dialogue of Dives and Pauper, which was published in 1493, the question is put: "Why pray we to God with oure mouth sithe he knowyth alle oure thoughte, all our desire, al our wyl and what us nedeth?" To this question the only answer which was not evasive came from the mystics who led a life of contemplation. Prayer, they said, is not mere petition; it is communion with God. It is not because prayer gives a man what he wants, but because it "ones the soul to God," that it is rational and necessary. This, too, is the conception of prayer held by a liberal pastor like Dr. Fosdick who looks with scorn upon "clamorous petition to an anthropomorphic God" and says that "true prayer … is to assimilate … (the) spirit which is God (that) · . . surrounds our lives." The same idea, stated in somewhat more precise language, is set down by Mr. Santayana when he says that "in rational prayer the soul may be said to accomplish three things important to its welfare: it withdraws within itself and defines its good, it accommodates itself to destiny, and it grows like the ideal which it conceives."
But, of course, this is not the way the common man through the ages has conceived prayer. In fact he must have prayed before he had any clear conception of what a prayer is or of whom it is addressed to. Thus we are told that in Arcadia the girls invoked Hera by the title of "Hera the Girl," the married women prayed to "Hera the Married One," and the widows prayed to "Hera the Widow." Sometimes the prayer is a spontaneous expression of sorrow or of delight, a lyrical cry which has no ulterior purpose and is addressed to no one. Sometimes prayer is a magical formula which compels the deity to listen and to obey. The subject is both complicated and obscure. But this much at least is clear: along with elements which can be described only as spontaneous and lyrical, with traces of magic, and at times with a purely disinterested desire to commune with God, simple people have looked upon prayer as "an instrument for applying God's illimitable power to daily life."
Popular discussion of prayer has often been extremely practical: "How can prayer be made most efficient? Is it by ordinary Masses or by other offices? Is it by the elaboration or the multiplication of services?" Lady Alice West who died in 1395 ordered 4400 Masses "in the most haste that it may be do, withynne xiiii nyght next after my deces." Thomas Walwayn who died in 1415 left orders for 10,000 Masses "with oute pompe whyche may not profyt myn soule." John Plot, however, wished his Masses said "with solempne seruise that ys for to sayn wyth Belle Ryngyng." There was debate as to whether prayers were most effective if said in Rome or in the Holy Land ...by certain priests rather than by others ...by the friars rather than by the priests ...whether there were more potent prayers than the Pater ...whether prayers should be addressed to the Father, the Son, or to St. Mary ...whether St. Mary could be approached best through her mother, St. Anne.
It is not necessary to dogmatize by saying that prayer is magic, or soliloquy, or communion, or petition for this and that, in order to see that it is the expression of a human need. The quality of the need varies. It may be anything from a desire for rain to a desire for friendship with unseen spirits, but always it illustrates the saying that "all men stand in need of God."
If we ask ourselves what we mean by 'need,' we must answer, I suppose, that the resources of our own natures and the power we are able to exercise over events are insufficient to satisfy the cravings of our natures. We must eat, but we cannot be sure that drought will not destroy the crops. We are beset by enemies, and we are not sure we can conquer them. We are threatened by earthquake, storm, and disease against which we cannot wholly protect ourselves. We become deeply attached to other persons. But they must die and we must die, and we cannot stay the doom. In brief, we find ourselves in a world in which our hopes are defeated.
Somehow we are so constituted that we demand the impossible. There is in us somewhere an intimation that we ought not to be defeated. But where did this intimation come from? How is it that we are not born satisfied with our mortality, content with our fate? Why is it that the normal fate of man seems to us abnormal? What is there in the back of our heads which keeps telling us that life as we find it is not what it ought to be?
The biologist might answer, I suppose, that this craving for a different kind of world is simply our own consciousness of that blind push of natural forces which create the variations on which natural selection works to produce the survival of the fittest. Nature, he might say, is wholly indifferent to the outcries of the individual; this vast process of which each of us is so insignificant a part, keeps going because there is in all the parts a superabundant urging to go on. There is no human economy in it and no human order. Man, for example, has far more sexual desire than is needed for the rational propagation of the species. But there is no rational plan in nature. It works here, and everywhere, on the principle that by having too much there will surely be enough; the seeds which do not germinate, the seedlings which perish, the desires which are left over, are no concern of nature's. For nature has no concern. There is no concern except that which we ourselves feel, and that is a mere flicker on the stream of time, and will soon go out.
While there is no way of gainsaying that this explanation is true, it is true only if we look at life from the particular point of view which the biologist adopts. If, however, we look inwardly upon ourselves, instead of surveying our species from the outside, we find, I think, that this sense that the world ought not to be what it is seems to originate in a kind of dim memory that it once was what we feel it ought to be. Indeed, so vivid is this memory that for ages men took it to be an account of historical events; in absolute good faith they constituted for themselves the picture of a Golden Age which existed before evil came into the world. Hope was, therefore, a kind of memory; the ideal was to achieve something which had been lost. The memory of an age of innocence has haunted the whole of mankind. It has been a light behind their present experience which cast shadows upon it, and made it seem insubstantial and not inevitable. Before this life, there had been another which was happier. And so they reasoned that what once was possible must somehow be possible again. Having once known the good, it was unbelievable that evil should be final.
Even after criticism has dissolved the beautiful legends in which it was embodied, this memory of a Golden Age persists. It persists as an intimation of our own inward experience, and like an uneasy spirit it intrudes itself upon our most realistic efforts to accept the world as we find it. For it takes many shapes, which sometimes deceive us, appearing then not as the memory of a happiness we have lost, but as the anticipation of utopia to come.
It is an intimation that man is entitled to live in the land of heart's desire. It is a deep conviction that happiness is possible, and all inquiry into the foundations of morals turns ultimately upon whether man can achieve this happiness by pursuing his desires, or whether he must first learn to desire the kind of happiness which is possible.