Faith and Knowledge

Faith and Knowledge

By the same author E V I L AND T H E G O D OF LOVE ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF G O D G O D AND THE UNIVERSE OF FAITHS DEATH AND ETERNAL L I F E G O D HAS M A N Y NAMES FAITH AND THE PHILOSOPHERS (editor)

T H E MANY-FACED ARGUMENT (editor with A. C. McGill) PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION T H E SECOND CHRISTIANITY

W H Y BELIEVE IN G O D ? (with Michael Goulder) T H E EXISTENCE OF G O D (editor) CLASSICAL AND CONTEMPORARY READINGS IN THE PHILOSOPHY

OF RELIGION (editor) T R U T H AND DIALOGUE (editor) T H E M Y T H OF G O D INCARNATE (editor) CHRISTIANITY AND O T H E R RELIGIONS

(editor with Brian Hebblethwaite) PROBLEMS OF RELIGIOUS PLURALISM

Faith and Knowledge John Hick Danforth Professor of the Philosophy of Religion The Claremont Graduate School, California

SECOND EDITION REISSUED WITH A NEW PREFACE

M

MACMILLAN PRESS

© J o h n Hick 1957, 1966, 1988 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First edition (Cornell University Press) 1957 Second edition (Cornell University Press) 1966 First published in the United Kingdom (Macmillan) 1967 Reissued with a new preface (Macmillan) 1988 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Printed in Hong Kong British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Hick,John Faith and knowledge.—2nd ed. reissued 1. Faith and reason I. Title 200'. 1 BT50 ISBN 0-333-41782-8 {hardcover) ISBN 0-333-41783-6 paperback)

Contents Preface to the 1988 Reissue of the Second Edition

vii

Preface to the Second Edition Preface to the First Edition Introduction

xi xiii 1

Part I Faith as Propositional Belief 1 The Thomist-Catholic View of Faith . . . . 11 2 Modern Voluntarist Views of Faith . . . . 32 3 Faith and Moral Judgment 57 4 Faith and the Illative Sense 69

5 6

Part II Faith as the Interpretative Element Religious Experience The Nature of Faith Faith and Freedom

7 8 9

Part III The Logic of Faith Faith and Fact Faith and Verification Faith as Knowledge

within 95 120

151 169 200

CONTENTS

Part IV Christian Faith 10 Christian Faith 11 Faith and Works

215 237

Acknowledgments

264

Index of Names

265

Index of Subjects

267

Preface to the 1988 Reissue of the Second Edition A brief account of the genesis of a book is sometimes of interest to readers. This one began in the filling of a notebook with philosophical jottings when I was serving in the Friends' Ambulance Unit in Italy during the winter of 1944, between working in Egypt and proceeding to Greece. It then lay fallow until four years later it became an academic thesis, written at Oxford under the benign but penetrating philosophical eye of my doctoral supervisor, H. H. Price. It then lay fallow again until, during three years as the minister of a rural congregation, I fashioned it into a book for publication. It was dedicated, as an expression of gratitude, to the office-bearers and members of Belford Presbyterian (now United Reformed) Church, Northumberland, whose constant kindness to their minister and his family is linked in my memory with the writing of the book. I took the complete typescript with me to my first teaching position, as assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell University, and it was published in 1957 by the Cornell University Press. Nine years later a considerably revised second edition appeared. It is this that is now reissued, in company with later books, to which Faith and Knowledge remains foundational. This epistemology of religion has been formed within the broad stream of Immanuel Kant's philosophical influence.

FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE

It was he who introduced into modern western thought the fundamental insight that the mind is active in all awareness of its environment, continually selecting, organizing and interpreting. H e developed this seminal insight in relation to sense perception. But the insight has much wider implications, which have since been worked out in cognitive psychology, the philosophy of science and the sociology of knowledge. They remain however to be fully applied to the epistemology of religion. K a n t himself approached this area from a different angle. But the realization of the interpretive element in religious as well as in sensory experience enables us to do justice to the important element of truth in the projection theories of Feuerbach and, more recently, of Freud and many others. The balanced understanding of religion that all this jointly makes possible is only now in the process of being developed and the present book is a contribution to that work. As such it begins with the focussing of attention, decisively begun in the nineteenth century by Schleiermacher, upon religious experience. This has often been treated as sui generis, differing fundamentally from other forms of putatively cognitive experience. But in fact all conscious cognition involves interpretation. All experience is experiencing-as. In ordinary sense perception the interpretive process is habitual and unconscious; for nature compels us to construe our physical environment in the way that is appropriate for the particular kind of animal that we are. Religious experience is similar and yet different in that it involves interpreting the same environment on another level of meaning, as mediating the divine. At this level the forms of interpretation are not compelled-for they are not required for our physical survival but represent a free cognitive choice made possible by the basic structure of our minds. Faith is the religious name for this free interpretive

PREFACE

moment within distinctively religious experience. An important pioneer in the exploration of this kind of approach was the early twentieth century Scottish philosopher of religion referred to in the Introduction, J o h n O m a n . From this point of view faith is not to be identified, as it was in both Catholic and Reformed scholastic theology, with the believing of revealed propositions. Theological propositions are human creations designed to make public sense of a community's religious experience. Nor is faith a desperate 'leap in the dark', although it does entail the risk of cognitive choice involving our whole being. (Here, I think, I might well have been more appreciative of William James' contribution than I was in Chapter 2.) Rather, faith is the element of uncompelled interpretation within the experience of divine presence, or of our dependent creatureliness, or of the religious meaning of personal and historical events and of the world as a whole. Whilst my own subsequent writings in the philosophy of religion have proceeded in a natural trajectory from the epistemology of Faith and Knowledge, the purely theological part of the book reflects a more traditional position than now seems to me sustainable. This is the case, in particular, with the Christology assumed in Chapter 10. Some readers may prefer the older view expressed there whilst others will prefer the newer view expressed in, for example, The Myth of God Incarnate. But the theology, whether old or new, does not affect the basic epistemological argument. This is applied here exclusively to the Christian awareness of the divine in a way which shares the restricted vision that had been characteristic of nearly all western philosophies of religion until very recently. I have however tried to contribute to the general rethinking that becomes necessary in the light of a greater awareness of the total religious life of the world in God and the Universe of Faiths, God Has Many Names, and Problems of Religious Pluralism.

FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE

Another respect in which I would have written the book differently today is in its continual use of ' m a n ' and 'he' when referring to human beings in general. I now find it as inappropriate to write about the h u m a n race as though it were exclusively male as to write about religion as though it were exclusively Christian. But the cost of rewriting and resetting the book in gender-inclusive language would have been prohibitive. The larger task of developing a religious interpretation of religion-as distinguished from a psychological or a sociological one, but nevertheless taking full account of the findings of these disciplines-in its plurality of forms, is one which I shall discharge, as far as I can, in a larger forthcoming book, An Interpretation of Religion. JOHN HICK

Department of Religion Claremont Graduate School Claremont, California 91711

Preface to the Second Edition IN REVISING this book, first published nine years ago, I have tried, often in response to the promptings of constructive critics, to make it more useful both as an introduction to the problem of religious knowledge and as an exposition of the view of faith which seemed to me, and still seems to me, most adequate. In this endeavor I have rearranged the structure of the book, omitting a good deal of material and introducing an equal or greater amount of fresh material. The original chapter on belief has been deleted, although the modified dispositional theory that it contained reappears in the last chapter, in what is I think its proper context for the purposes of this book—bridging the gap between faith and works and so providing a clue to the nature of the Christian ethic. A new opening chapter on the classic Thomist view of faith as a propositional attitude has been added. The original discussion of the idea of eschatological verification is now given a fuller treatment, which also takes account of important criticisms that have been offered. The heart of the book is in the two chapters of Part II. The chapter, "The Nature of Faith," which has been reprinted in two anthologies of readings in the philosophy of religion, remains unchanged. I am indeed grateful to those fellow workers in this

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

field who have used the first edition of the book, whether to agree with it or to disagree with it. It is their interest in it that has led me to prepare this second edition.

J.H. The Divinity School St. John's Street Cambridge, England March ig66

Preface to the First Edition

THIS book discusses a central problem in the epistemology of religion, namely the problem of the 'nature of religious faith. Its standpoint is philosophically to the "left" and theologically to the "right": that is to say, it looks for enlightenment in the directions of philosophical analysis and theological neo-orthodoxy. For these reasons it may perhaps be regarded as providing a distinctively contemporary introduction to the area of thought with which it is concerned. This introduction is effected, however, not by a systematic textbook treatment, but by the presentation of a continuous argument. Such usefulness as this essay may be found to have will be due in large measure to the generously given criticisms and suggestions of several of the writer's former teachers. A version covering part of the subject matter of the present book, as well as other topics not here included, was originally produced as an academic thesis. My mentor in this was Professor H. H. Price of Oxford, to work under whose guidance was a philosophical experience which, I should like to think, has left its mark on my writing. The present version was criticized chapter by chapter in typescript by Professor H. H. Farmer of Cambridge, Professor A. D. Ritchie and Mr. P. L. Heath of Edinburgh, and Professor T. E. Jessop of Hull, to each of whom I am most

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

grateful for doing me this substantial kindness. Needless to say, the many remaining faults of the work are not attributable to them but represent my own original contribution. Finally, I should like, as an expression of gratitude, to dedicate this book to the office-bearers and members of Bel ford Presbyterian Church, Northumberland, England, whose constant kindness to their Minister and his family is linked in my memory with the writing of the book.

J.H. Ithaca, New York January 1957

Introduction

T H E purpose of this Introduction is to pose the question to which the remainder of the book is an attempted answer. Our subject is the nature of religious faith, or the epistemological character of man's cognition or delusion, apprehension or misapprehension of God. We are inquiring into the manner and structure of the religious person's supposed awareness of the divine. This query is distinct from and relatively independent of the ontological question as to the existence of God. Whether or not there be a God, great numbers of people have reported an experience which they describe as "knowing God" or "being aware of God." We are to be concerned with the mode of this putative knowledge or awareness, a mode which has long been accorded the special name of "faith." We wish to know in what it consists and how it is related to knowing and believing in general. Such an investigation may well seem, to believer, nonbeliever, and disbeliever alike, to be worth undertaking. For the theist the inquiry is an act of fides qucerens intellectum, faith seeking in this case to understand itself. No further motive is required for the venture than man's persistent desire to understand. Just as the epistemologist who believes that men are aware of a physical world will seek to

FAITH AND

KNOWLEDGE

analyze their awareness of that world, so the epistemologist who believes that men are aware of God will seek to analyze their awareness of God. This is the position of the present writer. For the agnostic, on the other hand, the inquiry is a hypothetical one. / / there is a God, how is he known to men? The problem may be pursued simply as a classic philosophical puzzle, or it may be considered with a view to its bearing upon the larger question of divine existence. For although this cannot be settled by epistemological considerations, nevertheless the findings of epistemology are relevant to it. Religious people claim to apprehend God by faith, and epistemological investigation should be able to indicate whether the kind of cognition claimed is such as might reasonably be expected to occur if there is indeed a God to be known. The same inquiry into the nature of religious faith is also open to the philosophical atheist, although for him it will only concern the phenomenology of an illusion. In this book, then, we start from what is for the theist the conviction, for the agnostic the hypothesis, and for the atheist the delusion that God exists. In thus formulating our problem in terms of "God" rather than of "gods" we have already narrowed our concern from religion in general to its monotheistic forms. I propose now to narrow it still further to the ethical monotheism of the Judaic-Christian tradition. For this book is not a comprehensive treatment of the place of faith in the religions of the world, but only an essay on the epistemology of faith as it occurs in that form of religion which constitutes a live option for most of the participants in our Western stream of culture. We shall not, however (except in the last two chapters), be concerned with the religion of the Old and New Testaments as claiming to constitute a source of "special revelation," but only as providing the 2

INTRODUCTION

particular conception of deity to be presupposed in the discussion. This conception of God may be briefly, but for our present purpose sufficiently, characterized as that of the unique infinite personal Spirit, "holy, righteous, wise and loving," who has created the existing universe and who is fashioning human personalities for eternal fellowship with himself through their own free responses to the environmental challenges and opportunities which he appoints. Before setting out to investigate the cognitive meaning of "faith" it will be well to take note of the other main use to which the word is put in the language of religion, and to indicate the relation between this and the use which we are to examine. "Faith" is employed both as an epistemological and as a nonepistemological term. The words fides and fiducia provide conveniently self-explanatory labels for the two uses.1 We speak, on the one hand, of faith (fides) that there is a God and that such and such propositions about him are true. Here "faith" is used cognitively, referring to a state, act, or procedure which may be compared with standard instances of knowing and believing. On the other hand, we speak of faith (fiducia) as a trust, maintained sometimes despite contrary indications, that the divine purpose toward us is wholly good and loving. This is a religious trust which may be compared with trust or confidence in another human person. It is significant that in the Bible faith appears frequently as fiducia and hardly at all as fides. The reality of the divine Being is assumed throughout as a manifest fact. For within the borders of living religion the validity of faith in divine existence, like the validity of sense perception in ori Martin Buber, in Two Types of Faith, trans, by N. P. Goldhawk (London, 1951), uses the Greek pistis and the Hebrew Erhunah (trust) to indica(e the historical sources of these two uses of "faith." B

3

FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE

dinary daily life, is simply taken for granted and acted upon. The biblical writers are not conscious of their belief in the reality of God as being itself an exercise of faith, but only of their confidence in his promises and providence. It is only when the religious believer comes to reflect upon his religion, in the capacity of philosopher or theologian, that he is obliged to concern himself with the noetic status of his faith. When he does so concern himself, it emerges that faith as trust (fiducia) presupposes faith (fides) as cognition of the object of that trust. For in order to worship God and commit ourselves to his providence we must first have faith that he exists. And it is this logically (though not temporally) prior sense of "faith" that we are to investigate in the following chapters. Our primary concern, then, is with faith as cognition, and we shall treat of faith as trust only so far as may be required by our main purpose. There are at the outset objections against such an inquiry to be met from two different, and indeed opposite, quarters. There is first the Scholastic doctrine that the existence of God is capable of logical demonstration; so that faith enters into belief in God only in such as are incapable of following the theistic proofs, and then only as a confidence in the authority of those who have propounded them. This claim is seldom maintained today outside the Roman Church. It is now widely acknowledged that the a priori path to a proof of divine existence had been blocked by Kant's criticism of the ontological and cosmological arguments, while the various a posteriori routes have been fatally undermined by Hume's attack upon the argument from (or to) design. I do not propose, however, to enlarge the field of discussion by seeking to rebut the Scholastics' claim in detail. The problem to be treated here only arises for those—and they are the great majority of both contem4

INTRODUCTION

porary secular philosophers and Protestant theologians— who have abandoned the traditional theistic proofs as being nondemonstrative. For a theology without proofs the central epistemological problem becomes that of the nature of faith—the subject which we are to discuss in these chapters. From some sections of Protestant neo-orthodoxy there has come the contrary objection that faith is an unique divine gift, lying as such outside the scope of human epistemology. Lovell Cocks, for example, writing as an exponent of this standpoint, tells us that "only the believer can say what faith is, and even he cannot anatomise it. For there is nothing he can say of it except that it is the hearing of the Word of God." 2 Faith, he insists, may not be compared with other modes of cognition and made a subject of philosophical study. This would amount to a denial of its divine origin. "To show that faith is a human capacity, continuous with reason, or maybe the very ground of all our apprehension of the real, is to demonstrate 'the validity of religious experience' at the expense of invalidating faith's own verdict upon itself." 8 If this is accepted, it rules out ab initio the investigation upon which we have embarked. We must therefore consider candidly Cocks's objection. His position is this: We may expound the Word that is heard, but we cannot inquire into the nature of the hearing; we cannot compare it with other hearings and seeings and knowings and believings; and this because its object is the unique Word of God. We may cordially endorse Cocks's basic contention that "the human act of faith is the analogue of the divine act of revelation." * But this does not entail that no philosophical account of faith can be given. It would of course be a 2

By Faith Alone (London, 1943), p. 73. * Ibid., p. 75.

8

Ibid., p. 72.

5

FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE

logically possible view that a man's awareness of God is caused by a direct and miraculous divine operation upon the man's mind or brain, without natural preconditions; and on such a doctrine all that Cocks says concerning the impossibility of an epistemology of faith would hold good. However, Cocks is not advocating any such divine-injection theory of faith. Faith is for him a free response to God's gracious self-disclosure. Accordingly he allows that "faith is psychologically continuous with the rest of our experience." 8 But in this case it seems arbitrary for him to assert that no more can be said toward an understanding of faith than that it is the hearing of the Word of God. He has shown nothing to rule out the possibility of epistemological analogies between our awareness of God and, for example, our awareness of other human persons. He has said nothing to exclude the possibility of links between the apprehension of God and the apprehension of his creation, or even the mediation of the former through the latter. He has in fact said nothing that should rightly deter us from attempting an epistemological study of religious faith. The method of investigation will be as follows. Part I will review four types or groups of theory concerning the nature of theistic faith. These are not of course the only theories in the field. But they are, I think, the most important theories, both in themselves and in relation to the standpoint to be developed in Part II. In each case I shall offer criticisms of the theory under discussion, and yet from each of them a significant truth will be carried forward into the next part. In Part II I shall offer for the reader's consideration an account of the nature of religious faith and its relation to human cognition. This account owes much to the thought of a philosopher of religion of the last generation whose works, perhaps because of their difficulty, do not at pres5

lb id., p. 89.

6

INTRODUCTION

ent receive the attention which they both merit and richly reward. John Oman was probably the most original British theologian of the first half of the twentieth century, and his teaching concerning the relation between religion and environment, and the apprehension of the supernatural in and through the natural, provides (as it seems to me) an important key to the problem of religious knowledge. Although I shall not refer to Oman's discussions in detail, either by way of exposition or of criticism, those who are acquainted with The Natural and the Supernatural (1931) will find in the present essay an attempt to work out Oman's basic standpoint in relation to the very different world of contemporary philosophy. Part III will explore some of the main questions raised by contemporary philosophy for this or any theory of the nature of faith. And finally, in Part IV, the theory proposed in Part II will be brought to bear upon the distinctively Christian apprehension of God.

PART I

Faith as Propositional Belief

I

The Thomist-Catholic View of Faith

ACCORDING to the most widespread view of the matter today faith is unevidenced or inadequately evidenced belief. T o quote a typical definition, "The general sense is belief, perhaps based on some evidence, but very firm, or at least more firm, or/and of more extensive content, than the evidence possessed by the believer rationally warrants." * Faith thus consists in believing strongly various propositions, of a theological nature, which the believer does not and cannot know to be true. T o know here is taken to mean either to observe directly or to be able to prove by strict demonstration. Where this is possible, there is no room for faith. It is only that which lies beyond the scope of human knowledge that must be taken, if at all, on faith or trust. When in such a case we do adopt some belief, the lack of rational compulsion to assent is compensated by an act of will, a voluntary leap of trust, so that the 1

C . J. Ducasse, A Philosophical Scrutiny of Religion (New York, 95$)> PP- 73-74- This type of formulation goes back to Kant, with his account of faith (Glaube) as belief on grounds that are subjectively sufficient but objectively insufficient (Critique of Pure Reason, 2d ed., p. 850; trans, by Norman Kemp Smith [London, 1933], p. 646). l

11

FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE

man of faith comes to believe something which he cannot prove or see. This general view of the nature of faith, so far as it goes, would probably be accepted today by many both Catholic and Protestant Christians, as well as by the agnostic and atheist critics of Christianity. For it represents the dominant Western tradition of thought on the subject from the time it was established by St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. It is, accordingly, to Aquinas that we must turn if we are to go to the roots of this tradition. Aquinas discusses faith in all its aspects in his Summa Theologica, the second part of the second part, Questions 1-7.2 His conclusions can be presented under three main headings. 1. First, faith is a propositional attitude: that is to say, it consists in assenting to propositions. This is unambiguously stated, and its implications unambiguously accepted, both by Aquinas and throughout the Catholic tradition that has followed him. Aquinas explains that since "the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower" and "the mode proper to the human intellect is to know the truth by composition and division," 3 man's knowledge of God takes the form of knowing propositions about him, though God himself is of course not a proposition but the supreme Being. There is thus a sense in which the ultimate object of faith is the living God—that is, the propositions which are believed by faith are propositions about him. But the immediate objects of faith are these propositions themselves, and our cognitive relation to God 2

For an attractive contemporary restatement of the Thomist position, see Josef Pieper, Belief and Faith, trans, by R. Winston and C. Winston (New York, 1963, and London, 1964). a Summa Theologica, pt. n, 11, Q. 1, Art. 2. English Dominican translation, revised by Anton C. Pegis, Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York, 1945). 12

THOMIST-CATHOUC VIEW OF FAITH

consists in our believing them. Faith, says Aquinas, occupies a position between knowledge (scientia) and opinion (opinio) and accordingly falls on a common scale with them; and since they are both concerned with propositions, so also is faith. The particular propositions which are the objects of Christian faith are the articles, or distinguishable segments, or Christian truth * which are authoritatively summarized in the Church's creeds.5 Faith, then, for Aquinas, in practice means believing the articles of the creeds. It is necessary for salvation to believe explicitly such central articles as the Incarnation and the Trinity, but apart from these it is sufficient, especially in the case of the unlearned, to believe implicitly, that is, to be ready to believe the articles of the faith if and when they are explicitly presented to one's understanding. At every point, then, faith is concerned with propositions. This is made clear once again in the definition promulgated by the First Vatican Council (1869-1870) as follows: faith "is a supernatural virtue by which we, with the aid and inspiration of the grace of God, believe that the things revealed by Him are true, not because the intrinsic truth of the revealed things has been perceived by the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of God Himself who reveals them, who can neither deceive nor be deceived." e And the object of faith is defined as "all those things . . . which are contained in the written word of God and in tradition, and those which are proposed by the Church, either in a solemn pronouncement or in her ordinary and universal teaching power, to be believed as divinely revealed." 7 2. Second, the propositions which faith believes, or at *Ibid., Q. 1, Art. 6. »Ibid., Q. 1, Art. 9. * Dogmatic Constitution, ch. 3, in Denzinger, Symbolorum, no. 1789. 7 Ibid., no. 179s.

Enchiridion

13

FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE

any rate those that are of faith absolutely, i.e., that can be accepted only on faith, are of a special kind. They express "mysteries"; that is to say, they are propositions whose truth can never (in this life) be directly evident to us, and which therefore have to be accepted on authority. These Christian mysteries are such that the human mind could never discover them for itself, and such that the mind, having come to possess them, cannot fully penetrate and comprehend them. Chief examples of the Christian mysteries are the unity of deity and humanity in the person of Christ, and the nature of God as three in one and one in three. It follows from this that faith is to be distinguished from knowledge or scientia. By scientia Aquinas means the direct and indubitable knowledge that we have when we "see" self-evident truths or when we attain to further truths by strict logical demonstration. In scientia the truth compels assent either by self-evidence or by the force of the demonstration that has led the mind to it: we cannot help —in so far as we are rational—believing that which is to us either self-evident or proved by strict logic. Faith, however, differs from scientia in that the object of faith does not compel assent. For, since the propositions that are believed by faith are mysteries, we cannot directly see or prove their truth. Aquinas says, "Now the intellect assents to a thing in two ways. First, through being moved to assent by its very object, which is known either by itself . . . or through something else already known. [This is scientia.'] . . . Secondly, the intellect assents to something, not through being sufficiently moved to this assent by its proper object, but through an act of choice, whereby it turns voluntarily to one side rather than to the other." 8 This is faith, which is thus characterized as "an act of the 8

Summa

»4

Theologica, pt. 11, 11, Q. 1, Art. 4.

THOMIST-CATHOLIC VIEW OF FAITH

intellect assenting to the truth at the command of the will." • It is accordingly in the nature of the case impossible to have knowledge and faith simultaneously in relation to the same object; knowledge is intellectual vision, whilst faith is firm and undoubting belief concerning that which is not (at any rate in this life) directly knowable. It is of course in some cases possible for two different people to have knowledge and faith respectively in relation to the same object; for it may happen that "what is an object of vision or scientific knowledge (scitum) for one man, even in the state of a wayfarer, is, for another man, an object of faith, because he does not know it by demonstration." 10 But "in one and the same man, about the same object, and in the same respect, scientia is incompatible with either opinion or faith." » As well as being distinguished from knowledge, faith is also to be distinguished from opinion (opinio). Opinion, like faith, is an assent which is not compelled by its object but produced by an act of choice; but it differs from faith in that if the choice "be accompanied by doubt and fear of the opposite side, there will be opinion; while, if there be certainty and no fear of the other side, there will be faith." 12 Faith thus involves an act of commitment which sets aside the uncertainty that would otherwise be present in face of propositions which are not able by themselves to compel assent. Belief "cleaves firmly to one side," 1S whereas in opinion there always remains a certain admixture of active or latent doubt. Thus faith is distinguished from scientia by a difference between their objects: the object of scientia is such as to^ »Ibid., Q. 4, Art. 5. «Ibid., Q. 1, Art. 5. ™Ibid., Q. 2, Art. 1.

10 Ibid., Q. 1, Art. 5. 12 Ibid., Q. 1, Art. 4. 15

FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE

compel the assent of the human mind, whilst the object of faith is not.14 And faith is distinguished from opinion by the subjective or psychological difference that opinion is and faith is not accompanied by an inner feeling of doubt or uncertainty. 3. The third main aspect of Aquinas' doctrine of faith, its voluntary character, follows naturally; faith is belief which is not compellingly evoked by its object but which requires an act of will on the believer's part. We must now ask the following questions: What motivates this decision to believe? Is it an arbitrary and irrational "leap in the dark"? Or are there reasons for it? According to the Thomist-Catholic tradition, there are reasons. For faith, denned as belief in divinely authorized doctrines, presupposes the previous knowledge both that there is a God and that he has authorized the doctrines in question. This condition is acknowledged in Catholic theology, which provides "preambles to faith" designed to identify as divine the utterances which faith then obediently accepts. The preambles begin with the scholastic proofs of God's existence, and then proceed along a well-defined path whose course is summarized by the Catholic theologian, M. C. D'Arcy as follows: It is easy to pass from these conclusions [of the existence and unity of God] to others, for instance that God might reveal further knowledge about Himself if He chose. The question, therefore, now is whether He has communicated such further knowledge to us. We find when we look at the history of the human race that man left to himself has made a bad muddle of religion, and that, nevertheless, he has always longed for some deeper and more intimate relation with and knowledge 14

In this respect faith is less certain than scientia. In another sense however it is more certain than scientia: for its object, which is a divine truth, is in itself more certain than are the mundane objects of human scientia (ibid., Q. 4, Art. 8). 16

THOMIST-CATHOLIC VIEW OF FAITH

of God. This suggests that it is probable that God has come to the aid of mankind and taught the truth about His wishes for mankind and the way to realise them. We now turn to history, and in history we find that the founder of Christianity made the claim to be the messenger from God bringing a revelation of good news, and that the Catholic Church has unfailingly reiterated that claim. The next step is to examine that claim, since it is not impossible and is, indeed, even probable. An examination of it can end only in one conclusion, that it is made out. The historical evidence, the previous history of the Jewish people, the holiness and authority of Christ, which rule out the hypothesis that He could have been a dupe or deceiver, the miracles He worked, which are too closely bound up with the narrative of His teaching and character to be interpolations, the Resurrection, which has never successfully been gainsaid—all these facts can lead the reasonable inquirer to only one conclusion: Christ is the messenger of God or God. This once granted, the rest follows irresistibly.15 And so the conclusion is reached that the Roman hierarchy, culminating in the Pope, is the appointed guardian and teacher of the truths which God has imparted. If we now ask more particularly whether these preambula fidei are held to be rationally compelling, so that anyone who examines them and who is not prejudiced against the truth must acknowledge them, or whether, on the contrary, some degree of faith enters into their acceptance, no satisfactorily unambiguous answer is forthcoming. On the one hand it is held, in agreement with nonCatholic critics and commentators, that the preambles to faith must make out their case before the court of human reason. This was pointed out, for example, by the Protestant John Locke. He defines faith, in agreement with the scholastic tradition, as "the assent to any proposition, not 15

M. C. D'Arcy, The Nature

of Belief (London, 1945), pp.

224-225.

17

FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE

. . . made out by the deductions of reason, but upon the credit of the proposer, as coming from God in some extraordinary way of communication." 16 He then points out that, within the terms of this definition, our reason must establish that a particular proposition has in fact come from God before our faith can have- anything to exercise itself upon, and that therefore the certainty attaching to faith can never exceed that of the reasoning which preceded it: "though faith be founded on the testimony of God (who cannot lie) revealing any proposition to us, yet we cannot have an assurance of the truth of its being a divine revelation greater than our own rationally acquired knowledge; since the whole strength of the certainty depends upon our knowledge that God revealed it." 17 This idea is not resisted, but is on the contrary emphasized by many Catholic writers. For example Canon George D. Smith, writing on "Faith and Revealed Truth" in the composite work The Teaching of the Catholic Church, describes the evidence of miracles as "peremptory," and says: The human mind, then, is able to learn with certainty the existence of God; is able, by the proper investigation of the facts, to conclude that Christ is the bearer of a divine message, that he founded an infallible Church for the purpose of propagating that message; and finally, by the process indicated in apologetics, to conclude that the Catholic Church is that divinely appointed teacher of revelation. These things, I say, can be known and proved, and by those who have the requisite leisure, opportunity and ability, are actually known and proved with all the scientific certainty of which the subject is patient. The preambles of faith, therefore, rest upon the solid ground of human reason.18 16

Essay concerning the Human Understanding, sec. 2. 17 18 Ibid., sec. 5. New York, 1927, I, 13. 18

bk. iv, ch. 18,

THOMIST-CATHOLIC VIEW OF FAITH

Again, Aquinas, discussing the question whether the demons have faith (for "Even the demons believe—and shudder," James 2:19), says that they do, but that their faith is no credit to them since it is extorted by the evidence. "The demons are, in a way, compelled to believe by the evidence of signs, and so their will deserves no praise for their belief. . . . Rather are they compelled to believe by their natural intellectual acumen." Indeed, "The very fact that the signs of faith are so evident, that the demons are compelled to believe, is displeasing to them." 19 These statements seem to imply that there are coercive historical reasons for believing that the Church's message has the status of divine revelation. On the other hand in his main discussion of the nature of faith Aquinas teaches that faith is a virtue precisely because it is not compelled. We have already noted his stress upon the part played by the will in the genesis of faith. Faith is belief which is not coercively evoked by intrinsic evidence but which is produced by a voluntary adhesion to divine revelation. The preambula fidei constitute reasons providing a motive for faith, but these reasons are not so compelling as to undermine the believer's freedom, and therefore merit, in believing. "The believer has sufficient motive for believing, for he is moved by the authority of divine teaching confirmed by miracles, and, what is more, by the inward instigation of the divine invitation; and so he does not believe lightly. He has not, however, sufficient reason for scientific knowledge [ad sciendum] and hence he does not lose the merit." 20 The act of belief is thus sufficiently evidenced to be rational and yet not so overwhelmingly evidenced as to cease to be a free and meritorious act. It is indeed required by the structure of Aquinas' ™Summa Theologica, pt. 11, 11, Q. 5, Art. 2. 2« Ibid., Q. 2, Art. 9. c

19

FAITH AND

KNOWLEDGE

theology as a whole, in which faith has its place as one of the three theological virtues, that faith be recognized as involving a responsible act of the human will. This recognition, however, is not easily reconciled with the claim that the demons are compelled by the visible evidences, even against their will, to acknowledge the Christian mysteries as divine revelations. Aquinas' only suggestion for harmonizing these two divergent exigencies of his theology occurs in connection with the same problem of demonic faith. He here distinguishes two motives for faith. "Now, that the will moves the intellect to assent may be due to two causes. First, by the fact that the will is ordered towards the good; and in this way, to believe is a praiseworthy action. Secondly, because the intellect is convinced that it ought to believe what is said, though that conviction is not based on the evidence in the thing said [but on external evidences]. . . . Accordingly, we must say that faith is commended in the first sense in the faithful of Christ. And in this way faith is not in the demons, but only in the second way, for they see many evident signs, whereby they recognize that the teaching of the Church is from God." :n The two motives then are the implicit direction of the will or the personality toward the Good or God, which occurs as a gift of divine grace, and the compulsion of the evidence of miracles, prophecy, and so forth. But this distinction does not remove the contradiction which Aquinas has built into his doctrine. On the one hand, in discussing human faith he teaches that the historical evidence for the revelatory status of the Church's teaching does not compel assent, and that faith motivated by assent accordingly remains free and meritorious; but, on the other hand, in discussing demonic faith he teaches that this same evidence does compel assent -'i Ibid., Q. 5, Art. 2. 20

THOMIST-CATHOLIC VIEW OF

FAITH

even in minds which are wickedly resistant to it. The contradiction remains in full force. Aquinas' dilemma is caused by the necessity under which he labors to account for the epistemological condition of the demons as beings who believe God's revelation by faith rather than by sight, but whose faith is not meritorious since they are unqualifiedly evil and condemned creatures. The only effective solution would seem to be to jettison the demons, in the hope that they are mythological, and thus set aside the epicycle of theory that was developed to accommodate their faith. If this were done we could re-, gard Aquinas' discussion of human belief as representing his central contribution to the epistemology of faith. His teaching is, then, that Christian faith is a voluntary acceptance of the Church's doctrine, not because this can be directly seen by our intellects to be true, but because the historical evidence of prophecy and miracles leads (without coercing) a mind disposed toward goodness and truth to accept that teaching as being of divine origin. Many will account it a virtue that the Thomist-Catholic position makes its primary appeal to human reason, turning to ecclesiastical authority only after this authority has been accredited by reason. The Church's claim to be believed is based upon historical evidences which are to be assessed by the exercise of reason. But this virtue carries with it the danger that the court to which the Church thus appeals, the court of human reason, may not return a favorable verdict. Indeed, if the jury is mankind at large, the situation is that Catholics are convinced of the Roman Church's credentials, whilst the rest of humanity is not. Further, the appeal to reason must in practice be an appeal to the reason of individuals. As such, however, it is in grave danger, from the Catholic point of view, of being in effect an appeal to individual private judgment. 21

FAITH A N D

KNOWLEDGE

A common reply to this suggestion is that although private judgment is necessary to enable us to recognize a divine revelation, the revelation once accepted is found to be intrinsically authoritative and self-guaranteeing. In Cardinal Newman's simile, the lamp of private judgment may be required to enable us to find our way; but once we have reached home we no longer have need of it. Newman's analogy, however, is misleading. Once a traveler has safely reached his destination, it does not matter by what route he has arrived: he does not suddenly dissolve into thin air if it is discovered that he has come by an unauthorized path. The validity of a reasoned conclusion, however, is not correspondingly independent of the "route" by which it has been reached. If the arguments which have led to a conclusion are found to be invalid, it is left unsupported and must either collapse or be established afresh upon another basis. Again, rational argument has been likened to a ladder by which we climb up to a position of faith, but which can then be dispensed with. But to reach a conclusion by reason and then to renounce the authority of reason would be more like cutting off the branch on which one is sitting. The steps of an argument are not like the steps of a ladder: they are more akin to the links of a chain from which something is suspended. And a chain of reasoning can be no stronger than its weakest link; probable arguments never suffice to establish a certain conclusion. Thus we can never properly be more certain of the truth of a revealed proposition than of the soundness of our reasons for classifying it as revealed. We cannot claim that the revelation once accepted is self-guaranteeing, for (as John Locke pointed out) its guarantee is valid only if it is indeed a genuine revelation, and whether this is so must first be decided by reason.22 22

On the question of the rational coerciveness or otherwise of the premabula fidei, and their relation to the act of faith, there have 22

THOMIST-CATHOLIC VIEW OF FAITH

We now have the Thomist-Catholic analysis of faith before us. To introduce labels which will draw attention to the three main aspects of it which we have noted, we will say that it is intellectualist, in that it regards faith as a propositional attitude; fideistic, in that it regards faith and knowledge as mutually exclusive; and voluntaristic, in that it sees faith as the product of a conscious act of will. These three elements have remained linked together in Catholic thought down to the present day. In recent writings from the more liberal wing of Catholic thought an impulse is indeed evident toward a less rigidly intellectualist view. There is apparent a desire to escape from the older image of faith as merely the acceptance of theological propositions, and to draw into the doctrine of faith the "I-Thou" encounter between God and man which has been so much stressed in modern Protestant theology, partly under the influence of the Jewish thinker, Martin Buber. Thus Eugene Joly in the volume on faith in the TwentiethCentury Encyclopedia of Catholicism announces that his discussion is to be concerned "simply and solely with meeting the living God," 23 and at one point he characterizes faith as "a personal encounter with the living God." 2* This sounds very different from the traditional view of faith as a believing of theological propositions on the authority of God who has revealed them. At the end of the book, however, Joly offers as normative the definition of faith promulgated by the First Vatican Council and quoted above on page 13, with its straight Thomist docbeen several writings by English Catholic theologians who are fully aware of the difficulty noticed above, e.g., Dom Mark Pontifex, Religious Assent (London, 1927); M. C. D'Arcy, The Nature of Belief (London, 1945); Dom Illtyd Trethowan, Certainty (London, '948). 23 Qu'est-ce que croire? (Paris, 1956), trans, by Dom Illtyd Trethowan as What is Faith? (New York, 1958), p. 7. 24 Ibid., p. 86. 23

FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE

trine expressed in uncompromisingly intellectualist terms. In expounding it Joly himself falls back into the ways of thinking which it embodies and from which he fails to escape. "God," he says, "has revealed all that it was necessary for us to know about him and about his plans for the world. . . . The apostles, the hearers and witnesses of Christ, have handed on this revelation to the Church which has the mission of faithfully preserving and infallibly interpreting the revelation completed by Jesus Christ. . . . We admit [a doctrine] because Christ has declared it to us and because the Church has infallibly transmitted to us these words of Christ and their proper interpretation." 25 In this crucial discussion in Joly's book, to which the preceding discussions were "approaches," 26 there is no reference to the divine-human encounter or to meeting the living God; faith has reverted to its traditional character as belief in the dogmas of the Church. Again, even so impressively bold and independent a Catholic as the late Father Gustave Weigel, S.J., said in his last book, "To a Catholic, the word 'faith' conveys the notion of an intellectual assent to the content of revelation as true because of the witnessing authority of God the Revealer. . . . Faith is the Catholic's response to an intellectual message communicated by God." 27 We will now note briefly the wider context of theological thought within which this intellectualist understanding of faith has its place. Faith and revelation are correlative terms, faith being the cognitive aspect of man's response to divine revelation, so that a conception of the nature of 25

2e Ibid., pp. 131-132. Ibid., p. 130. Faith and Understanding in America (New York, 1959), p. 1. Note however Weigel's description of faith as "an intellectual act which is simultaneously an orientation of man towards ihe revealing Lord," in his contribution to the New York University Institute of Philosophy in i960, Religious Experience and Truth, edited by Sidney Hook (New York, 1961), p. 104. 27

24

THOMIST-CATHOLIC VIEW OF FAITH

faith develops in partnership with a corresponding conception of revelation. The Thomist-Catholic notion of faith is accompanied by a view of revelation as the divine communication to man of the truths, belief in which comprises faith. In the words of The Catholic Encyclopedia, "Revelation may be defined as the communication of some truth by God to a rational creature through means which are beyond the ordinary course of nature." 28 God has communicated the knowledge that is necessary to man's salvation, first through the prophets of Israel and then in a fuller and final way through Christ, and this knowledge has ever since been preserved and propagated by the Church. The Bible finds its place within this scheme of thought as the book in which the saving truths are written down and made available, under the Church's guardianship, to all mankind. This view requires of course a theory of the Bible's ultimate divine authorship and hence its verbal inerrancy, such as was laid down in the pronouncement of the First Vatican Council concerning the books of the Bible that "having been written by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author." 29 (Whether God's revelation is wholly contained within the Bible, or whether there is essential supplementary knowledge in the oral traditions of the Church seems, in the light of the Second Vatican Council, to be at present an open question for Catholics.) These various principles also determine the ThomistCatholic account of the relation between faith and reason. According to this account there are two sets of theological truths: those that are accessible to human reason and that can be established by philosophical demonstration (such as that God exists and that he is one), and those exceeding 28 New York, 1912, XIII, 1. 29 Dogmatic Constitution, ch. 2. Denzinger, Enchiridion. bolorum, no. 1789.

25

Sym-

FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE

the scope of reason (such as that God is triune). The former constitute the corpus of natural theology and the latter of revealed theology; and the former are grasped by reason, the latter by faith. The truths of natural theology, however, as well as being rationally available, are also presented for acceptance by faith. For otherwise many would fail to attain them, being too unlearned, too busy or too indolent to pursue the abstruse metaphysical reasonings required for a philosophical knowledge of God. Again, those few who did come to know God by the way of rational reflection would arrive at that knowledge only late in life, since metaphysical reasoning presupposes considerable previous training and study. And finally, the conclusions of human reasoning are subject to a certain suspicion in the minds of nonphilosophers because of the possibility of errors in reasoning, and therefore the truths of natural theology are always treated by many with a certain reserve. For all these reasons "it was necessary that the unshakeable certitude and pure truth concerning divine things should be presented to men by way of faith." 30 The Thomist-Catholic understanding of faith as the believing of revealed truths likewise determines a view of the nature of theological thinking. The theologian's task is not to create doctrines as a philosopher may create metaphysical theories. The Christian truths are already known, having been given in revelation, and the theologian's task is to systematize them, expound them, and guard them from erroneous and misleading modes of exposition. The central thread which holds these conceptions together is the intellectualist assumption which restricts the entire discussion to propositional truths: revelation is God's communicating of such truths to man, faith is man's obedient believing of them; and they are written down in the Bible and systematized by the theologians. This intel30

Summa contra Gentiles, bk. i, ch. 4, par. 5. 26

THOMIST-CATHOLIC VIEW OF FAITH

lectualist assumption is to be found not only throughout the greater part of Christian thought, past and present, but also in most of the criticism of Christianity, which has not unnaturally been a reaction against the dominant Christian view. For example, Julian Huxley in his Religion without Revelation speaks of "the hypothesis of revelation," which is "that the truth has been revealed in a set of god-given commandments, or a holy book, or divinelyinspired ordinances." 31 Again, Walter Kaufmann, in his hard-hitting Critique of Religion and Philosophy, reveals his understanding of the Christian concept of revelation when he says, "Even if we grant, for the sake of the present argument, that God exists and sometimes reveals propositions to mankind. . . ." 32 And again, Richard Robinson, in An Atheist's Values, a book often of singular beauty, defines faith as "assuming a certain belief without reference to its probability," and as "belief reckless of evidence and probability." He therefore urges the virtue of undermining faith: "We ought to do what we can towards eradicating the evil habit of believing without regard to evidence." 33 Is there any alternative account of religious faith which does not proceed from this widespread intellectualist assumption? An alternative has always been implicit in the piety of ordinary religious men and women within both Judaism and Christianity, and has now been made explicit in the main streams of twentieth-century Protestant theology. According to this alternative view revelation consists, not in the divine communication of religious truths, but in the self-revealing actions of God within human history. God has acted above all in that special stream of history which Christianity sees as Heilsgeschichte, holy history: beginning with the calling out of the Hebrews as a people 31

Revised ed.; London, 1957, p. 207. 33 82 New York, 1958, p. 89. Oxford, 1964, pp. 120, 121.

27

FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE

in covenant with their God; continuing through their stormy career, during which God was seeking through events and circumstances, as interpreted to them by the prophets, to lead his people into a fuller knowledge of himself; and culminating in the Christ event, in which God's love for mankind was seen directly at work on earth in the actions of Jesus. Revelation, considered as completed communication, consists in the conjunction of God's activity within our human experience, with the human recognition that the events in question are God's actions. As William Temple wrote, "there is event and appreciation; and in the coincidence of these the revelation consists." 34 The events are always in themselves ambiguous, capable of being seen either simply as natural happenings or as happenings through which God is acting towards us. For example, in the prophetic interpretation of history embodied in the Old Testament records, events which would be described by a secular historian as the outcome of political, economic, sociological and geographical factors are seen as incidents in a dialogue which continues through the centuries between God and his people. Again, the central figure of the New Testament could be regarded in purely human terms, as a political agitator or as a dangerous critic of the religious establishment, but could also be seen and worshiped as the one in whom the world encounters the divine Son made man. Thus, when the revelatory events are seen and responded to as divine actions, man exists in a conscious relation to, and with knowledge of, God: and this total occurrence is revelation. Faith is an element within this totality in that it is the human recognition of ambiguous events as revelatory, and hence the experiencing of them as mediating the presence and activity of God. So understood, revelation is not a divine promulgation z* Nature, Man and God (London, 1934), p. 314. 28

THOMIST-CATHOLIC VIEW OF

FAITH

of propositions, nor is faith a believing of such propositions. The theological propositions formulated on the basis of revelation have a secondary status. They do not constitute the content of God's self-revelation but are human and therefore fallible verbalizations, constructed to aid both the integration of our religious experience into our own minds and the communication of religious experience to others. The formulation and approval of doctrine is thus a work not of faith but of reason—reason operating upon the data of revelation. The function of faith in this sphere is to establish the premises, not the conclusions, of theological reasoning. According to this view the two objects of "natural" and "revealed" theology, God's existence and God's revelation, merge into one. The divine Being and the divine selfcommunication are known in a single apprehension which is the awareness of God as acting self-revealingly toward us. The believer does not make two separate acts of faith, nor an act of reason and an act of faith, directed respectively to divine existence and to divine revelation. He claims to know "that God exists" because he knows God as existing and having to do with him in the events of the world and of his own life. It would be an oversimplification to say that this nonpropositional, heilsgeschichtliche conception of the revelation-faith complex represents the Reformed in distinction from the Catholic point of view. In the early days of the Reformation, as part of the great upsurge of direct, personal religious experience and piety which in the sixteenth century burst the limits of a decadent and legalistic scholasticism, the foundations were laid for a nonpropositional doctrine of faith. For Luther, faith was not primarily acceptance of the Church's dogmas but a wholehearted response of trust and gratitude toward the divine grace revealed in Jesus Christ. Indirectly it included acceptance 29

FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE

of all the fundamental Christian beliefs; but Luther's primary emphasis was upon faith as a total reliance upon the omnipotent goodness of God. In a distinction that Luther himself drew, faith is not belief that but belief in.35 But Protestant theology suffered a rapid decline after Luther's insight. Calvin, the great systematizer of Reformed theology, represents an intermediate position, with his definition of faith as "a firm and certain knowledge of God's benevolence towards us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds [in the Bible] and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit." 36 But after Calvin there was a decisive relapse into a Protestant scholasticism as narrowly intellectualist as that of the Thomist-Catholic tradition. In the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647, for instance, it is said of "saving faith" that "By this faith, a Christian believeth to be true whatsoever is revealed in the word, for the authority of God himself speaking therein"; 37 and more than two hundred years later a Calvinist theologian was writing as though he were strict Thomist: "And we define faith . . . to be the assent of the mind to truth, upon the testimony of God, conveying knowledge to us through supernatural channels. . . . Reason establishes the fact that God speaks, but when we know what he says, we believe it because he says it." 38 In more recent times the notion of divinely revealed propositions has virtually disappeared from Protestant theology, being replaced by the idea of revelation through history.39 But among philosophers discussing the problems of religion, the basic intellectualist assumption that 35 Werke 36

( W e i m a r ed.), V I I , 215.

37 Institutes, bk. in, ch. 2, par. 7. Ch. 14, par. 2. 38 A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology (London, 1863), pp. 49-50. 39 On this development see John Baillie, The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought (New York, 1956).

SO

THOMIST-CATHOLIC VIEW OF

FAITH

faith means primarily and centrally the holding of unevidenced beliefs has continued to operate and has produced some of the theories of faith which we shall examine in the next two chapters.

3*

2

Modern Voluntarist Views

of Faith T H E way of thinking to be considered in this chapter is that which stresses the part played by the will in the act or state of faith. W e are familiar from recent works of philosophical theology with such statements as the following: Faith is distinguished from the entertainment of a probable proposition by the fact that the latter can be a completely theoretic affair. Faith is a "yes" of self-commitment, it does not turn probabilities into certainties; only a sufficient increase in the weight of evidence could do that. But it is a volitional response which takes us out of the theoretic attitude. 1 O r again: The distinctive feature of faith, in contrast with mere belief, is the element in it of will and action. . . . Faith is not merely the assent that something is true, it is our readiness to act on what we believe true. 2 1 D. E. Emmett, The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking 1945), p. 140. 2 S. M. Thompson, A Modern Philosophy of Religion

»955)> P- 7432

(London, (Chicago,

MODERN VOLUNTARIST VIEWS OF FAITH

Behind such statements there lies a long ancestry, going back even beyond St. Thomas Aquinas, with his description of faith as an act of the intellect moved by the will. We shall perhaps best see this standpoint in its relation to contemporary questionings if we study two very different modern writers who offer variations on the voluntarist theme. These are William James, the apostle of pragmatism, with his famous doctrine of the Will to Believe; and F. R. Tennant, the Cambridge theologian and author of the massive Philosophical Theology. In each case I shall preface the discussion with an expository "pilot scheme," treating the same issue in brief as it appears in the writings of a precursor. Our pilot scheme for the Will to Believe is Pascal's "Wager." 3 In considering this remarkable passage4 we should, in justice to Pascal, remember two facts. First, the argument of the Wager is not proposed as a normal path to belief in God; it is rather a final and desperate attempt to move the almost invincibly apathetic unbeliever. And second, the Pensees as published consists of notes written by Pascal only for his own future use when preparing a work in which, in its finished form, there would no doubt have 3 The earliest appearance of the Wager idea would seem to be in Arnobius, who asks, "is it not more rational, of two things uncertain and hanging in doubtful suspense, rather to believe that which carries with it some hopes, than that which brings none at all? For in the one case there is no danger, if that which is said to be at hand should prove vain and groundless; in the other there is the greatest loss, even the loss of salvation, if, when the time has come, it be shown that there was nothing false in what was declared" (Contra nationes, bk. n, sec. 4, translation in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. VI). Cf. Margaret Leigh, "A Christian Sceptic of the Fourth Century: Some Parallels between Arnobius and Pascal," Hibbert Journal, XIX (1920-1921). * Pensees, 451. In Oeuvres Completes, ed. J. Chevalier (Paris, 1954), pp. 1212 ff.; in Brunschvicg's ed., no. 233.

33

FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE

been safeguards and qualifications of various kinds. We shall, then, be noting an important idea which Pascal formulated in the course of his reflections, but one which does not by itself represent his central thinking concerning theistic belief. The Wager passage assumes that from the point of view of our cognitive capacities the problem of divine existence must be classed with the question whether a coin will fall head or tail at a particular throw. It is a matter which the unaided reason has no means of deciding. He thus likens the choice between belief and disbelief to a game of chance. In our cosmic gambling den we cannot avoid wagering either that God does or does not exist. How then are we to decide? "Pesons le gain et la perte, en prenant choix que Dieu est. Estimons ces deux cas: si vous gagnez, vous gagnez tout; si vous perdez, vous ne perdez rien. Gagez done qu'il est, sans hesiter." 8 For you will then win eternal life and felicity if you are right and lose next to nothing if you are wrong. Make a wager by which you can lose nothing and may gain everything. The system is infallible! And indeed if God is conceived on the model of a touchy Eastern potentate, Pascal's Wager might well be a rational form of insurance. For to postulate such a God is to suppose that we live in a place which some declare to be the court of an all-powerful despot. He is said to be invisible but inordinately jealous for homage, and we are advised to make a slight bow to the apparently empty throne whenever we pass it. If he does not exist after all, we lose little, while if he does exist, we may thereby save our lives. The fact that the Wager translates so readily into somewhat barbarous earthly terms reveals its essentially nonreligious character. It is its implied conception of the deity that has shocked many readers since the Wager's first pub6 Ibid., p. 1214. Cf. James Cargile, "Pascal's Wager," Philosophy, July, 1966.

34

MODERN VOLUNTARIST VIEWS OF FAITH

lication. However, William James has used the same basic idea in the interests of an understanding of the divine nature more consonant with Christian theism; and to this we now turn. In his famous essay The Will to Believe? supplemented by a previous essay, The Sentiment of Rationality (1879), William James offered a defense of faith which has had a wide and continuing influence in many circles. His teaching in these writings represented a stage in his movement towards the fully developed pragmatist philosophy. When James applies his later doctrine to religion, he does so only in very general terms, discussing belief in "the salvation of the world" instead of the prior and more precise issue of divine existence.7 But his earlier "will to believe" argument, which we are to examine here, is worked out both fully and persuasively. The kind of faith of which it is a defense is the kind which is least obviously defensible. It is not quite that described by the schoolboy who said that "Faith is when you believe, 'cos you want to, something which you know ain't true." But neither is it, on a superficial view, greatly removed from this; for it consists in treating as certain a proposition which you know (or believe) is not certain. "Faith," says James, "is synonymous with working hypothesis. . . . [The believer's] intimate persuasion is that the odds in its favour are strong enough to warrant him in acting all along on the assumption of its truth." 8 Again, "Faith means belief [strong enough to determine action] in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible." 9 Before examining James's main position, we must refer 6

First published in The New World, V, no. 18 (June, 1896), and reprinted in The Will to Believe and Other Essays (New York, »897)''Pragmatism (New York, 1907), ch. 8. 8 The Will to Believe and Other Essays, p. 95. »Ibid., p. 90. D

35

FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE

to a subsidiary question, of some intrinsic importance, which he raises in the course of his discussion. He points out that "there are . . . cases where faith creates its own verification"; 10 there are truths which "cannot become true till our faith has made them so." X1 Such cases are not infrequent in ordinary life. The performance of any feat requiring a steady nerve is largely dependent upon the agent's own belief that his powers are adequate for the task. Tightrope walking, for example, must be a supreme act of "faith." On such occasions the proposition "I can do this" is true if it is believed sufficiently wholeheartedly, and false if it is not. Faith creates factl A like phenomenon is found in recovery from illnesses. It is sometimes the case that if a patient loses hope, he will relapse, whereas if he firmly expects to recover, he is likely to do so. And the speed of recuperation is often related to the strength of the patient's own faith in his recovery. Prevenient or creative faith also plays an important part in the sphere of personal relationships. Such a fact as A's liking for B may depend partly upon B's faith that A likes him, and upon his resulting courtesy, trust, and reciprocal affection. As James says, "The previous faith on my part in your liking's existence is in such cases what makes your liking come. But if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt, as the absolutists say, ad extorquendum assensum meum, ten to one your liking never comes." 12 Finally as James also points out: A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure 10

Ibid., p. 97.

36

" Ibid., p. 96.

12 ibid., pp. 23-24.

MODERN VOLTJNTARIST VIEWS OF FAITH

consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned.13 And he concludes: "Where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is 'The lowest kind of immorality' into which a thinking being can fall." " Although these examples seem undeniably real, the suggestion that a proposition can be made true by the purely external circumstance that someone believes it, is on the face of it remarkable and deserving of further investigation. If such propositions always referred to the future their oddness might be regarded as only apparent. For it is a familiar fact that our beliefs affect our actions and that our actions in turn cause changes in the world. But, unfortunately, self-verifying beliefs do not always refer to the future. They not only take such forms as "I shall succeed in doing X" but also such forms as "I can do X." And whereas the first of these statements appears to be about the future, the second appears to be about the present. And yet a proposition describing present fact must, surely, already be true or false irrespective of whether it is believed. The solution of the problem is, I think, that the word "can" performs here a hypothetical-prophetic rather than a descriptive function. "I can" means (in this context) "I shall if I try." Thus "I can do X" is a proposition about any future attempt I may make to accomplish X. And that this proposition should be true if I believe it (and go on believing it up to and into the moment of action), but false if I disbelieve it, would be no more odd than the fact that the proposition "It will rain here tomorrow" is true if certain meteorological events are now occurring (and con™lbid., p. 24.

i*Ibid., p. 25.

37

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tinue to develop according to a certain pattern), and false if they are not. There is then, on reflection, no serious logical puzzle involved in the suggestion that faith may sometimes have the power to produce its own verification. But while James's doctrine of creative faith is thus far well founded, it is of limited application. It is relevant to beliefs about matters which depend wholly or partly upon processes governed by ourselves. But—to pass directly to the belief with which we are specially concerned—can it apply to the conviction that there is a God? Can human faith turn an "atheous" into a theistic universe? It would of course be possible to construct in thought a metaphysical system within which this could happen; but in terms of the Judaic-Christian view of God as Creator (with which James was working) such a possibility does not arise. Human faith cannot create the Creator of the human race. Faith may perhaps be required for the discovery of God— this, as we shall see, is James's central contention—but it cannot be required to bring God into existence. The part which, as James has noted, is played by the faith-attitude in human personal relationships is not strictly relevant, for such faith does not create the person of the friend but only makes that person friendly. It might be argued that the faith-attitude has a like part to play in the relationship between man and God. But this would not be faith making theism true. On the contrary, such faith could only be effective if theism were already true; for otherwise there would be nothing in the cosmos to respond to our advances of trust and worship. Precursive faith, then, is a real and important phenomenon, but it does not bear directly upon theistic belief. James himself does not appear to have been entirely clear as to this. He attaches his mention of precursive faith to his main Will to Believe argument as though they were adjoining links in a single logical chain. But in fact the 38

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two topics are distinct. T h e only justification for the reference to precursive faith in his essay would be the pedagogic one that it might serve to break down a reader's nonrational prejudice against the faith-attitude, and so prepare his m i n d for the argument proper. James opens his main argument from the same premise of epistemological agnosticism as Pascal. Nothing can be gained, he says, by waiting for proof that God does or does not exist, for such proof may never be forthcoming. But nevertheless the issue is of tremendous concern to us; there is n o more important question than that concerning the reality of God. A n d "we cannot escape the issue by remaining sceptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve." 15 T h e decision between belief and disbelief is thus a "living, momentous, and forced option," and one which nevertheless cannot be decided by rational enquiry. Whichever way we decide, we r u n a risk. " I n either case we act, taking our life in our hands." 16 If we believe, we risk accepting falsehood; if we disbelieve, we risk losing the truth and the practical good which in this case accompanies it. Which of these risks should we accept? T h e skeptic is he who prefers to risk losing the truth: Better risk loss of truth than chance of error, that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field. T o preach scepticism to us as a duty until "sufficient evidence" for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true. It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only 15

Ibid., p. 26.

16

Ibid., p. 30.

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intellect with one passion laying down its law. And by what, forsooth, is die supreme wisdom of this passion warranted? Dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear? I, for one, can see no proof; and I simply refuse obedience to the scientist's command to imitate his kind of option, in a case where my own stake is important enough to give me the right to choose my own form of risk. If religion be true and the evidence for it be still insufficient, I do not wish . . . to forfeit my sole chance in life of getting upon the winning side, that chance depending, of course, on my willingness to run the risk of acting as if my passional need of taking the world religiously might be prophetic and right. 17 H e is asserting, in other words, our right to believe at our own risk whatever we feel an inner need to believe. One further passage should be quoted (from The Sentiment of Rationality) to underline the essentially sporting nature of James's attitude to these ultimate issues of belief: Of course I yield to my belief in such a case as this or distrust it, alike at my peril, just as I do in any of the great practical decisions of life. If my inborn faculties are good, I am a prophet; if poor, I am a failure; nature spews me out of her mouth, and there is an end of me. In the total game of life we stake our persons all the while; and if in its theoretic part our person will help us to a conclusion, surely we should also stake them there, however inarticulate they may be. 18 T h i s is the essence of the "will to believe" or, as it would more accurately be called, the "right to believe," 19 argument. James adds, however, a further consideration in favor of the reasonableness of theistic belief. H e points out that the relevant live option for most of us in the West 18 " Ibid., pp. 26-27. Ibid., p. 94. 19 In a letter James said that his essay "should have been called by the less unlucky title the Right to Believe" (The Letters of William James, II [London, 1920], 207).

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concerns the existence of a personal God and that in order to know persons we have to be willing to make a venture of faith and to meet them halfway. He says: The universe is no longer a mere It to us, but a Thou, if we are religious; and any relation that may be possible from person to person might be possible here. . . . To take a trivial illustration: just as a man who in a company of gentlemen made no advances, asked a warrant for every concession, and believed no one's word without proof, would cut himself off by such churlishness from all the social rewards that a more trustworthy spirit would earn, so here, one who should shut himself up in snarling logicality and try to make the gods extort his recognition willy-nilly, or not get it at all, might cut himself off for ever from his only opportunity of making the gods' acquaintance. . . . I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.20 All valuable personal relationship, James points out, is genetically based upon faith, upon treating others in a more trustful way than the evidence currently warrants. If we were never willing to trust people in this manner, we should never find out whether they are in fact trustworthy. Without an element of venture, of willingness to anticipate proof, such relationships as love and friendship could never arise. Indeed, we might say, elaborating James's brief discussion, that knowledge in the personal sphere consists precisely in faith which has been put into practice and verified in our experience. But clearly, if this is so, we cannot have the verification without the experiment. We cannot achieve a tested and verified faith if we refuse to 20

Ibid., pp. 27-28. 4i

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begin with an untested and unverified faith; we cannot enjoy the flower if we never plant the seed. T o decline faith, in the personal sphere, is thus to decline knowledge also, for knowledge here is simply faith which has been acted upon and found to be true. But while this consideration, drawn from the character of the "I-Thou" world, is both sound and important, it adds little to James's "right to believe" argument. It merely underlines the fact that if the theistic hypothesis is true, we shall miss the truth by refusing faith. It thus makes our loss more certain if theism should "win" without our having backed it. It does not, however, increase the odds in favor of that hypothesis. The argument from the nature of personal relationship is important for the neighboring topic of faith as trust (fiducia), but not for that of faith as cognition (fides). We now have before us the full range of James's discussion and can proceed to the stage of criticism. The first thing to be said about this view of faith is that it is not the view of the ordinary religious believer. The ordinary believer does not regard his faith as a prudent gamble. He regards it as in some sense knowledge of God. He does not think it possible, except as a purely verbal concession, that God might not exist. His attitude is thus entirely different from that of the gambler. For the latter is conscious that he is dealing in uncertainties, while the man of faith is convinced that he has met with certainty. Keeping, however, within the borders of James's theory itself, we may note' some of the consequences which would follow from an attempt to take his argument seriously. It would, I think, be found to prove too much. For it authorizes us to believe ("by faith") any proposition, not demonstrably false, which it might be advantageous to us, in this world or another, to have accepted. It is true that James tries to narrow our license for gratuitous belief to 42

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"live options," i.e., to propositions which we already have some inclination to adopt. But surely such a restriction is unwarranted. For whether or not a belief constitutes a "live option" to a particular mind has no bearing upon its truth or falsity. All sorts of accidental circumstances may predispose us toward a proposition; the mere fact that it is widely held in the society around us is often sufficient. For a Chinese, Confucianism (or rather, today, Communism) tends to be a live option; for an Arab, Mohammedanism; and for a Briton or an American, Christianity: and each religion to the exclusion of the others. But it would clearly be absurd to suppose that the truth varies geographically with the liveliness of the local options. If we are rational, then, and have been convinced by The Will to Believe, the mere thought of what might be gained if a proposition is true will automatically render it a live option to us, in whatever part of the world we may happen to live. Thus the example which James offers of a thoroughly dead option is an instance of one which his own argument, if sound, should bring to life in any thoughtful mind. He supposes the Mahdi to write to us, saying, "I am the Expected One whom God has created in his effulgence. You shall be infinitely happy if you confess me; otherwise you shall be cut off from the light of the sun. Weigh, then, your infinite gain if I am genuine against your finite sacrifice if I am not!" 21 I do not see how James could consistently refuse such an invitation. For if it is rational to believe in the Christian God on the ground that this may be the only way of gaining the final truth, then it is equally rational to believe in any alternative religious system which may also be the sole pathway to Truth. The fact that our minds are more accustomed to one claim than to another is an irrelevancy. T o a purely rational mind, liberated from the accidents of geography and illuminated by 21 Ibid., p. 6.

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James's argument, it must appear as important to believe in the Mahdi or Mohammed or any other self-assertive person who offers a heaven and threatens a hell as to believe in the orthodox God of Europe and America. And indeed the more stupendous the promises and threats, the more justified the belief. However, if we were to set out on a course of rational self-insurance against all possible risks of losing the truth, we should quickly find that the promised rewards are for the most part mutually exclusive. In order to make sure of one good, if it exists, we have to risk losing other goods, if they exist. Accordingly, the only reasonable course would be to wager our faith where the greatest good is to be hoped for if our faith should turn out to be justified. That is to say, we should all believe in that religion or philosophy which we most desire to be true. For it may be that it is true, and that only by pinning our faith on it can we realize its benefits. But when we have spelled out James's conception of faith thus far, we cannot help asking whether it is much better—or indeed any better—than an impressive recommendation of "wishful thinking." Is he not saying that since the truth is unknown to us we may believe what we like and that while we are about it we had better believe what we like most? This is certainly unjust to James's intention; but is it unjust to the logic of his argument? I do not see that it is: and I therefore regard James's theory as open to refutation by a reductio ad absurdum. Our "pilot scheme" for the discussion of F. R. Tennant's theory will be a brief comment upon some related views of James Ward, whose thought constituted one of Tennant's formative philosophical influences. In the writings of James Ward we meet the conception of faith as working within nature and providing the motive 44

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power of the evolutionary process. "Life from beginning to end," he said, "is a striving for self-consciousness and betterment. At first there is only the venture of a primitive trustfulness in trying open possibilities—an instinct which precedes knowledge and is the chief means of acquiring and increasing it. Such is faith at the very outset of life." 22 And he writes elsewhere: We shall find that almost every forward step in the progress of life could be formulated as an act of faith—an act not warranted by knowledge—on the part of the pioneer who first made it. There was little, for example, in all that the wisest fish could know, to justify the belief that there was more scope for existence on the earth than in the water, or to show that persistent endeavours to live on the land would issue in the transformation of his swim-bladder into lungs. And before a bird had cleaved the air there was surely little, in all that the most daring of saurian speculators could see or surmise concerning that untrodden element, to warant him in risking his neck in order to satisfy his longing to soar; although, when he did try, his forelimbs were transformed to wings at length, and his dim prevision of a bird became incarnate in himself.23 Whether the evolution of the forms of life takes place by means of random variations, some of which, possessing superior survival value, lead their species in that direction, or, alternatively, by means of some teleological potency immanent within nature as a whole or within its individual organisms, is of course in dispute and will no doubt long remain so. Ward's theory is compatible only with the latter possibility, a possibility which is far from being es22

Essays in Philosophy (London, 1927), p. 349. Ward's theory of faith has been fairly influential, being taken up by others as well as by Tennant. For example, D. S. Cairns, in The Riddle of the World (London, 1918), pp. 30 f., used Ward's argument. =3 Ibid.,

p. 106.

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tablished. However, even if we waive the uncertainty of the scientific foundation of Ward's view, we shall I think be daunted by other aspects of it. For is there really any proper continuity or true analogy between, on the one hand, the developments which led through thousands of generations from the fish to the land animal and, on the other hand, the human "instinct" or desire to worship a higher being? We should not, in justice to Ward's stature as a philosopher, make too much of his somewhat Aesopian language, referring as he does to the fish's "belief that there was more scope for existence on the earth than in the water," or the saurian's "longing to soar" and its "dim prevision" of the bird. Instead we may note some of the implications and limitations of his basic conception. The suggestion is that the fish's "groping" for the land is analogous to man's "groping" for God, with the difference that the latter groping has attained to selfconsciousness. We are invited to picture evolution as a grand procession of life through the ages, climbing steadily to its human pinnacle and urging man himself to launch out into a higher spiritual sphere. Theistic faith thus stands justified as "only the full and final phase of an ascending series." But such a theory overlooks the innumerable loose ends and cul-de-sacs of prehistory. Most of the experimental gropings of life, and feelings towards new forms, have ended in ignominious extinction. Even the "wisest" of fish and the "most daring of saurian speculators" have been deceived more often than not. It is only the fortunate few that have perpetuated their kinds. By what right, then, do we hail as prophetic the analogous hopes of wise men and human speculators concerning an invisible realm of spirit? May not this also prove to be one of nature's many cul-de-sacs? Without stopping to press these questions, we pass to the carefully elaborated structure of thought which Tennant 46

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has developed from Ward's rough ground plan. His theory of faith is expounded in Philosophical Theology, volume I, Chapter 11, and more popularly in The Nature of Belief, Chapter 6. T e n n a n t treats the religious and scientific modes of cognition as continuous with one another and as exhibiting an identical logical structure. H e seeks to reveal the faithattitude as active behind both religious and scientific belief. According to this theory faith is "the conative source of all knowledge." 24 In all awareness other than the bare apprehension of sense data there is, T e n n a n t argues, a phase of "postulation" or "creative imagination," followed by empirical verification. Each of these phases involves conation, and thus "conation is genetically a source of all knowledge higher than involuntary sense-knowledge." 2 5 T h i s conative element in or behind all awareness is what we call faith. H e therefore distinguishes faith from belief (and knowledge) as follows: "Belief" serves to emphasise the cognitive, and "faith" to lay stress on the conative, side of experience involving venture. Belief is more or less constrained by fact or Actuality that already is or will be, independently of any striving of ours, and which convinces us. Faith, on the other hand, reaches beyond the Actual or the given to the ideally possible, which in the first instance it creates, as the mathematician posits his entities, and then by practical activity may realise or bring into Actuality. Every machine of human invention has thus come to be. Again, faith may similarly lead to knowledge of Actuality which it in so sense creates, but which would have continued, in absence of the faith-venture, to be unknown: as in the discovery of America by Columbus. 26 W e must pause to notice an ambiguity in T e n n a n t ' s terminology. For it is not immediately evident precisely 24

Philosophical Theology, I (Cambridge, 1928), 303. z&Ibid., p. 298. 26 ibid., p. 297.

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which element in his various examples he intends to identify as faith. In cases of invention and discovery there are two distinguishable phases prior to verification: (1) The act of mental synthesis or supposal, i.e., the formulation of an hypothesis; this is the work of creative imagination. (2) The continuing affective attitude or concern which leads one to undertake and persevere in the attempt to verify one's hypothesis; this is akin to hope (tinged with obstinacy) that one's theory is correct. Sometimes Tennant seems to be identifying faith with one and sometimes with the other. Perhaps, however, we should assume that the two factors jointly constitute faith as he conceives it. His contention, then, is that faith plays a necessary part in the acquisition of knowledge (and belief) alike in the scientific and in the religious spheres. He continues: There is, of course, no necessity as to the hopeful issue of faith in either actualisation or knowledge. Hopeful experimenting has not produced the machine capable of perpetual motion; and had Columbus steered with confidence for Utopia, he would not have found it. But when faith succeeds, it is defined with psychological accuracy as the substantiation, or "realisation," of things hoped for and unseen. The religious writer who gave us this definition, goes on to enumerate instances of the heroic life which faith enabled men of old to achieve. . . . We might . . . extend this writer's roll of the faithful, and say: by faith, or by hope, Newton founded physics on his few and simple laws of motion; by faith the atomists of ancient Greece conceived the reign of law throughout the material world; and so on indefinitely.27 On this basis Tennant would accord to scientific and religious belief a common epistemological status. For, Without more venturesome response from human subjects than is involved in infallible reading off of the self-evident, there would have emerged neither religion nor science . . . 27

Ibid., pp. 297-298.

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Science postulates what is requisite to make the world amenable to the kind of thought that conceives of the structure of the universe and its orderedness according to quantitative law; theology, and sciences of valuation, postulate what is requisite to make die world amenable to the kind of diought that conceives of the why and wherefore, the meaning or purpose of the universe, and its orderedness according to teleological principles.28 And he concludes that science and theology are alike "substantiations of the hoped for and the unseen; the electron and God are equally ideal positings of faith-venture, rationally indemonstrable, invisible; and the 'verifications' of the one idea, and of the other, follow lines essentially identical, accidentally diverse." 29 It is clear from this that the notion of verification plays a crucial part in Tennant's epistemology. Faith, on his view, is valuable only as a stage on the way to verification. The relative values of religious and scientific beliefs must therefore depend upon the extent to which they are respectively capable of being verified. There is a further important passage which enlarges on this. It occurs in Philosophical Theology, but I shall quote instead the slightly more expanded version in Tennant's later and semipopular book The Nature of Belief, in which the same view of faith is proposed, often in the same words, but sometimes with additional explanations. He refers to the instances of faith cited in the famous eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews. These, he says, are "examples of the gaining of material and moral advantages, the surmountings of trials and afflictions, and the attainment of heroic life, by men of old who were inspired by faith. It is thus that faith is pragmatically 'verified' and that certitude as to the unseen is established." 80 He then proceeds to define more precisely, 28 30

29 Ibid., p. 299. Ibid., p. 303. The Nature of Belief (London, 1943), p. 70.

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and thereby to reduce, the claim which he has previously made for religious as compared with scientific belief: It should be observed, however, that such verification is only for [subjective] certitude, not a proving of [objective] certainty as to external reality. The fruitfulness of a belief or of faith for the moral and religious life is one thing, and the reality or existence of what is ideated and assumed is another. There are instances in which belief that is not true, in the sense of corresponding with fact, may inspire one with lofty ideals and stimulate one to strive to be a more worthy person. And though the foundations of inductive science are matters of faith, and Science's verification of them is also merely pragmatic, it is of a different kind from that which is illustrated in the Epistle [to the Hebrews]. Verification of a scientific postulate or theory does not consist in disciplining the scientific researcher, either as a lover of truth or as a moral citizen, and consequently cannot be likened to the pragmatic verification of religious faith. It consists in finding that the postulate or theory is borne out by appeal to external facts and tallies with them. It is true that this latter kind of verification also falls short of logical certification; for to be the explanation of facts, a theory must not only fit and be exemplified by the facts, but must be the only one that does so; and that scarcely admits of proof. Still, such verification has probability of a higher order than the other. Nevertheless, verification such as religion claims for its faith will satisfy most men. 31 Here, then, is T e n n a n t ' s theory. Although its language is very different from that of Aquinas—reflecting the wide difference between the medieval world and the age of modern science—nevertheless it is to be noted that the basic themes are the same. T e n n a n t is indeed a kind of modern secular Thomist in his conception of faith. For he retains, in new forms, the basic features of the Thomist81

Ibid., pp. 70-71.

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Catholic view: (a) As acceptance of the "religious hypothesis" faith is a propositional attitude, (b) Faith is of the same epistemological order as scientific knowledge, but operates at a lower level of evidence, (c) Faith is not concerned with the material world itself, which is the sphere of scientific knowledge, but with the invisible, in the form of the teleological meaning of the world, (d) Faith is characterized by the conative element within it. What are we to say of this transplanted version of the traditional Thomist analysis of faith? It appears to me paradoxical that such an argument should be offered, as it is by Tennant, in defense of religious faith. It must surely constitute one of the most damaging defenses in the whole history of apologetics. For stripped to the bare bones, Tennant's contention is this. The scientist postulates various entities—such as the electron—and finds that he achieves practical results by assuming that these entities exist; and on the basis of this pragmatic verification he concludes that there is a certain probability that they do exist. The religious man likewise postulates an object, God, and finds that to live as if God existed makes for moral and spiritual success in life; hence, it is concluded, there is a certain probability that God too exists. The probability of the theistic hypothesis is admittedly lower than that of a verified scientific hypothesis, for the latter receives objective and the former only subjective certification. But nevertheless the pragmatic verification of religious faith is such that "it will satisfy most men." S2 The question, however, is whether it ought to satisfy most men. And it seems clear to me that, when conceived on these lines, it ought not. For Tennant's argument is undermined by the admission (in the passage last quoted) that "fruitfulness of a belief or of faith for the moral and religious life is one thing, and the reality or existence of s 2 The Nature of Belief, p. 71. E

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what is ideated or assumed is another. There are instances in which a belief that is not true, in the sense of corresponding with fact, may inspire one with lofty ideals and stimulate one to strive to be a more worthy person." This is a point upon which Tennant several times insists. Thus he says in another place, "Spiritual efficacy, or capacity to promote pious and moral life, is one thing; Reality of the ideal Objects figuring in efficacious doctrines is another." 33 But if this is so, as of course it is, then religion's proffered verification is radically and fatally ambiguous. In a half acknowledgment of this Tennant concedes that, whereas the verification of a scientific hypothesis "consists in finding that the postulate or theory is borne out by appeal to external facts and tallies with them," S4 the verification of the religious hypothesis consists in the spiritual disciplining of the researcher himself, and that the one kind of verification cannot be likened to the other. Science verifies by comparing theory (or more precisely, predictions derived from a theory) with facts, and religion by observing its theory's emotional and spiritual concomitants in the theorist. However, in spite of this Tennant still makes the claim that "science and theology are of the same epistemological status." 35 Yet on his own analysis they cannot be. For while science often claims a high degree of probability for its deliverances, theology can only rightly claim that its conclusions have a beneficial effect upon the believer. And any evidential weight which these effects may have is counterbalanced by the admission that illusions might have no less beneficial effects. Tennant's analysis of religious faith amounts then, it appears to me, to a disguised surrender of its claims. Religion gains entry into the courts of Science by claiming to be a hypothesis susceptible of verification; but it must remain 33 33

Philosophical Theology, I, 302. Philosophical Theology, I, 303.

52

34

Nature of Belief, p. 70.

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forever in the outer courts, for its verification is weak and its probability uncertain and impossible to assess. Under such conditions religion could only wither and die. For to the believer faith is not a probability but a certainty; and to assimilate it to the ever-tentative theorizings of science, as something less certain than an accepted hypothesis in the physical sciences, would be to destroy it. Once again, then, we must set aside the voluntarist analysis as failing to encompass faith as it actually occurs in the experience of religious people. And yet although James and Tennant both ascribe to the human will too large and central a part in the act of faith, it would equally be a mistake to accord to it no place at all. Faith is an activity of the whole man, and as such there is a volitional side to it. I shall suggest later that religious faith is a "total interpretation," or mode of apperceiving the world. And in the entry into modes of apperception the will has its part to play, a part which we shall note at a later stage. The consideration of Tennant's theory raises the topic of "scientific faith"; and this is accordingly a convenient point at which to refer to what is perhaps the most frequently employed strategy for the defense of religious faith. This form of apologetic accepts without criticism the popular conception of faith as voluntary or gratuitous believing as distinguished from belief which is compelled by weight of evidence or by logical demonstration. It is when someone believes, in a case where the same balance of evidence leaves others uncertain or disbelieving, that in ordinary usage we characterize his belief as faith. Thus "faith" refers to a conviction which exceeds its purely logical warrant; it denotes the adoption of a proposition either in the absence of objective grounds or more strongly than such grounds authorize. Faith is an activity which—whether legitimately or illegitimately—jumps across gaps in the evi53

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dence, arriving at certitude where a neutral calculus would authorize only a judgment of probability. The defense of religious faith with which we are now concerned accepts this analysis but seeks to involve other types of cognition in a similar predicament. It claims that all our important certitudes are imperfectly evidenced, and that theistic conviction accordingly does not stand in need of any special justification. Not only religion but the greater part of our life and knowledge is already based upon faith in this sense. Scientific activity, for example, depends upon faith in the "uniformity" of nature; all social intercourse upon faith in the characters of our friends; and the simplest maneuver in the physical world upon faith in the reliability of our sense organs. We cannot then, it is argued, either as scientists, as social beings, or as practical men, throw dialectical stones at those who profess to live by faith. For in this respect we all dwell in equally brittle glass houses. And if science and ordinary life can properly be based upon faith, why not religion also? This was the thesis of Lord Balfour's influential book, The Foundations of Belief (1895). In a later series of Gifford Lectures, those of G. M. Gwatkin, the same argument is expressed in a conveniently concise form: Christians are not the only people who walk by faith and not by sight. We all do it, and must do it every moment of our life. Even as we venture from step to step, whether of common life or of the abstrusest scientific argument, in faith that the sequences of nature will not fail us, so we wing our way from earth to heaven in faith that these sequences are not without a cause.38 36

The Knowledge of God (Edinburgh, 1907), I, 16. The first Christian apologist to argue in this manner was Origen (Contra Celsum, bk. 1, ch. 11). Arnobius later developed the possibilities of this type of apologetic, ridiculing his pagan opponents for being willing to accept on faith almost anything except the Christian

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In spite of its being "on the side of the angels," this reasoning appears to me to be insecurely founded, depending as it does upon an ambiguous use of the term "faith." It is true that in all practical affairs, including scientific research, we make suppositions. We do this because we are agents and because we do not know the future: in order to act we are obliged to make assumptions, therefore, at least about the continued existence and structure of our environment. But these assumptions are not "acts of faith" as the phrase is used in religion. Religious faith is absolute and implicit belief; the articles of a creed are no merely provisional assumptions. The scientists (qua scientist) does not believe "religiously," i.e., absolutely and implicitly, that the universe will continue to exhibit the same "laws" tomorrow as yesterday and today. He merely has no reason to suppose that it will not; and since it is only on the assumption of "uniformity" that he can plan his researches, he cheerfully makes that assumption. His is an act religion. He says, "And since you have been wont to laugh at our faith, and with droll jests to pull to pieces our readiness of belief too, say, O wits, soaked and filled with wisdom's draught, is there in life any kind of business demanding diligence and activity, which the doers undertake, engage in, and essay, without believing that it can be done? Do you travel about, do you sail otAhe sea, without believing that you will return home when your business is done? Do you break up the earth with the plough, and fill it with different kinds of seeds without believing that you will gather in the fruit with the changes of the seasons?" (Contra nationes, bk. H, sec. 8, translation in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. VI). Moving from the Church Fathers to contemporary philosophers, one of the most recent invocations of "scientific faith" in aid of religious faith occurs in Raphael Demos, "Are Religious Dogmas Cognitive and Meaningful?" in Academic Freedom, Logic, and Religion (American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, •953)» H- A widely read work which adopts the same general standpoint is Alan Richardson's Christian Apologetics (London, 1947)-

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not of faith but of policy. He is moreover prepared to withdraw his assumption if the facts ever fail to justify it. Relatively slight irregularities on nature's part, it is true, prompt him to seek to enlarge his conception of the natural order rather than relinquish his belief in nature's orderliness; and to this extent his faith verges on the religious. But any considerable and massive irruption of chance and chaos would reduce the scientist to despair. His attitude thus stands in contrast to that of the religious believer, whose faith is an unshakable dogma, able to absorb and reinterpret all adverse or seemingly contradicting circumstances.37 There is, then, no such easy path as some have supposed from the "faith of science" to a "science of faith." 37

Cf. C. A. Bennett, The Dilemma of Religious Knowledge (New Haven, 1931), pp. 15-16.

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3

Faith and Moral Judgment ANOTHER widely influential approach to the epistemological nature of faith, considered as propositional conviction, traces the genesis of faith to man's moral experience. Historically, this way of thinking first arose in reaction from the previously dominant view that religious beliefs could be sustained by rational demonstration. Rejecting that view, Immanuel Kant and his followers turned from physical and metaphysical science to ethics for the ground of faith, and this move produced, or expressed, a new understanding of the nature of the act of faith itself. Any exposition of Kant's positive account of religious belief should be prefaced by a reference to his negative contention in this field. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant denies that the existence of God is capable of rational demonstration. He subjects the traditional theistic proofs, ontological, cosmological, and teleological, to fundamental criticisms, criticisms which have generally been accepted by subsequent philosophers. He thus excludes the possibility of constructing a logically certified theology. However, having thus judged logical demonstration to be incapable of providing a basis for theistic belief, Kant found its basis in another exercise of rationality. It was one of his momentous contributions to modern philosophy to insist that (as indeed plain men have always taken unspeculatively 57

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for granted) reason operates practically as well as theoretically. Rationality can be expressed in decisions as well as in conclusions, and can issue in actions as well as reflections. Reason is the capacity to see not only what propositions are true but also what actions ought to be performed. It is able to issue commands to the will. These commands are of two kinds, categorical or moral, and hypothetical or technical. The latter type of imperative presupposes a desired end and, under the hypothesis that this end is to be attained, commands the requisite actions. A categorical imperative on the other hand commands without reference to our desires, enjoining an action as right and therefore as obligatory irrespective of the manner in which it gratifies or thwarts our personal wishes. It requires the doing of duty for duty's sake. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals Kant defines the formal nature of the categorical imperative. The basic principle involved is that of "universalisability," formulated by Kant as "Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law," * or (in a subordinate formula) "Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature." 2 Translating these imperatives into the indicative mood, Kant's contention is that a man is morally good, not insofar as he acts in response to his personal desires or with his own private interests in view, but insofar as he acts upon a principle which applies impartially to others and to himself. The test of right action is thus whether the principle (or "maxim") involved is one which could properly be adopted by anyone else in similar circumstances. Such action, being independent of i Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (2d ed.), p. 52. I have quoted from p. 88 of H. J. Pawn's translation, published under the title of The Moral Law (London, 1948). 2/fc«d., p. 89.

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one's personal hopes and wishes, is to be performed simply and solely because it is right. Some words of H. J. Paton's express well the essence of the Kantian ethic: "An action done from duty has its moral worth, not from the results it attains or seeks to attain, but from a formal principle or maxim—the principle of doing one's duty whatever that duty may be." 3 We are not concerned here with the further details of Kant's ethical theory in the Grundlegung, but with the connection between morality and religion as this is set forth in the Critique of Practical Reason. We have noted that Kant regards all actions performed merely to fulfill our desires or to gain pleasure or happiness as devoid of distinctively moral worth. He is, however, far from ignoring the unique position of happiness as the ultimate goal of human desire. On the contrary, he says that "to be happy is necessarily the desire of every rational but finite being." 4 This recognition of the inevitable participation of happiness in any end which human nature may set itself combines with Kant's doctrine of the good will to form his conception of the summum bonum. One might expect, after reading the Grundlegung and the Analytic of the second Critique, that for Kant the summum bonum would consist simply in the right ethical disposition of the realm of wills; for the fundamental dogma from which his ethical theory begins is that "it is impossible to conceive anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be taken as good without qualification, except a good will." 5 But when in the Dialectic of the Critique of Practical Reason Kant comes to discuss the idea of the summum bonum he begins by drawing a distinction be3

Ibid., p. 20. Critique of Practical Reason, pt. I, bk. I, ch. l, Remark n, trans, by L. W. Beck (New York, 1956), p. 24. 5 Grundlegung (2d ed.), p. 2; Paton's translation, p. 61. 4

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tween two senses of bonum, namely supremum and consummatum. The supremum bonum is that which constitutes an ethical end in itself, a good which is valuable per se and for its own sake, quite apart from any further goods to which it may contribute. This is for Kant, as he has from the first insisted, the good will, or the state of virtue. The bonum consummatum, on the other hand, is the most complete and comprehensive good, the good which is not itself an element in any larger good; and this consists not in virtue alone but in virtue rewarded with happiness. This is the state of affairs which a rational being would will if he had unlimited power; and this is what Kant refers to as the summum bonum. "That virtue (as the worthiness to be happy) is the supreme condition of whatever appears to us to be desirable and thus of all our pursuit of happiness and, consequently, that it is the supreme good have been proved in the Analytic. But these truths do not imply that virtue is the entire and perfect good as the object of the faculty of desire of rational finite beings. For this, happiness is also required." 6 Kant makes it clear that desire for happiness cannot provide the motive of moral goodness; for goodness thus motivated would not be moral. Virtue simply for its own sake remains the sole good which is to be pursued as an end in itself. But nevertheless virtue is not the whole good possible to man. The complete good would consist in virtue crowned with happiness, virtue enjoying the happiness which it merits.-This is the summum bonum which "reason presents to all rational beings as the goal of all their moral wishes"; this is "the necessary highest end of a morally determined will." 7 This conception of the summum bonum is for Kant the 6

Critique of Practical Reason, pt. I, bk. n, ch. 2; Beck's translation, p. 114. 7 Ibid., p. 119. 60

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stepping stone from morality to religion. For the practical reason, pursuing the summum bonum, must assume that its attainment is possible, and must therefore postulate a Good Will powerful enough to ensure a final apportionment of happiness to virtue. T h e compulsion to postulate divine existence is thus a compulsion to "assume that without which an aim cannot be achieved which one ought to set before himself invariably in all his actions," 8 namely the summum bonum. T h e theistic postulation is accordingly an act of faith (Glaube) made necessary by o u r moral nature. 9 T h e right is still to be done for its own sake, b u t the postulate of divine existence (together with the related postulate of immortality) is involved in the doing of it. These two postulates are indeed "not conditions of the moral law, b u t only conditions of the necessary object of a will which is determined by this law." 10 T h e y "proceed from the principle of morality, which is not a postulate b u t a law by which reason directly determines the will. T h i s will, by the fact that it is so determined, as a pure will, requires these necessary conditions for obedience to its precepts. These postulates are not theoretical dogmas b u t presuppositions of necessarily practical import." u T h e last sentence indicates Kant's view of the epistemological status of such postulates. T h e y do not represent insights of theoretical reason, b u t conclusions which reason as a theoretical activity accepts from reason as a practical activity. But if pure reason of itself can be and really is practical, as the consciousness of the moral law shows it to be, it is only one and the same reason which judges a priori by principles, 8

Ibid., Preface; Beck's translation, p. 5. Cf. ibid., pt. 1, bk. n, ch. 2, sec. 5. 10 Ibid., Preface; Beck's translation, p. 4. 11 Ibid., pt. 1, bk. n, ch. 2, sec. 6; Beck's translation, p. 137.

9

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whether for theoretical or for practical purposes. Then it is clear that, if its capacity in the former is not sufficient to establish certain propositions positively (which, however, do not contradict it), it must assume these propositions just as soon as they are sufficiently certified as belonging imprescrip tively to the practical interest of pure reason. It must assume them indeed as something offered from the outside and not grown on its own soil. . . . It must remember that they are not its own insights but extensions of its use in some other respect, viz., the practical. 12 Again, from these religious postulates the theoretical knowledge of pure reason does not obtain an accession, but it consists only in this—that those concepts which for it are otherwise problematical (merely thinkable) are now described assertorically as actually having objects, because practical reason inexorably requires the existence of these objects for the possibility of its practically and absolutely necessary object, the highest good. Theoretical reason is, therefore, justified in assuming them. l s For the purpose of our inquiry, the main comment to be made upon this Kantain theory is that it leaves no room for any acquaintance with or experience of the divine, such as religious persons claim. T h e ideas of God and immortality are believed, as a necessary assumption, to have an object and a situation respectively corresponding to them; b u t this assumption is still "no extension of knowledge to . . . supersensuous objects." 14 W e may make a justifiable intellectual move to the belief that there is a God; b u t we cannot be conscious of God himself, nor therefore can we enter into any kind of personal relationship with him. It is true that Kant conceives his theory as authorizing "the rec12

Ibid., pt. i, bk. n, ch. 2, sec. 3; Beck's translation, pp. 125-126. Ibid., sec. 7; Beck's translation, p. 139. 14 Ibid., sec. 7; Beck's translation, p. 140.

13

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ognition of all duties as divine commands"; 1S but such commands are not of the nature of personal communications, but rather "essential laws of any free will as such." 16 This cannot, I think, be regarded as an analysis of the faith of the ordinary religious believer; and in the later very fragmentary Opus Postumum Kant moved toward a rather different view according to which the experience of the moral law, instead of being treated as the basis for a theistic postulation, is thought of as in some manner mediating the divine presence and will. From our standpoint in this essay the latter type of position is more helpful than the former; and we therefore turn to a somewhat similar view which has been worked out by a twentieth-century British writer, Donald M. Baillie. In Faith in God, Baillie advocates an analysis of faith as arising out of moral experience. He makes it clear, however, that by moral experience he means our appreciation of all values, aesthetic and intellectual as well as ethical. He speaks "sometimes of absolute values, goodness, truth and beauty, but sometimes briefly of Conscience, as the revelation of God and the bed-rock of faith." 17 Baillie points out that in the Victorian age, an age peculiarly haunted by religious doubts, one religious soul after another made a like discovery as to the basic character and credentials of his faith. "It was a case of faith being driven back by intellectual difficulties upon its own last defences, and thus discovering what these defences actually are—the certainties of the moral consciousness. These a man could not doubt, in actual life; and these, taken seriously and faithfully, carried with them a religious faith in goodness at the heart of the universe." 18 15

16 Ibid., sec. 5; Beck's translation, p. 134. Ibid. Faith in God and Its Christian Consummation (Edinburgh, 1927), p. 181. 1R Ibid., p. 157. 17

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Baillie illustrates this from the writings of F. W . Robertson, Tennyson, Browning, Tolstoy, and others. H e chooses such writers as these, rather than professional philosophers who have come to a like conclusion, because he is concerned with faith itself as an actual experience, and not with the subsequent apologetic for it: "Citations from the literature of academic philosophy or theology would not have served our purpose so well, since it might be complained that we were exhibiting the philosophical proof of theism rather than the actual standing-ground of the religious man's belief, and thus were throwing no light upon the nature of faith." 19 T h i s passage makes it clear that Baillie's concern is identical with our own. H e is interested in the analysis of faith as an actual occurrence, rather than in the validity of the various theistic arguments. Baillie sums u p as follows the view which he supports: Religious faith is essentially the conviction that our highest values must and do count in the whole scheme of things, that they are not simply our little dream, but reveal the very meaning and purpose of the universe, that love is at the heart of all things; that (to use Charles Secretan's phrase which William James adopted) "perfection is eternal"; that the world "means intensely and means good"; that our highest values "are the answer of man's heart to something, to someone, that is not himself, and yet is like himself in the love of righteousness, truth, and beauty." This is the conviction which, when worked out and lived out, becomes faith in God. It is for this fundamental conviction that every sincere doubter is really struggling in the last resort, and it is out of this germinal conviction that the whole rich harvest of religious belief grows: the conviction that our ideals of love and duty have the very Purpose and Will of the universe behind them, and are laid upon us by One in whom somehow they are perfectly realised—are indeed but the shadowings of a Divine Reality 19

Ibid., p. 165.

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which is beyond our imagining, but which is all our heart's Desire.20 T h i s then, in outline, is Donald Baillie's account of the logic of religious assent. " I t is not a matter," he says, "of arguing from the existence in m a n of a u n i q u e faculty called Conscience to the existence of a supernatural Author who could have implanted it." 21 Rather, " W h a t we here claim is that this voice of Conscience, which we all accept, tells us, when really understood, not only of duty, b u t of God, and not as an explanation of its origin, b u t as involved in the content of its utterances." 22 I n asking next how an awareness of God is thus involved in our awareness of moral values, Baillie insists that the connection is not one of philosophical postulation such as Kant (in his critical period) taught. W e do not arrive at divine existence as a postulate of the practical reason. Surely the realm of religious reality is given us in, or with, our moral consciousness in a much more direct way than that. . . . Either our moral values tell us something about die nature and purpose of reality (i.e. gives us the germ of religious belief) or they are subjective and therefore meaningless. The conviction, "I ought to do this," if it means anything at all, tells me something not simply about myself or about the action indicated, but about the very meaning of the universe. 23 W h e n we meet, as we do, morally earnest m e n who are unable to believe in God—good, kindly, and conscientious agnostics and atheists—we must therefore hold that they have an implicit or unconscious faith, which they are prevented from realizing through intellectual misunderstandings. For God is what we really desire in every simple, spontaneous, disinterested choice of the ideal in our daily lives. God is 21 -o Ibid., p. 166. Ibid., p. 152. 23 Ibid., pp. 172-175.

22

Ibid., p. 170.

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what we really love whenever we truly love our fellows. God is what we dimly know, even in apprehending our duty in the commonplace details of practice. But the more we live ourselves into the ideal, in a daily life of duty and love, the clearer becomes our conscious knowledge of God, in which alone we can rest, and which alone, in its turn, can empower us to realise the ideal. And this is more than morality: this is religion.24 From exposition we turn to comment. Our purpose throughout this book is to study theistic faith from the standpoint of epistemology. We are attempting an analysis of faith considered as a mode of cognition; not a philosophical apologia for the content of religious faith. Donald Bailie adopts a similar aim. It is therefore as an account of the act or state of faith that we desire to examine this theory. This should be emphasized at the outset, for there appears to be an oscillation in Baillie's thought between the variant interests and methods of epistemology and apologetics. The teaching of Faith in God is, as we have seen, that theistic faith is "a conviction arising out of the moral consciousness." 2B The fact that there is a God is given in and with the utterances of conscience, as part of those utterances.26 However, it is clear from Baillie's further discussion that he does not hold divine existence to be part of the manifest content of conscience; for there are conscientious persons who do not acknowledge a God. How then is the apprehension of the divine related to our moral experience? Baillie's answer to this question moves upon two planes. In some passages he is describing the historical origin of religious faith in the human mind, namely, in the appreciation of and response to values. In other and more numerous passages he is setting forth a validation of faith by 2

* Ibid., pp. 223-224.

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2

& Ibid., p. 155.

26

Cf. ibid., p. 170.

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means of an argument from the objectivity of values to the existence of God. Under the latter heading Baillie treats divine existence as a corollary of moral experience, capable of being grasped by an exercise of intelligence. "Our moral convictions," he says, "our absolute values, the utterances of our Conscience, which remain indubitable to us in actual life, even through the darkest periods of religious doubt, cannot in the last analysis be given a meaning without the introduction of' the idea of God" 27—so that the conscientious man, "whether he realizes it or not, believes something which involves not only duty but God, not only morality but religion." 28 Again, "our moral consciousness, when taken in earnest, involves us in a whole realm of religious truth." 29 It is not suggested that God's existence is given together with conscience as a fact patent to all; rather it is an ultimate implicate, available to all but grasped only by some. Thus Baillie's thesis is not that conscience witnesses openly to God, but that the acknowledgement of the authority of conscience logically carries with it a recognition of God's existence. Respect for conscience, Bailie holds, cannot ultimately be justified without resort to theism. The act of faith is thus the inference which unfolds to the morally earnest man the final implicates of that by which he is living. It is by this method of drawing out the metaphysical implications of our moral experience that many of the foremost Christian apologists of recent generations have proceeded. However, as will appear in Chapter 7, I am not myself able to adopt either this or any other form of natural theology designed to present theism as the most likely explanation of the universe. I cannot discover any logically compulsory inference-route from the character of our ethi21 29

F

Ibid., p. 169 (my italics). Ibid., p. 171 (my italics).

2S

Ibid, (my italics).

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cal experience to divine existence, any necessary transition from respect for conscience to belief in God. If there were any such demonstrative proof, capable of being resisted only by intellectual obtuseness, it could hardly have failed by now to gain general acceptance. T h e r e would be n o intelligent and conscientious atheists or agnostics. But in fact there are such persons, as Baillie acknowledges. It therefore seems clear that some other factor than logical calculation lies behind the move from morality to God; and this other factor is of course precisely religious faith. T h e r e is a second strand in Baillie's discussion, and one from which we may gladly carry forward something valuable into Part II. T h i s other strand is the thought of o u r apprehension of the divine as mediated through our apprehension of values. T h i s occurs in such passages as the following: The germ of faith in God is present (we have now seen) even in moral conviction. T o put it somewhat dangerously: faith is what every one knows, if only one is willing to know it. Faith is the inward voice which all can hear increasingly according to their loyalty. This is the real "religious a priori." It is the elemental sense of the Divine which expresses itself in all our values, though not completely in any of them or in all of them put together. 30 T h e thought is expressed even more explicitly in the words of George Tyrrell, which Baillie quotes, " T h e sense of the Absolute is given not beside, b u t in and with and through the sense of the Ideal in every department." 31 T h i s second element occurs much less extensively in Donald Baillie's discussion than the argument from morality to religion, b u t it is more germane to o u r purpose in this essay. In Part II we shall attempt to go yet further in the same direction. 30 31

Ibid., p. 186 (my italics). Ibid., p. 222, quoting Tyrrell, Lex Orandi, p. xi.

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4

Faith and the Illative Sense F. H. BRADLEY once spoke of metaphysics as the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.1 Cardinal Newman would have approved this dictum. He was deeply conscious of the fact that our more fundamental convictions are reached, not by the intellect alone, but by the whole man functioning as a thinking, feeling, and willing unity. There is a passage in his account of his gradual conversion to Roman Catholicism which gives expression to this view. "For myself," he says, "it was not logic, then, that carried me on; as well might one say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather. It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new place; how? the whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it." 2 The central aim of Newman's main contribution to philosophy, his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (first published in 1870), is to describe the informal ways in which our convictions are in fact arrived at, particularly in matters of religion, in distinction from the theoretical procedures of "paper logic." His object is to describe rather than to speculate, and his discussion is for the most part 1

F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (2d ed.; London, 1897), p. xiv. 2 Apologia pro Vita Sua (2d ed.; London, 1865), p. 188.

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psychological in subject matter and empirical in method. However, the border between the psychological and the epistemological is notoriously difficult to maintain, and Newman's pages in fact provide a combined psychologicalepistemological discussion which throws light upon both sides of the border. Newman's analysis rests upon an initial distinction between inference and assent. T o infer a proposition by a logical calculus, he says, is not eo ipso to assent to that proposition; for inference is hypothetical while assent is categorical. In arguing from p to q we infer q on the hypothesis p. Inference as such cannot lead us to assent to q, but only to "if p then q." For inference is concerned solely with the relations between propositions; with the validity of an argument, not with the truth of its conclusion. The acceptance of an argument as valid does not in itself constitute the adoption of its conclusion: "though acts of assent require [in the cases he is considering] previous acts of inference, they require them, not as adequate causes, but as sine qua non conditions." 3 Otherwise assent and inference would be identical, and one of the two terms would be otiose. If a professed act can only be viewed as the necessary and immediate repetition of another act, if assent is a sort of reproduction and double of an act of inference, if when inference determines that a proposition is somewhat, or not a little, or a good deal, or very like truth, assent as its natural and normal counterpart says that it is somewhat, or not a little, or a good deal, or very like truth, then I do not see what we mean by saying, or why we say at all, that there is any such act.4 If, in cases of assent to a reasoned conclusion, we may assent only when we infer, and if whenever we infer we 3 4

A Grammar of Assent, ed. C. F. Harrold (New York, 1947), p. 32. Ibid., p. 124. 70

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assent, then assent is a stage within inference, and the two are inseparable. But, says Newman, in fact they are not inseparable. For, first, we often assent to a proposition long after we have forgotten how to infer it; and on these occasions assent is psychologically divorced from inference. And second, the move from inference to assent, from conditional to unconditional acceptance, is seldom a purely automatic one. It is often a further and important step, and a step which is taken by the "whole man." Sometimes, however, the "whole man" will refuse to take it, so that inference is complete qua inference and yet fails to produce assent. For example, we may be presented with a "watertight" argument, and yet have vague and perhaps unformulable doubts about its premises such that, although we are unable to state grounds for challenging them, and although we acknowledge the formal validity of the reasoning, yet we still cannot accord our whole-hearted assent to its conclusion. Or it may be that although we feel confident about both the premises and the reasoning considered in themselves, yet the conclusion conflicts with other already formed convictions, of longer standing in our minds, which prevent us from assenting to it. Newman describes the kinds of motive which might lead us to withdraw our adherence from a previously accepted belief while having no formal objection to raise against the reasoning on which it is based: There may have been some vague feeling that a fault lay at the ultimate basis, or in the underlying conditions, of our reasonings; or some misgiving that the subject-matter of them was beyond the reach of the human mind; or a consciousness that we had gained a broader view of things in general than when we first gave our assent; or that there were strong objections to our first acceptance, which we had never taken into account.5 5

Ibid., pp. 126-127.

7»

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And M. C. D'Arcy adds the observation that "owing to a natural timidity of mind some cannot believe that their views and arguments are sound until they find an independent witness or hear another supporting the same point of view." 6 In such cases as these we may be conscious that the proposition in question is in a sense proved, and yet nevertheless be unable to assent to it. Therefore, says Newman, assent is neither equivalent to inference nor an automatic concomitant of it. As a psychological observation—namely, that unqualified adoption does not always supervene upon the conclusion of an inference which we regard as valid—Newman's distinction appears to be well founded. Further, says Newman, speaking still as a psychological observer, assent is an "all or nothing" phenomenon. "If human nature is to be its own witness, there is no medium between assenting and not assenting." 7 We may often assent on insufficient grounds, and often fail to assent when the grounds are ample, but this does not alter the fact that assent, when it occurs, is distinct from the perception of grounds for belief. For assent is an unconditional acceptance of and adherence to a given proposition without doubt or hesitation. Evidence for a proposition may grow until at last the moment comes when we assent to it. But our assent does not grow with the evidence. To assent is to be certain, and I cannot be more than certain, or partially, comparatively, or increasingly certain: "assent" is (in Gilbert Ryle's terminology) an achievement or "got it" word. Related to this dividing of assent from inference is Newman's famous distinction between "real" and "notional" thinking. The distinction is a useful one, but unfortunately Newman introduces it in a misleading way. He distinguishes first between real and notional propositions— 0 7

The Nature of Belief (2d ed.; London, 1945), p. 118. Grammar of Assent, p. 133.

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the terms of a real proposition being particular and those of a notional proposition general. He then equates Teal apprehension with the apprehension of "real" propositions and notional apprehension with the apprehension of "notional" propositions: Now there are propositions, in which one or both of the terms are common nouns, as standing for what is abstract, general, and non-existing, such as "Man is an animal, some men are learned, an Apostle is a creation of Christianity, a line is a length without breadth, to err is human, to forgive divine." These I shall call notional propositions, and the apprehension with which we infer or assent to them, notional. And there are other propositions, which are composed of singular nouns, and of which the terms stand for things external to us, unit and individual, as "Philip was the father of Alexander," "the earth goes round the sun," "the Apostles first preached to the Jews"; and these I shall call real propositions, and their apprehension real.8 So far Newman's statement is clear; the distinction between real and notional apprehension rests upon a formal division between singular and general propositions. The distinction thus belongs to the province of logic. But Newman then proceeds to upset this position by adding that "the same proposition may admit of both these interpretations at once, having a notional sense as used by one man, and a real as used by another." 9 For example, "No one could possibly confuse the real assent of a Christian to the fact of our Lord's crucifixion, with the notional acceptance of it, as a point of history, on the part of a philosophical heathen." 10 Here the real-notional antithesis clearly refers, not to two propositional forms, but to two modes of apprehending propositions. The distinction has now become a psychological one. It is this latter, psychological distinction with which 8 Ibid., p. 8.

»Ibid.

"»Ibid., p. 30.

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Newman is really concerned and which he uses in his later discussions. The contrast is perhaps more familiar today as that between the "cashed" and the "uncashed" use of symbols. Symbols can be used either as counters to be combined and calculated inter se, or as signs to be "cashed" in terms of their appropriate mental images. In their uncashed use we apprehend words (and other indicative symbols) "notionally," treating them as ends in themselves, as objects in their own right; and in their cashed use we apprehend them "real-ly," treating them as means or instruments, as tokens representing objects beyond themselves. Perhaps the only cases of purely notional or uncashed thinking occur in mathematics and in the manipulation of variables in symbolic logic. At various removes from this in the direction of fully real apprehension we find numerous cases of a predominantly notional use of symbols. For example, the schoolboy parrots, "William the First, 10661087; William the Second, 1087-1100 . . ." as an almost purely verbal exercise: although if he comes to acquire a body of information about these men, and an imaginative grasp of the life of their periods, the phrases gradually become charged with significance for him. Again, to quote one of Newman's own illustrations: a clever schoolboy, from a thorough grammatical knowledge of both languages, might turn into English a French treatise on national wealth, produce, consumption, labour, profits, measures of value, public debt, and the circulating medium, with an apprehension of what it was his author was stating sufficient for making it clear to an English reader, while he had not the faintest conception himself what the treatise, which he was translating, really determined.11 He would be efficiently transposing the symbols, but apprehending the propositions expressed by them only no^Ibid.,

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p. 18.

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tionally. His mind would be operating as a wellprogrammed calculating machine. Notional thinking has both its uses and its abuses. These are indicated in Hobbes's aphorism, "Words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools." 12 The advantage of uncashed symbols is that we can manipulate them more speedily than images, encumbered as these are by a drag of associations. Notionally apprehended words can conveniently be calculated with in accordance with linguistic rules, the final stage only being cashed in mental images and executive decisions. Thus, for example, it is useful for certain purposes to classify and label such items as periods of history, systems of philosophy, groups of people, and even individuals, so that, in Newman's phrase, a person "is made the logarithm of his true self, and in that shape is worked with the ease and satisfaction of logarithms." 13 Indeed all speech and all fully verbalized thinking is to a considerable extent notional, consisting in operations with symbols in accordance with syntactical rules. But symbols employed in this way should be used as a short cut to, and not as a substitute for, an end-state which is cashed or apprehended "real-ly." In other words, our counters must be treated as such, and at the end of the game the result of the transactions must be realized in the hard currency of experience. Real apprehension, on the other hand, is the use of symbols to evoke images and to recall relevant associations, so that the idea presented for attention receives an infusion of life from our stored memories. Thus, when I read of a storm raging in the Atlantic or a great fire burning in San Francisco, the words borrow meaning from my memories of storms or fires and so operate, not merely notionally, as detached labels, but real-ly, as calling up vivid pictures to my imagination. T o quote a well-known passage of Newman's: 12 Leviathan, bit. I, ch. 4.

» Op. cit., p. 25.

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"Duke et decorum est pro patria mori," is a mere commonplace, a terse expression of abstractions in the mind of the poet himself, if Philippi is to be the index of his patriotism, whereas it would be the record of experiences, a sovereign dogma, a grand aspiration, inflaming the imagination, piercing the heart, of a Wallace or a Tell.14 This real-notional distinction is related to that between inference and assent in that inferences, which are essentially conditional, are "especially cognate to notional apprehension, and assents, which are unconditional, to real." 15 However, the two distinctions are only offered as prolegomena to Newman's main task, which is to lay bare the grammar of assent, the procedures by which men arrive at their convictions. He is dealing solely with convictions concerning matters of fact, which are as such outside the scope of demonstrative proof; and he is interested primarily in the grammar of religious conviction, or faith.16 The title under which Newman introduces his main contribution to our understanding in this sphere is "the Illative Sense." The phrase invokes the ghost of the discarded faculty psychology. However, we need not waste time in chiding Newman upon this, or in elaborately exorcising the haunted words. Instead we can better occupy ourselves by trying to restate in more contemporary lan14

15 Ibid., pp. 8-9. Ibid., p. 10. Newman does not renounce the official Roman Catholic view of faith as an adoption of theological beliefs on authority. In others of his writings this theme has free rein. (For example he says that "the very meaning, the very exercise of faith, is joining the Church" [Sermons, II, 184].) But in the Grammar of Assent he employs a different usage and refers to all specifically religious assents as faith (cf. p. 76). He also calls such assents belief (cf. p. 68). Whichever word he uses, he is discussing the subject with which we are concerned in this book, namely religious faith considered as putatively cognitive. 16

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guage the doctrine which is, as D'Arcy says, "Newman's answer to the problem that he set out to solve." 17 It will be convenient to introduce Newman's theory of informal inference and its correlative illative sense, by contrast with the view against which he was reacting. T h i s may be called rationalism, in one of that term's several uses. T h i s is the view, derived from Descartes, and modelled on the mathematical ideal, that knowledge consists in the possession of clear and distinct ideas, and is increased by chains of such ideas arranged in the form of demonstrative proofs; so that to know p is equivalent to being able to prove p. Locke, sturdy empiricist though he was, remained in this sense a rationalist 1 8 and it is Locke whom Newman takes as the spokesman of this point of view. Locke had written: There is nobody in the commonwealth of learning, who does not profess himself a lover of truth: and there is not a rational creature that would not take it amiss to be thought otherwise of. And yet for all this, one may truly say there are very few lovers of truth for truth's sake, even amongst those who persuade themselves that they are so. How a man may know whether he be so in earnest, is worthy enquiry: and I think there is this one unerring mark of it, viz., the not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant. Whoever goes beyond this measure of assent, it is plain, receives not truth for the love of it; loves not truth for truth's sake, but for some other by-end. For, as the evidence that any proposition is true (except such as are self-evident) lying only in the proofs a man has of it, 17

Op. cit., p. n o , Cf. James Gibson, Locke's Theory of Knoiuledge (Cambridge, 1917). Norman Kemp Smith (Commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, p. 592) goes so far as to say that "Locke gives more extreme expression than even Descartes does, to the mystically conceived mathematical method." 18

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whatsoever degree of assent he affords it beyond the degrees of that evidence, it is plain that all the surplusage of assurance is owing to some other affection and not to the love of truth: it being as impossible, that the love of truth should carry my assent above the evidence there is to me that it is true, as that the love of truth should make me assent to any proposition, for the sake of that evidence, which it has not that it is true; which is, in effect, to love it as a truth, because it is possible or probable that it may not be true.19 In a sense of course this is axiomatic. We should all wish to adopt propositions with a confidence proportionate to their probability, and to be certain only of such propositions as we know to be true. But that this is in practice a less simple matter than Locke had made it appear is brought out by Newman's comments. Locke admitted, he points out, that although we do not strictly know the truth of such useful propositions as that fire warms and iron sinks in water, yet for all practical purposes we behave as if we did. Of such pseudo-knowledge Locke said that "we receive it as easily and build as firmly upon it as if it were certain knowledge; and we reason and act thereupon with as little doubt as if it were perfect demonstration." 20 "These probabilities," he says, "rise so near to certainty that they govern our thoughts as absolutely, and influence all our actions as fully, as the most evident demonstration; and, in what concerns us, we make little or no difference between them and certain knowledge." 21 It seems then that the rationalist doctrine of apportioning our assent strictly to the evidence is one for use only in the study, while we act in practical life upon other and less exacting principles—as indeed David Hume, in his philosophy of belief, was quick to acknowledge.22 Newman therefore asks: 19 20 22

Essay, bk. iv, ch. 19, sec. 1. 21 Essay, bk. iv, ch. 16, sec. 6. Ibid. Treatise, bk. 1, sec. 8 (see, e.g., Selby-Bigge's ed., p. 269).

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How then is it not inconsistent with right reason, with the love of truth for its own sake, to allow in his [Locke's] words quoted above, certain strong "probabilities" to "govern our thoughts as absolutely as the most evident demonstrations"? how is there no "surplusage of assurance beyond the degrees of the evidence" when in the case of these strong probabilities, we permit "our belief, thus grounded, to rise to assurance," as he pronounces we are rational in doing? 23 T h e rationalist, in fact, is unable to practice what he preaches; and the only escape from his self-appointed dilemma consists in accepting an enlarged view of knowledge. In Newman's terminology, we must recognize the validity of "informal" as well as "formal" inference. In explanation of the general principle underlying what he calls informal inference, Newman bases an analogy upon the opening lemma of Newton's Principia. H e says: We know that a regular polygon, inscribed in a circle, its sides being continually diminished, tends to become that circle, as its limit; but it vanishes before it has coincided with the circle, so that its tendency to be the circle, though ever nearer fulfilment, never in fact gets beyond a tendency. In like manner, the conclusion in a real or concrete question is foreseen in the number and direction of accumulated premisses, which all converge to it, and as the result of their combination, approach it more nearly than any assignable difference, yet do not touch it logically (though only not touching it) on account of the nature of its subject-matter, and the delicate and implicit character of at least part of the reasonings on which it depends. It is by the strength, variety, or multiplicity of premisses, which are only probable, not by invincible syllogisms—by objections overcome, by adverse theories neutralised, by difficulties gradually clearing up, by exceptions proving the rule, by unlooked-for correlations found for received truths, by suspense and delay in the process issuing in triumphant reactions—by all these ways and many others, it is that the practiced and experienced mind is able to make a sure 23

Grammar of Assent, p. 123.

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divination that a conclusion is inevitable, of which his lines of reasoning do not actually put him in possession.24 Reasoning of this kind is not demonstrative; and yet it is rational to adopt and to act upon its conclusions. To Newman, approaching these matters with the assumption that all valid inference is syllogistic or capable of being translated into syllogisms, this was a revolutionary discovery. For it suggested to him that we can know without being able to prove. Perhaps the best known pages of the Grammar are those in which Newman gives concrete illustrations of this principle. I will cite only his use of the belief that Britain is an island (or more exactly, a group of islands). I have not sailed round the entire coast oi Britain, and even if I had, or thought that I had, the proof of its insularity would be far from complete. It would amount to no more than a probable inference, for I should still not have viewed it all at once and observed it to be an island. I might all the time have been sailing along the shore of an inland sea. Perhaps, however, I know of someone who has been sufficiently high in an airplane or a rocket to see directly that Britain is entirely surrounded by water. Even so his report cannot count as strict proof for me; it constitutes only evidence authorizing a judgment of probability. For the observer might have been deluded or be lying; and his photographs might be faked, or might merely record some atmospheric distortion. In short, although we are completely certain that Britain is an island, so that, as Newman says, "there is no security on which we should be better content to stake our interests, our property, our welfare, than on the fact that we are living on an island," 25 yet most of us cannot properly claim to know (in the strict rationalist sense) that it is so, nor could we easily prove it to a persistent 24

Ibid., p. 244.

80

-3 Ibid.,

p . 223.

FAITH AND THE ILLATIVE SENSE

doubter. W e believe it because the belief coheres with the mass of our other beliefs and is not contradicted by any item of our experience. Our reasons for believing that we are circumnavigable are such as these:—first, we have been so taught in our childhood, and it is so on all the maps; next, we have never heard it contradicted or questioned; on the contrary, everyone whom we have heard speak on the subject of Great Britain, every book we have read, invariably took it for granted; our whole national history, the routine transactions and current events of the country, our social and commercial system, our political relations with foreigners, imply it in one way or another. Numberless facts, or what we consider facts, rest on the truth of it; no received fact rests on its being otherwise.26 " O n the whole," Newman concludes, "I think it is the fact that many of our most obstinate and most reasonable certitudes depend on proofs which are informal and personal, which baffle our powers of analysis, and cannot be brought under logical rule, because they cannot be submitted to logical statistics." 2 T Passing over the curious phrase "logical statistics," it appears to me that Newman has made out his main contention, namely that the reasoning by which we arrive at many, perhaps most, of the certainties by which we live, does not consist in acquiring Cartesian "clear and distinct ideas" and perfectly cogent chains of reasoning, b u t rather in appreciating the drift of a miscellaneous mass of evidence. T h e reasons for our conclusions operate, in a phrase of J o h n Wisdom's, "like the legs of a chair, not like the links of a chain." 28 A great mass of facts fit together in terms of our belief, though no one of them strictly entails it. O u r capacity to see a large field of evidence as a whole and to divine its significance is what Newman calls the illative sense. 26 28

27 Ibid., p. 224. Ibid., p. 229. Proc. Aristot. Soc, 1944-1945, p. 195.

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In his discussion of informal inference and the illative sense Newman is, I think, drawing attention to two distinct facts which it will perhaps be well to treat separately. (a) He is concerned to make the point that our reasoning is often implicit, or unconscious, but that it is none the less rational on that account, (b) He argues also that our reasoning concerning matters of fact involves an unavoidably personal or subjective element, a recognition of which is vital to the study of such fundamental convictions as those of religion. (a) When we acknowledge that "one should attend to the undemonstrated dicta and opinions of the skilful, the old, and the wise" 29 we are recognizing, inter alia, the validity and importance of implicit or unconscious (and subconscious) trains of reasoning. For the judgments of the experienced—for example, the experienced mechanic, soldier, farmer, or physician—are often not consciously reasoned but are instead arrived at with an apparently intuitive directness. The aged shepherd is probably quite unable to explain why he feels sure that it will rain tomorrow, and yet his judgment is based upon evidence, in the form of a multiplicity of meteorological signs which he has learned by experience to interpret aright. His feeling represents the outcome of a reasoning process of the form "if p, r, s} t, etc., then very probably q"; but this process is habitual and unconscious. Indeed the more experienced the judging mind the less does it need consciously to rehearse and scrutinize the processes leading to its conclusions. Just as, in reading print, the practiced reader has no need to spell out each letter of a word and each word of a sentence, passing instead straight from the Gestalt appearance of a phrase to its meaning, so the expert in any field tends to take in the relevant signs at a glance and to interpret them without conscious effort. 29

Aristotle, Nicomachean 82

Ethics, bk. vi, ch. s.

FAITH AND THE ILLATIVE SENSE

What Newman is rightly concerned to stress in this connection is that although the man of experienced judgment may be unable to give public, or even private, expression to his train of reasoning, his conclusions are not on that account any the less rational. Indeed the reasons which people give on demand for an "intuitive" verdict are often not the reasons on which their verdict is in fact based; for they may be quite unable to formulate these reasons. Diagnostic skill in a particular field, and skill in the deployment of words, are different skills; and a lack of the latter does not entail any deficiency in the former. Noting this fact, J. S. Mill cites in illustration "Lord Mansfield's advice to a man of practical good sense, who, being appointed governor of a colony, had to preside in its court of justice, without previous judicial practice or legal education. The advice was to give his decision boldly, for it would probably be right; but never to venture on assigning reasons, for they would almost infallibly be wrong." 30 Consider also such personal assessments as that "So-and-so can be relied on to arbitrate impartially," or "has no sense of humour," or "would be a useful person to be with on a lion hunt." Very often we believe such propositions, and believe them as a result of prolonged and accurate observations of the person in question, and are yet unable on being challenged to point to any—or at any rate, to sufficient— evidence to support them. This difficulty in citing evidence may well be due, not to our conclusion's being based on inadequate evidence, but on the contrary to its being based upon such a vast multiplicity of evidence that we cannot now separately recall the particular items. If a man's character makes a consistent impression upon us over a period of time, we normally come to hold a definite and evidenced opinion of him. And yet we may be powerless to convey to another the grounds for our opinion. In 30

G

Logic, bk. H, ch. 3, par. 3.

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KNOWLEDGE

such cases there has been an unconscious accumulation of relevant observations, issuing in a reasoned—but unconsciously reasoned—conclusion. In short then, reasoning may be implicit and yet rational; and our capacity for such reasoning is one aspect of what Newman calls the illative sense. Considered from this point of view the illative sense has, as Newman notes, a specialized character. "It is in fact attached," he says, "to definite subject-matters, so that a given individual may possess it in one department of thought, for instance, history, and yet not in another, for instance, philosophy." 31 We may be familiar with a given field of thought or experience and able to move about adroitly within it, while being lost in a neighboring subject. The phronimos, for example, or man of practical wisdom in the sphere of moral choice, may have no technical competence in dealing with horses or children. The schoolboy may be expert at dissecting a radio or a motor engine but have an obstinately undeveloped grasp of Latin grammar. Newman cites as a striking example of a specialized flair Napoleon's military genius: By long experience, joined to a great natural quickness and precision of eye, he had acquired the power of judging, with extraordinary accuracy, both of the amount of the enemy's force opposed to him in the field, and of the probable result of the movements, even the most complicated, going forward in the opposite armies. . . . He looked around him for a little while with his telescope, and immediately formed a clear conception of the position, forces and intention of the whole hostile array. In this way he could, with surprising accuracy, calculate in a few minutes, according to what he could see of their formation and the extent of the ground which they occupied, the numerical force of armies of 60,000 or 80,000 men: and if their troops were at all scattered, he knew at once how 31

Grammar

84

of Assent,

p. 272.

FAITH AND THE ILLATIVE SENSE

long it would require for them to concentrate, and how many hours must elapse before they could make their attack.32 (b) Newman's epistemologically more important contention is that into all reasoning concerning matters of fact—as distinguished from demonstrations of the relations between ideas—there enters a personal or subjective element. "A cumulation of probabilities," he says, "over and above their implicit character will vary both in their number and their separate estimated value, according to the particular intellect which is employed upon it. It follows that what to one intellect is a proof is not so to another. . . . We judge for ourselves, by our own lights, and on our own principles; and our criterion of truth is not so much the manipulation of propositions, as the intellectual and moral character of the person maintaining them, and the ultimate silent effect of his arguments or conclusions upon our minds." 33 In short, it is not a mind but a person that reasons. We are never in a position to say (except of tautologies), "It is certain that . . . ," but only, "I am certain that . . ." All our probable reasoning is relative to ourselves, in the sense that it is affected by the cognitive capacities and limitations of our own minds. Further, we cannot stand outside the special structure of our intellect in order to criticize it. It is, as Newman says, "unmeaning in us, to criticise or find fault with our own nature, which is nothing else than we ourselves, instead of using it according to the use of which it ordinarily admits. Our being, with its faculties, mind and body, is a fact not admitting of question, all things being of necessity referred to it, not it to other things." 34 As an account of the genesis of many of our commonest and most assured beliefs, Newman's doctrine of the illative 32 33

Ibid., pp. 253-254, quoting Sir A. Alison's History, X, 286-287. 3 Ibid., pp. 22s, 230. * Ibid., p. 263.

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sense is, I think, to be accepted as substantially correct. No one believes on a basis of apodictic proof, and very few on a basis of direct sensory experience, such matters as "that the earth, considered as a phenomenon, is a globe; that all its regions see the sun by turns; that there are vast tracts on it of land and water; that there are really existing cities on definite sites, which go by the names of London, Paris, Florence and Madrid." 35 Our beliefs concerning matters of fact beyond the range of our own personal observation are normally based upon the convergence of a mass of indications and testimonies; and in the appreciation of some of these fields of data a personal flair or illative sense is required. In such cases the grammar of assent is "the cumulation of probabilities too fine to avail separately, too subtle and circuitous to be convertible into syllogisms, too numerous and various for such conversion, even were they convertible." 36 Providing that this analysis is not pressed too far, ignoring the public checks and interim verifications which make for agreement and tend to produce common conclusions, all this can receive the Nihil Obstat not only of Newman's Church but of the wider commonwealth of learning. It is when we go on to consider whether and in what manner these principles are applicable to religious beliefs that the subject becomes philosophically both more difficult and more interesting. What is the function of the illative sense in matters of religion? Newman's answer to this question occurs in an important interlude between his discussions of natural and revealed religion.37 His answer is not, I shall suggest, finally satisfactory; but it does nevertheless represent a significant advance upon the views which had typically prevailed before him. He does not indeed reject the dogma that the basic teachings of religion are certifiable by demonstrative 35

Ibid., p. 134.

86

S6

Ibid., p. 219.

37

Ibid., pp. 310-315.

FAITH AND THE ILLATIVE SENSE

proofs. But he does recognize very clearly that they are not brought home to the individual mind by such supposed proofs, and that men's assent to them is normally an act, not of logical inference but of what he has called the illative sense. In thus speaking of Natural Religion as in one sense a matter of private judgment, and that with a view of proceeding from it to the proof of Christianity, I seem to give up the intention of demonstrating either. Certainly I do; not that I deny that demonstration is possible. Truth certainly, as such, rests upon grounds intrinsically and objectively and abstractedly demonstrative, but it does not follow from this that the arguments producible in its favour are unanswerable and irresistible. These latter epithets are relative, and bear upon matters of fact. . . . The fact of revelation is in itself demonstrably true, but it is not therefore true irresistibly; else, how comes it to be resisted? There is a vast distance between what it is in itself, and what it is to us. Light is a quality of matter, as truth is of Christianity; but light is not recognised by the blind, and there are those who do not recognise truth, from the fault, not of truth, but of themselves.38 He therefore wishes "to prove Christianity in the same informal way in which I can prove for certain that I have been born into this world, and that I shall die out of it" 39 —or (to draw other and perhaps more apposite examples from his own previous discussion) that Great Britain is an island, or that cities called Paris and Rome stand on definite sites with specific geographical relations to one another. Newman is clear that neither in religion nor in ordinary matters of fact beyond one's own observation can assent be compelled by a "knock down" argument. It is not wonderful then, [he says] that, while I can prove Christianity divine to my own satisfaction, I shall not be able to force it upon any one else. Multitudes indeed I ought to 88

Ibid., pp. 311-312.

39 Ibid.,

p. 312.

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succeed in persuading of its truth without any force at all, because they and I start from die same principles, and what is a proof to me is a proof to them; but if anyone starts from any other principles but ours, I have not die power to change his principles or die conclusions which he draws from them, any more than I can make a crooked man straight. . . . [It is a fact that] in any enquiry about diings in die concrete men differ from each odier, not so much in the soundness of their reasoning as in the principles which govern its exercise, that diose principles are of a personal character, that where there is no common measure of minds, there is no common measure of arguments, and diat the validity of proof is determined, not by any scientific test, but by die illative sense.40 Newman accordingly holds that the religious believer can offer grounds for his faith, not indeed compulsive grounds b u t nevertheless "grounds which he holds to be so sufficient, that he thinks others do hold them implicitly or in substance, or would hold them, if they inquired fairly, or will hold if they listen to him, or do not hold them from impediments, invincible or not as it may be, into which he has n o call to inquire." 41 T h e nature of these grounds is explained in the last quarter of the Grammar of Assent, in which Newman describes the converging evidences which seem to him to point unmistakably to the truth o£ his own religious creed. H e adduces three pointers to theism, followed by further pointers to the specifically Christian form of theism. T h e r e is not—nor does there profess to b e — anything new or distinctive in this section of Newman's book, and we may therefore summarize his exposition somewhat briefly. His first argument makes use of the fact of conscience. If, as is the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that there is One to whom we are responsible, before *<>Ibid., pp. 313-314.

88

*ilbid.,

p. 293.

FAITH AND THE ILLATIVE SENSE

whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear. . . . If the cause of these emotions does not belong to this visible world, the Object to which [the conscientious person's] perception is directed must be Supernatural and Divine.42 His second argument is based upon the almost universal belief of mankind in the existence of a god or gods, and the almost universal practice of some form of worship. In this connection he stresses especially the recurrent theme of sacrifice, which (he holds) implies both a moral deity and a conscious human need for the expiation of sins. These phenomena Newman regards as powerful evidences of divine existence.43 Thirdly, Newman cites what he interprets as a providential ordering of the world. In the prominent events of the world, past and contemporary, the fate, evil or happy, of great men, the rise and fall of states, popular revolutions, decisive battles, the migration of races, die replenishing of the earth, earthquakes and pestilences, critical discoveries and inventions, the history of philosophy, the advancement of knowledge, in these the spontaneous piety of the human mind discerns a Divine Supervision. . . . Good to the good, and evil to the evil, is instinctively felt to be, even from what we see, amid whatever obscurity and confusion, the universal rule of God's dealings with us.44 Then, proceeding from natural to revealed religion, Newman points to the prophecies of a Saviour in Old Testament Judaism, and the fulfillment of these prophecies in the life and death of Jesus Christ; to the spectacle of Christ's disciples going out into the world to conquer it, not by force but by love; to their resilience under persecution; and to the world-wide expansion of Christianity and the remarkable power which it has manifested through the ages. « I b i d . , pp. 83-84. Cf. pp. 296-298. *3 Ibid., pp. 297-301, 306-310.

44

Ibid., pp. 305-306.

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This very brief resume will, I think, suffice for our present purpose. It serves to indicate the scope and style of Newman's argument in the last quarter of the Grammar. T o have examined these pages at greater length would only have deflected us from our main concern, which is not with the details or the validity of Newman's argument but rather with its general character and purpose. Newman's basic though unformulated assumption is that our belief in divine existence and in divine revelation is concerned with propositions, and with propositions of the same logical type as "New York is to the north of Washington" or "Lincoln was born in 1809." The only important difference which he recognizes is that certain accidental factors, hopes and fears and the influence of human wickedness, which are not usually evoked by propositions of purely mundane import, tend to intervene in matters of religion to confuse men's judgments. He assumes that truth in both the natural and the supernatural spheres may be ascertained in essentially the same way —the adding up of probabilities until they amount to virtual certainty. His method of establishing Christianity is that of "an accumulation of various probabilities"; for "from probabilities we may construct legitimate proof, sufficient for certitude." 45 However, this method of probabilification, consisting in the amassing of evidences from the different sides of human experience, begs fundamental questions. The propositions "God exists" and "Jesus Christ is the Son of God" differ in logical type from "Boston exists" and "John Smith is the son of Richard Smith"; and it cannot be assumed without careful inquiry that they are established by comparable procedures. Newman himself was not conscious of the need for any such inquiry; indeed it is only during the last decades that the "type fallacy," which he *BIbid., p. 312. 90

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unconsciously committed, has become a recognized philosophical malady. Newman's thought did not extend to this distinctively present-day puzzle; but within its own borders his contribution to the study of faith is of solid and lasting value. He saw clearly that in the sense in which men actually use the term, we know a great many things which we are not able to prove, and that the religious person's knowledge of God falls within this category. He further pointed out that religious judgments have a marked family resemblance with exercises of the illative sense, or the acquired capacity to respond to indefinable indications in a given field and to marshal a mass of apparently unrelated evidences and divine their trend. The judgment of religious faith consists in what one of Newman's commentators has called a "global impression" or interpretation. 46 But this impression or interpretation is not, as both Newman and his commentator assume, directed upon a logically homogeneous range of data. The structure of the theistic interpretation is even more complex than Newman recognized. Further, the even more basic question has to be raised as to whether faith, in its primary sense, is rightly regarded as a prepositional attitude at all. However far Newman may diverge from the Thomist tradition as regards the psychology of faith, he leaves unquestioned the assumption that faith is essentially a matter of believing theological propositions. It is this assumption that will be rejected in Part II. * 8 D'Arcy, op. cit., pp. 130 ff.

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PART II

Faith as the Interpretative Element within Religious Experience

5

The Nature of Faith WE COME now to our main problem. What manner of cognition is the religious man's awareness of God, and how is it related to his other cognitions? We become conscious of the existence of other objects in the universe, whether things or persons, either by experiencing them for ourselves or by inferring their existence from evidences within our experience. The awareness of God reported by the ordinary religious believer is of the former kind. He professes, not to have inferred that there is a God, but that God as a living being has entered into his own experience. He claims to enjoy something which he describes as an experience of God. The ordinary believer does not, however, report an awareness of God as existing in isolation from all other objects of experience. His consciousness of the divine does not involve a cessation of his consciousness of a material and social environment. It is not a vision of God in solitary glory, filling the believer's entire mind and blotting out his normal field of perception. Whether such phrases correctly describe the mystic's goal, the ultimate Beatific Vision which figures in Christian doctrine, is a question for a later chapter.1 But at any rate the ordinary person's religious awareness here on earth is not of that kind. He claims instead an apprei See Chapter 8. 95

FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE

hension of God meeting him in and through his material and social environments. He finds that in his dealings with the world of men and things he is somehow having to do with God, and God with him. The moments of ordinary life possess, or may possess, for him in varying degrees a religious significance. As has been well said, religious experience is "the whole experience of religious persons." 2 The believer meets God not only in moments of worship, but also when through the urgings of conscience he feels the pressure of the divine demand upon his life; when through the gracious actions of his friends he apprehends the divine grace; when through the marvels and beauties of nature he traces the hand of the Creator; and he has increasing knowledge of the divine purpose as he responds to its behests in his own life. In short, it is not apart from the course of mundane life, but in it and through it, that the ordinary religious believer claims to experience, however imperfectly and fragmentarily, the divine presence and activity. This at any rate, among the variety of claims to religious awareness which have been and might be made, is the claim whose epistemological credentials we are to examine. Can God be known through his dealings with us in the world which he has made? The question concerns human experience, and the possibility of an awareness of the divine being mediated through awareness of the world, the supernatural through the natural. In answer to this query I shall try to show, in various fields, that "mediated" knowledge, such as is postulated by this religious claim, is already a common and accepted feature of our cognitive experience. T o this end we must study a basic characteristic of human experience, which I shall call "significance," together with the correlative mental activity by which it is apprehended, which I shall call 2

William Temple, Nature, Man and God (London, 1934), p. 334.

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"interpretation." We shall find that interpretation takes place in relation to each of the three main types of existence, or orders of significance, recognized by human thought—the natural, the human, and the divine; and that in order to relate ourselves appropriately to each, a primary and unevidenceable act of interpretation is required which, when directed toward God, has traditionally been termed "faith." Thus I shall try to show that while the object of religious knowledge is unique, its basic epistemological pattern is that of all our knowing. This is not to say that the logic of theistic belief has no peculiarities. It does indeed display certain unique features; and these (I shall try to show) are such as follow from the unique nature of its object, and are precisely the peculiarities which we should expect if that object is real. In the present chapter, then, we shall take note of the common epistemological pattern in which religious knowledge partakes, and in the following chapter we shall examine some special peculiarities of religious knowing, and especially its noncompulsory character. "Significance" seems to be the least misleading word available to name the fundamental characteristic of experience which I wish to discuss. Other possible terms are "form" and "meaning." But "form," as the word is used in the traditional matter-form distinction, would require careful editing and commentary to purge it of unwanted Aristotelian associations. "Meaning," on the other hand, has been so overworked and misused in the past, not only by plain men and poets, but also by theologians and philosophers,3 as to be almost useless today, except in its restricted technical use as referring to the equivalence of symbols. We may perhaps hope that after a period of exile the wider concept of "meaning" will be readmitted into the philo3

Cf. Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (7th ed.; London, 1945), ch. 8.

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sophical comity of notions. Indeed Brand Blanshard has long braved the post-Ogden and Richards ban by his use of the phrase "perceptual meaning." * I propose here, however, to use the less prejudged term "significance." By significance I mean that fundamental and allpervasive characteristic of our conscious experience which de facto constitutes it for us the experience of a "world" and not of a mere empty void or churning chaos. We find ourselves in a relatively stable and ordered environment in which we have come to feel, so to say, "at home." The world has become intelligible to us, in the sense that it is a familiar place in which we have learned to act and react in appropriate ways. Our experience is not just an unpredictable kaleidoscope of which we are bewildered spectators, but reveals to us a familiar, settled cosmos in which we live and act, a world in which we can adopt purposes and adapt means to ends. It is in virtue of this homely, familiar, intelligible character of experience—its possession of significance—that we are able to inhabit and cope with our environment. If this use of "significance" be allowed it will, I think, readily be granted that our consciousness is essentially consciousness of significance. Mind could neither emerge nor persist in an environment which was totally nonsignificant to it. For this reason it is not possible to define "significance" ostensively by pointing to contrasting examples of significant and nonsignificant experience. In its most general form at least, we must accept the Kantian thesis that we can be aware only of that which enters into a certain framework of basic relations which is correlated with the structure of our own consciousness. These basic relations represent the minimal conditions of significance for the human mind. The totally nonsignificant is thus debarred from entering into our experience. A completely undiffer* The Nature of Thought (London, 1939), I, chs. 4-6.

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entiated field, or a sheer "buzzing, booming confusion," would be incapable of sustaining consciousness. For our consciousness is (to repeat) essentially consciousness of significance. Except perhaps in very early infancy or in states of radical breakdown, the human mind is always aware of its environment as having this quality of fundamental familiarity or intelligibility. Significance, then, is simply the most general characteristic of our experience. Significance, so defined, has an essential reference to action. Consciousness of a particular kind of environmental significance involves a judgment, implicit or explicit, as to the appropriateness of a particular kind, or range of kinds, of action in relation to that environment. The distinction between types of significance is a distinction between the reactions, occurrent and dispositional, which they render appropriate. For the human psychophysical organism has evolved under the pressure of a continual struggle to survive, and our system of significance-attributions has as a result an essentially pragmatic orientation. Our outlook is instinctively empirical and practical. Physiologically we are so constituted as to be sensitive only to a minute selection of the vast quantity and complexity of the events taking place around us—that precise selection which is practically relevant to us. Our ears, for example, are attuned to a fragment only of the full range of sound waves, and our eyes to but a fraction of the multitudinous variations of light. Our sense organs automatically select from nature those aspects in relation to which we must act. We apprehend the world only at the macroscopic level at which we have practical dealings with it. As Norman Kemp Smith has said, "The function of sense-perception, as of instinct, is not knowledge but power, not insight but adaptation." 5 For an animal to apprehend more of its environment than 5 Prolegomena to an Idealist 1924), pp. 38-33. H

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is practically relevant to it would prove a fatal complication; it would be bemused and bewildered, and unable to react selectively to the stimuli indicating danger, food, and so on. And it is equally true at the human level that the significance of a given object or situation for a given individual consists in the practical difference which the existence of that object makes to that individual. It is indeed one of the marks of our status as dependent beings that we live by continual adaptation to our environment; and from this follows the essentially practical bearing of that which constitutes significance for us. Although the locus of significance is primarily our environment as a whole, we can in thought divide this into smaller units of significance. We may accordingly draw a provisional distinction between two species of significance, object-significance and situational significance, and note the characteristics of significance first in terms of the former. Every general name, such as "hat," "book," "fire," "house," names a type of object-significance. For these are isolable aspects of our experience which (in suitable contexts) render appropriate distinctive patterns of behavior. The word "hat," for example, does not name a rigidly delimited class of objects but a particular use to which things can be put, namely, as a covering for the head. Objects are specially manufactured for this use; but if necessary many other items can be made to fulfill the function of a hat. This particular way of treating things, as headgear, is the behavioral correlate of the type of object-significance which we call "being a hat." Indeed the boundaries of each distinguishable class of objects are defined by the two foci of (1) physical structure and (2) function in relation to human interests. Our names are always in part names for functions or uses or kinds of significance as apprehended from the standpoint of the agent. 100

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Significance, then, is a relational concept. A universe devoid of consciousness would be neither significant nor nonsignificant. An object or a sense-field is significant for or to a mind. We are only concerned here with significance for the human mind, but it is well to remember that the lower animals also are aware of their environment as being significant, this awareness being expressed not in words or concepts but in actions and readinesses for action. There is, I hope, no suggestion of anything occult about this fundamental feature of our experience which I am calling "significance." The difficulty in discussing it is not novelty but, on the contrary, overfamiliarity. It is so completely obvious that we can easily overlook its importance, or even its existence. There is also the related difficulty that we do not apprehend significance as such, but only each distinguishable aspect of our experience as having its own particular type of significance. For significance is a genus which exists only in its species. Just as we perceive the various colors, but never color in general, so we perceive this and that kind of significance, but never significance simpliciter. After this preliminary characterization of the nature of significance, we may take note of the mental activity of interpretation which is its subjective correlate. The word "interpretation" suggests the possibility of differing judgments; we tend to call a conclusion an interpretation when we recognize that there may be other and variant accounts of the same subject matter. It is precisely because of this suggestion of ambiguity in the given, and of alternative modes of construing data, that "interpretation" is a suitable correlate term for "significance." Two uses of "interpretation" are to be distinguished. In one of its senses, an interpretation is a (true or false) explanation, answering the question, Why? We speak, for example, of a metaphysician's interpretation of the universe. 101

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In its other sense, an interpretation is a (correct or incorrect) recognition,6 or attribution of significance, answering the question, What? ("What is that, a dog or a fox?") These two meanings are closely connected. For all explanation operates ultimately in terms of recognition. We explain a puzzling phenomenon by disclosing its context, revealing it as part of a wider whole which does not, for us, stand in need of explanation. We render the unfamiliar intellectually acceptable by relating it to the already recognizable, indicating a connection or continuity between the old and the new. But in the unique case of the universe as a whole the distinction between explanation and recognition fails to arise. For the universe has no wider context in terms of which it might be explained; an explanation of it can therefore only consist in a perception of its significance. In this case, therefore, interpretation is both recognition and explanation. Hence the theistic recognition, or significance-attribution, is also a metaphysical explanation or theory. However, although the explanatory and the recognition aspects of theistic faith are inseparable, they may usefully be distinguished for purposes of exposition. In the present chapter we shall be examining interpretation, including the religious interpretation, as a recognition, or perception of significance. An act of recognition, or of significance-attribution, is a complex occurrence dealing with two different types of ambiguity in the given. There are, on the one hand, interpretations which are mutually exclusive (e.g., "That is a fox" and "That is a dog," referring to the same object), and on the other hand interpretations which are mutually 6

This is a slightly off-dictionary sense of "recognition," equating it, not with the identification of the appearances of an object at different times as appearances of the same object, but with the apprehension of what has been discussed above as the "significance" of objects. 102

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compatible (e.g., "That is an animal" and "That is a dog"; or "He died by asphyxiation" and "He was murdered"). Of two logically alternative interpretations only one (at most) can be the correct interpretation. But two compatible interpretations may both be correct. We shall be concerned henceforth with this latter kind of difference, in which several levels or layers or orders of significance are found in the same field of data. The following are some simple examples of different levels or orders of object-significance. (a) I see a rectangular red object on the floor in the corner. So far I have interpreted it as a "thing" (or "substance"), as something occupying space and time. On looking more closely, however, I see that it is a red-covered book. I have now made a new interpretation which includes my previous one, but goes beyond it. (b) There is a piece of paper covered with writing. An illiterate savage can perhaps interpret it as something made by man. A literate person, who does not know the particular language in which it is written, can interpret it as being a document. But someone who understands the language can find in it the expression of specific thoughts. Each is answering the question, "What is it?" correctly, but answering it at different levels. And each more adequate attribution of significance presupposes the less adequate ones. This relationship between types of significance, one type being superimposed upon and interpenetrating another, is a pattern which we shall find again in larger and more important spheres. We have already noted that significance is essentially related to action. The significance of an object to an individual consists in the practical difference which that object makes to him, the ways in which it affects either his immediate reactions or his more long-term plans and policies. 103

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There is also a reciprocal influence of action upon our interpretations. For it is only when we have begun to act upon our interpretations, and have thereby verified that our environment is capable of being successfully inhabited in terms of them, that they become fully "real" modes of experience. Interpretations which take the dispositional form of readinesses for action, instead of immediate overt activity, borrow this feeling of "reality" from cognate interpretations which are being or have already been confirmed in action. (For example, when I see an apple on the sideboard, but do not immediately eat it, I nevertheless perceive it as entirely "real" because I have in the past verified similar interpretations of similar apple-like appearances.) It is by acting upon our interpretations that we build up an apprehension of the world around us; and in this process interpretations, once confirmed, suggest and support further interpretations. The necessity of acting-interms-of to "clinch" or confirm an interpretation has its importance, as we shall note later, in relation to the specifically religious recognition which we call theistic faith. We have been speaking so far only of object-significance. But, as already indicated, object-significance as contrasted with situational significance is an expository fiction. An object absolutely per se and devoid of context would have no significance for us. It can be intelligible only as part of our familiar world. What significance would remain, for example, to a book without the physical circumstance of sight, the conventions of language and writing, the acquired art of reading, and even the literature of which the book is a part and the civilization within which it occurs? An object owes its significance as much to its context as to itself; it is what it is largely because of its place in a wider scheme of things. We are indeed hardly ever conscious of anything in complete isolation. Our normal consciousness is of groups of objects standing in recognizable patterns of 104

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relations to one another. And it is the resulting situation taken as a whole that carries significance for us, rendering some ranges of action and reaction appropriate and others inappropriate. We live and plan and act all the time in terms of the situational significance of our environment; although of course our interest may focus at any given moment upon a particular component object within the current situation. We do not, it is true, as plain men generally think of the familiar situations which constitute our experience from moment to moment as having "significance" and of our actions as being guided thereby. But in the fundamental sense in which we are using the term, our ordinary consciousness of the world is undoubtedly a continuous consciousness of significance. It is normally consciousness of a routine or humdrum significance which is so familiar that we take it entirely for granted. The significance for me, for example, of my situation at the present moment is such that I go on quietly working; this is the response rendered appropriate by my interpretation of my contemporary experience. No fresh response is required, for my routine reactions are already adjusted to the prevailing context of significance. But this significance is none the less real for being undramatic. The component elements of situational significance are not only physical objects—tables, mountains, stars, houses, hats, and so on—but also such nonmaterial entities as sounds and lights and odors and, no less important, such psychological events and circumstances as other peoples' thoughts, emotions, and attitudes. Thus the kinds of situational significance in terms of which we act and react are enormously complex. Indeed the philosopher who would trace the morphology of situational significance must be a dramatist and poet as well as analyst. Attempts at significance-mapping have been undertaken by some of the 105

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existentialist writers: what they refer to as the existential character of experience is the fact that we are ourselves by definition within any relational system which constitutes a situation for us. However, these writers have usually been concerned to bring out the more strained and hectic aspects of human experience, presenting it often as a vivid nightmare of metaphysical anxieties and perils. They are undoubtedly painting from real life, particularly in this anguished age, but I venture to think that they are depicting it in a partial and one-sided manner. A "situation" may be defined, then, as a state of affairs which, when selected for attention by an act of interpretation, carries its own distinctive practical significance for us. We may be involved in many different situations at the same time and may move by swift or slow transitions of interpretation from one to another. There may thus occur an indefinitely complex interpenetration of situations. For example I am, let us say, sitting in a room playing a game of chess with a friend. The game, isolated by the brackets of imagination, is a situation in itself in which I have a part to play as one of the two competing intelligences presiding over the chess board. Here is an artificial situation with its conventional boundaries, structure, and rules of procedure. But from time to time my attention moves from the board to the friend with whom I am playing, and I exchange some conversation with him. Now I am living in another situation which contains the game of chess as a sub-situation. Then - suddenly a fire breaks out in the building, and the attention of both of us shifts at once to our wider physical situation; and so on. There are the wider and wider spatial situations of the street, the city, the state, continent, globe, Milky Way, and finally, as the massive permanent background situation inclusive of all else, the physical universe. And there are also the widening circles of family, class, nation, civilization, and all the 106

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other groupings within the inclusive group of the human species as a whole. The complex web of interplays within and between these two expanding series gives rise to the infinite variety of situations of which our human life is composed. Finally, enfolding and interpenetrating this interlocking mass of finite situations there is also, according to the insistent witness of theistic religion, the all-encompassing situation of being in the presence of God and within the sphere of an on-going divine purpose. Our main concern, after these prolonged but unavoidable preliminaries, is to be with this alleged ultimate and inclusive significance and its relation to the more limited and temporary significances through which it is mediated. Our inventory, then, shows three main orders of situational significance, corresponding to the threefold division of the universe, long entertained by human thought, into nature, man, and God. The significance for us of the physical world, nature, is that of an objective environment whose character and "laws" we must learn, and toward which we have continually to relate ourselves aright if we are to survive. The significance for us of the human world, man, is that of a realm of relationships in which we are responsible agents, subject to moral obligation. This world of moral significance is, so to speak, superimposed upon the natural world, so that relating ourselves to the moral world is not distinct from the business of relating ourselves to the natural world but is rather a particular manner of so doing. And likewise the more ultimately fateful and momentous matter of relating ourselves to the divine, to God, is not distinct from the task of directing ourselves within the natural and ethical spheres; on the contrary, it entails (without being reducible to) a way of so directing ourselves. In the case of each of these three realms, the natural, the 107

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human, and the divine, a basic act of interpretation is required which discloses to us the existence of the sphere in question, thus providing the ground for our multifarious detailed interpretations within that sphere. Consider first the level of natural significance. This is the significance which our environment has for us as animal organisms seeking survival and pleasure and shunning pain and death. In building houses, cooking food, avoiding dangerous precipices, whirlpools, and volcanoes, and generally conducting ourselves prudently in relation to the material world, we are all the time taking account of what I am calling (for want of a better name) the natural significance of our environment. We have already noted some instances of natural significance when discussing the recognition of objects and situations. It is a familiar philosophical tenet, and one which may perhaps today be taken as granted, that all conscious experience of the physical world contains an element of interpretation. There are combined in each moment of experience a presented field of data and an interpretative activity of the subject. The perceiving mind is thus always in some degree a selecting, relating and synthesizing agent, and experiencing our environment involves a continuous activity of interpretation. "Interpretation" here is of course an unconscious and habitual process, the process by which a sense-field is perceived, for example, as a threedimensional room, or a particular configuration of colored patches within that field as a book lying upon a table. Interpretation in this sense is generally recognized as a factor in the genesis of sense perception. We have now to note, however, the further and more basic act of interpretation which reveals to us the very existence of a material world, a world which we explore and inhabit as our given environment. In attending to this primary interpretative act we are noting the judgment which carries us beyond the 108

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solipsist predicament into an objective world of enduring, causally interacting objects, which we share with other people. Given the initial rejection of solipsism (or rather given the interpretative bias of human nature, which has prevented all but the most enthusiastic of philosophers from falling into solipsism) we can, I think, find corroborations of an analogical kind to support our belief in the unobserved continuance of physical objects and the reality of other minds. But the all-important first step, or assumption, is unevidenced and unevidenceable—except for permissive evidence, in that one's phenomenal experience is "there" to be interpreted either solipsistically or otherwise. But there is no event within our phenomenal experience the occurrence or nonoccurrence of which is relevant to the truth or falsity of the solipsist hypothesis. That hypothesis represents one possible interpretation of our experience as a whole, and the contrary belief in a plurality of minds existing in a common world represents an alternative and rival interpretation. It may perhaps be objected that it does not make any practical difference whether solipsism be true or not, and that these are not therefore two different interpretations of our experience. For if our experience, pheonomenally considered, would be identical on either hypothesis, then the alternative (it will be said) is a purely verbal one; the choice is merely a choice of synonyms. I do not think, however, that this is the case. Phenomenally, there is no difference between a dream in which we know that we are dreaming and one in which we do not. But, nevertheless, there is a total difference between the two experiences— total not in the sense that every, or indeed any, isolable aspects of them differ, but in the sense that the two experiences taken as wholes are of different kinds. We are aware of precisely the same course of events, but in the one case this occurs within mental brackets, labeled as a dream, 109

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while in the other case we are ourselves immersed within the events and live through them as participants. The phenomena are apprehended in the one case as dream constituents and in the other case as "real." And the difference caused by a genuine assent to solipsism would be akin to the sudden realization during an absorbing dream that it is only a dream. If the solipsist interpretation were to be seriously adopted and wholeheartedly believed, experience would take on an unreal character in contrast with one's former nonsolipsist mode of experience. Our personal relationships in particular, our loves and friendships, our hates and enmities, rivalries and co-operations, would have to be treated not as transsubjective meetings with other personalities, but as dialogues and dramas with oneself. There would be only one person in existence, and other "people," instead of being apprehended as independent centers of intelligence and purpose, would be but humanlike appearances. They could not be the objects of affection or enmity, nor could their actions be subjected to moral judgment in our normal nonsolipsist sense. In short, although it must be very difficult, if not impossible, for the sanely functioning mind seriously to assent to solipsism and to apperceive in terms of it, yet this does represent at least a logically possible interpretation of experience, and constitutes a different interpretation from our ordinary belief in an independently existing world of things and persons. It follows that our normal mode of experience is itself properly described as an interpretation, an interpretation which we are unable to justify by argument but which we have nevertheless no inclination or reason to doubt. Indeed as Hume noted, nature has not left this to our choice, "and has doubtless esteem'd it an affair of too great importance to be trusted to our uncertain reasonings and speculations. We may well ask, What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body [i.e., matter]? but 'tis vain to ask. no

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Whether there be body or not? That is a point, which we must take for granted in all our reasonings." 7 But the ordering of our lives in relation to an objective material environment thus revealed to us by a basic act of interpretation is not the most distinctively human level of experience. It is characteristic of mankind to live not only in terms of the natural significance of his world but also in the dimension of personality and responsibility. And so we find that presupposing consciousness of the physical world, and supervening upon it, is the kind of situational significance which we call "being responsible" or "being under obligation." The sense of moral obligation, or of "oughtness," is the basic datum of ethics. It is manifested whenever someone, in circumstances requiring practical decision, feels "obligated" to act, or to refrain from acting, in some particular way. When this occurs, the natural significance of his environment is interpenetrated by another, ethical significance. A traveler on an unfrequented road, for example, comes upon a stranger who has met with an accident and who is lying injured and in need of help. At the level of natural significance this is just an empirical state of affairs, a particular configuration of stone and earth and flesh. But an act or reflex of interpretation at the moral level reveals to the traveler a situation in which he is under obligation to render aid. He feels a categorical imperative laid upon him, demanding that he help the injured man. The situation takes on for him a peremptory ethical significance, and he finds himself in a situation of inescapable personal responsibility. As has often been remarked, it is characteristic of situations exhibiting moral significance that they involve, directly or indirectly, more than one person. The other or others may stand either in an immediate personal relationship to the moral agent or, as in large-scale social issues, in i Treatise, bk. I, pt. iv, sec. 2 (Selby-Bigge's ed., pp. 187-188). ill

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a more remote causal relationship. (The sphere of politics has been denned as that of the impersonal relationships between persons.) Ethical significance, as the distinctive significance of situations in which persons are components, includes both of these realms. To feel moral obligation is to perceive (or misperceive) the practical significance for oneself of a situation in which one stands in a responsible relationship to another person or to other people. That the perception of significance in personal situations sets up (in Kant's terms) a categorical imperative, while natural situations give rise only to hypothetical imperatives, conditional upon our own desires, is a denning characteristic of the personal world. Clearly, moral significance presupposes natural significance. For in order that we may be conscious of moral obligations, and exercise moral intelligence, we must first be aware of a stable environment in which actions have foreseeable results, and in which we can learn the likely consequences of our deeds. It is thus a precondition of ethical situations that there should be a stable medium, the world, with its own causal laws, in which people meet and in terms of which they act. The two spheres of significance, the moral and the physical, interpenetrate in the sense that all occasions of obligation have reference, either immediately or ultimately, to overt action. Relating oneself to the ethical sphere is thus a particular manner of relating oneself to the natural sphere: ethical significance is mediated to us in and through the natural world. As in the case of natural situational significance, we can enter the sphere of ethical significance only by our own act of interpretation. But at this level the interpretation is a more truly voluntary one. That is to say, it is not forced upon us from outside, but depends upon an inner capacity and tendency to interpret in this way, a tendency which we are free to oppose and even to overrule. If a man chooses to 112

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be a moral solipsist, or absolute egoist, recognizing no responsibility toward other people, no one can prove to him that he has any such responsibilities. The man who, when confronted with some standard situation having ethical significance, such as a bully wantonly injuring a child, fails to see it as morally significant, could only be classified as suffering from a defect of his nature analogous to physical blindness. He can of course be compelled by threats of punishment to conform to a stated code of behavior; but he cannot be compelled to feel moral obligation. He must see and accept for himself his own situation as a responsible being and its corollary of ethical accountability. Has this epistemological paradigm—of one order of significance superimposed upon and mediated through another—any further application? The contention of this chapter is that it has. As ethical significance interpenetrates natural significance, so religious significance interpenetrates both ethical and natural. The divine is the highest and ultimate order of significance, mediating neither of the others and yet being mediated through both of them. But what do we man by religious significance? What is it that, for the ethical monotheist, possesses this significance, and in what does the significance consist? The primary locus of religious significance is the believer's experience as a whole. The basic act of interpretation which reveals to him the religious significance of life is a uniquely "total interpretation," whose logic will be studied in Part III. But we must at this point indicate what is intended by the phrase "total interpretation," and offer some preliminary characterization of its specifically theistic form. Consider the following imagined situation. I enter a room in a strange building and find that a militant secret society appears to be meeting there. Most of the members "3

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are armed, and as they take me for a fellow member I judge it expedient to acquiesce in the role. Subtle and blood-thirsty plans are discussed for a violent overthrow of the constitution. The whole situation is alarming in the extreme. Then I suddenly notice behind me a gallery in which there are batteries of arc lights and silently whirring cameras, and I realize that I have walked by accident onto the set of a film. This realization consists in a change of interpretation of my immediate environment. Until now I had automatically interpreted it as being "real life," as a dangerous situation demanding considerable circumspection on my part. Now I interpret it as having practical significance of a quite different kind. But there is no corresponding change in the observable course of events. The meeting of the "secret society" proceeds as before, although now I believe the state of affairs to be quite other than I had previously supposed it to be. The same phenomena are interpreted as constituting an entirely different practical situation. And yet not quite the same phenomena, for I have noticed important new items, namely, the cameras and arc lights. But let us now in imagination expand the room into the world, and indeed expand it to include the entire physical universe. This is the strange room into which we walk at birth. There is no space left for a photographers' gallery, no direction in which we can turn in search of new clues which might reveal the significance of our situation. Our interpretation must be a total interpretation, in which we assert that the world as a whole (as experienced by ourselves) is of this or that kind, that is to say, affects our plans and our policies in such and such ways. The monotheist's faith-apprehension of God as the unseen Person dealing with him in and through his experience of the world is from the point of view of epistemology an interpretation of this kind, an interpretation 114

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of the world as a whole as mediating a divine presence and purpose. He sees in his situation as a human being a significance to which the appropriate response is a religious trust and obedience. His interpretative leap carries him into a world which exists through the will of a holy, righteous, and loving Being who is the creator and sustainer of all that is. Behind the world—to use an almost inevitable spatial metaphor—there is apprehended to be an omnipotent, personal Will whose purpose toward mankind guarantees men's highest good and blessedness. The believer finds that he is at all times in the presence of this holy Will. Again and again he realizes, either at the time or in retrospect, that in his dealings with the circumstances of his own life he is also having to do with a transcendent Creator who is the determiner of his destiny and the source of all good. Thus the primary religious perception, or basic act of religious interpretation, is not to be described as either a reasoned conclusion or an unreasoned hunch that there is a God. It is, putatively, an apprehension of the divine presence within the believer's human experience. It is not an inference to a general truth, but a "divine-human encounter," a mediated meeting with the living God. As ethical significance presupposes natural, so religious significance presupposes both ethical and natural. Entering into conscious relation with God consists in large part in adopting a particular style and manner of acting towards our natural and social environments. For God summons men to serve him in the world, and in terms of the life of the world. Religion is not only a way of cognizing but also, and no less vitally, a way of living. T o see the world as being ruled by a divine love which sets infinite value upon each individual and includes all men in its scope, and yet to live as though the world were a realm of chance in which each must fight for his own interests against the rest. i

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argues a very dim and wavering vision of God's rule. So far as that vision is clear it issues naturally in a trust in the divine purpose and obedience to the divine will. We shall be able to say more about this practical and dispositional response, in which the apprehension of the religious significance of life so largely consists, when we come in Part IV to examine a particular form of theistic faith. At present we are concerned only with the general nature of the awareness of God. Rudolf Otto has a somewhat obscure doctrine of the schematization of the Holy in terms of ethics.8 Without being committed to Otto's use of the Kantian notion, or to his general philosophy of religion, we have been led to a parallel conception of the religious significance of life as schematized in, mediated through, or expressed in terms of, its natural and moral significance. As John Oman says of the Hebrew prophets, What determines their faith is not a theory of the Supernatural, but an attitude towards the Natural, as a sphere in which a victory of deeper meaning than the visible and of more abiding purpose than the fleeting can be won. . . . The revelation of the Supernatural was by reconciliation to the Natural: and this was made possible by realising in the Natural the meaning and purpose of the Supernatural.8 In one respect this theistic interpretation is more akin to the natural than to the ethical interpretation. For while only some situations have moral significance, all situations have for embodied beings a continuous natural significance. In like manner the sphere of the basic religious interpretation is not merely this or that isolable situation, but the uniquely total situation constituted by our experi8 The Idea of the Holy, trans, by J. W. Harvey (London, 1923), ch. 7. • The Natural and the Supernatural (Cambridge, 1931), p. 448. 116

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ence as a whole and in all its aspects, up to the present moment. But on the other hand the theistic interpretation is more akin to the ethical than to the natural significance-attribution in that it is clearly focused in some situations and imperceptible in others. Not all the moments of life mediate equally the presence of God to the ordinary believer. He is not continuously conscious of God's presence (although possibly the saint is), but conscious rather of the divine Will as a reality in the background of his life, a reality which may at any time emerge to confront him in absolute and inescapable demand. We have already observed how one situation may interpenetrate another, and how some sudden pressure or intrusion can cause a shift of interpretation and attention so that the mind moves from one interlocking context to another. Often a more important kind of significance will summon us from a relatively trivial kind. A woman may be playing a game of cards when she hears her child crying in pain in another room; and at once her consciousness moves from the artificial world of the game to the real world in which she is the mother of the child. Or an officer in the army reserve may be living heedless of the international situation until sudden mobilization recalls him to his military responsibility. The interrupting call of duty may summon us from trivial or relatively unimportant occupations to take part in momentous events. Greater and more ultimate purposes may without warning supervene upon lesser ones and direct our lives into a new channel. But the final significance, which takes precedence over all others as supremely important and overriding, is (according to theism) that of our situation as being in the presence of God. At any time a man may be confronted by some momentous decision, some far-reaching moral choice either of means or of ends, in which his responsibility as a servant of God intrudes 117

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upon and conflicts with the requirements of his earthly "station and its duties," so that the latter pales into unimportance and he acts in relation to a more ultimate environment whose significance magisterially overrules his customary way of life. When the call of God is clearly heard other calls become inaudible, and the prophet or saint, martyr or missionary, the man of conscience or of illumined mind may ignore all considerations of worldly prudence in responding to a claim with which nothing else whatever may be put in the balance. T o recapitulate and conclude this stage of the discussion, the epistemological point which I have sought to make is this. There is in cognition of every kind an unresolved mystery. The knower-known relationship is in the last analysis sui generis: the mystery of cognition persists at the end of every inquiry—though its persistence does not prevent us from cognizing. We cannot explain, for example, how we are conscious of sensory phenomena as constituting an objective physical environment; we just find ourselves interpreting the data of our experience in this way. We are aware that we live in a real world, though we cannot prove by any logical formula that it is a real world. Likewise we cannot explain how we know ourselves to be responsible beings subject to moral obligations; we just find ourselves interpreting our social experience in this way. We find ourselves inhabiting an ethically significant universe, though we cannot prove that it is ethically significant by any process of logic. In each case we discover and live in terms of a particular aspect of our environment through an appropriate act of interpretation; and having come to live in terms of it we neither require nor can conceive any further validation of its reality. The same is true of the apprehension of God. The theistic believer cannot explain how he knows the divine presence to be mediated through his human experience. He just finds himself in118

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terpreting his experience in this way. He lives in the presence of God, though he is unable to prove by any dialectical process that God exists. T o say this is not of course to demonstrate that God does exist. The outcome of the discussion thus far is rather to bring out the similarity of epistemological structure and status between men's basic convictions in relation to the world, moral responsibility, and divine existence. The aim of the present chapter has thus been to show how, if there be a God, he is known to mankind, and how such knowledge is related to other kinds of human knowing. I hope that at least the outline of a possible answer to these questions has now been offered.

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IN T H E last chapter we have considered an analysis of theistic faith as an act of "total interpretation." Religious faith, I have suggested, shares a common epistemological structure with cognition in other fields. T o know this or that object is to apprehend our environment as significant in this or that way. For example, to perceive a gate in my path is to be aware of my environment, in that particular region, as rendering certain actions or readinesses for action appropriate and others inappropriate. Again, to perceive in some situation that I am under a moral obligation to act in this or that way, is to be aware of my environment as constituting a realm of personal relationships, the present practical significance of which for myself is this moral requirement. Each distinguishable order and kind of significance makes its own immediate or potential "difference" to the cognizer. Awareness of significance, whether natural or ethical or of any other order, consists accordingly in the formation within us of volitional dispositions, adjusting our plans and policies to the perceived character of our environment. AH awareness of environment, I have argued, is awareness of it as significant. Significance, we noted, is apprehended by an activity of interpretation. That is to say, recognition is not a purely automatic reflex, but an exercise of intelligence or ration120

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ality. I further suggested that religious faith, considered as cognitive, is an interpretative act of this kind. That we "know God by faith" means that we interpret, not only this or that item of our experience, but our experience as a whole, in theistic terms; we find that in and through the entire field of our experience we are having to do with God and he with us. Our knowledge of him is thus, like all our knowledge of environment, an apprehension reached by an act of interpretation, although it differs from the rest of our knowing in that in this case the interpretation is uniquely total in its scope. I hope that in the argument of the preceding chapter, thus briefly recapitulated, I have presented what is at least a possible account of our cognition of God. It remains now to ask whether any greater attraction can be claimed for it than the somewhat austere virtue of logical possibility. Is there anything to recommend this view apart from its own internal coherence? Granted that, if there be a God, he may be known to mankind in the manner suggested, can we discern any positive reason why he should make himself known in this, on the face of it, strangely indirect fashion? I think that we can discern such a reason, a reason which turns upon the safeguarding of our personal freedom and responsibility in relation to the divine Being. Our knowledge of God, on the view advocated here, is not given to us as a compulsory perception, but is achieved as a voluntary act of interpretation. Indeed I have argued that not only awareness of the divine but all awareness of environment contains an unavoidable element of personal interpretation. Cognition can, accordingly, never be formally infallible. Our apprehension of reality is never correct merely by definition. If it is right, it is right although it could have been wrong. If it succeeds, it succeeds in spite of the fact that it might have failed. As John Oman says (using "meaning" instead of "significance"), "knowing is 121

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not knowledge as an effect of an unknown external cause, but is knowledge as we so interpret that our meaning is the actual meaning of our environment." 1 T o interpret aright is to know; to interpret amiss is to be in error. However, the fallibility which religious judgments share with all other interpretations does not constitute an epistemic defect, but rather a virtue. What I have called compulsory perception, or the mere impinging of the surrounding world upon our consciousness, is the lowest and least interesting level of cognition. As H. H. Price remarks, "It is the capacity of making mistakes, not the incapacity of it, which is the mark of the higher stages of intelligence . . . Only an intelligent being can err." 2 The cost of being a cognizing person, and not merely a complex machine registering the impacts of the surrounding world, is that every veridical perception is an achievement. We pay for the privilege of being right by running the risk of being wrong. In order to know our environment aright, then, we have to interpret it aright. Only at an elementary level does it force itself baldly and unambiguously upon our attention. We are thus endowed with a significant measure of cognitive freedom. Our powers of apprehension are improved and extended not by eliminating but by deliberately perfecting their interpretative phase. We must often exert ourselves in relation to a suspected or reported or halfapprehended aspect of reality in order to become more fully aware of it. What we can know depends in consequence, to an important extent, upon what we chose to be and to do. We are endowed with responsibility as well as freedom in our cognitive life. Knowing is accordingly not an experience distinct from our general activity as free and i The Natural and the Supernatural (Cambridge, 1931), p. 175. 2 Thinking and Experience (London, 1953), pp. 87, 316. See also

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self-directing beings, but is an integral part of that activity. The extent of our cognitive freedom varies in respect of the different aspects of our environment. It is at a minimum in sense perception, and for that reason passes unnoticed by the man in the street. For in perceiving the material world, the physical pole of cognition has become so fully developed in all of us, as the result of a long process of evolution, that it is stable as between mind and mind. Hence as animal organisms we all perceive the same world —that is to say, our several experience-histories are capable of being correlated in terms of a hypothetical universal experience. At this level of experience we are—broadly speaking, and with occasional lapses—compelled to experience correctly. We have all learned, within comparatively slight limits, to discern uniformly the "natural" significance of our environment. For there are constant practical checks and verifications to guide us. If we reach out to pluck a star, thinking it to be a shining spot just above our heads, our hands grasp empty air; if we try to walk through a brick wall, believing it to be an open door, we are quickly cured of our error. The margin of cognitive freedom is here a narrow one. The physical world is thus public to members of the same species, not only because the raw material of their several experience-histories is similar, but because under the pressure of identical biological needs they interpret their data in common patterns. Biologically valuable habits of ordering our experience having once been established, further experiments are liable to consist only in perilous deviations from the path approved by nature. Indeed our interpretative activity is at this level so nearly a function of our environment that we are not normally aware in ordinary practical life that we are interpreting at all. 123

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This is why knowledge of the physical world has always been regarded by common sense as the standard type of knowledge, and why, in our contemporary Atlantic culture, the physical sciences are accorded a unique authority as arbiters of truth. For the same reason a fundamental distinction has traditionally been drawn between "judgments of fact" and "judgments of value," the former being in effect assertions in relation to which there is no room for informed disagreement, and the latter being regarded by contrast as matters of personal taste. But if by "fact" is meant simply "that which is the case," then we must insist that other things besides the changing structure of a cloud of molecules are the case. The proper distinction is not between "objective" knowledge of facts and "subjective" value judgments, but between those facts in relation to which the subjective pole of cognition largely cancels out between different individuals, and those facts in relation to which it varies from person to person and is consequently noticed as a factor in cognition. When we turn from the natural to the moral and the aesthetic significance of our environment, variations and divergences of interpretation are at once apparent. In Herbartian terminology, we have all acquired a very similar "apperceiving mass" in relation to our environment as it is known to us through sense perception, but have developed more individual and specialized apperceptive equipment for dealing with its nonphysical aspects. Outside the basic sphere in which wrong interpretation is biologically disastrous to the individual or the species, the responsibility for discovering the nature of our environment rests to a considerable extent with ourselves. We can, for example, at will develop or neglect to develop our capacity for appreciating beauty. I do not wish to introduce the subject of aesthetics into the present discussion. But it is perhaps permissible to note in passing that the characteristic of, say, a 124

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landscape as being beautiful is not forced upon our attention as are its physical configurations as such when these lie before our open eyes. Most of us have voluntarily to make an effort, to "go out of our way," if we are to discover the aesthetic riches about us. In this respect human beings do not all experience the same world. A similar situation obtains in relation to moral significance. This is the distinctive significance of situations in which we have to do, directly or indirectly, with other people. Moral significance is the "difference" made for us by the world as mediating a system of personal relationships. The perception of ethical significance, which is based upon the awareness of moral obligation, is more akin to aesthetic appreciation than to sense perception. Everyone, I think we must hold, has an innate capacity for moral experience, but this capacity is very variously developed in different people. One man is more perceptive than another, more sensitive to life's ethical requirements. Further, in addition to the diverse general moral development of different individuals, men's consciences are liable to development in varying fields. A man may be acutely aware, for example, of his duties toward his own family while being chronically blind to obligations coming from beyond that circle. Or he may have a keen scholarly conscience, painstakingly accurate within a particular academic field, and yet be grossly dishonest in practical life. In short, there is a very wide range of individual variations in the interpretation of our environment in terms of moral significance. A factor emerges here which bears upon religious significance. T o perceive oneself to be under obligation to do or to refrain from doing some particular action, is eo ipso to acknowledge the validity of that obligation; in short, to feel obligated by it. The perception already involves a recognition of the rightful authority of the demand. It is indeed precisely this acknowledgment of moral authority 125

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that constitutes such awareness as the awareness of specifically ethical significance. Moral interpretation is accordingly never a detached noticing but always an act in which the whole self is involved. The judgment "I ought . . ." is an existential judgment. For having once seen clearly that one ought to do x, all but the most hardened wrongdoers are unable to be at peace with themselves until they have done, or at least attempted to do, x; and it is more than a surmise that even in hardened exceptions deliberate wickedness sets up profound inner strains and tensions which must sooner or later react disruptively upon the personality as a whole. Man is essentially a social being, made for community and fellowship; and the whole tendency and bias of his nature is to acknowledge the validity of the moral claims which this involves. He responds instinctively to the requirements of family and group life. He can indeed, in his egoism, violently override the clear dictates of conscience. But this is not the normal pattern of wickedness. Human beings seldom do evil as evil; we usually persuade ourselves first that the evil is really good, or at least not nearly as evil as it seems. Our selfishness takes the form of moral shortsightedness; we fail to see our neighbor's need as constituting a call upon ourselves. Egoism is thus normally to be diagnosed as (culpable) insensitivity; the selfish man is morally incognitive. Our rejection of moral obligations which we are unwilling to accept does not typically take the form of a blank refusal to do what we see to be right, but rather of an evasion at the prior stage of cognition, the turning of a blind eye to the moral facts of the situation. We try to exclude from our minds an obligation which is beginning to dawn unwelcomely upon us. We juggle with the ethical weights, seeking to shift the balance from one side to the other. We re-think the problem, bringing forward those factors which support the conclusion at which 126

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we are determined to arrive, and relegating to the background those which tell against it. Thus we "talk ourselves into" a more comfortable view of the matter. There is a classic display of this process in the second chapter of Sense and Sensibility, where Jane Austen shows herself to be well aware of the remarkable power of self-deception at the command of the human mind. There is truth, in other words, in the Socratic equation of virtue with knowledge. Socrates spoke of knowledge of the Good, but his thought can readily be transposed into a deontological key as knowledge of the right. Human wrong doing does not usually result from sheer refusal to do that which has been seen and accepted as morally obligatory, but rather from a deliberate failure to recognize that it is obligatory. This willful moral blindness is an exercise of cognitive freedom. The line on which we make our stand is the outer defense of our personality, the frontier of awareness. If the invading duty passes that border it joins forces with a fifth column within us and almost certainly wins the day. Our best chance of turning it back lies out on the cognitive frontiers, where the passes are narrow and strongly held. This frontier of the personality, which each man controls for himself, safeguards his personal integrity and liberty in relation to those aspects of the environment which would lay a claim upon him. We have the primary, cognitive freedom to recognize or to reject the credentials of any imperative which claims authority over us. Duty's embassy must stand beyond the gates of perception and wait for recognition, and only if we ourselves allow it to enter can it establish a sway over us. It is through our control of this frontier that we take the decisive step toward egoism or fellowship. It is here that the fundamental direction of our lives is chosen. The epistemological pattern which we see emerging is 127

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one in which certain aspects of our environment force themselves upon our attention, while others can only reach us if we ourselves admit them across our personal frontiers. As we have seen, our cognitive freedom is at a minimum vis-a-vis the physical world, which is our environment interpreted in terms of its "natural" significance. It has greater scope in relation to the aesthetic and ethical significance of the world about us. And it is at a maximum, we must now proceed to notice, in our cognition of the religious significance of our environment, its significance as mediating the divine presence. One of the distinctive emphases of recent Protestant theology has been upon the nature of God as personal. That God is personal, a He, or rather a Thou, and not an It, is of course implied on every page of the Bible, and has never been seriously doubted by Christian thought. But it has not by any means always been regarded as centrally important, and has sometimes been treated as little more than a linguistic convention. Within the last two or three decades, however, the thoroughgoing personal ism of the Christian faith has been powerfully emphasized by a number of thinkers, and recognized as a normative principle of theology. God, these theologians have insisted, is the divine Thou, who deals with us as a Person with persons, as a Father with children. 3 Between people two different kinds of relationship are possible. There are personal relationships and nonpersonal relationships between persons. In Martin Buber's language 4 we can enter both into I-Thou and I-It relationships with others. In the I-Thou relationship we apprehend and 8

Perhaps the most important single work expressing the implications of this recovered insight is John Oman's Grace and Personality (ist ed., Cambridge, 1917; 4th ed., 1931). *Ich und Du (1923), trans, by R. Gregor Smith, / and Thou (2d ed., Edinburgh, 1958). 128

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treat the other person as an autonomous mind and will, a responsible and self-directing consciousness with views and rights of his own which must be consulted and respected— in short, as another person. In the I-It relationship we treat the other merely as an object to be moved about (as, for example, when he is unconscious) or as an animal to be coerced (as in terroristic methods of prison discipline) or, at one remove toward the personal, as a labor unit or a pair of hands to be hired—in short, not as a person but as a thing or a commodity. The difference between these two types of relationship is familiar to common observation, and is brought to sharp focus on those occasions when we are discussing someone in his absence, analyzing his character and motives, and he unexpectedly enters the room and joins the group who are discussing him. At once there is an involuntary shift from an I-It to an I-Thou relationship toward him. We can no longer treat him as a specimen to be dissected, for he manifestly stands on an equal footing with ourselves as a separate mind and will, an unique personality, one who can analyze and criticize as well as be analyzed and criticized. In all fully personal dealings with people we respect their personal independence and integrity; we treat them, not as means, but as ends in themselves; we regard them as of the same ultimate status as ourselves, so that their views and wishes, their hopes and fears, their arguments and prejudices, are entitled to consideration along with our own. Nature, or as we should rather say from the standpoint of Christian faith, God acting through Nature, has so fashioned man's personality as to protect his individual autonomy, thus making possible fully personal relationships both between man and man and between man and God. It is written into the constitution of human nature that the ultimate I, the "pure ego," is for ever inaccessible to others. As an item in the physical world a person can be 129

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pushed around by superior force; but in the inner recesses of his personality he is not thus manipulatable. He can be coerced into outward conformity, but not into inward assent: "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still." However completely he may be externally ruled and regimented, the individual remains the sole inhabitant of his own inner realm of consciousness. His ultimate privacy is secured by the circumstance that personality can communicate with and seek to influence personality only through the medium of symbols, which require the co-operation of both parties if they are to convey meaning. We cannot insert our thoughts into another's mind as we drop a letter into a mail box. Not even "brainwashing" techniques can do this—although they can, over a period of time, so refashion a personality as to make it receptive to certain ideas. Mind can only communicate with mind indirectly, through a reciprocal use of symbols.5 Whether these be physical gestures such as pointing, or imitative noises, or the complex symbolism of a developed language, they must be not merely performed and observed, but meant and understood if they are to function as vehicles of communication. Communication between minds is only established when the hearer understands by the symbols 6

The phenomenon of telepathy might seem to constitute an exception to this. For people are sometimes the involuntary recipients of telepathic "messages." A thought, whether in the form of a mental image or of a verbal pattern, occurs to B as a result of its occurring to A, without any spoken words or other signs being employed between them. This is not however a case of communication unmediated by symbols. T h e actual causal linkage between the two minds may be an operation upon rather than with symbols; but communication only occurs when the appropriate symbols, whether words or images, are presented to and understood by the receiving consciousness. T h e symbols may have arrived by a purely psychological route, instead of any of the more usual physical routes; but they still have to arrive, and communication still cannot take place without their successful appropriation. 130

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that which the speaker intends by them. The symbols are in themselves inert and neutral. If the two minds fail to achieve a shared meaning in their use of them, the symbols remain opaque, a baffling barrier to the understanding—as when we hear speech in an unknown language. But a corresponding interpretation of the symbols from both sides brings about a meeting of minds. The opaqueness fades and the symbols become, so to say, transparent. We see straight through them to their meaning—as in reading we scarcely notice the individual marks on the paper but are conscious only of the words and thoughts which they symbolize. Thus symbols have the dual capacity to veil and to reveal, both safeguarding our mental autonomy and privacy and also enabling us voluntarily to transcend that privacy and to enter into relations with other minds. We have, in other words, an ultimate freedom to establish or to avoid communication. Without this freedom our status as responsible personal beings would be profoundly impaired. If the intellect could be directly manipulated, and thoughts thrust into the mind, we should no longer be distinct and autonomous persons. We should be in the position of a patient under hypnosis, with the normal cognitive barriers broken down and the citadel of the mind helpless before the invasion of every suggestion which is directed upon it. At this point, however, a qualification must be entered. It will be obvious that this picture of communication as requiring voluntary co-operation from both sides applies only "in principle" to our ordinary everyday use of the symbolism of language. Using the distinction between "formal" and "material" freedom, we may say that we are formally but not materially free to receive or reject meanings mediated through speech. When someone speaks to us, we do not normally consider whether to regard his noises as intelligible words or as mere gibberish. We canK

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not help interpreting them as words, and likewise as we hear the words we cannot help understanding them. We have become so entirely "geared in" to social life, in which language plays an essential part and in which we are in almost constant rapport with other persons through the medium of speech, that the habit of interpreting certain sounds (and likewise certain visible marks) as words, and words as conveying meaning, holds us in an involuntary state of intercommunication with our fellows. If we did succeed in breaking this habit we should run the risk of being regarded as insane. Our normal everyday understanding of the symbols of a familiar language has taken on something,of the in voluntariness and compulsion of sense perception. As we are compelled by the disciplines of our physical environment to interpret its sensible signs aright, so we are induced by the psychological pressures of society to engage in the conventional commerce of speech. Like a bridge player who has been initiated into the rules of the game and is then expected to play his cards correctly, we have all been taught the rules of the language-game and are required to respond appropriately when addressed. However, the analysis of communication as involving a willingness to be communicated with remains formally true even of everyday speech, in spite of the fact that in the circumstances of social life we have now sold our freedom into the slavery of habit. For the habit is acquired, the freedom innate. On occasions we can glimpse an original freedom underlying the habit. For example, a child could not learn to use a language unless he were willing to cooperate with his mother or teacher by an anxiety to please and a willingness to learn. Again, we can imagine a child who had only been speaking for a short while suddenly being cut off from human society for many years and finding on a first renewed contact with mankind that he pos132

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sessed a real cognitive freedom in relation to the spoken symbolism of language. And yet, having pointed to this primitive liberty, we must reaffirm that in normal life it exists only formally, being therein akin to our interpretative liberty in respect of the environing physical world. Our formal cognitive freedom in relation to persons, thus guaranteed by the necessity for all interpersonal communication to pass through the medium of symbols, becomes a material and important freedom in relation to the divine Person. There are two reasons for this, one immediate, arising from our own cognitive limitations, and the other more ultimate, arising from the nature of the divine Being who has ordained those limitations. The immediate reason is that God is not, like human persons, a part of the material world; and therefore his presence is less manifest to us, as sentient beings who are organic to our environment, than is that of our fellows. But the more ultimate reason is that the infinite nature of the Deity requires him to veil himself from us if we are to exist as autonomous persons in his presence. For to know God is not simply to know one more being who inhabits this universe. It is to know the One who is responsible for our existence and who determines our destiny; One in whose will lies our final good and blessedness, so that the fulfillment of his purpose for our lives is also our own perfect self-fulfillment; and One whose commands come with the accent of absolute and unconditional demand, claiming our obedience at whatever cost to our other interests, even if necessary at the cost of life itself. Clearly, to become aware of the existence of such a being must affect us in a manner to which the awareness of other human persons can offer only a remote parallel. The nearest analogy on the human level is the becoming aware of another which is at the same time a falling in love with »33

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that other. This is an awareness far removed from casual observing; in it the observer is himself profoundly involved and affected, so that the whole course of his life may thenceforth be changed. However, in all our purely human relationships the other remains ultimately on "the same level" as ourselves, whereas in the knowledge of God the Other is one to whom the only appropriate relationship is the utter abasement of worship. In "finding God" the worshipper abdicates from the central position in his world, recognizing that this is God's rightful place. His life must become consciously reorientated towards a Being infinitely superior to himself in worth as well as in power. There is thus involved a radical reordering of his outlook such as must be undergone willingly if it is not to crush and even destroy the personality. For so great a change can only be a conversion of the same person, and not the substitution of another person, if there is throughout a continuity, not only of memory, but also of insight and of assent. Only when we ourselves voluntarily recognize God, desiring to enter into relationship with him, can our knowledge of him be compatible with our freedom, and so with our existence as personal beings. If God were to reveal himself to us in the coercive way in which the physical world is disclosed to us, he would thereby annihilate us as free and responsible persons. Referring to the way in which, on the human level, a more powerful personality may unwittingly overshadow and diminish a weaker personality, H. H. Farmer asks, If that danger exists in respect of human personality, how much more in respect of the personality of God in its relation with finite creatures whom He seeks to fashion into personal life? Wherefore, in pursuit of that purpose He has withdrawn Himself behind symbols. Neither for man's thinking, nor for his loving, does He present Himself as a single, unmediated 134

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divine object. He speaks to man through the world, through the system of society and nature in which He has placed him.8 If man is to be personal, God must be deus absconditus. He must, so to speak, stand back, hiding himself behind his creation, and leaving to us the freedom to recognize or fail to recognize his dealings with us. Therefore God does not manipulate our minds or override our wills, but seeks our unforced recognition of his presence and our free allegiance to his purposes. He desires, not a compelled obedience, but our uncoerced growth towards the humanity revealed in Christ, a humanity which both knows God as Lord and trusts him as Father. He could, of course, as the omnipotent God, create beings who in all outward ways conform to this pattern, without having ever sought it for themselves in freedom and responsibility. But instead he has created beings whom he is leading gradually through their own choices and decisions toward his kingdom. It is thus integral to the divine plan, as we see it in operation, that men's integrity as persons, their individual freedom and accountability, are respected, above all in the utterly fateful and final sphere of their confrontation by God, which is the sphere of religion. Thus faith is a correlate of freedom: faith is related to cognition as "free will" to conation. As one of the most interesting of the early theologians, Irenaeus, said, "And not merely in works, but also in faith, has God preserved the will of man free and under his own control." 7 There is accordingly a similarity—together, as we shall see presently, with an important dissimilarity—between the manner of our cognition in ethics and in religion. 6

H. H. Farmer, The World and God (2d ed., London, 1936), p

737

Against Heresies, bk. iv, ch. 37, par. 5, translation in The AnteNicene Fathers, vol. I (Grand Rapids, 1956). 135

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Concerning the apprehension of moral significance we concluded that man has an innate tendency to interpret his social experience in ethical terms, though remaining individually free either to develop or to stunt or distort that tendency. Man is by nature an ethical animal; he is spontaneously receptive to the moral claims of the realm of personal relationships. As the mind displays a disposition to interpret the data of sensation in terms of our familiar material world, so also it reveals a disposition to interpret man's social environment in ethical terms. And in a like manner the human mind reveals to the student of the incidence and history of religions a tendency to interpret its experience in religious terms. Man is a worshipping animal, with an ingrained propensity to construe his world religiously. At the same time, as in the case of his ethical interpretations, he has the freedom either to encourage or to thwart this propensity. The evidence for the existence of such an innate religious tendency or disposition is the almost universal occurrence of religion in some form among mankind in every age concerning which we have evidences. Theoretical atheists are—even in present-day Communist Russia—a very small minority of highly sophisticated individuals whose very sophistication suggests that they have repressed, rather than that they are ab initio devoid of, this otherwise universal bias in the human mind toward a religious interpretation of the phenomena of life.8 In speaking of an innate religious bias of human nature, what—we must now ask—do we mean by the term "reli8

The doctrine of an innate human tendency to interpret life in terms of a divine presence and activity is by no means incompatible, as some assume it to be, with a "high" view of revelation. No less Calvinistic a theologian than John Calvin himself firmly asserted diat "There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity" (Institutes, bk. I, ch. 3, sec. 1. Battles' translation). Again, "a sense of divinity which can never be effaced is engraved upon men's minds" (ibid., sec. 3). 136

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gious"? For an enormous range of phenomena have been labelled religious—from the mana-taboo beliefs of primitive peoples to the most exalted forms of ethical theism; from the Brahmanic-Hindu view of the Absolute as a nonpersonal Unity to the Judaic-Christian and Islamic view of the Absolute as moral personality; from swarming polytheisms and belief in evil deities who demand the sacrifice of human blood, to the Christian belief in one God, holy, righteous and loving, creator and ruler of the universe, who seeks kindness and compassion between man and man, and who descends in the self-giving of incarnation to enable men to fulfill his will; and so on through all the wide variety covered by the highly elastic noun "religion." Where, if anywhere, is the factor which links together such diverse beliefs and activities? There is, I think, despite this bewildering variety, a basic common factor in all that has ever by general consent been called religion. This is the belief (implicit or explicit) that man's environment is other and greater than it seems, that interpenetrating the natural, but extending behind or beyond or above it, is the Supernatural, as a larger environment to which men must relate themselves through the activities prescribed by their cult. The Supernatural, whether conceived as one or as many, as good or evil or part good and part evil, as lovable or fearful, to be sought or shunned, figures in some fashion in everything that can be termed religion.9 And our innate tendency to interpret our world religiously is a tendency to experience it "in depth," as a supernatural as well as a natural environment. This religious bias operates, in modern man at any rate, only as an "inclining cause." In primitive man, however, it may well have operated as a "determining cause." For the anthropologists have taught us that individual personality 9

Cf. J. Oman, The Natural and the

Supernatural.

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and thought have only gradually become separated out from the group mind of the tribe. In primitive societies the individual is so entirely merged in the group, and his religious ideas are so entirely molded by the collective mind of which he is part, that speculation and doubt are rare occurrences. Any kind of critical thinking on the part of the individual about the common dogmas and the established deities and taboos of the tribe has been a comparatively late development in the history of the race, a development associated with economic and other changes tending to larger social units and the consequent release of the individual from the closely knit existence of the tribe. It is only at this comparatively recent stage of development that our cognitive freedom in relation to the divine has become effectively operative. Prior to that, mankind's innate bias towards religion, although not irresistible, was not (as far as we know) in fact resisted, but held an unquestioned sway over men's minds. Occurring, significantly, hand in hand with this growth of individuality there has come about a development within religious awareness toward deeper and more penetrating conceptions of the demands which the Supernatural makes upon humanity. From nonrational taboos there has been a development to the ethically rational demand for righteousness, and from an exclusive interest in outward acts and observances to a larger concern which embraces the inner thoughts and intents of the heart. Like all phenomena in the field of religion this development is capable of both a naturalistic and a theistic interpretation. The naturalistic interpretation would reduce it to its social and economic concomitants. The theistic interpretation, on the other hand, sees behind this process a divine pressure upon the minds of men, gradually drawing them forward through their own free responses to God's providential dealings with them in the events of their world. Through 138

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the insight first of individuals, then of the few, and later of the many, God has gradually been creating in mankind a capacity to receive a fuller revelation of his nature and purpose, which revelation has culminated, according to the claim of the Christian religion, in divine incarnation in the person of Jesus Christ. There have, then, proceeded pari passu through the ages the gradual liberation of the individual mind from absorption in the group mentality of the tribal family, and the gradual realization by that mind of deeper and more farreaching demands meeting it through its awareness of the Supernatural. Thus man's cognitive freedom toward his environment, as mediating claims upon his personality, has been preserved. Mankind has been brought through his religious infancy to a stage at which a fuller and more demanding self-disclosure of the divine is matched by man's own fuller freedom and responsibility. This innate religious bias of our nature, inclining but not determining us to interpret our world religiously, is an essential precondition of any truly personal relationship between God and man. For it enables us to preserve our autonomy in God's presence. It is in virtue of this tendency that we are able both to know God and yet to be genuinely free in relation to him. If mankind had no such bias toward a religious response to life, if the idea of the Supernatural found no spontaneous hospitality in the human mind, then only a quite overwhelmingly unambiguous self-disclosure could reveal the divine to man; and this revelation would be received by a compelled and not a voluntary awareness. In order to be cognitively free in relation to God we must possess an innate tendency to recognize his presence behind the phenomena of life, and yet a tendency which is not irresistible but which we may repress without doing manifest violence to our nature. This, I suggest, is the substance of the answer to the 139

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question which was posed for the present chapter. The reason why God reveals himself indirectly—meeting us in and through the world as mediating a significance which requires an appropriate response on our part, or as a realm of symbol which is opaque or transparent according to our own use of it—is that only thus can the conditions exist for a personal relationship between God and man. The classic exemplification of this principle occurs in the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. That doctrine will be treated more at length from a slightly different angle in Chapter 10. But we may note at this point that it employs to the full the notion of God as revealing himself indirectly, in a manner which requires for its success an appropriate human activity of interpretation. The selfdisclosure of God in Jesus Christ, as set forth in Christian teaching, is a veiled revelation which achieves its purpose only when men penetrate the divine incognito by an uncompelled response of self-commitment and trust—the purpose of the veiling being precisely to make that free response possible. Kierkegaard, with his concept of indirect communication, has greatly aided the Christian understanding of the divine method in revelation; although Luther, in his blunt and less subtle way, had seen it with equal clarity. But long before either Luther or Kierkegaard, the twelfth-century theologian Hugh of St. Victor offered a striking statement of the divinely intended correlation between ambiguity and faith. He says: God from the beginning wished neither to be entirely manifest to human consciousness nor entirely hidden. [For] if He were entirely hidden, faith would indeed not be aided unto knowledge, and lack of faith would be excused on the ground of ignorance. Wherefore, it was necessary that God should show Himself, though hidden, lest He be entirely concealed and entirely unknown; and again, it was necessary that He should conceal Himself, though shown and known to some 140

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degree, lest He be entirely manifest, so that there might be something which through being known would nourish the heart of man, and again something which through being hidden would stimulate it. 10 But it is Pascal who, in a passage curiously reminiscent of that from H u g h of St. Victor, has most vividly made the point. Speaking of Christ, he says: It was not then right that He should appear in a manner manifestly divine, and completely capable of convincing all men; but it was also not right that He should come in so hidden a manner that He could not be known by those who should sincerely seek Him. He has willed to make Himself quite recognizable by those; and thus, willing to appear openly to those who seek Him with all their heart, He so regulates the knowledge of Himself that He has given signs of Himself, visible to those who seek Him, and not to those who seek Him not. There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition. 11 W i t h o u t wishing to compile an anthology on this subject I should like to add one more statement, that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote that divine existence "could not be intellectually more evident without becoming morally less effective; without counteracting its own end by sacrificing the life of faith to the cold mechanism of a worthless because compulsory assent." 12 T h u s far we have seen that the discovery of God as lying behind the world, and of his presence as mediated in and through it, arises from interpreting in a new way what was already before us. It is epistemologically comparable, not 10 On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, bk. i, pt. in, sec. 2, trans, by Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), pp. '41-42. 11 Pensees, ed. Brunschvicg, trans, by W. F. Trotter (London, 1932), no. 430. 12 Biographia Literaria, Everyman ed. (London, 1906), p. 106.

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to the discovery of a man concealed behind a screen, or of inferred electrons underlying the observed behavior of matter, but to what Wittgenstein called "seeing as." 13 He drew attention to this in the case of puzzle pictures. In such a case, as we gaze at the enigmatic page covered with dots apparently scattered over it at random, it suddenly dawns upon us that this is, say, the picture of a man standing in a grove of trees. We thus come to apperceive the familiar data as significant in a fresh way, a way which supersedes our original interpretation. To reach the religious case, however, we must expand the notion of "seeing as" into that of "experiencing as," not only visually but through all the modes of perception functioning together. We experience situations as having different kinds of significance and so as rendering appropriate different kinds of practical response. The Old Testament prophets, for example, experienced their historical situation as one in which they were living under the sovereign claim of God, and in which the appropriate way for them to act was as God's agents; whereas to most of their contemporaries, who were "experiencing as" in a different way, the situation did not have this religious significance. The prophets' interpretation of Hebrew history, as this is embodied in the Old Testament, shows that they were "experiencing as" in a characteristic and consistent way. Where a secular historian would see at work various economic, social and geographical factors bringing about the rise and fall of cities and empires, the prophets saw behind all this the hand of God raising up and casting down and gradually fulfilling a purpose. When, for example, the Chaldeans were at the gates of Jerusalem, the prophet Jeremiah experienced this event, not simply as a foreign political threat but also as God's judgment upon Israel. As one wellknown commentator says, "Behind the serried ranks of the J

3 Philosophical Investigations (Oxford, 1953), pt. 11, sec. 11. 142

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Chaldean army [Jeremiah] beheld the form of Jahwe fighting for them and through them against His own people." 14 It is important to appreciate that this was not an interpretation in the sense of a theory imposed retrospectively upon remembered facts. It was the way in which the prophet actually experienced and participated in these events at the time. He consciously lived in the situation experienced in this way. And in general, the religious man finds his experience to be significant in a way which both transcends and transforms his earlier nonreligious mode of experience and reveals it as mediating a personal relationship with the divine Person. This discovery differs in character from the reapperception of a puzzle picture, not only because the religious interpretation is an uniquely total one, but also because the totality which it discloses constitutes a situation within which the interpreter is himself inextricably involved as a constituent, a situation which makes continual practical demands upon him. Indeed all changes in apperception— whether the trivial change in viewing the puzzle picture or the immensely important change of religious conversion— involve the will, either as making a deliberate choice, or as voluntarily accepting and adopting the new pattern of significance which offers itself to the mind. But in the special case of theistic faith the whole personality, including the will, is engaged in an even more far-reaching manner. For to know God is to know oneself as standing in a subordinate relationship to a higher Being and to acknowledge the claims of that Being upon the whole range of one's life. The act of will, or the state of willingness or consent, by which one adopts the religious mode of apperception is accordingly also an act of obedience or a willingness to obey. Thus although belief in the reality of God, and a practical 14

John Skinner, Prophecy and Religion

(Cambridge, 1922), p.

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trust and obedience towards him, must be distinguished in thought, they occur together and depend closely upon one another: fides and fiducia are two elements in a single whole, which is man's awareness of the divine. In this study we are concerned only with the cognitive element in faith; but a fuller treatment of the subject of faith would have much to say also about its volitional and fiduciary elements. This analysis of religious faith as interpretation is not itself a religious, or an antireligious, but an epistemological doctrine. It can with logical propriety be accepted, and developed for their different purposes, both by the theist and by the atheist. For the ambiguity of "the given," which we have found at every stage to be a precondition of faith, extends to the nature of faith itself. It therefore now remains to show how this view of faith might be integrated into the theistic and antitheistic world views respectively. The atheist's use of such an analysis might well be conceived in terms of the philosophical study of language. He might point out (as does John Wisdom) 15 that language is used not only to convey information and to express emotions but also to alter our apprehensions, to set an object or a situation in a new light which reveals it as, in a sense, a different object or situation; and that the statement that there is a God functions in this way. The theistic assertion serves to bring out characteristics of the world and of human experience which are concealed by the contrary assertion. What the theist describes as "knowing God" consists in regarding and feeling about the world in a certain way, a way characteristically different from that in which one regards it who does not "know God." But, he would add, this difference is purely subjective. There is no extra Person, whom we call God, in addition to the world. It K

'Cf. "The Logic of God," in Paradox and Discovery (Oxford, <9 5)6

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may well be that the world is richer in its significance for mankind than the nonreligious person has realized. It may be that the religious mode of apperception is the one which "gets the most out of life." But to describe this manner of experiencing in terms of an actually existing transcendent divine Being is to invoke an ontological myth— perhaps an inevitable myth, but (so the atheist would insist) none the less mythical. The word "God," according to him, is the name for a logical construction out of human experience, a personified formula to aid our appreciation of life's more elusive profundities. It would, I think, be along some such lines as these that an atheist, having accepted an epistemological analysis of religious faith as an act of "total interpretation," would conceive its ontological bearings. On his view, the religious interpretation is closely analogous to the aesthetic interpretation as a way of viewing and feeling about the world. For the theist, however, the aesthetic analogy holds only up to a certain point and then breaks down. And in breaking down it misses all that is most distinctive in religion. For aesthetic apperception terminates in the world itself, which is contemplated, enjoyed, and valued for its own sake. But religious apperception passes through the world to God, seeing the natural as mediating the Supernatural. It thus entails an ontological claim which has no analogy in the sphere of aesthetics. Aesthetic apperception asserts that this and that are beautiful, but need not assert that Beauty exists as a Platonic essence subsisting in another realm. But theistic religion, in claiming that the world mediates a divine activity, must also claim that God exists as a real Being, transcending our world as well as meeting us in and through it. This ontological claim is the final point of distinction not only between religion and aesthetics but also between religion and ethics. Moral obligation is apprehended in practical life simply as a felt 145

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"ought," and its theological analysis in terms of the will of God rests upon the further act of interpretation which we call religious faith. The perception of duty as such involves no claim concerning divine existence. But the perception of life's religious significance does entail such a claim. For the theist, the word "God" does not designate a logical construction, nor is it simply a poetic term for the world as a whole; it refers to the unique transcendent personal Creator of the universe. And the awareness of God which the theist claims is not any kind of inference from the character of the world, but an awareness of God as acting towards him through the circumstances and events of his life. The theistic believer does not apprehend these circumstances and events as being themselves divine, as the aesthetic analogy would suggest, but as media of God's activity towards him. Directly, each moment of experience expresses either natural law or human decisions or the interaction of these; but ultimately the whole historical process expresses the divine intention of the creation of human souls through their free response to the continuous opportunities of God's wise appointments and requirements. To the person who has found God, the whole of life can thus mediate the divine presence and purpose; or as we expressed this on a previous page, life can at any point focus God's presence upon us; the ultimate significance can at any moment intrude upon and supersede all lesser significances. Thus the believer's entire view of life and practical response to it are transformed— not as the same mind looking upon a new world, but as a new mind looking upon the same world and seeing it as different. T o the believer "the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork"; 16 in 16

Psalm 19:1.

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the endless beauty of the earth he sees the smile (as it were) of the earth's Creator; in his neighbors he discovers fellow children of the heavenly Father; in the imperatives of morality he feels the pressure upon him of the absolute demands of God; in life's joy and happiness he discerns the bountiful goodness of the Lord, and in its frustrations and disappointments he sees, even if usually only in retrospect, God's austere but gracious discipline saving him from too complete involvement in purely earthly hopes and purposes. In both joy and sorrow, success and failure, rejoicing and mourning, he sees, however fitfully and faintly, the hand of God holding him within the orbit of the on-going divine purpose, whose fulfillment can alone secure his own final fulfillment and blessedness. Thus the believer's daily life is of a piece with his inner life of prayer, when he speaks to God in direct communion. The God to whom he prays in secret he finds openly in the world. All of life is for him a dialogue with the divine Thou; in and through all his dealings with life he is having to do with God and God with him. T h e limitations of an epistemological analysis of religious faith are made clear by the fact that it is thus capable of both a theistic and an atheistic application; and that limitation should perhaps be stressed again at this point. I have been trying in these chapters to show how, if there be a God, he may be known to us; I have not been trying to establish, or even to probability, the proposition that there is a God. I have sought to show that, from the standpoint of epistemology, the kind of cognition of God which religious people profess to experience is the kind which they might reasonably be expected to enjoy if there is indeed a God to be known such as theism asserts. But whether the theistic claim is justified is not a question for the epistemologist, or indeed for any category of specialist as such. L

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It is a question for each individual exercising his cognitive powers in relation to the environment in which he finds himself, and responding in his own personal freedom and responsibility to its claims and calls.

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PART III

The Logic of Faith

7

Faith and Fact FAITH has been presented in the last two chapters as the interpretative element within the religious person's claimed awareness of God. Such a view raises at once the question whether faith entails any factual claims about "what there is" and "how things are" in the universe, or whether it is what R. M. Hare has called a blik, that is, a way of looking at the world which terminates in the world itself.1 The aim of this chapter is to present the full challenge of that question. Faith is an uncompelled mode of "experiencing as"— experiencing the world as a place in which we have at all times to do with the transcendent God; and the propositional belief to which it gives rise is correspondingly noncoercive in that it is not only presently unverifiable but also unable to be supported by arguments of probability. This is not because it is in any degree improbable, but because the concept of probability is not applicable to total interpretations. For probability, whether defined in terms of frequency ratios or authorization of belief, is a relational concept. Nothing can be said to be probable per se but only in relation to data beyond itself. And in the spe1

R . M. Hare, "Theology and Falsification," in Nexu Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. A. G. N. Flew and A. C. Maclntyre (London, 1955). »5i

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cial case of our experience as a whole there is nothing beyond itself which could stand in a probabilifying relation to it. The theistic problem has often in the course of its long history been stated in terms of probability. Given the universe as we experience it, with its various suggestions both of chance and of design, it has seemed natural to ask whether the probability of its being God-produced is greater or less than the probability of its being non-Godproduced.2 Given those features of our experience (such as the sense of moral obligation) which seem to invite a theistic explanation and those others (such as pain and death) which seem to contradict such an explanation, it has appeared reasonable to try to estimate the relative probabilities of these rival interpretations. Is theism or atheism—philosophers have asked—the more likely account of the universe? The concept of probability has undergone useful clarification during the decades of this century, and it is, I think, clear that on any accepted analysis of it these theological queries are unanswerable. Indeed they are strictly speaking unaskable; they are logically improper questions. The uniqueness of the universe rules such inquiries out. If, in Charles Peirce's phrase,3 universes were as plentiful as blackberries, we might be able to estimate the probable character of this particular universe on the basis of the already known characters of other universes. But since there can by definition be only one universe, no such comparative procedure is possible. The concept of probability is 2

A probability argument of this kind is developed by Pierre Lecomte du Noiiy in Human Destiny (New York, 1947), and is criticized by Wallace I. Matson in The Existence of God (Ithaca, »965)- PP- 1 0 2 - i n . 3 "The Probabilities of Induction" in The Philosophy of Peirce, ed. J. Buchler (New York, 1940). 152

FAITH AND FACT not applicable to the character of the "totality of all that is." * We may confirm this by applying the two main types of probability theory to the theistic problem. According to the frequency theory, probability is a matter of statistics. If, to cite a stock example, i oo balls are mixed together in a bag, 10 of the balls being known to be red and 90 black, and the balls are to be drawn out one by one, then the proposition, "The next ball will be red," if reiterated, will be true 10 times out of 100, and its probability at any one utterance is therefore 10/100 or 1/10. Applying the frequency principle to the probability of causes, the statement that the probability of a being the cause of x is l/n, means that x is a member of a class of objects (or events) this proportion (namely l/n) of which are known to have been caused by a's. Here is a tenable analysis of probability. But clearly, on such a basis nothing can be said about a cause of the universe; for the universe is not a member of a class of universes, and therefore it cannot be made the subject of any such statistical pronouncement. A like conclusion follows from the older definition of probability in terms of reasonableness or authorization of belief.5 On this view a proposition is probable, not in isolation but in relation to other, evidence-stating propositions. A judgment of probability thus presupposes a corpus of (actual or supposed) items of information (p, q, r) such that belief in these prior propositions authorizes belief in a further proposition (x); and the strength or confidence of the belief thus authorized is the measure (although not a measure capable of precise numerical state* Cf. David Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, pt. 11 (Kemp Smith's ed., p. 185), and Arthur Pap, Elements of Analytic Philosophy (New York, 1949), pp. 197-200. 5 Cf. J. M. Keynes, A Treatise on Probability (London, 1921), ch. 1.

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ment) of the probability of x in relation to p, q, and r. Here too is an intelligible analysis of probability. But once again it is not applicable to the theistic problem. For in the case of a proposition stating a total interpretation, there can, by definition, be no data outside the interpretant, no corpus of prior propositions through relation to which it could receive a probability-value. The concept of probability then, we must conclude, is not applicable to comprehensive world-views. We cannot weigh one metaphysical system against another as relatively more or less probable. Since there is by definition only one universe, all that can be required of an interpretation of it is that account be taken of the entire field of the known data. No way of accounting for the data can be said to be, in any objectively ascertainable sense, more probable than another. Hence if theism and naturalism are alike permissible interpretations of the phenomena of human experience, they must in the eyes of logic stand on an equal footing. But, it may be said, while this is true of probability considered as a mathematical or logical concept, is there not also an alogical type of probability? Whatever the philosophical theory of probability may permit, most people do in fact reach a conviction that some one interpretation of the universe is more probable or likely than others. Some range of facts—perhaps their own moral experience, or the Christian revelation; perhaps the evil and tragedy which they have witnessed, or the apparently impersonal mechanism of the universe—outweighs all else in their minds, and they see it as overwhelmingly likely that theism, or naturalism, is true. In so judging are they not employing, perhaps without knowing it, the concept of "alogical probability?" 6 6

For a defense of this concept see F. R. Tennant, Philosophical Theology (Cambridge, 1928), I, ch. 11.

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People do indeed cherish such convictions about the universe, and do express them in terms of probability or likelihood. But what they are thus expressing is an individual impression or feeling or "hunch" which cannot be evaluated by any kind of calculus and cannot therefore be imparted as other than a private judgment. It represents the personal response of the whole man to his environment, and is as such outside the sphere of demonstrative reasoning. Religious philosophers have on the whole recognized this, at any rate since the widespread abandonment of the theistic proofs. But not by any means all have accepted the full implications of a theology without proofs. In place of the traditional ontological and cosmological demonstrations they have sought to set up an alternative argument to the effect that, considered as a metaphysical system, the Christian world view is at least as convincing as any other, or perhaps more convincing than any other. This, they claim, can be made good to reflective reason without the aid of concealed bias or preformed convictions. The program of such philosophical theologians, of whom F. R. Tennant is perhaps the outstanding recent representative, is twofold. They first offer powerful criticisms of the various psychological and sociological versions of naturalism; and then depict the spiritual, moral, and aesthetic experience of mankind as pointing unmistakably towards theism. The critical part of the program has been performed with considerable success. The standard naturalistic theories do indeed display serious inconsistencies and inadequacies under examination, and these can be exposed by arguments which are as valid for the unbeliever as for the religious believer. But in the constructive apologetic the method changes, overtly or covertly, from impersonal demonstration to personal persuasion, from argument to recommendation. For there are no common scales in which to measure, for example, the evidential 155

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weight of apparent universal mechanism against that of the impact of Christ upon his disciples. T h e r e is no objective measuring rod by which to compare the depth to which wickedness can sink with the height to which goodness can rise, and so to balance the problem of evil, which challenges theism, against the problem of good, which challenges naturalism. Looked at in a completely neutral light, and through the spectacles of no philosophy, the face of the world would present a checkerboard of alternative black and white. It can be seen either as white diversified by black—a divinely ruled world containing accidental pockets of evil; or as black diversified by white—a godless world containing the incongruous factor of moral goodness. When the theist and atheist argue together, each is trying, by emphasizing this at the expense of that and by drawing this into the center and relegating that to the perimeter, to bring the other to see the universe as he himself sees it. T h e difference between them is not due to any variation in logical acumen or calculating capacity, b u t to the difference between two radically different ways of viewing and engaging in the experiences of human life. And their respective arguments are but elaborate afterthoughts, excogitated to support and justify convictions already arrived at by another path. T h e point of entry of theism into the human mind, then, is not a philosophically immaculate natural theology, b u t the spontaneous religious response to the world which some call natural religion. As H. H. Farmer has said in a recent discussion of these matters, The degree in which a reasoned case for theism carries conviction . . . depends on the degree in which there is already present in the mind a disposition towards theistic belief; or, in other words, natural theology can only make progress towards 156

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its desired haven when it allows its sails to be filled in part widi the wind of natural religion.7 But is it in fact the case that a complete and consistent theism and a complete and consistent naturalism are alike possible? For there are both naturalistic thinkers who doubt whether theism amounts even to a coherent logical possibility, and religious thinkers who doubt whether a consistent and thoroughgoing naturalism is really capable of being formulated. It is therefore necessary to say something in reply to each of these doubts. It is obviously not possible within the limits of this discussion to attempt to examine all the many considerations which have from time to time been offered both as theistic and as antitheistic evidence. Such a task would require a volume, or rather a library. All that I can do is to refer to those key items which have generally been felt to weigh most heavily both for and against theistic belief, showing that in each case the evidence is ambiguous and is capable of being accommodate both in a theistic and in an atheistic world view. We may begin with the antitheistic evidence. Its main item is the fact of evil. We know in general, it is said, what a universe would be like which had been created by an omnipotent and infinitely good creator. It would be "the best of all possible worlds." But we can all suggest numerous improvements in the existing world. Therefore this is not the best of all possible worlds; and hence it cannot be the work of the kind of creator alleged by ethical monotheism. Such is the skeptic's reasoning. But it goes beyond what 7 Revelation and Religion (London, 1954), p. 13. This does not mean that argument has no office to fulfill in the service of religion. Although it cannot create faith, it can both prepare the way for it and confirm and strengthen it when present. Cf. die continuation of Farmer's discussion, pp. 13 ff.

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is warranted. It assumes that the best of all possible worlds must at any given moment be incapable of improvement. Whether that is so must depend upon the purpose, if any, for which the world exists. The theist's claim is that it exists because God wills that it should exist, and that its function in the divine plan is that of a process through which moral personality is gradually being created by free response to environmental challenges and opportunities. It is a process within which human beings can develop those qualities of unselfishness, love, and courage which are evoked by difficulties and obstacles and by situations which may demand the sacrifice of the self and its interests for the sake of others. Perhaps a universe in which men live thus as free and responsible beings, endowed with the power to bring sorrow and pain, as well as happiness and delight, both to themselves and to one another, is capable of producing a far higher value in the sphere of personality than a ready-made hedonistic paradise. Hence it is possible that our own at present imperfect and untidy universe is after all the best of all conceivable universes, not in the sense that none of its individual items is at present incapable of improvement, but in the sense that taken as a whole and throughout its entire history the universe is such that to remove its present finite evils would be to preclude an infinite future good. Whether this is in fact the case cannot be determined simply by inspecting the world around us. We cannot tell from within it, during the brief period of observation afforded by a man's life on this earth, or indeed by scrutinizing the entire scroll of recorded history, whether this earthly scene is a "vale of soul making" or a "fortuitous concourse of atoms." All that we can say is that in spite of the antitheistic evidence the religious claim may nevertheless be true. 8 8 I have argued this position much more fully in Evil and the God of Love (London and New York, 1966).

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We turn now to an equally brief discussion of the theistic evidence. This consists in (a) certain general characteristics of the world and of human experience—such as the order and beauty of nature, and man's universal moral sense and propensity to worship; and (b) certain particular happenings, such as alleged miracles, answers to prayer, and special revelations and theophanies. In the former group the item upon which stress is most often laid today by religious apologists is man's moral experience. It is argued that the sense of obligation implies a transcendent personal Will as its source and ground. The view thus baldly stated in a sentence has been set forth in impressive detail by leading religious philosophers.8 And yet to many nonbelieving philosophers it entirely lacks cogency or even plausibility, from which we can only conclude that "the wind of natural religion" has been carrying the argument home in the one case, while for lack of that wind it remains becalmed in the other. T o note this is not of course to rebut the claim that the sense of obligation mediates the pressure of a divine Will upon our lives. The point is simply that this religious analysis of moral obligation (whether true or false) is a corollary rather than a premise of theism. Taken by themselves the facts of our ethical experience are capable of either a naturalistic or a theistic explanation, and our choice at this point is determined by our prior conviction as to the theous or atheous character of the universe. An even briefer comment, to the same effect, may be made upon revelations and theophanies in some words of Thomas Hobbes, who pointed out that when a man claims that God spoke to him in a dream, this is "no more than to 9

The views of one such thinker have been considered in the latter part of ch. 4. For an important recent sympathetic treatment of the moral argument, see H. J. Paton, The Modern Predicament (London, 1955). 159

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say he dreamed that God spake to him." 10 More generally, we must acknowledge concerning any ostensively revelatory experience, whether vision, voice, inner feeling, trance, or dream, that the intellectual move from the experience itself to the religious interpretation of it is always capable of being queried; for it is true of any move that it may be a mistaken move. With regard to alleged miracles and answers to petitionary prayer, new data have come into prominence in recent years through the investigations grouped together under the name of psychical research or parapsychology. It is sometimes prophesied by students of this new science that their researches will rehabilitate religion in the modern mind. It is true that the first effect of acquaintance with the data and speculations of parapsychology is frequently to assist religious belief by sweeping away the remains of scientific and philosophical materialism. But a later effect is to make possible, in principle if not in detail, a more thoroughgoing naturalism than has hitherto been propounded, at any rate in Western thought. For it is now possible to suggest a nontheistic explanation of undisputed "miraculous" happenings and effective "answers to prayer." Such explanations have not yet been exploited by the self-styled Rationalists; but we may presume that when they have emerged from the narrow valley of nineteenthcentury materialism they will hail these investigations with delight. Suppose it to be established, for example, that the prayers of religious people are fulfilled in a significantly larger proportion of cases than would be expected as the result of "chance." Such prayers may be petitions either for material or for spiritual aid. In the case of physical effects, the 10 Leviathan, pt. 3, ch. 32. For a philosophically elaborate contemporary use of this argument, see C. B. Martin, Religious Belief (Ithaca, 1959), ch. 5.

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student of psychical research might subsume the phenomena under the heading of "psychokinesis," the alleged power of the mind to influence directly the configurations of matter beyond the agent's own body.11 The motive power answering the prayer would then be that of the believer's own intense desire and faith. Likewise it might be said that prayers for the bodily healing of others take effect either by means of psychokinesis or, perhaps more probably, by operating telepathically upon the patient's unconscious mind, and via this upon his body. The spiritual effects of prayer may likewise be observed either in the person praying or in someone else on whose behalf he intercedes. In the former case an explanation in terms of autosuggestion might be capable of covering the observed facts. In the latter case the hypothesis of telepathy could again be invoked. It might be said that we are constantly influencing one another unconsciously, and that in efficacious prayer this effect becomes concentrated and specifically directed. If these possibilities are allowed, there would remain no compulsion to postulate divine intervention in response to prayer; a prayer might bring its own answer by means of parapsychological mechanisms which are as yet only partly understood. Further, precognition (for which there is a growing body of evidence) could be used in a naturalistic interpretation of "providential" escapes from accident and of warnings received through dreams and visions. These are samples of the way in which the findings of psychical research might be brought to bear to dissolve away certain traditional forms of theistic evidence. Thus it appears that a consistent naturalistic theory, covering all the special phenomena of religious experience and history as well as the general facts of nature, is possible, at least in principle. Consequently the religious inter11

Cf. J. B. Rhine, The Reach of the Mind (New York, 1947). 161

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pretation of life cannot be accepted merely in default of an alternative. This is all that a survey of the evidence entitles on to say—that the observed facts are systematically ambiguous, constituting permissive evidence both for theism and for naturalism. It follows from this conclusion that theism is not an experimental issue. There is no test observation, no crucial instance such that if A occurs theism is shown to be true, while if B occurs theism is shown to be false. From this conclusion it is but a short step for a naturalistically inclined thinker to the conception of religious faith as a way of seeing and feeling about the world, a way which entails no claim concerning the existence of a transcendent divine Being. There is great interest today in the possibility of a religious naturalism which will recognize the importance and value of religious forms of life whilst rejecting the traditional belief in the existence of God. The issue is whether religion should be defined in terms of God, as men's varying responses to a real supernatural Being, or whether God should be defined in terms of religion, as one of the basic symbols with which religion works. Our twentieth-century Atlantic culture seems to be in process of adopting the latter alternative. The characteristic contemporary stress is upon the social and psychological usefulness of religion, and its statistically certifiable dividends, rather than upon its claim to be true. The distinctive religious attitude today sees religion as an activity which has value independently of any alleged connection with a divine creator and redeemer. Indeed whether or not, or in what sense, there is a God is regarded as a technical question about which religious thinkers differ. R. M. Hare has introduced the term blik for a conviction which, although unverifiable and unfalsifiable, is also unshakable. But it is J. H. Randall, Jr., who has developed most fully a naturalistic use of the view of religious 162

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faith as a kind of blik (although he does not use Hare's term). Randall conceives of religion as a human activity which, like its compeers, science and art, makes its own special contribution to man's culture. It has the two main functions of nourishing and strengthening our commitment to moral values, and of cultivating our awareness of some of life's more elusive depths and "splendors." This latter function of revealing aspects of life and of the world which remain unnoticed in our secular moods is the nearest approach which religion makes to a cognitive activity. In this connection Randall offers an interesting analogy with art. The artist reveals to his fellows dimensions of beauty in the world which they had not hitherto perceived. Art "makes us see the new qualities with which that world, in co-operation with the spirit of man, can clothe itself." The prophet and the saint function in a similar way. "They teach us how to discern what human nature can make out of its natural conditions and materials. They enable us to see and feel the religious dimension of our world better, the 'order of splendor,' and of man's experience in and with it." 12 Thus far this is compatible with the view of faith as religious "experiencing as" developed in the two previous chapters. But Randall himself uses the notion within a naturalistic philosophy, in that he conceives the subject matter of religion to be confined to human nature and its natural environment. God does not in any sense exist as a real Being; he is "an intellectual symbol for the religious dimension of the world, for the Divine." 13 This religious dimension, says Randall, is "a quality to be discriminated in human experience of the world, the splendor of the vision that sees beyond the actual into the perfected and 12

The Role of Knowledge

in Western Religion

(Boston, 1958),

pp. 128-129. 18 Ibid., p. 112. M

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eternal realm of the imagination." 14 T h i s last statement reveals the naturalistic presupposition of Randall's thinking. T h e products of the h u m a n imagination are not eternal; they did not exist before man himself existed, and they can persist, even as imagined entities, only so long as men exist. T h e Divine, as defined by Randall, is the temporary mental construction or projection of a recently emerged animal inhabiting one of the satellites of a minor star. God is not the creator and the ultimate ruler of the universe; he is a fleeting ripple of imagination in a tiny corner of space-time. J o h n Wisdom is another philosopher who has presented a "seeing as" view of religious cognition. His understanding of religion is more subtle and elusive than that of Randall, b u t seems in the end, like Randall's, to constitute a form of religious naturalism. 1 5 1 shall quote here onjy the now famous parable of the garden, with which, in 1944, Wisdom opened the recent discussion of the verifiability of religious beliefs. Two people return to their long neglected garden and find among the weeds a few of the old plants surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other "It must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these plants." Upon inquiry they find that no neighbour has ever seen anyone at work in their garden. The first man says to the other "He must have worked while people slept." The other says, "No, someone would have heard him and besides, anybody who cared about the plants would have kept down these weeds." The first man says, "Look at the way these are arranged. There is purpose and a feeling for beauty here. I believe that someone comes, 14

Ibid., p. 119. This at any rate is an interpretation which Wisdom's published writings as a whole (especially "The Logic of God") invite, although there is a contrary indication in Paradox and Discovery (Oxford, 1965), pp. 53-54. 15

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FAITH AND FACT someone invisible to mortal eyes. I believe that the more carefully we look the more we shall find confirmation of this." They examine the garden ever so carefully and sometimes they come on new things suggesting that a gardener comes and sometimes they come on new things suggesting the contrary and even that a malicious person has been at work. Besides examining the garden carefully they also study what happens to gardens left without attention. Each learns all the other learns about this and about the garden. Consequently, when after all this, one says, "I still believe a gardener comes" while the other says, "I don't" their different words now reflect no difference as to what they have found in the garden, no difference as to what they would find in the garden if they looked further and no difference about how fast untended gardens fall into disorder. At this stage, in this context, the gardener hypothesis has ceased to be experimental, the difference between one who accepts and one who rejects it is not now a matter of the one expecting something the other does not expect. What is the difference between them? The one says, "A gardener comes unseen and unheard. He is manifested only in his works with which we are all familiar," the other says, "There is no gardener" and with this difference in what they say about the gardener goes a difference in how they feel towards the garden, in spite of the fact that neither expects anything of it which the other does not expect.16 W e can restate the problem in a more formal mode by means of the logical truism that in order to assert something a proposition must deny something. T o assert, for example, that this table top is square is to deny that it is round, rectangular, elliptical, triangular, or any other unsquare shape. If my original assertion is to amount to anything, if it is to make any truth-claim, it must carry 16

"Gods," Proc. Aristot. Soc, 1944-1945, pp. 191-192, reprinted in Logic and Language, ed. A. G. N. Flew, First Series (Oxford, '951), and in Wisdom, Philosophy and Psycho-Analysis (Oxford, »953)165

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these denials with it. To affirm that the table is square in a sense defined as compatible with its being round, rectangular, elliptical, and so on, would not constitute a genuine assertion. For it would be equally consistent with whatever shape the table might be found on inspection to have. A genuine assertion, as a putative statement of fact, must lay itself open to correction and refutation. It must commit itself to something being there which might conceivably turn out not to be there, or to something happening which might not happen, or happening in this way when it might instead happen in that way. The maxim applies, "nothing venture, nothing gain"; in order to achieve a meaningful assertion we must be willing to run the risk of error. In order to say something which may possibly be true we must say something which may possibly be false. The underlying principle may be stated as follows: if a proposition p is to constitute a (true or false) assertion, the state of the universe which satisfies p must differ, other than in the fact of including this assertion, from any state of the universe that satisfies not-p. Applying this principle to theology, the questions are asked of the theist: How do you suppose the present state of the universe to differ from the state in which it would be if there were no God? What do you deny by your assertion that there is a God? What does the theistic assertion allege to exist or to happen or to happen thus, which might conceivably fail to exist or occur or which might occur otherwise? At what point, in short, does it lay itself open to confirmation or refutation? When we ask these questions there at once unfolds before us the prospect of an endless regress. Is the occurrence of evil and pain in the world incompatible with the truth of theism? No, for reasons already sketched in this chapter.17 If the extent or intensity of the world's pain and evil " S e e pp. 157-158.

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were greatly to increase, would this be taken as disproving theism? No; there is no assignable limit to the capacity of religious faith to trust in God despite d a u n t i n g and apparently contradicting circumstances. W o u l d then any conceivable happening compel the faithful to renounce their religious belief? T h e r e may well of course be psychological limits to the persistence of challenged and discouraged faith, limits which will differ in each individual. But is there any logical terminus any definite q u a n t u m of unfavorable evidence in face of which it would be demonstrably irrational to maintain theistic belief? It does not appear that there is or could be any such agreed limit. It seems, on the contrary, that theism is to this extent compatible with whatever may occur. But if this is so, we must ask: Does theism constitute a genuine assertion? Antony Flew has posed the question in a characteristically forthright and challenging way, and I shall conclude the statement of the problem by quoting his words: Now it often seems to people who are not religious as if there was no conceivable event or series of events the occurrence of which would be admitted by sophisticated religious people to be a sufficient reason for conceding "There wasn't a God after all" or "God does not really love us then." Someone tells us that God loves us as a father loves his children. We are reassured. But then we see a child dying of inoperable cancer of the throat. His earthly father is driven frantic in his efforts to help, but his Heavenly Father reveals no obvious sign of concern. Some qualification is made—God's love is "not a merely human," or it is "an inscrutable love," perhaps—and we realise that such sufferings are quite compatible with the truth of the assertion that "God loves us as a father (but, of course . . .)." We are reassured again. But then perhaps we ask: what is this assurance of God's (appropriately qualified) love worth, what is this apparent guarantee really a guarantee against? Just what would have to happen not merely (morally and wrongly) to tempt but also (logically and rightly) to en167

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title us to say "God does not love us" or even "God does not exist"? I therefore put . . . the simple central question, "What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute . . . a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God" 18 Flew here links together the two questions concerning, respectively, divine existence and the divine character as loving. And since our concern is with specifically Christian faith we may accept this and indeed go further and, as an act of definition, merge the latter issue in the former. We shall accordingly concentrate our discussion upon the existence of God, meaning by this the existence of a loving God as set forth in Christian teaching. It is obvious, even at a first glance, that there is something unusual, perhaps even unique, about such a belief. One might reasonably expect that since the deity is by definition unique, as the creator of all that is, the logic of our belief in his existence will display characteristics which are not found elsewhere. And we shall in fact find that the logic of theism is both unique and complex. 18

"Theology and Falsification," in New Essays in Theology.

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Faith and Verification T H E previous chapter has left the task of showing that Christian faith is not merely a blik—a way of regarding the world which is in principle neither verifiable nor falsifiable—but a mode of cognition to which the alternatives "veridical or illusory" properly apply. We have already acknowledged that verifiability is a valid criterion o£ factual meaning. Accordingly, in order to be either veridical or illusory the mode of experiencing that we call religious faith must be such that the theological statements which express it are either verifiable or falsifiable. It must make an experienceable difference whether they are true or false. In a formula used above, a state of the universe which satisfies the faith-assertions must differ in some experienceable way from states of the universe which fail to satisfy them. In other words, the existence of God must be experientially verifiable. The notion of verification has, especially during the period between the two world wars, been among the most intensively discussed of philosophical concepts; and the general upshot of the discussions has been that this is not a simple, readily defined idea, but rather a range or family of interrelated notions. The core of the concept of verification, I suggest, is the removal of ignorance or uncertainty concerning the truth of a proposition. That p is verified 169

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(whether p embodies a theory, hypothesis, prediction, or straightforward assertion) means that something happens which makes it clear that p is true. A question is settled so that there is no longer room for rational doubt concerning it. The way in which grounds for rational doubt are excluded varies of course with the subject matter. But the general feature common to all cases of verification is the ascertaining of truth by the removal of grounds for rational doubt. When such grounds are removed, we rightly speak of verification having taken place. T o characterize verification in this way is to raise the question whether the notion is purely logical or is both logical and psychological. Is the statement that p is verified simply the statement that a certain state of affairs exists (or has existed), or is it the statement also that someone is aware that this state of affairs exists (or has existed) and notes that its existence establishes the truth of p? A geologist predicts that the earth's surface will be covered with ice in fifteen million years. Suppose that in fifteen million years the earth's surface is covered with ice, but that in the meantime the human race has perished, so that no one is left to observe the event or to draw any conclusion concerning the accuracy of the geologist's prediction. Do we now wish to say that his prediction has been verified, or shall we deny that it has been verified, on the ground that there is no one left to do the verifying? The use of "verify" and its cognates is sufficiently various to permit us to speak in either way. But the only sort of verification of theological propositions which is likely to interest us is one in which human beings participate. We may therefore, for our present purpose, treat verification as a combined logical and psychological, rather than as a purely logical, concept. I suggest then that "verify" be construed as a verb which has its primary uses in the active voice: I verify, you verify, we verify, they verify or have 170

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verified. The impersonal passive, it is verified, now becomes logically secondary. T o say that p has been verified is to say that (at least) someone has verified it, often with the implication that his or their report to this effect is generally accepted. But it is impossible, in this usage, for p to have been verified without someone having verified it. "Verification" is thus primarily the name for an event which takes place in human consciousness.1 It refers to an experience, the experience of ascertaining that a given proposition or set of propositions is true. T o this extent verification is a psychological notion. But of course it is also a logical notion, for not any experience is rightly called an experience of verifying. Both logical and psychological conditions must be fulfilled in order for verification to have taken place. In this respect, "verify" is like "know." Knowing is an experience which someone has or undergoes, or perhaps a dispositional state in which someone is, and it cannot take place without someone having or undergoing it or being in it; but not by any means every experience which people have, or every dispositional state in which they are, is rightly called knowing. With regard to this logico-psychological concept of verification, such questions as the following'arise. When A, but nobody else, has ascertained that p is true, can p be said to have been verified; or is it required that others also have undergone the same ascertainment? How public, in other words, must verification be? Is it necessary that p could in principle be verified by anyone without restriction even though perhaps only A has in fact verified it? If 1

This suggestion is closely related to Carnap's insistence that, in contrast to "true," "confirmed" is time-dependent. To say that a statement is confirmed, or verified, is to say that it has been confirmed at a particular time—and, I would add, by a particular person. See Rudolf Carnap, "Truth and Confirmation," Feigl and Sellars, Readings in Philosophical Analysis (New York, 1949), pp. aigff. 171

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so, what is meant here by "in principle"; does it signify, for example, that p must be verifiable by anyone who performs a certain operation; and does it imply that to do this is within everyone's power? These questions cannot be given any general answer applicable to all instances of the exclusion of rational doubt. We cannot properly stipulate, for instance, that verification must by definition be fully public. 2 We must determine for each subject matter what type of verification ought to be obtainable. Verification is often construed as the substantiation of a prediction. As the exclusion of grounds for rational doubt, however, verification does not necessarily consist in the proving correct of a prediction; a verifying experience does not always need to have been predicted in order to have the effect of excluding rational doubt. But when we are interested in the verifiability of propositions as the criterion for their having factual meaning, the notion of prediction becomes central. If a proposition contains or entails predictions which can be verified or falsified, its character as an assertion (though not of course its character as a true assertion) is thereby established. Such predictions may be and often are conditional. For example, statements about the features of the dark side of the moon are rendered meaningful by the conditional predictions which they entail to the effect that if an observer comes to be in such a position in space, he will make suchand-such observations. It would in fact be more accurate to say that prediction is always conditional, but that sometimes the conditions are so obvious and so likely to be fulfilled that they require no special mention, while sometimes they require for their fulfillment some unusual expedition or operation. A prediction, for example, that the 2 As does, e.g., Paul F. Schmidt, in Religious Knowledge York, 1961), p. 60.

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sun will be observed to rise within twenty-four hours is intended unconditionally, at least as concerns conditions to be fulfilled by the observer; he is not required by the terms of the prediction to perform any special operation. But even in this case there is an implied negative condition that he shall not put himself in a situation (such as immuring himself in the depths of a coal mine) from which a sunrise would not be perceptible. Other predictions however are explicitly conditional. In these cases it is true for any particular individual that in order to verify the statement in question he must go through some specified course of action. The prediction is to the effect that if you conduct such an experiment you will obtain such a result; for example, if you go into the next room you will have such-and-such visual experiences, and if you then touch the table which you see you will have such-and-such tactual experiences. The content of the "if" clause is always determined by the particular subject matter. The logic of "table" determines what you must do to verify statements about tables; the logic of "molecule" determines what you must do to verify statements about molecules; and the logic of "God" determines what you must do to verify statements about God. In those cases in which the individual whg is to verify a proposition must himself first perform some operation, it clearly cannot follow from the circumstance that the proposition is known to be true that everybody has in fact verified it or will at some future time verify it. For whether or not any particular person performs the requisite operation is a contingent matter. What is the relation between verification and falsification? We are all familiar today with the phrase, "theology and falsification." Antony Flew 3 and others instead of ask3

A. G. N. Flew, "Theology and Falsification," in New Essays.in Philosophical Theology. On the philosophical antecedents of this

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ing the question, "What possible experiences would verify 'God exists'?" have raised the matching question, "What possible experiences would falsify 'God exists?" or "What conceivable state of affairs would be incompatible with the existence of God?" In posing the question in this way it was apparently assumed that verification and falsification are symmetrically related, and that the latter is apt to be the more accessible of the two. In the most common cases, certainly, verification and falsification are symmetrically related. The logically simplest case of verification is provided by the crucial instance. Here it is integral to a given hypothesis that if, in specified circumstances, A occurs, the hypothesis is thereby shown to be true, whereas if B occurs the hypothesis is thereby shown to be false. Verification and falsification are also symmetrically related in the testing of such a proposition as "There is a table in the next room." The verifying experiences in this case are experiences of seeing and touching, predictions of which are entailed by the proposition in question, under the proviso that one goes into the next room; and the absence of such experiences in those circumstances serves to falsify the proposition. But it would be rash to assume, on this basis, that verification and falsification must always be related in this symmetrical fashion. They do not necessarily stand to one another as do the two sides of a coin, so that once the coin is spun it must fall on one side or the other. There are cases in which verification and falsification each correspond to a side on different coins, so that one can fail to verify without this failure constituting falsification. Consider, for example, the proposition that "there are three successive sevens in the decimal determination of it." So far as the value of n has been worked out, it does not change from the notion of verification to that of falsification, see Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934; E.T., 1959). 174

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contain a series of three sevens, but it will always be true that such a series may occur at a point not yet reached in anyone's calculations. Accordingly, the proposition may one day be verified if it is true, but can never be falsified if it is false. The hypothesis of continued conscious existence after bodily death provides an instance of a different kind of such asymmetry, and one which has a direct bearing upon the theistic problem. This hypothesis has built into it a prediction that one will, after the date of one's bodily death, have conscious experiences, including the experience of remembering that death. This is a prediction which will be verified in one's own experience if it is true, but which cannot be falsified if it is false. That is to say, it can be false, but that it is false can never be a fact which anyone has experientially verified. This circumstance does not undermine the meaningfulness of the hypothesis, however, since it is also such that if it be true, it will be known to be true. It is important to remember that we do not speak of verifying logically necessary truths, but only propositions concerning matters of fact. Accordingly verification is not to be identified with the concept of logical certification or proof. The exclusion of rational doubt concerning some matter of fact is not equivalent to the exclusion of the logical possibility of error or illusion. For truths concerning fact are not logically necessary. Their contrary is never selfcontradictory. But at the same time the bare logical possibility of error does not constitute ground for rational doubt as to the veracity of our experience. If it did, no empirical proposition could ever be verified, and indeed the notion of empirical verification would be without use and therefore without sense. What we rightly seek, when we desire the verification of a factual proposition, is not a demonstration of the logical impossibility of the proposi»75

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tion being false (for this would be a self-contradictory demand), but such kind and degree of evidence as suffices, in the type of case in question, to exclude rational doubt. These features of the concept of verification—that verification consists in the exclusion of grounds for rational doubt concerning the truth of some proposition; that this means the exclusion of doubt from particular minds; that the nature of the experience which serves to exclude grounds for rational doubt depends upon the specific subject matter; that verification is often related to predictions and that such predictions are often conditional; that verification and falsification may be asymmetrically related; and, finally, that the verification of a factual proposition is not equivalent to logical certification—are all relevant to the verification of the religious claim, "God exists." I wish now to apply these discriminations to the notion of eschatological verification. The strength of the notion of eschatological verification is that it is not an ad hoc invention but is based upon an actually operative religious concept of God. In the language of Christian faith, the word "God" stands at the center of a system of terms, such as Spirit, grace, Logos, incarnation, Kingdom of God, and many more; and the distinctively Christian conception of God can only be fully grasped in its connection with these related terms. It belongs to a complex of notions which together constitute a picture of the universe in which we live, of man's place therein, of a comprehensive divine purpose interacting with human purposes, and of the general nature of the eventual fulfillment of that divine purpose. This Christian picture of the universe, entailing as it does certain distinctive expectations concerning the future, is a very different picture from any that can be accepted by one who does not believe that the God of the New Testament exists. Further, the differences are such as to show themselves in human experience. The possibility of experiential confir176

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mation is thus built into the Christian concept of God; and the notion of eschatological verification seeks to relate this fact to the problem of theological meaning. Let me first give a somewhat general indication of this suggestion, by means of a parable, and then try to make it more precise and eligible for discussion. Here is the parable. Two men are traveling together along a road. One of them believes that it leads to a Celestial City, the other that it leads nowhere; but since this is the only road there is, both must travel it. Neither has been this way before, and therefore neither is able to say what they will find around each next corner. During their journey they meet both with moments of refreshment and delight, and with moments of hardship and danger. All the time one of them thinks of his journey as a pilgrimage to the Celestial City and interprets the pleasant parts as encouragements and the obstacles as trials of his purpose and lessons in endurance, prepared by the king of that city and designed to make of him a worthy citizen of the place when at last he arrives there. The other, however, believes none of this and sees their journey as an unavoidable and aimless ramble. Since he has no choice in the matter, he enjoys the good and endures the bad. But for him there is no Celestial City to be reached, no all-encompassing purpose ordaining their journey—only the road itself and the luck of the road in good weather and in bad. During the course of the journey the issue between them is not an experimental one. They do not entertain different expectations about the coming details of the road, but only about its ultimate destination. And yet when they do turn the last corner it will be apparent that one of them has been right all the time and the other wrong. Thus, although the issue between them has not been experimental, it has nevertheless from the start been a real issue. They have not merely felt differently about the road; for one 177

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was feeling appropriately and the other inappropriately in relation to the actual state of affairs. Their opposed interpretations of the road constituted genuinely rival assertions, though assertions whose status has the peculiar characteristic of being guaranteed retrospectively by a future crux. This parable has of course (like all parables) strict limitations. It is designed to make only one point: that Christian doctrine postulates an ultimate unambiguous state of existence in patria as well as our present ambiguous existence in via. There is a state of having arrived as well as a state of journeying, an eternal heavenly life as well as an earthly pilgrimage. The alleged future experience of this state cannot, of course, be appealed to as evidence for theism as a present interpretation of our experience; but it does suffice to render the choice between theism and atheism a real and not a merely empty or verbal choice. And although this does not affect the logic of the situation, it should be added that the alternative interpretations are more than theoretical in that they render different practical plans and policies appropriate now. The universe as envisaged by the theist, then, differs as a totality from the universe as envisaged by the atheist. This difference does not, however, from our present standpoint within the universe, involve a difference in the objective content of each or even any of its passing moments. The theist and the atheist do not (or need not) expect different events to occur in the successive details of the temporal process. They do not (or need not) entertain divergent expectations of the course of history viewed from within. But the theist does, and the atheist does not, expect that when history is completed it will be seen to have led to a particular end-state and to have fulfilled a specific purpose, namely that of creating "children of God." The idea of an eschatological verification of theism can 178

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make sense, however, only if the logically prior idea of continued personal existence after death is intelligible. A desultory debate on this topic has been going on for several years in some of the philosophical periodicals. C. I. Lewis has contended that the hypothesis of immortality "is an hypothesis about our own future experience. And our understanding of what would verify it has no lack of clarity." 4 Moritz Schlick agreed, adding, "We must conclude that immortality, in the sense defined [i.e. 'survival after death,' rather than 'never-ending life'], should not be regarded as a 'metaphysical problem,' but as an empirical hypothesis, because it possesses logical verifiability. It could be verified by following the prescription: 'Wait until you die!' " 5 However, others have challenged this conclusion, either on the ground that the phrase "surviving death" is self-contradictory in ordinary language 6 or, more substantially, on the ground that the traditional distinction between soul and body cannot be sustained. I should like to address myself to this latter view. T h e only self of which we know, it is said, is the empirical self, the walking, talking, acting, sleeping individual who lives, it may be, for some sixty to eighty years and then dies. Mental events and mental characteristics are analyzed into the modes of behavior and behavioral dispositions of this empirical self. The human being is described as an organism capable of acting in the "high-level" ways which we characterize as intelligent, thoughtful, humorous, calculating, and the like. The concept of mind or soul is thus the concept not 4 "Experience and Meaning," Philosophical Review, 1934, reprinted in Feigl and Sellars, Readings in Philosophical Analysis (New York, 1949), p. 142. 5 "Meaning and Verification," Philosophical Review, 1936, reprinted in Feigl and Sellars, op. cit., p. 160. 6 See e.g., A. G. N. Flew, "Death," New Essays in Philosophical Theology; "Can a Man Witness His Own Funeral?" Hibbert Journal, 1956.

N

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of a "ghost in the machine" (to use Gilbert Ryle's loaded phrase 7) but of the more flexible and sophisticated ways in which human beings behave and have it in them to behave. According to this view there is no room for the notion of soul in distinction from body; and if there is no soul in distinction from body there can be no question of the soul surviving the death of the body. Against this philosophical background the specifically Christian (and also Jewish) belief in the resurrection of the flesh or body, in contrast to the Hellenic notion of the survival of a disembodied soul, might be expected to have attracted more attention than it has. For it is consonant with the conception of man as an indissoluble psychophysical unity, and yet it also offers the possibility of an empirical meaning for the idea of "life after death." Paul is the chief biblical expositor of the idea of the resurrection of the body.8 His view, as I understand it, is this. When someone has died he is, apart from any special divine action, extinct. A human being is by nature mortal and subject to annihilation by death. But in fact God, by an act of sovereign power, either sometimes or always resurrects or (better) reconstitutes or recreates him—not, however, as the identical physical organism that he was before death, but as a soma pneumatikon ("spiritual body") embodying the dispositional characteristics and memory traces of the deceased physical organism, and inhabiting an environment with which the soma pneumatikon is continuous as the ante-mortem body was continuous with our present world. In discussing this notion we may well abandon the word "spiritual," as lacking today any precise established usage, and speak of "resurrection bodies" and i The Concept of Mind, 1949, which contains a classic exposition of the interpretation of "mental" qualities as characteristics of behavior. 8 I Cor. 15. 180

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of "the resurrection world." The principal questions to be asked concern the relation between the physical world and the resurrection world, and the criteria of personal identity which are operating when it is alleged that a certain inhabitant of the resurrection world is the same person as an individual who once inhabited this present world. The first of these questions turns out on investigation to be the more difficult of the two, and I shall take the easier one first. Let me sketch a very old possibility (concerning which, however, I wish to emphasize not so much its oddness as its possibility!), and then see how far it can be stretched in the direction of the notion of the resurrection body. In the process of stretching it will become even more odd than it was before; but my aim will be to show that, however odd, it remains within the bounds of the logically possible. This progression will be presented in three pictures, arranged in a self-explanatory order. First picture: Suppose that at some learned gathering in England one of the company were suddenly and inexplicably to disappear, and that at the same moment an exact replica of him were suddenly and inexplicably to appear at some comparable meeting in Australia. The person who appears in Australia is exactly similar, as to both bodily and mental characteristics, with the person who disappears in England. There is continuity of memory, complete similarity of bodily features, including even fingerprints, hair and eye coloration and stomach contents, and also of beliefs, habits, and mental propensities. In fact there is everything that would lead us to identify the one who appeared with the one who disappeared, except continuity of occupancy of space. We may suppose, for example, that on flying to Australia to interview the replica of the man who disappeared a deputation of his colleagues finds that he is in all respects but one exactly as though he had traveled 181

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from Cambridge to Melbourne by conventional means; and and yet he describes how, as he was sitting listening to Dr. Z. reading a paper, on blinking his eyes he suddenly found himself sitting in a different room listening to a different paper by an Australian scholar. He asks his colleagues how the meeting went after he ceased to be there, and what they made of his disappearance, and so on. He clearly thinks of himself as the one who was present with them at their meeting in England. I suggest that faced with all these circumstances his colleagues would soon, if not immediately, find themselves thinking of him and treating him as the individual who had so inexplicably disappeared from their midst. We should be extending our normal use of "same person" in a way which the postulated facts would both demand and justify if we said that the one who appears in Australia is the same person as the one who disappears in England. The factors inclining us to identify the men would far outweigh the factors disinclining us to do this. We should have no reasonable alternative but to extend our usage of "the same person" to cover the strange new case. Second picture: Now let us suppose that the event in England is not a sudden and inexplicable disappearance, and indeed not a disappearance at all, but a sudden death. Only, at the moment when the individual dies, a replica of him as he was at the moment before his death, complete with memory up to that instant, appears in Australia. Even with the corpse on our hands, it would still, I suggest, be an extension of "same person" required and warranted by the postulated facts, to say that the same person who died has been miraculously recreated in Australia. The case would be considerably odder than in the previous picture, because of the existence of the corpse in England contemporaneously with the existence of the living person in Australia. But I submit that, although the oddness of 182

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this circumstance may be stated as strongly as you please, and can indeed hardly be overstated, yet it does not exceed the bounds of the logically possible. Once again we must imagine some of the deceased's colleagues going to Australia to interview the person who has suddenly appeared there. He would perfectly remember them and their meeting, be interested in what had happened, and be as amazed and dumbfounded about it as anyone else; and he would perhaps be worried about the possible legal complications if he should return to claim his property; and so on. Once again, I believe, they would soon find themselves thinking of him and treating him as the same person as the dead Cantabrigian. Once again the factors inclining us to say that the one who died and the one who appeared are the same person would outweigh the factors inclining us to say that they are different people. Once again we should have to extend our usage of "the same person" to cover this new case. Third picture: My last supposal is that the replica, complete with memory, etc., appears, not in Australia, but as a resurrection replica in a different world altogether, a resurrection world inhabited by resurrected persons. This world occupies its own space, distinct from the space with which we are now familiar.8 That is to say, an object in the resurrection world is not situated at any distance or in any direction from an object in our present world, although each object in either world is spatially related to each other object in the same world. Mr. X, then, dies. A Mr. X replica, complete with the set of memory traces which Mr. X had at the last moment before his death, comes into existence. It is composed of other material than physical matter, and is located in a resurrection world which does not stand in any spatial re9

On this possibility, see Anthony Quinton, "Spaces and Times," Philosophy, XXXVII, no. 140 (1962). >83

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lationship with the physical world. Let us leave out of consideration St. Paul's hint that the resurrection body may be as unlike the physical body as is a full grain of wheat from the wheat seed, and consider the simpler picture in which the resurrection body has the same shape as the physical body.10 In these circumstances, how does Mr. X know that he has been resurrected or recreated? He remembers dying; or rather he remembers being on what he took to be his deathbed, and becoming progressively weaker until, presumably, he lost consciousness. But how does he know that (to put it Irishly) his dying proved fatal; and that he did not, after losing consciousness, begin to recover strength, and has now simply awakened? The picture is readily enough elaborated to answer this question. Mr. X meets and recognizes a number of relatives and friends and historical personages whom he knows to have died; and from the fact of their presence, and also from their testimony that he has only just now appeared in their world, he is convinced that he has died. Evidences of this kind could add up to the point at which they are quite as strong as the evidence which, in pictures one and two, convinces the individual in question that he has been miraculously translated to Australia. Resurrected persons would be no more in doubt about their own identity than we are about ours now, and would be able to identify one another in the same kinds of ways, and with a like degree of assurance, as we do now. If it be granted that resurrected persons might be able to arrive at a rationally founded conviction that their existence is post-mortem, how could they know that the world in which they find themselves is in a different space from that in which their physical bodies were? How could such a 10

As would seem to be assumed, for example, by Irenaeus (Adversus Haereses, bk. n, ch. 34, sec. 1).

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one know that he is not in a like situation with the person in picture number two, who dies in England and appears as a full-blooded replica in Australia, leaving his corpse in England—except that now the replica is situated, not in Australia, but on a planet of some other star? It is of course conceivable that the space of the resurrection world would have properties which are manifestly incompatible with its being a region of physical space. But on the other hand, it is not essential to the notion of a resurrection world that its space should have properties different from those of physical space. And supposing the properties are not different, it is not evident that a resurrected individual could learn from any direct observations that he was not on a planet of some sun which is at so great a distance from our own sun that the stellar scenery visible from it is quite unlike that which we can now see. The grounds that a resurrected person would have for believing that he is in a different space from physical space (supposing there to be no discernible difference in spatial properties) would be the same as the grounds that any of us may have now for believing this concerning resurrected individuals. These grounds are indirect and consist in all those considerations (e.g., Luke 16:26) which lead most of those who consider the question to reject as absurd the possibility of, for example, radio communication or rocket travel between earth and heaven. In the present context, however, my only concern is to claim that this doctrine of the divine creation of bodies— composed of a material other than that of physical matter, but endowed with sufficient correspondence of characteristics with our present bodies and sufficient continuity of memory with our present consciousness for us to speak of the same person being raised up again to life in a new environment—is not self-contradictory. If, then, the doctrine cannot be ruled out ab initio as meaningless, we may 185

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go on to consider whether and how it is related to the possible verification of Christian theism. So far I have argued that a survival prediction such as is contained in the corpus of Christian belief is in principle subject to future verification. But this does not take the argument by any means as far as it must go if it is to succeed. For survival, simply as such, would not serve to verify theism.11 It would not necessarily be a state of affairs which is manifestly incompatible with the nonexistence of God. It might be taken just as a surprising natural fact. The atheist, in his resurrection body, and able to remember his life on earth, might say that the universe has turned out to be more complex, and perhaps more to be approved of, than he had realized. But the mere fact of survival, with a new body in a new environment, would not demonstrate to him that there is a God. It is fully compatible with the notion of survival that the life to come be, so far as the theistic problem is concerned, essentially a continuation of the present life, and religiously no less ambiguous. And in this event, survival after bodily death would not in the least constitute a final verification of theistic faith. I shall not spend time in trying to draw a picture of a resurrection existence which would merely prolong the religious ambiguity of our present life. The important question, for our purpose, is not whether one can conceive of afterlife experiences which would not verify theism (and in point of fact one can fairly easily conceive them), but whether one can conceive of afterlife experiences which would serve to verify theism. I think that we can. In trying to do so I shall not appeal II

Occasionally in published discussions the notion of eschatological verification has been equated with, and rejected as, this very incomplete and inadequate idea. See, e.g., Frank B. Dilley, Metaphysics and Religious Language (New York, 1964), p. 41.

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to the traditional doctrine, which figures especially in Catholic and mystical theology, of the Beatific Vision of God. The difficulty presented by this doctrine is not so much that of deciding whether there are grounds for believing it, as of deciding what it means. I shall not, however, elaborate this difficulty, but pass directly to the investigation of a different and, as it seems to me, more intelligible possibility. This is the possibility not of a direct vision of God, whatever that might mean, but of a situation which points unambiguously to the existence of a loving God. This would be a situation which, so far as its religious significance is concerned, contrasts in a certain important respect with our present situation. Our present situation is one which seems in some ways to confirm and in other ways to contradict the truth of theism. Some events around us suggest the presence of an unseen benevolent intelligence and others suggest that no such intelligence is at work. Our situation is religiously ambiguous. But in order for us to be aware of this fact we must already have some idea, however vague, of what it would be for our situation to be not ambiguous, but on the contrary wholly evidential of God. I therefore want to try to make clearer this presupposed concept of a religiously unambiguous situation. There are, I suggest, two possible developments of our experience such that, if they occurred in conjunction with one another (whether in this life or in another life to come), they would assure us beyond rational doubt of the reality of God as conceived in the Christian faith. These are, first, an experience of the fulfillment of God's purpose for ourselves, as this has been disclosed in the Christian revelation, and second, in conjunction with the first, an experience of communion with God as he has revealed himself in the person of Christ. The divine purpose for human life, as this is depicted in 187

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the New Testament documents, is the bringing of the human person, in society with his fellows, to enjoy a certain valuable quality of personal life, the content of which is given in the character of Christ—which quality of life (that is, life in relationship with God, described in the Fourth Gospel as eternal life) is said to be the proper destiny of human nature and the source of man's final selffulfillment and happiness. The verification situation with regard to such a fulfillment is asymmetrical. On the one hand, so long as the divine purpose remains unfulfilled, we cannot know that it never will be fulfilled in the future; hence no final falsification is possible of the claim that this fulfillment will occur—unless, of course, the prediction were to contain a specific time clause, which, in Christian teaching, it does not. But on the other hand, if and when the divine purpose is fulfilled in our own experience, we must be able to recognize and rejoice in that fulfillment. For the fulfillment would not be for us the promised fulfillment without our own conscious participation in it. It is important to note that one can say this much without being cognizant in advance of the concrete form which such fulfillment will take. The before-and-after situation is analogous to that of a small child looking forward to adult life and then, having grown to adulthood, looking back upon childhood. The child possesses and can use correctly in various contexts the concept of "being grown-up," although he does not know, concretely, what it is like to be grown-up. But when he reaches adulthood he is nevertheless able to know that he has reached it; he is able to recognize the experience of living a grown-up life even though he did not know in advance just what to expect. For his understanding of adult maturity grows as he himself matures. Something similar may be supposed to happen in the case of the fulfillment of the divine purpose for human life. That fulfillment may be as far removed from our 188

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present condition as is mature adulthood from the mind of a little child; nevertheless, we possess already a comparatively vague notion of this final fulfillment, and as we move towards it our concept will itself become more adequate; and if and when we finally reach that fulfillment, the problem of recognizing it will have disappeared in the process. The other feature that must, I suggest, be present in a state of affairs that would verify theism, is that the fulfillment of God's purpose be apprehended as the fulfillment of God's purpose and not simply as a natural state of affairs. T o this end it must be accompanied by an experience of communion with God as he has made himself known to men in Christ. The specifically Christian clause, "as he has made himself known to men in Christ," is essential, for it provides a solution to the problem of recognition in the awareness of God. Several writers have pointed out the logical difficulty involved in any claim to have encountered God.12 How could one know that it was God whom one had encountered? God is described in Christian theology in terms of various absolute qualities, such as omnipotence, omnipresence, perfect goodness, infinite love, etc., which cannot as such be observed by us, as can their finite analogues, limited power, local presence, finite goodness, and human love. One can recognize that a being whom one "encounters" has a given finite degree of power, but how does one recognize that he has unlimited power? How does one observe that an encountered being is omnipresent? How does one perceive that his goodness and love, which one can perhaps see to exceed any human goodness and love, are actually infinite? Such qualities cannot be given in human experience. One might claim, then, to have en12

For example, H. W. Hepburn, Christianity (London, 1958), pp. 56 ff.

and

Paradox,

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countered a Being whom one presumes, or trusts, or hopes to be God; but one cannot claim to have encountered a Being whom one recognized to be the infinite, almighty, eternal Creator. This difficulty is met in Christianity by the doctrine of the Incarnation—although this was not among the considerations which led to the formulation of that doctrine. The idea of incarnation provides answers to the two related questions: "How do we know that God has certain absolute qualities which, by their very nature, transcend human experience?" and "How can there be an eschatological verification of theism which is based upon a recognition of the presence of God in his Kingdom?" In Christianity God is known as "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." 13 God is the Being about whom Jesus taught; the Being in relation to whom Jesus lived, and into a relationship with whom he brought his disciples; the Being whose agape toward men was seen on earth in the life of Jesus. In short, God is the transcendent Creator who has revealed himself in Christ. Now Jesus' teaching about the Father is a part of that self-disclosure, and it is from this teaching (together with that of the prophets who preceded him) that the Christian knowledge of God's transcendent being is derived. Only God himself knows his own infinite nature; and our human belief about that nature is based upon his self-revelation in Christ to men. As Karl Barth expresses it, "Jesus Christ is the knowability of God." 14 Our beliefs about God's infinite being are not capable of observational verification, being beyond the scope of human experience, but they are susceptible of indirect verification by the removal of rational doubt concerning the authority of Christ. An experience of the reign of the Son in the kingdom of the Father would confirm that authority and therewith, indirectly, the validity of 13

I I Cor. 11:31. 190

14

Church Dogmatics, II, pt. 1, p. 150.

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Jesus' teaching concerning the character of God in his infinite transcendent nature. The further question as to how an eschatological experience of the kingdom of God could be known to be such has already been answered by implication. God's union with man in Christ makes possible man's recognition of the fulfillment of God's purpose for man as being indeed the fulfillment of God's purpose for him. The presence of Christ marks this kingdom as being beyond doubt the kingdom of the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is true that even the experience of realizing the promised kingdom of God, with Christ reigning as Lord of the New Aeon, would not constitute a logical certification of his claims nor, accordingly, of the reality of God. But this will not seem remarkable to any philosopher in the empiricist tradition, who knows that it is only a confusion to demand that a factual proposition be an analytic truth. A set of expectations based upon faith in the historic Jesus as the incarnation of God and in his teaching as being divinely authoritative could be so fully confirmed in postmortem experience as to leave no grounds for rational doubt of the validity of that faith. There remains of course the problem (which falls to the New Testament scholar rather than to the philosopher) whether Christian tradition, and in particular the New Testament, provides a sufficiently authentic "picture" of the mind and character of Christ to make such recognition possible. I cannot here attempt to enter into the vast field of biblical criticism, and shall confine myself to the logical point, which only emphasizes the importance of the historical question, that a verification of theism made possible by the Incarnation is dependent upon the Christian's having a genuine knowledge of the person of Christ, even though this is mediated through the life and tradition of the Church. 191

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One further point remains to be considered. When we ask the question, "To whom is theism verified?" one is initially inclined to assume that the answer must be, "To everyone." We are inclined to assume that, as in my parable of the journey, the believer must be confirmed in his belief and the unbeliever converted from his unbelief. But this assumption is neither demanded by the nature of verification nor by any means unequivocably supported by our Christian sources. We have already noted that a verifiable prediction may be conditional. "There is a table in the next room" entails conditional predictions of the form: if someone goes into the next room he will see. . . . But no one is compelled to go into the next room. And it may be that the predictions concerning human experience which are entailed by the proposition that God exists are conditional predictions and that no one is compelled to fulfill those conditions. Indeed we stress in much of our theology that the manner of the divine self-disclosure to men is such that our human status as free and responsible beings is respected, arid an awareness of God is never forced upon us. It may then be a condition of post-mortem verification that we be already in some degree conscious of God by an uncompelled response to his modes of revelation in this world. It may be that such a voluntary consciousness of God is an essential element in the fulfillment of the divine purpose for human nature, so that the verification of theism which consists in an experience of the final fulfillment of that purpose can only be experienced by those who have already entered upon an awareness of God by the religious mode of apperception which we call faith. If this be so, it has the consequence that only the theistic believer can find the vindication of his belief. This circumstance would not of course set any restriction upon who can become a believer, but it would entail that while 192

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theistic faith can be verified—found by one who holds it to be beyond rational doubt—yet it cannot be proved to the nonbeliever. Such an asymmetry would connect with that strand of New Testament teaching which speaks of a division of mankind even in the world to come. Having noted this possibility I will only express my personal opinion that the logic of the New Testament as a whole, though admittedly not always its explicit content, leads to a belief in ultimate universal salvation.15 However, my concern here is not to seek to establish the religious facts, but rather to establish that there are such things as religious facts, and in particular that the existence or nonexistence of the God of the New Testament is a matter of fact and claims as such eventual experiential verification. However, various difficulties in the argument of this chapter have been pointed out by philosophical and theological critics; and I should like now to consider these difficulties. I believe that in each case the objections arise from regarding the notion of eschatological verification as attempting to do different jobs from that assigned to it here. We will begin with a basic clarification which will enable us to meet some of the difficulties. It is not being denied here that the religious man already enjoys a genuine knowledge of God; it is not being suggested that he has to wait until after death to find out with certainty whether God exists. On the contrary, faith has been presented in Part II as an awareness of the divine presence, an experiencing of the world as a realm in which we have at all times to do with God and he with us. And this present consciousness of God is independent of any beliefs that the religious man may have about an afterlife. Thus the Old Testament prophets were intensely aware of the presence 15

I have discussed this difficult matter more fully in Evil and the Cod of Love (London and New York, 1966), pp. 377-388. 193

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and power of God whilst being devoid of any significant hope of a life beyond death. It is not, then, being suggested that the existence of God has the status in the believer's mind of a tentatively adopted hypothesis which awaits verification after death.16 The believer can already have, on the basis of his religious experience, a warrant as to the reality of God. He may already know God in a way which requires no further verification. Now to the extent to which the believer actually has a present consciousness of God, he does indeed need no future verification of God's reality, and the life of heaven will not fundamentally change his cognitive relation to his Maker. But this does not render the notion of eschatological verification any less apposite to the function for which it has been advanced—namely, establishing the factual character of theistic belief in response to questions raised by contemporary philosophy. It is not that the believer needs further confirmation of his faith, but that the philosopher—whether believer or not—wants to know what aspects of Christian belief bring that system of belief within the accepted criteria of factual meaningful ness. The religious man has always assumed—usually without formulating this as a philosophical position—that the propositions expressing his faith-awareness of God have the character of factual statements: that they are factually true or false, and of course, according to him, true. That is to say, the ordinary religious believer has always taken it for 16

It is misinterpreted in this way by D. R. Duff-Forbes in his discussion of I. M. Crombie's use of the idea of eschatological verification in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, p. 126. See Duff-Forbes' "Theology and Falsification Again," Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 39 (1961), p. 153. See also a reply to this article by Antony Flew, "Falsification and Hypothesis in Theology," Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 40 (1962), and further reply by Duff-Forbes. 194

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granted that the dispute between himself and an atheist concerns a momentous question of fact: the existence or nonexistence of a transcendent divine Being. But in our own time, as a result of investigations of the concepts of meaning and verification, this assumption has been questioned. Do the core religious statements (such as "God loves mankind") really have the logical character of factual assertions? Or are they incapable in principle of either verification or falsification, and thus factually vacuous? These questions challenge the religious apologist to point to any features of theological discourse which establish its factual character. The task is not to show that religious statements are true, but to show that they make factual assertions, and are accordingly true-or-false. And it is this task that the notion of eschatological verification is invoked to perform. It draws out of the system of Christian belief—which can be regarded as a complex expansion of the Christian concept of God—that element which makes an experientially verifiable claim, in virtue of which the belief-system as a whole is established as being factually true-or-false. Thus the purpose of the reference to eschatological verification is simply to show the inquirer who is concerned about the questions raised by logical positivism and its philosophical descendants that the theistic assertion is indeed—whether true or false—a genuinely factual assertion. It must be added, however, that a state of faith which is so complete that it leaves no room for doubt, and therefore no room for the exclusion of doubt by further verifying experiences, represents an ideal that is seldom attained in this life. Faith is in practice a variable state, with both its moments of indubitable consciousness of God and its times of precarious living upon the memory of those moments. Even the perfect God-consciousness of Jesus seems to have faltered in the experience which evoked his cry of derelic195

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tion on the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Thus whilst in its strongest possible form faith needs no further verification, in its common forms it does not exclude the possibility of such future confirmation. An important philosophical objection has been presented by Kai Nielsen in an article on "Eschatological Verification." 17 He offers several secondary criticisms, but his main criticism is that the argument begs the question by presupposing that which is to be shown. Nielsen focuses attention upon the two suggested conditions fulfillment of which, it is claimed, would remove grounds for rational doubt as to the existence of the God of Christian faith: namely, the completion of God's purpose for us as this has been disclosed in the New Testament, and an eschatological confirmation of the authority of Jesus and hence of his revelation of God. Nielsen claims that these conditions presuppose that we already know what it is for God to exist, to have a purpose for us, and to be encountered in Christ, and that they cannot be used to establish the meaning, nor therefore the factual meaning, of these religious ideas. Speaking of the first of the two allegedly verifying conditions, Nielsen says: But what we do not know is what it would be like to verify "There is divine existence." We have no idea at all of what it would be like for that statement to be either true or false. . . . And . . . to appeal to the divine purpose for man assumes we already know what it would be like to verify that our lives have such a purpose. We do not know what must be the case for it to be true or false that our lives have a purpose, a telos, a destiny or final fulfillment. We do not know what must happen for us to assert correctly that so and so is 17

In Canadian Journal of Theology, XVII, no. 4 (i960). See also a reply by George Mavrodes, "God and Verification," in X, no. 3 (1964), and a reply to this by Nielsen, "God and Verification Again" in XI, no. 2 (1965). 196

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"apprehended as the fulfillment of God's purpose and not simply as a natural state of affairs." 18 And referring to the second condition, he says: Unless we already understand what is meant by "God," how can we possibly understand such words as "Christ," "The Christ," "The Son of God," or "Our Lord Jesus Christ"? How can utterances incorporating them be used to make verifiable statements? What would count as verifying them? What conceivable experiences, post-mortem or otherwise, would tell us what it would be like to encounter not just Jesus, but the Christ, the Son of God, and the Son of Man, or our Lord, where "Our Lord" does not just mean a wise teacher or a monarch whom we meet either now or hereafter? If we do not know what it would be like to verify "God exists" directly, we have no better idea of what it would be like to verify "The Son of God exists," where "The Son of God" is not identical in meaning with "Jesus." 19 Certainly the philosophical elucidation of the Christian concept of God raises the most profound, elusive, and perhaps insoluble problems. And it is therefore correspondingly difficult, or even impossible, to state in full what it is for God to be real. For to set forth the complete truthconditions of "God exists" would require an exhaustive definition of the divine nature. And Nielsen is right in saying that the notion of eschatological verification does not enable us to do this. But it was not invoked to do this. It was invoked to establish that the statement "God exists" is factually true-or-false. It does this by showing that the concept of deity, in its Christian context, involves eschatological expectations which will be either fulfilled or not fulfilled. But it is not suggested that the fulfillment of these expectations, by participation in the ultimate Kingdom of God, defines the meaning of "God exists." In try18 19

Nielsen, "Eschatological Verification," pp. 276-277. Ibid., p. 277.

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ing to describe a situation in which it would be irrational for a human being to doubt the reality of God, as allegedly revealed in Christ, one is not undertaking to define exhaustively the nature of God or, therefore, the truthconditions of "God exists." If it is asked how we can be in a position to tell the difference between God existing and God not existing without fully knowing what "God" means, the general answer is that such combined knowledge and ignorance is a very common epistemological situation. As Nielsen himself emphasizes on another occasion, we can often use a word correctly, applying it to the right objects or situations, and yet be unable to give a satisfactory philosophical analysis of its meaning.20 We all know what "This is a material object" or "He is alive" means, and we may have an assured knowledge of many things that they are material objects and of many people that they are alive, and yet be unable to define fully what it is to be a material object or to be alive. And so in the theological case we must not rule out a priori that one might be able to be aware of the presence of God, to identify an act of God, and to recognize God's rule, without being able fully to define or comprehend the divine nature. Within Christianity it is possible to talk about the infinite God, incomprehensible though he still remains, because he has become finitely incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. That is to say, God is identified as the Being about whom Jesus taught and whose attitude to mankind was expressed in Jesus' deeds. Building upon Jesus' teaching, together with that of the Hebrew prophets before him, Christian theologians have developed the philosophical 20

"God and Verification Again," Canadian Journal of Theology, XI, no. 2 (1965) pp. 136-137. Cf. G. E. Moore, Some Main Problems of Philosophy (London, 1953), pp. 205-206 and Philosophical Papers (London, 1959), pp. 36 ff.

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conception of this Being as infinite, uncreated, eternal, and so on. But the starting point and basis of the Christian use of the word "God" remains the historical figure of Jesus, as known through the New Testament records. Under his impact we come (in some degree and at some times) to experience life in a distinctively new way, as living in the presence of the God whose love was revealed in the words and actions of Jesus. Is the appropriateness of this response to the haunting figure of Jesus—this response of personal discipleship, of acceptance of his teaching, and of coming to experience life in its relation to "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ"—in any way verifiable by future events? Surely our participation in an eschatological situation in which the reality of God's loving purpose for us is confirmed by its fulfillment in a heavenly world, and in which the authority of Jesus, and thus of his teaching, is confirmed by his exalted place in that world, would properly count as confirmatory. It would not (to repeat) amount to logical demonstration, but it would constitute a situation in which the grounds for rational doubt which obtain in the present life would have been decisively removed. Such eschatological expectations—without the detailed imagery in which earlier ages have clothed them—are an integral part of the total Christian conception of God and his activity. And they suffice, I suggest, to ensure the factual, true-or-false character of the claim that God, as so conceived, exists.

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Faith as Knowledge I HAVE argued for the view of faith as the interpretative element within religious experience and as having the function of preserving our cognitive freedom in relation to God; and f have argued that the language in which the faith-awareness of God is expressed is cognitive in character, so that such statements as "God treated the world" and "God loves mankind" are factually true-or-false assertions. Is the religious man entitled to describe his awareness of God as a form of knowledge? Or should faith be equated with belief, in sharp distinction from, knowledge? From the time of Plato almost until our own day knowledge has generally been regarded a s direct and infallible acquaintance with "reality" (in ancient philosophy) or with "truth" (in modern philosophy). The idea of knowledge, thus defined, is drawn by analogy from our dominant sense, vision. Knowing is a generalisation of seeing, seeing being construed as simple intuition. Thus a modern Platonist asks, "How does knowing differ from opining and believing?" and replies, "The true Answer to this question can be given in three words, 'By being vision.' " x Knowledge is here conceived in terms of the metaphor of intellectual vision. ' A . E. Taylor, "Knowing and Believing," Proc. Aristot. Soc, 1928-1949, reprinted in Philosophical Studies (London, 1934), p. 398. 200

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At the end of the medieval period we find in Descartes' writings the completed shift from Platonic Ideas to propositions as the supposed objects of human knowledge. Instead of being acquaintance with the fully (as distinguished from the imperfectly) real, knowledge has become awareness of the truth of either self-evident or necessarily (as distinguished from contingently) true propositions and their implicates. Mathematics is accordingly regarded as exemplifying the epistemological ideal. From this background, the background of European rationalism, there has arisen the widely held dogma that to know anything is equivalent to being able to prove it. We need not discuss separately the two variants of the traditional teaching, relating knowledge to "reality" and to "truth" respectively. The central tenet of the theory in either form is that knowing (sharply distinguished from believing) is self-authenticating and infallible. We cannot know anything that is not in fact the case; and when"we are in the state of mind called knowing, what we know must be so. That X knows p entails that p is true; whereas that X believes p does not entail anything concerning the truth-value of p. As John Cook-Wilson, a leading modern exponent of this way of thinking, says, "Belief is not knowledge and the man who knows does not believe at all what he knows; he knows it." 2 T o know is to be confronted by fact or truth, and to be aware that one is confronted by it. Thus knowledge is by definition infallible—^although it need not of course be exhaustive. It is essential to this position that (in a curious but unavoidable locution) when we know, we know that we know. T o quote Cook-Wilson again, "The consciousness that the knowing process is a knowing process must be contained within the knowing process itself." 8 There can 2 Statement and Inference (London, 1926), I, 100. 3 Ibid., p. 107. 201

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therefore be no question of a criterion of knowledge external to the act of knowing; knowing is a self-contained process. The claim to know requires no endorsement from outside; knowledge shines in its own light with a sufficient and self-certificating authority. We may conveniently refer to this view as the infallibilist theory or definition of knowledge. It is commonly argued in favor of it that unless we do actually possess knowledge in this sense—even if it be narrowly restricted in extent—there can be no certainty of anything, no fixed point upon which to build our beliefs or by which to guide our lives. Unless there are at least some items of indubitable knowledge, we are condemned to an endless relativity of shifting opinions. It is further argued that the denial of all knowledge in the infallibilist sense is a self-refuting denial; for it amounts to the claim to know that nothing is strictly knowable. Now all this, while fully coherent with the premises on which it is based, represents, as so many more recent epistemologists have emphasized, a misleading approach to our field of inquiry as a whole. Instead of sitting down before the facts and treating our cognitive experiences as data to be described, compared, and classified, the infallibilist philosophers have defined a priori an ideal concept of knowledge and have assumed that this must be exemplified in our experience. They have constructed an epistemological model, instead of scrutinizing human knowledge in the sense in which we actually possess it and seeking to determine precisely what that sense is. They have, in effect, in the spirit of "high priorism," sought to view human knowledge from a vantage point outside human nature and thus to play the part of an angelic or godlike intelligence. But such a standpoint cannot be achieved. We can 202

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"know" only with the aid, and by the means, of the cognitive equipment with which we are endowed. We have to conduct our epistemological thinking with the same powers of intellect that our epistemology itself studies. We cannot step outside our nature in order to examine it from without; for wherever we step our nature steps with us. In short, all our cognition is (in a sense which will be made more precise as we proceed) relative to ourselves, and contains an inescapably subjective element. The traditional idealization of the concept of knowledge is not only speculative; it is also self-defeating. Its effect is to elevate "knowledge" to a metaphysical peerage in which it loses all contact with common human experience, and thereby to degrade almost all concrete instances of cognition to an inferior status of "beliefs." Thus a procedure which began by exalting human cognition ends in a general deflation of it and promotes the skepticism which it sought to combat. For knowledge, in the sense of an infallible acquaintance with truth (or reality) does not occur. There is no state or activity of mind called "knowing" which carries with it an absolute guarantee of freedom from error. This is conceded in principle by the inevitable admission that we sometimes erroneously think that we know. Indeed it is a commonplace that the state of knowing and the state of being in error are not psychologically distinguishable; to be in error is just to appear to oneself to be knowing when in fatt one does not know. Thus Cook-Wilson conceded that when a man comes to a conclusion with complete conviction but upon a mistaken view of the evidence, he "is in exactly the same frame of mind as when he decides that the evidence proves and it really does prove." * The late A. E. Taylor, defending a Platonic account of 4

Ibid.,

p. 106.

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knowledge as "direct and immediate apprehension of truth," allowed this and sought to guard against its damaging implication. He says, That I sometimes suppose myself to know when I do not really know is a fact having the same sort of signification as the equally familiar facts that I sometimes suppose a demonstration which really involves a fallacy to be cogent, that I sometimes suffer from hallucinations of the senses, and that my memory is sometimes at fault. What the fact really shows is merely that there is no psychological criterion by which we can infallibly discriminate knowledge from belief, any more that there is such a criterion for the discrimination of sense or memory from imagination.5 But, if this is so, knowledge is not after all self-authenticating. T o allow that we can mistakenly think that we know is to abandon the claim that knowledge is any kind of selfsufficient and self-guaranteeing intellectual vision. It does not suffice to say that we may have genuine knowledge, even though we cannot know that we have it; for what we then have is not knowledge but only true belief. T o know, on this theory, involves knowing that we know. But if there is always the possibility that this second-order knowi n g may be illusory, then we can never be sure that we know; in other words, we can never know. We have still however to meet the familiar charge that such a denial is self-refuting, on the ground that "only by knowledge can we know whether there be such a thing as knowledge." 6 There is, according to John Laird, "still vitality in the age-long refutation of scepticism, that to assert that you know that you don't know anything at all is a contradiction, and that to suspect that you don't know s op. cit., p. 385. 6

M. C. D'Arcy, The Nature of Belief (2nd ed.; London, 1945), P- 43204

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anything at all cannot be justified by logical evidence." 7 There is no need to elaborate this argument; its strength lies on the surface. How can we profess to know that there is no such occurrence as knowledge? The problem vanishes when we remember that the "skeptic's" (i.e., the non-infallibilist's) claim is not to know, in the ideal sense, that there is no such occurrence as knowledge in the ideal sense. That would indeed be a selfrefuting claim. He is instead urging a general abandonment of the infallibilist standpoint. He wishes to reject the traditional classification of cognitions under the two heads of fallible belief and infallible knowledge. All our cognitions, he believes, are fallible. And there does not appear to be any circularity or inconsistency in the holding of such a belief. Nor—to refer to another possible misunderstanding— does this view involve that there is no such thing as "truth,"—that is to say, that there are no true propositions. It involves only that we have no infallible test of truth. As William James has said, "No bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp." We are in the last resort thrown back upon the criterion of coherence with our mass of experience and belief as a whole; there is no further criterion by which the criteriological adequacy of this mass can itself be tested. This is surely our actual situation as cognizing subjects. We find ourselves alive and receiving a multitude of impressions. During the first months of consciousness we gradually become aware of repetitions and similarities among these impressions. Presently a continuous environmental order dawns upon us, and we are conscious of a world of definite and relatively enduring objects and persons. This world exhibits a de facto stability in virtue of which we are able to explore it and able to supplement our own experience by the reports 1 Knowledge, Belief and Opinion (London, 1930), p. 187. 205

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of others. No apparent de jure necessity guarantees the persisting structure of our environment. But so long as it continues to present itself to our senses, to maintain its perceptual solidity and completeness, to respond consistently to our reality tests, and to change in an orderly fashion upon which we can found verifiable predictions, so long we shall have a use for our present system of cognitive terms, and so long we shall continue to treat our experience in its entirety as our touchstone of reality and truth. This is a perfectly satisfactory situation; at least it is one in which we have all been content to live since the day of our birth. And there is nothing to be gained by claiming to possess knowledge in some quite other, mysteriously direct and infallible sense. But if knowledge is not an infallible and self-guaranteeing mode of cognition, what is it? Under what circumstances do we rightly say "I know . . ."? "I know" registers the highest possible cognitive claim, and does so in a form which (as J. L. Austin pointed out) 8 authorizes others to rely upon our statement in a way analogous to that in which "I promise . . ." functions. Thus knowledge is a diploma word; and there has been much discussion in recent works of epistemology of the conditions under which it is proper to award this diploma. One such condition is the psychological state of an unqualified feeling of certainty. It would be absurd to say "I know p—but I am not sure of it." We only make the claim implied by "I know" if we are absolutely certain. Indeed it is thus far true that, as John Locke said, "To know and to be certain is the same thing; what I know, that I am certain of; and what I am certain of, that I know." 9 However, we do not allow the feeling of certitude alone 8

"Other Minds," Proc. Aristot. Soc, suppl. vol. XX (1946), 170-

9

Second Letter to Stillingfleet. 2 06

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to count as a sufficient basis for the claim to know. The speaker must also have the right to feel sure. In other words, we require rational or adequately grounded certitude. By this is not meant a certainty which is automatically inerrant, but one which has been arrived at judiciously and self-critically. For in educated usage "knowledge" does not refer to a merely casual absence of doubt but to a stable and tested certainty which has withstood critical scrutiny. It is not of course possible to specify the exact amount of criticism necessary to constitute rational certainty. But there sometimes comes a point in our cognitive procedures when we feel confident that we have grasped the truth of the proposition in question and are conscious of a sense of intellectual satisfaction, of security, or immoveableness, achievement, finality, which is for us the inner hallmark of knowledge. This dogmatic sense of immoveableness carries the important rider that what is thus evident to us can be evident to others also. When we are rationally certain of a proposition we are thereby assured that anyone else confronted with the same evidence or reasoning can likewise be certain of it. It is "here that knowledge, despite its subjective aspect, displays an objective character. It is objective in the sense that it is "the same for everyone." That which I know is in principle knowable by others. For the certainty of a rational being involves the assumption that those grounds which have been sufficient to evoke certainty in himself are likewise sufficient to evoke it in any other rational mind acquainted with them. In other words, we are certain that "it is certain that . . ." Should we add as a third (or indeed perhaps as the first and most fundamental) element in the definition of knowledge that, in addition to the knower possessing rational grounds for certainty, that which is known must in fact be the case? It is generally held that this is part of the defini207

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tion of knowledge. Thus A. J. Ayer says that "the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowing that something is the case are first that what one is said to know be true, secondly that one be sure of it, and thirdly that one should have the right to be sure." 10 There is, however, a difficulty. If knowledge is so defined that we are only knowing when, as well as being and having the right to be sure, that of which we are sure is in fact the case, then knowledge is elevated into something that we may have but can never know that we have. For we can never claim that in addition to grounds for rational certainty that p, we have some further and independent guarantee that p. There is thus a significant case for defining knowledge, in order that the word shall have a practical use, in terms of rational certainty alone. But on the other hand this would lead to paradoxical departures from common usage. For we are sometimes rationally certain and yet mistaken (that is, we are sometimes rationally certain that a past rational certainty was erroneous), and we normally say in such a case that we did not really know after all. We do not say, "I knew p, but now I know not-/?." And in order to avoid this we seem driven to define knowledge in such a way that one can never be said to know something that is not in fact the case. However, these two apparently conflicting considerations are reconciled by distinguishing between, on the one hand, the definition of knowledge and, on the other hand, the conditions which justify a claim to know. There can only be knowledge of p when p is true; but a claim to know p is justified by a rational certainty that p, even if it should subsequently become clear that p was not true. Thus knowledge cannot (by definition) be erroneous; but it is always possible for a knowledge claim to be erroneous. '" The Problem of Knowledge 208

(London, 1956), p. 34.

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And whenever it is uttered "I know . . ." means strictly "I (claim to) know. . . ." What consequences now follow for claims to religious knowledge? For undoubtedly men of faith have claimed and do claim to know such facts as that God is real. They have been sure of this, and have claimed—or it has been claimed for them—that theirs is a rational certainty, based upon adequate grounds. These grounds consist primarily in their own religious experience. T o the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament apostles, for example, whose religious experience lies behind the biblical writings, God was an experienced reality. He was known to them as a dynamic will interacting with their own wills; a sheer given reality, as inescapably to be reckoned with as destructive storm and life-giving sunshine, or the fixed contours of the land, or the hatred of their enemies and the friendship of their neighbours. The biblical writers were (sometimes, though doubtless not at all times) as vividly conscious of being in God's presence as they were of living in a material environment. Their pages resound and vibrate with the sense of God's presence, as a building might resound and vibrate from the tread of some great being walking through it. This experiencing of life as a "dialogue with God" is the believer's primary reason for being sure that God is real. In testing such a reason we must be careful to ask the right question. This is not: do someone's accounts of his experience of the divine presence and activity provide an adequate reason for someone else, who has had no such experience, to be sure that God is real? Or, can one validly infer the existence of God from the reports of religious experiences? The answer in each case is no. But the proper question is whether the religious man's awareness of being in the unseen presence of God constitutes a sufficient reason for the religious man himself to be sure of the reality 209

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of God. He does not profess to infer God as the cause of his distinctively religious experiences. He professes to be conscious of living in the presence of God; and this consciousness is (in the classic cases) as compelling as is his consciousness of the natural world. It is to be observed that we are not inquiring whether there is any such thing as knowledge of God; in order for there to be agreement about this there would first have to be agreement as to whether there is a God to be the object of such knowledge. We are focussing attention instead upon the question whether it is proper for the man who reports a compelling awareness of God to claim to know that God exists. We are concerned with the circumstances in which it is reasonable for a man to claim to have a rational certainty that there is a God; not with the question whether there is a God. It seems that a sufficiently vivid religious experience would entitle a man to claim to know that God is real. Indeed if his sense of the divine presence is sufficiently powerful he can hardly fail to make this claim. He is sure that God exists, and in his own experience of the presence of God he has a good, and compelling, reason to be sure of it. The onus lies upon anyone who denies that this fulfills the conditions of a proper knowledge-claim to show reasons for disqualifying it. The negative fact that he does not himself experience life as a relationship with God does not authorize him to deny that others do experience it in this way, or to deny that a person for whom life has this quality can properly claim to know that God is real. Of course, if someone made the positive counterclaim to know that there is no God, he would (by implication) be claiming to know that the religious man's knowledge-claim is illfounded—though not necessarily that it is unreasonable. But who would make such a counterclaim? Even so notable a critic of religious knowledge-claims as Bertrand 210

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Russell does not profess that the nonexistence of God can be proved.11 There is, however, another and more fundamental ground on which someone might disallow the religious man's knowledge-claim. He might hold that such a claim has no content since the religious concept of God is so formed that there can be no possible verification or falsification of belief in divine existence. This is a relevant and weighty argument, which can be met only by withdrawing the factual element in the religious knowledgeclaim or by showing that this claim is, after all, open to eventual verification or falsification within human experience. In the previous chapter I have tried to follow the latter course. 11

See Bertrand Russell and F. C. Coplestone, "A Debate on the Existence of God" (British Broadcasting Corporation, 1948), reprinted in Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian (London, 1957), p. 144, and in The Existence of God, ed. John Hick (New York and London, 1964), p. 167.

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PART IV

Christian Faith

10

Christian Faith

T H E two previous Parts have offered an account o£ the epistemological character o£ religious faith. Such faith, I have suggested, is an act of interpretation. Within the Judaic-Christian religious tradition—with which we are concerned—the believer's experience as a whole is interpreted as a sphere in which at all times he is having to do with God and God with him. For Christian theism is the conviction that all life is under the control of a single, sovereign, personal will. and purpose whose scope includes and yet transcends this present world and whose fulfillment secures man's deepest happiness and well-being. This at least is its propositional formulation. But the faith of which we have been speaking does not consist in the intellectual acceptance of such propositions but in the concrete interpretation of life and all that it brings in these terms, seeing its requirements, disciplines, mercies, rebukes, and joys' as mediating the divine presence. We have thus far discussed this theistic apperception as an already operative mode of cognition, without concerning ourselves with its origin. Now we go on to inquire, What induces a man to experience the world religiously? I have argued that the human mind possesses an innate readiness and tendency to interpret its experience in religious terms; but what is it that activates this capacity? In 215

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terms of the figure of the puzzle picture referred to earlier, we are now seeking the cause of the switch in the process of perception by which we come for the first time to perceive what lies before us as a coherent picture. Where is the clue which prompts a man to interpret his experiences in terms of a divine purpose and so to discern God "behind" the phenomena of the world? The general nature of the answer is I think clear enough. Religious interpretations of human experience arise from special key points within that experience which act as focuses of religious significance.1 These key-points both set going the tendency of the mind to interpret religiously and also act as patterns guiding the forms which such interpretations take. Among the endless variety of life's phenomena some moment or object or person stands out as uniquely significant and revealing, providing a clue to the character of the whole. Some item of experience, or group of items, impresses the mind so deeply as to operate as a spiritual catalyst, crystallizing what was hitherto a cloud of relatively vague, amorphous feelings and aspirations, and giving a new and distinctive structure to the "apperceiving mass" by which we interpret our stream of experience. A sufficiently powerful spiritual catalyst may cause a total reapperception, changing a man's entire view of the world. Such a conversion, whether gradual or sudden, forms or reforms the personality around a new center, thereby winnowing its interests and imparting coherence, impetus and direction to its energies. In Christianity the catalyst of faith is the person of Jesus Christ. It is in the historical figure of Jesus the Christ that, according to the Christian claim, God has in an unique and final way disclosed himself to men. 1 Ian Ramsey, in Religious Language (London, 1957) and elsewhere, has illuminatingly discussed the relation between such disclosure situations and religious conviction.

2l6

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Christianity sees God's self-disclosure in Christ as the climax of a long process of revelation taking place through the events of Jewish history, as this was interpreted by the great prophets. In the story of the Hebrew people—in their epic escape from slavery in Egypt, in their settlement in Canaan as Jahweh's convenant nation, their persistent failure to keep the appointed commandments of their religion, the growing threats to their independence from the expanding empires of Assyria and Babylon, the eventual destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of its leaders, and then in their return and in the period of reconstruction— the prophets saw a clear and momentous religious significance. God was seeking to make of a selected people a source of spiritual illumination for the world, "a light to lighten the Gentiles." 2 The prophetic era ended with this hope unfulfilled, and the Hebrews began to cherish the expectation that God would intervene in the history of Israel by sending his Messiah to inaugurate the divine kingdom. This latter was generally thought of in materialistic terms, as a revival and enlargement of David's kingdom, and as resulting in the world dominion of the Jewish people. Jesus came, according to his own claim, as the expected Messiah—expected, and yet not expected, for he reinterpreted the Messianic idea in relation to the divine plan for Israel, viewing himself as the spiritual servant, and not the earthly lord, of humanity. He came to heal the sick, give sight to the blind, bind up the broken hearted, and preach to the poor the good tidings of the kingdom, and to give his own life for the salvation of mankind. As we study the Christian claim concerning Christ, it will make for clarity if we distinguish within it two movements or phases, which we may call faith in Christ and faith from Christ. There is, first, faith directed upon the person of Christ himself in an act of interpretation which 2

Isaiah 46:6. 217

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sees him as the unique Son of God; this is faith in Christ. And there is, second, faith surveying the world from this new-found standpoint, and interpreting life and all that it brings in the light of the revelation of Christ; this is faith from Christ. In this second movement of faith Christ acts as the spiritual catalyst for a reinterpretation of the believer's experience as a whole. We shall consider first the Christian's faith in Christ, expressed in the assertion that in Jesus Christ God became incarnate. In discussing this claim (as indeed in discussing each of the main facets of Christian belief) we do well to distinguish between, on the one hand, the basic convictions which directly transcribe Christian experience, providing matter for subsequent theological reflection, and on the other hand, such theological reflection itself and the formulations in which it has issued. Using the terms to express a distinction, we may call these two types of religious utterance primary affirmations of faith and theological doctrines respectively. The former are the basic assertions of faith which are characteristic of a given religion and which constitute for its adherents data for theological reasoning. The theological doctrines of a religion are the propositions officially accepted as interpreting its primary affirmations and as relating them together in a coherent system of thought. The formulation of the primary affirmations is thus a descriptive and empirical process, the aim of which is to express the basic data apprehended by faith. The construction of doctrine, on the other hand, is speculative in method, being philosophical thinking undertaken within the boundaries of a particular religion. The affirmation of the "facts of faith" of a given religion should be fixed and unchangeable; for they define the religion in question by pointing to the area of primary religious experiences from which it has arisen. Doctrines, 218

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on the other hand, can and do change. The same deliverances of religious experience may be correlated and systematized in a variety of ways, alternative doctrinal systems being built upon the same experiential foundations. Within a given positive religion the rejection of the basic facts of faith must constitute heresy, while the rejection of orthodox doctrine amounts only to heterodoxy. The proper function of a creed is to state the former, not the latter. From this point of view, the Apostles' Creed, for example, is a genuine creed, whereas the Athanasian Creed is a doctrinal manifesto in credal guise. The doctrine of the Incarnation has a long and still continuing history. The first attempt to create a doctrine of Christ's person took the form of the proclamation that in Christ the Logos of Greek philosophy had become incarnate. Later the more universally intelligible concept of the divine Son became theologically central in connection with the developing doctrine of the Trinity, and it was proclaimed that Christ was the incarnate Son of God. Christian thought then focused itself upon the problem of the "hypostatic union," the relation between Christ's divine nature and his human nature. Many questions arose and many solutions were offered. Could it be said, for example, that Christ's body was human but his soul divine? Or was Christ divine in the sense of being, among all mankind, uniquely obedient to God's will and thus uniquely a vehicle of the divine purpose? Or is kenosis—the selfemptying by the Son of his divine attributes in order to become man—the true key to an understanding of the Incarnation? And so on, down to the most recent substantial contribution to the theory of the Incarnation, that of the late D. M. Baillie,3 who suggested that the union of natures in Christ is to be conceived as the supreme instance of the "paradox of grace" whereby a man's good deeds rep8

God Was in Christ (London, 1948). 219

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resent at once free human volitions and acts of the divine enabling grace. Some of these theories have been rejected by the Church and others accepted as permissible speculations. It is significant that the reason for the rejection of those theories which were judged heretical during the Christological controversies was that they denied by implication one or other of the basic "facts of faith." For the function of doctrine is to provide a philosophical explanation of these facts, and when a doctrinal formulation has the effect of denying what it set out to explain, it is rightly condemned as unsound doctrine. However, we are not concerned here to enter the field of Christological discussion. The point I wish to make is that these various doctrines of the person of Christ are philosophical speculations characterized by the fact that they accept the primary affirmations of Christian faith as data to be explained. Thus in making an epistemological study of the central datum that God has revealed himself to men in Christ, we are not asking which, if any, of the various Christological theories erected upon it is correct. We are not dealing with Christian doctrine at all, as defined above, but with a "fact of faith" stated in a primary Christian affirmation. We are thus concerned with the experiential data upon which the various doctrines of Christ's person have been based. There is, I think, no room for debate as to the content of the basic claim of Christian faith concerning Christ. This claim is succinctly expressed in an early credal formula (quoted by Harnack): "Jesus Christus, Deus et homo." The conviction out of which the entire theology of the Incarnation has arisen is that Christ is in some sense both God and man. The dogma that Christ was a man is self-explanatory. It is the assertion that he came within the purview of the apostolic witnesses as one more human being, as a man 220

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among men. The intention of the dogma is made clear by its exclusion of Docetism, which denied the full humanity of Christ; his human body was said to be an appearance only, incapable of suffering and incapable of being subjected to the indignity and ordeal of crucifixion. As against this, orthodox Christian dogma insisted that Jesus was genuinely human, and subject to temptation, fatigue, sorrow, pain, and ignorance. The act of interpretation by which his contemporaries perceived this did not differ from that by which human beings are normally recognized as such, and need not detain us here. The balancing dogma of Christ's deity emerged less easily. It operated as a dispositional attitude of the disciples toward their Master before it came to conscious propositional expression in their minds. T o what extent it approached explicit formulation during his lifetime is impossible to determine with certainty. The declaration of Peter at Caesarea Philippi, "Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God," * might at first seem to resolve this doubt: but comparison of the Synoptic accounts suggests that 6 Yto? TOU ®eov TOV ££>VTO9, "the son of the living God," in Matthew is an addition, representing a later conviction of the Church. Probably during Christ's lifetime his disciples were too close to him and too busy doing his work to indulge in speculations concerning his person, apart from asking themselves, as was inevitable in Jews, whether their beloved rabbi was the long-awaited Messiah. The precise timetable of the dawning of the Church's conviction of Christ's deity is not important in relation either to the truth-value of that conviction or to its epistemological analysis. The important point is that it represented the unfolding of a judgment which was already implicit in the practical attitudes and reactions, the feelings, hopes, and loyalties of the disciples while they fol4

Matt. 16:16. Cf. Mark 8:27-29; Luke 9:18-20. 221

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lowed Jesus in Palestine. From an early stage their relationship to him, and their attitude to his words and deeds, contained the seed of the Christological dogma. He had spoken and acted in ways which at the time seemed natural and appropriate, but which could be seen on reflection to imply a more than human status. He had assumed authority to forgive sins, authority to declare God's will to men, power over disease and insanity; and had treated the responses of men and women to himself as of crucial significance for their final destiny; and his right to do this had been accepted even before its far-reaching implications began to be realized. The seed of theology had thus been sown, and during the period of intense mental ferment following Christ's death that seed grew. The Church early accorded to Jesus the semidivine Jewish title of Messiah and the semidivinf title of the world of mystery cults, KVpiO'i. But the process of development continued further, and Christian thought soared to the ultimate heights of the Johannine theology with its proclamation that "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life" 5—a proclamation which has its Pauline equivalent in, for example, the Christological passage (or hymn) of Phil. 2:5-11, to which the kenotic theories of the Incarnation trace their origin. It was not long—perhaps some twenty years—before the mind of the early Church had crystallized into the conviction which was later typically expressed in the second-century epistle, II Clement, "Brethren, we ought so to think of Jesus Christ, as of God (
John 3:16. 222

8

I I Clem. 1:1.

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the flesh? It is to be noted once again that we are inquiring, not into the truth or falsity of their judgment, but into its cognitive structure. The Christian's faith in the deity of Christ is an interpretation of a human life and personality as being more than human, as being continuous with the life of God. This interpretation both involves and transcends an ethical valuation of his personality. The deity of Christ was mediated first through his moral character. For in whatever manner Jesus Christ first impressed his disciples—whether as a wonder-worker, as a teacher, or as a magnetic and numinous personality—the outstanding fact about him, which soon gripped them, was his sheer moral goodness and purity, his total lack of concern for himself and the absolute dedication of his life to his heavenly Father's purposes.7 This quality had the dual effect of constituting a rebuke to men's selfishness, and yet being powerfully attractive and inspiring to those who had the humility to acknowledge its rebuke. On the one hand, Jesus' very existence was a persistent condemnation of greed, pride, and uncharitableness. As the light creates shadows, moral perfection reveals moral imperfections. T o recognize that someone else is better than oneself is thereby to become acutely aware of one's own faults. Peter's reaction in the presence of Christ is said to have been to cry out, "Lord depart from me, for I am a sinful man." 8 But to those who, like Peter, accepted the rebuke, Jesus' character had a profoundly inspiring quality, creating in them a new determination to live according to the divine will. Christ's goodness was not a narrow tightlipped, puritanical goodness, but spontaneous and natural. He did not seek to impose his teaching by authority; instead his teaching came with an intrinsic authority, as of 7

Cf. John Knox, Jesus: Lord and Christ (New York, 1958), p. 34. » Luke 5:8. 223

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the truth shining in its own light. Men and women were drawn to him by his unhesitating moral insight and by the complete conformity of his own life to that insight. He was able to confront them with the limitless ideals of the Sermon on the Mount because he was himself manifestly living out those ideals; he called men to follow in a path which he himself was treading day by day. Thus far, then, the early Christians' interpretation of Christ was a perception of ethical significance. It was Jesus' perfect moral character, and the compelling authority of his ethical teaching, that constituted the sharp spearhead of his impact upon men. But there was also another and deeper element in their faith. Behind that spearhead of moral demand was the long driving shaft of a religious message concerning the presence and the sovereign purpose of God. At every point Christ's moral exhortations rest upon assertions of religious fact. The ethical "oughts" of the gospel are based upon an underlying metaphysical "is." Forgiveness, mercy, love are right attitudes between men because they are already God's attitude toward men. And they are practicable and realistic policies because the world in which men are called to practice them is God's world. Jesus did not simply urge his hearers to love God and to love their neighbors. He made credible to them a vision of the world as ruled by divine Love, thereby releasing them from selfish preoccupations and setting them free to love one another as themselves.8 As in the case of Jesus' moral impact upon men, so also his revelation of God as Ruler of this world, and of this world as the sphere of God's rule, consisted not only in his uttering these truths, but even more in the embodiment of them in his own person. The biblical metaphor which describes Christ as "the Truth" is for Christian faith a strikingly apt metaphor. For the three closely interrelated doc9

See Chapter 11. 224

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trines which he taught, concerning the kingdom of God, the love of God, and reconciliation with God, were to his disciples manifest facts made visible and tangible in the person of their Teacher. God ruling, God loving, and God forgiving were words made flesh in Jesus Christ. It was their experience that the kingdom or rule of God was a present fact in Christ's own life, and that to serve him was to dwell within the borders of that Kingdom. It appeared to them, as they looked back over their Master's career, that in Jesus the divine purpose had invaded this world and had sought and won their free allegiance. But the kingdom was still a hidden kingdom, like (in the parable similes) seed in the ground or leaven in the dough. It was apparent only to faithful eyes and obedient wills; and its sign was to be a cross rather than a crown. Yet it was also the firm assurance of the disciples that the kingdom which they had glimpsed in operation in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ was the rule of God destined one day to be fully and perfectly manifested. Again, it was the experience of the disciples that God's fatherly love was revealed in the life of Christ. Jesus told men that God loves and cares for each of them with an infinitely gracious, tender, and wise love; and the assertion was credible on his lips because this supernatural agape was apparent in his own dealings with them. There was no practical distinction between the divine love about which Jesus taught with such direct authority and that which was seen and felt in his actions. The will and power of love which flowered out from him in healing to men's bodies and renewal of their spirits was manifestly continuous with the eternal heavenly love of which he spoke. It was as though in Jesus the divine agape had taken on human personality and dwelt among them. ' And it was likewise the experience of the disciples that the divine forgiveness of which Jesus spoke came to them 225

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through him as a transforming experience. When he pronounced pardon for men's sins, they felt not only forgiven by him but reconciled to God himself. They came to believe that in Jesus the divine agape had broken through the barrier of their own sinfulness and made it possible for them to worship and serve God in gratitude and peace. It was as though in Christ God was at work reconciling the world to himself. This threefold sense of a divine purpose and love and forgiveness embodied in Christ was later reflected in the thought of the Church as the dogma of Christ's deity. It became the conviction of his disciples that the Lord had not only been teaching them concerning the kingdom and rule of God; he had been exhibiting that rule in operation. He had not only been speaking about the divine love; he was himself the divine love speaking. He had not only been referring to God's forgiveness as a possibility; he had been directly offering that forgiveness. It has been the task of Christian theology ever since to try to determine the meaning of this conviction for philosophical understanding. But here was the original experiential ground out of which Christological doctrine grew. The disciples' innate tendency to interpret their experience religiously was powerfully evoked by and focused upon the person of Christ, and it deepened into a consciousness that in some infinitely significant and momentous sense Jesus Christ was God incarnate. We have thus far been considering the recognition of Christ's divinity by those who were his disciples during his earthly life. They did not indeed formulate and proclaim this recognition until after their Master's death and resurrection, but when they did come to formulate it they were aware that they were bringing into full consciousness what had already been implicit in their practical attitude toward him throughout his ministry. There was thus a direct 226

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causal connection between the disciples' acquaintance with the historical Jesus and their interpretation of him as being the incarnate Son of God. But what of the faith of subsequent generations of believers, who have never had the opportunity to know Jesus in the flesh? What is the origin of the faith of Christian people in subsequent ages and in our own day? One of the most striking phenomena reflected in the New Testament documents is the unbroken continuity of Christian faith between the minority who had companied with Jesus in Palestine and the ever growing majority who had never seen the Lord. This continuity of Christian experience found expression in the concept of the Holy Spirit. Jesus himself had spoken of the Spirit which would come upon the disciples after his departure. 10 That Spirit came to them in an experience of intense mental and emotional upheaval at the Feast of Pentecost, fifty days after Jesus' crucifixion and some days after the last of his resurrection appearances. From that time onward new disciples, many of whom had never seen Jesus or heard him preach, and including men and women in lands far beyond the borders of his native Palestine, received the Spirit in equal measure and became no less wholeheartedly devoted to the Lord than were those who had known him in Galilee and Jerusalem. 11 Paul, for example, had not, so far as we know, seen Jesus in the flesh. But nevertheless Paul's faith was entirely Christocentric. And the great Christians of later ages—Augustine, Francis, Luther, Loyola, Wesley, Bonhoeffer, and many thousands of others—have been as completely dedicated to Christ's service as were the original band of apostles. These later disciples have experienced Christ as the Spirit who is able to be present in all 10

Mark 13:11; Matt. 10:19-20; Luke 12:11-12; J o h n 26; 15:26; 16:13; Acts 1:5. 11 Cf. Acts 11:15-17; 15:8-9.

e

14:16-17,

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ages and places, and who is yet indissolubly linked with the Jesus of the gospel records. For the work of the Spirit has been continuous with that of the incarnate Christ. Indeed the Holy Spirit is sometimes referred to in the New Testament as the Spirit of Jesus or the Spirit of the Lord,12 and always comes to men in conjunction with the preaching of the apostles or their successors concerning him. The faith in Christ, then, of the great majority of Christians, the increasing multitude who have not known the earthly Jesus, is related in a dual way to the faith of the apostolic witnesses. It is identical with that faith in that it is a like interpretation of the person of Jesus Christ as incarnating the divine agape. And yet it differs in that Christ in the flesh has become Christ in the Spirit, making himself known to each succeeding generation through the records of his earthly life. There is much in all this that would require expansion and justification in a theological treatise. However, our concern here is confined to the epistemological character of Christian faith in its two movements, as faith in Christ and as faith from Christ. We have seen that in its first phase it is an interpretation of Jesus Christ as mediating the divine presence. From this we turn to the second phase, from the Christian's discovery of Christ as his divine Lord to his resulting reinterpretation of all life in the light of Christ's Lordship. Our subject is the wide range of Christian experience which the doctrine of providence seeks to expound and explain. Once again, however, we are not concerned with the various doctrines excogitated by the theologians, but with the primary faith and experience of ordinary Christian believers, in New Testament times and since, which constitutes the data upon which the theologians have worked. It has, with impressive consistency, been the faith of URom. 8:9-10; II Cor. 3:17; 3:18; Acts 16:7, where the best MSS have TA wtO/ia 'Iij
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ordinary believers in every age that this life, with its mingled moments of joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure, hardship and ease, and with its varying mixture of tears and laughter, is wholly within the secure grasp of God's purpose; so that at no point are men outside his care or beyond the scope of his redemptive activity. This distinctively Christian experience of life as a sphere in which the divine purpose disclosed in Christ is everywhere at work is superimposed in the believer's mind upon his no less certain experience of the world as a system of natural cause and effect. Men's scientific and prescientific beliefs about their environment have of course varied widely through the ages and in different cultures. In the earliest period all natural phenomena were attributed to animating spirit or life within any object which exhibited change. A second broad stage assumed a background of regularity in which all manner of arbitrary agencies, gods and spirits, demons and fairies, the unseen powers of the air and of the earth, black and white witchcraft and magic, were thought to intervene to influence the course of events. Today, civilized man has (apart from numerous relapses into superstition) abandoned these beliefs, holding instead that all observable events occur in accordance with "natural law," i.e., exhibit regular and in principle predictable patterns of sequence, though interacting in certain cases with free human volitions. These several stages represent a considerable span of development in human thought. But in relation to the Christian experience of providence, all these philosophies, from the animistic tothe scientific, can be classed together as postulating a system of natural (as distinguished from divine) causation. It makes no difference for our present discussion by what agencies, demonic or natural, the observed conformity of matter to predictable patterns is achieved. The significant point is that nature constitutes a complete and selfsufficient (though, for religious faith, a created) system. 229

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We shall for the purposes of this discussion ignore the prescientific variants of this view and confine our attention to the contemporary view of the course of nature as exhibiting causal "laws." Adding, then, the Christian's religious interpretation of life to his scientific understanding of it, his resulting conviction is twofold and indeed paradoxical. It is paradoxical in a manner which (as D. M. Baillie has pointed out) 1 3 is paralleled by the dual dogma of Christ's humanity and deity. For the Christian wishes to affirm of the events of a human experience-history both that they have their place within a natural causal sequence and also that they have their place within the purpose and providence of God. In a familiar illustrative simile, the changing pattern of events can be plotted both in the "horizontal" plane of mundane cause and effect and in a "vertical" plane in which each occurrence stands in direct relation to the divine will. The supreme instance of this in the New Testament, and indeed the event from which the Christian conception of providence is derived, is the death of Jesus Christ. On the one hand, the Synoptic passion narratives, representing probably the earliest documentation of Christ's life, are wholly realistic in their portrayal of motive. They depict the High Priest's .determination to kill Jesus, within the law or without; Judas' greed; the mob's blood lust; Pilate's cowardice; the soldiers' callousness; and the quiet courage of the victim. At every stage in the drama, free and responsible human decisions determine the course of events. The judicial murder of Jesus is in the fullest sense a human act. And yet on the other hand the New Testament proclaims no less insistently that Jesus' death is an act of divine grace, the climax of God's work for man's salvation. This is expressed first in the relating of Jesus' death, 13

Op. cit., pp. m - 1 1 3 . 230

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originally it would seem by Jesus himself, to Old Testament prophecy. "How is it written of the Son of man," Jesus asks, "that he must suffer many things, and be set at nought?" " The early Church from the first echoed this thought and spoke of Jesus as being "delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God." 15 In the minds of the first generation of Christians, this conviction was linked with, and given meaning and credibility by, their experience of a new, reconciled relationship to God, which they felt to have come about through Christ's selfsacrifice for them upon the cross. They felt that in some way (for the definition of which theologians have ever since been searching) Christ's death had been undergone on their behalf. Part of the accepted teaching which Paul both received and transmitted was that "Christ died for our sins," 18 a saying which, as Vincent Taylor remarks,17 reads almost like an excerpt from a primitive creed. Belief in the reconciling effect of his death goes back to teaching of Jesus himself, which survives in such sayings as that the Son of man came "to give himself a ransom for many" 18 and that his blood was to be "shed for many." 19 Thereafter the belief is expressed again and again in every part of the New Testament, as one of its recurrent and distinctive themes.20 These two related convictions, that Christ's death was foreordained in the purpose of God and that it had made possible the new life which Christians experienced, coalesced in the mind of the Church into the 14

Mark 9:12; cf. 14:21.

15

Acts 2:23. Cf. 3:18; I Cor. 15:3; I Pet. 1:20. JOICor. 15:3. 17 The Atonement in New Testament Teaching (London, 1940), p. 22. 18

19 Mark 10:45. Mark 14:24. John 1:29; Rom. 3:25; 4:25; 5:8; I Cor. 5:7; I Thess. 5:10; I Tim. 2:5-6; Titus 2:14; I John 2:2; 3:5; 4:10; Heb. 2:9; 9:14, 26, 20

28; 10:12; 13:11-12; Rev. 5:9.

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theological kerygma that "when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son . . . to redeem"; 21 that God "gave his only-begotten Son"; ** and has "sent the Son to be the Savior of the world." 2S Thus the New Testament writings witness to the paradoxical conviction that the crucifixion of Christ was a fearful crime, for which the perpetrators were fully to blame, and that it was the very pivot of the divine plan for the salvation of men. Jesus himself brings these two themes together in the saying, "The Son of man indeed goeth, as it is written of him: but woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed." 24 In the early Christian preaching recorded J n the Acts of the Apostles the same two thoughts stand side by side. Thus Peter fells a Jewish audience in Jerusalem that Jesus, "being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain." 25 The death of Jesus, then, seen through Christian eyes, is the greatest crime in history and yet at the same time the occasion of man's salvation. It discloses in one revealing moment the appalling extent of human blindness and sin, in that they led men to crucify the divine Son, and the depth of the self-giving love of God, in obedience to which Jesus accepted this fate at men's hands. For by giving its ultimate scope to man's wickedness and folly the cross of Christ reveals the full character and power of evil. And by his bearing of that evil in forgiving love it brings home the divine forgiveness' to men's hearts and draws them into a new and reconciled relationship to God. As the unique paradox of man's redemption, it is both the worst and the best thing that has ever happened. The crucifixion of Christ, thus interpreted as both a human and a divine act, the supreme evil turned to supreme good, is the paradigm for the distinctively Christian 21 Gal. 4:4-5. 24 Mark 14:21. 232

22John 3:16. " I John 4:14. 25 Acts 2:23. Cf. 4:10; 13:28-29.

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experience of and reaction to evil. The Christian's faith from Christ, his recognition of God's providence in all life, is the obverse of his faith in Christ; it is, according to the Christian claim, the Spirit of Christ within the believer enabling him to see and to act according to the mind of the Lord. For there is a specifically Christian mode of response to life's evils and catastrophes. Viewed through Christian eyes, evils do not cease to be evils; wrong deeds do not cease to be culpable defiances of God's will, rising sometimes to a demonic intensity, nor do accident and disease cease to be dreadful in their consequences. Life's tragedies are not apprehended by Christian faith, when it is unspoiled by speculative theology, as in any ordinary sense acts of God. Like the cross of Christ they manifestly come from mundane causes, which can be observed and traced. And yet it has been the persistent claim of those seriously and wholeheartedly committed to the way of Christian discipleship that tragedy may nevertheless be turned through a man's reaction to it from a cause of despair and alienation from God to a stage in the fulfillment of God's loving purpose for that individual. As the greatest of all evils, the crucifixion of Christ, was made the occasion of man's redemption, so other evils can be used in the divine strategy of salvation if they are met in a spirit derived from that in which Christ faced the cross, a spirit of trusting acceptance, without bitterness or despair. As Jesus saw his execution by the Romans as an experience which his heavenly Father desired him to accept, and which was thereby to be brought within the sphere of the divine purpose and made to serve the divine ends, so the Christian response to calamity is to accept the adversities, pains, and afflictions which life brings, and thereby enable them to be turned to a positive spiritual use.26 26

The Christian interpretation of life, and especially of its setbacks and tragedies, is considerably easier to expound than to practice; but nevertheless we can sometimes observe the transforming

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This principle of acceptance and of the offering of one's life to be used in the outworking of the divine purpose applies not only to daunting and testing moments but to our human experience as a whole. T o interpret with the mind of Christ is to see the unimportance of those things which he regarded as spiritually indifferent—wealth, power, outward pomp, and earthly glory—and the supreme importance of those things which he treated as being spiritually momentous and decisive—the opposites of love and hatred, faith and despair, forgiveness and malice, selfgiving and greed, spiritual vision and blindness. The true values, as they are seen by Christian faith, are independent of the point in time, the geographical location, the station in society, and the cultural background of the person in whom they are manifested. They are independent, not in power of Christian faith at work in face of calamity. I witnessed this some years ago in a cottage in Northumberland where an old shepherd and his wife had both been paralyzed by strokes within a day or two of each other, and were both close to death. They accepted their affliction without bitterness, and faced the prospect of death in simple Christian trust. Their family gathered round them and filled the home with loving care. After a period during which they lived each day without any expectation of seeing the next, they both began to recover; and we all rejoiced. But the strange fact is that even if it had been otherwise, one would still have felt that something fine had taken place in the sphere of human character and its reaction to adversity, something ennobling to those in whom it occurred and inspiring to those who were aware of it. It is difficult to escape the feeling that although the sudden prostrating illness was in itself a sheer evil, utterly contrary to the divine will, yet that evil having come about, it was made to serve God's ultimate purpose of the spiritual growth of his creatures. That purpose, as it is conceived by Christianity, far transcends this world and all its achievements and failures, and is forwarded in the present life not by the outward events as such which constitute human history but by the character of men's inner participation in and reaction to those events and by the spiritual use which is thereby made of them.

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the sense that spiritual values have no relation to the details of a man's environment and habitat, but in the sense that they can find appropriate expression in any set of earthly circumstances. Whether a human being is a Chinese of the tenth century B.C, or a Palestinian peasant of the first century A.D., a medieval nobleman or serf, or an English agricultural laborer, an American university professor, or a housewife of the twentieth century—rich or poor, influential or insignificant, illiterate or highly educated—defines only the setting or stage of his existence. The stage provides the scenes and determines the form of the action. However, a man's life does not consist in the stage but in the quality of his performance on it. It is the spiritual use which he makes of life's circumstances, not the details of the circumstances themselves, that will build his eternal character and destiny. There is thus a sense in which, for Christian faith, it is indifferent what shape life's occasions and problems and opportunities take, but allimportant how the individual reacts to and participates in them, of whatever kind they may be.27 And yet of course there is another sense in which life's outward circumstances are far from unimportant. Although it is ultimately indifferent into what set of circumstances an individual is born, yet having been born at some particular stage of human history and into some one particular race and nation and family and endowed with a particular genetic inheritance, these circumstances now constitute the appointed sphere within which (and in the changing of which) the individual must live his life and exercise his freedom and responsibility. The outward circumstances as such do not indeed express God's design; they express rather man's marring of that design. But nevertheless God's purpose embraces each man's given sit="Cf. P. T . Forsyth, The Justification P- 139-

of God (London, 1948),

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uation; for in and through and out of it the fulfillment of the divine purpose is either forwarded or retarded. Any point in the infinite variety of the human scene can be made a point on the soul's journey to the divine kingdom. Thus the whole of life is interpreted by Christian faith as a sphere of interaction with the will and purpose of God. Through the web of natural causation and the thread of human aims and desires, there is seen to run the divine purpose of the making of "children of God" who shall be "heirs of eternal life." Interpenetrating the significance of events as physical occurrences rendering appropriate certain bodily reactions, and interpenetrating their ethical significance as involving other persons and requiring moral choices, the Christian finds in life a further and more ultimate significance as the scene of God's gradual creation of spiritual personality, a significance to which the appropriate reaction is the acceptance of life and all that it brings and its positive use as a sphere of service and worship.

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"FAITH without works," we read, "is dead." * This is certainly true for the conception of faith presented in this book. From this point of view the Christian ethic describes the way of life of one who is conscious of being in God's presence. This is also, I would suggest, the New Testament understanding of the Christian life. In Jesus' teaching either "religion" or "ethics," if abstracted from its relation to the other, would be radically altered in character and would forfeit the power to grasp and change human lives. On the one hand Jesus' moral teaching, so far from being an irrelevant appendix to his religious message, is an essential part of his disclosure of the character of God. The New Testament reveals God as such that for us to be aware of him makes a profound practical difference for the conduct of our lives; and Jesus' ethic is his description of this practical difference, spelled out especially in the matter of a man's dealings with his neighbor. Thus Jesus' moral teaching helps to define his vision of God as Lord and Father by indicating, in concrete terms, what it means to act upon that vision. On the other hand Jesus' religion constitutes the rational basis for his moral teaching, without which the latter would be absurdly quixotic and unpractical. For whether or not it is 1

James 2:26.

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rational to behave in a given way depends upon the character of the environment in which we are living; and Jesus' teaching about the world in its relation to God depicts our environment as such that the Christ-style of life is alone realistically appropriate to it. In the teaching of Jesus, belief in God and the following of a distinctive way of life are connected by the idea of the kingdom of God. T o know God as Lord and Father is to live in a certain way, which is determined by the character and purposes of God. So to live is to stand within the divine kingdom, and the Christian ethic is a description of the way of life of that kingdom. Considerable work has been done in recent decades on the meaning of the New Testament phrase "kingdom of God" or "kingdom of Heaven," and two conclusions may now be said to have the secure if truistic status of commonplaces. 1. The kingdom of God is not a territorial concept. T o draw out more formally the thought which is given in Jesus' teaching in images, parables and imperatives, the kingdom means the acknowledged sovereignty or operative rule of God in the lives of created beings endowed with freedom. Wherever in human life God's will is willingly done, there the divine sovereignty is manifested on earth, and there the kingdom of God is properly said to have come. The kingdom is the rule of God in the realm of freedom which God has created. 2. As is equally well known, there are sayings of Jesus which speak of the kingdom of God as having already come (sayings which give rise to the concept of realized or inaugurated eschatology), and sayings in which the kingdom is spoken of as lying still in the future (supporting the contrasting notion of futurist eschatology). As an example of a saying of the latter kind there are the familiar words of the Lord's Prayer, "Thy kingdom come." The sense in 238

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which the acknowledged sovereignty of God, or the willing doing of the divine will, is something as yet unrealized which is to be ardently hoped and prayed for, rather than something already present in the world, must surely be this: it is the universal acknowledgment of God's sovereignty, the willing doing of the divine will by all men. When this occurs human society, in this or another world, will have become a perfect manifestation of the rule of God, fulfilling the divine intention for human life. The kingdom in this ultimate sense is the heavenly city, the new Jerusalem, about which the voice of Christian hope can speak only in myth and symbol. This, however, is not the aspect of the kingdom which gives rise to the Christian ethic. That ethic describes the life of the kingdom, not in its eventual universal form, but in its already operative, though fragmentary, earthly existence. A central example of a realized eschatological saying of Jesus is this: "If it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you." 2 In what sense was Jesus proclaiming that the Rule of God had arrived, and that its power was apparent in his own healing acts? Surely the original meaning can be only that the kingdom was present on earth in himself. The coming of Jesus as the Christ was the coming of the kingdom. In his life the sovereignty of God was acknowledged unreservedly and in his actions God's purpose was directly fulfilling itself on earth. For Jesus' will was to do the will of his Father in heaven, and the rule of God accordingly became a reality in his actions. Wherever he was, there the kingdom was a concrete fact and there the powers of the kingdom were at work combatting physical and spiritual disease and drawing men and women into reconciliation with the eternal Source of their being. It follows that whenever Jesus gains a disciple, the king* Luke 11:20.

«39

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KNOWLEDGE

dom gains a citizen. As the rule of God was an operative reality in the life of Jesus, so it is also present in the lives of his disciples to the extent that they are "in Christ" and responsive to that Spirit which is "the spirit of Jesus." The Rule of God, then, has been inaugurated on earth in the coming of the Christ and extends its frontiets into the lives of all who follow him. How is Jesus' moral teaching related to the coming of the kingdom? Jesus' ethic may be described as the ethic of the kingdom. That is to say, it is a general account of the way of life of an individual who acknowledges the rule of God in this present world. It specifies the mode of behavior of one who knows and seeks to serve the God revealed in Christ. In Jesus' own life God's will was perfectly fulfilled; and in so far as men and women become his disciples, entering by adoption into his relationship with the heavenly Father, they become citizens of the kingdom whose mores Jesus was concerned both to preach and to practice. T o say that the Christian ethic is a description of a way of life is to say that it is not to be construed primarily as a set of commandments. Of course any description of a way of life can be translated into the imperative mood; and in the main this is what the Catholic tradition has done to Jesus' moral teaching. But Jesus himself was concerned, not to impose a preformed pattern upon his disciples, but rather to indicate to them the kind of life they will live as they become conscious of God as their Lord and Father. At this point an apparently contradicting fact must be noticed, namely that Jesus' recorded ethical teaching is generally couched in the language of command. For example, "I say unto you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." 3 Being thus in large part a series of imperatives, Jesus' pronouncements have the appearance 8

Matt. 5:44. 240

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of a new law, a set of requirements by which his disciples are enjoined to live. This appearance of constituting a code of moral regulations must at once be suspect, for it conflicts markedly with Jesus' attitude to the existing Mosaic Law. His objection to the Law was not merely that it needed revision in various particulars. It came under a more radical objection to legalistic morality as such. A system of laws must, in the nature of the case, prescribe and proscribe specific overt deeds. But Jesus' critique of the Law arises from his perception that the kingdom is extended not merely by securing the conformity of men's overt deeds to a stated code, but by changing people themselves. This is certainly not because the physical deed was unimportant in Jesus' eyes. It would be truer to say that he was concerned neither with motives in the abstract, nor with physical events simply as such, but with their unity in motivated deeds, in which human beings act and react responsibly toward one another in the unseen presence of God. Jesus' parable of the widow's mite 4 illustrates the sense in which he was and the sense in which he was not concerned about overt acts as such. T h e widow in giving her last penny was performing an action which, from the point of view of its inner character, was the placing of all her resources without reservation at God's disposal and, as a physical event, was the putting of an insignificant sum into the temple treasury. The rich man who contributed a much larger amount out of his ample fortune was performing a different action which, in its inner character, was the withholding of his main resources for himself and which, as a physical deed, was the donation of a substantial sum to the temple. Comparing these two actions, Jesus pronounced the first to be more acceptable to God than the second. In so doing he was neither abstracting deed from 4

Mark 12:41 f. = Luke 21:1 f. 241

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motive (as though it were intrinsically preferable to give small sums than large) nor motive from deed (as though the widow's generous impulse would still have evoked his admiration if it had failed to produce her sacrificial deed), but he was comparing total actions, or motivated deeds. The only way to change actions, in this total sense of the term, is to change people. For a man's actions are simply the reaction of his character upon the world of things and people in which he finds himself. A radical solution of the problems of morality thus requires a change in people, and not merely a change in some of their deeds. If there is change only in individual deeds, assuring their conformity to a specified pattern, the inner springs of action may remain unchanged. The only way to get genuinely and consistently good fruit is to have a good tree. "Every sound tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears evil fruit." 3 How is anyone induced or empowered to live as a citizen of the kingdom? T o raise this question is to meet again from another angle the close interdependence of religion and ethics in the understanding of Jesus. From a point of view outside that of the biblical faith the question of the motive of the Christian life is a very natural one, since that life, as depicted in Jesus' teachings, voluntarily relinquishes much that is highly valued— wealth, power and the approval of one's peers—and aims in general, not at promoting the agent's own interests as these are usually identified, but rather at serving his neighbors in their various needs. It is in other words a markedly other-regarding ethic; and it is generally assumed that if people are to be guided by a concern for others as well as for themselves they must be provided with a special and overriding motive in the form of either some proffered reward or threatened punishment. T o pose the question of motive in this way, however, is 5

Matt. 7:17. 242

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to misconceive the fundamental character of the Christian life. Jesus' teaching does not demand that we live in a way which runs counter to our deepest desires, and which would thus require some extraordinary counterbalancing inducement. Rather he reveals to us the true nature of the world in which we are living and indicates in the light of this the only way in which our deepest desires can be fulfilled. In an important sense then Jesus does not propose any new motive for action. He does not set up a new end to be sought, or provide a new impulse to seek an already familiar end. Instead he offers a new vision, or mode of apperception, of the world, such that to live humanly in the world as it is thus seen to be is to live the kind of life which Jesus describes. The various attitudes and policies for living which he sought to replace are expressions of a sense of insecurity that is natural enough if the world really is, as most people take it to be, an arena of competing interests in which each must safeguard himself and his own against the rival egoisms of his neighbors. If human life is essentially a form of animal life, and human civilization a refined jungle in which self-concern operates more subtly but not less surely than by animal tooth and claw, then the quest for invulnerability in its many guises is entirely rational. To seek security in the form of power over others, whether physical, psychological, economic, or political, or in the form of recognition and acclaim, would then be indicated by the character of our environment. But Jesus rejects these attitudes and objectives as based upon an estimate of the world which is false because it is atheistic; it assumes that there is no God, or at least none such as Jesus knew. Jesus was accordingly far from being an idealist, if by this we mean one who sets up ideals and recommends us to be guided by them instead of by the realities around us. He was a realist, presenting life in which the neighbor is valued equally with the self, as dicR

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tated by the character of the universe as it really is. He urged men to live in terms of reality; and his morality differs from the common morality of the world because his vision of reality differs from the common view of the world. Whereas the ethic of egoism is ultimately atheistic, the ethic of Jesus is radically and consistently theistic. It sets forth the way of life which is appropriate when God, as Jesus depicts him, is known to be real. The pragmatic, and in a sense prudential, basis of Jesus' moral teaching is very clearly expressed in the parable, with which the Sermon on the Mount closes, of the houses built on sand and rock." The universe is so constituted that to live in it in the manner which Jesus has described is to build one's life upon enduring foundations, whilst to live in the opposite way is to go "against the grain" of things and to court ultimate disaster. The same thought occurs in the saying about the two ways, one of which leads to life and the other to destruction.7 Jesus assumes that as rational beings we want to live in terms of reality, and he is concerned to tell us what the true structure of reality is. The vision of the world, and of God acting toward us in and through it, which issues in the Christian life, and the way in which this consequence follows without the intervention of a special motive, is perhaps best illustrated from findings in modern child psychology. Indeed, these findings provide something more than an illustration; for a child's awareness of his parents' love, and his apperception of his world as a sphere in which that love is a basic reality influencing his reactions to specific occurrences, is continuous in psychological character with the conviction of mature Christian faith as to God's love for his human children, and the resulting apperception of this world as lying wholly within the sphere of a sovereign purpose of good 8 7

Matt. 7:248. Matt. 7:13-14. T h e Didache also uses the figure of the two ways.

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which constitutes an ultimate background reality influencing the believer's reactions to the various experiences of his life. It is an established psychological thesis that the child who feels himself to be the object of a dependable love tends to develop one pattern of reactions to the world, whilst the child who feels deprived of love tends to develop an opposite pattern of reactions. A child's certainty of surrounding affection tends to evoke love in himself, which, in its fuller development, is not simply an answering affection directed upon his parents but is a comprehensive attitude toward people in general. To quote the psychiatrist Erich Fromm, "Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one 'object,' of love." 8 The parents' love has cosmic significance in the small world of the infant's consciousness. "The child, in these decisive first years of his life, has the experience of his mother as the fountain of life, as an all-enveloping, protective, nourishing power. Mother is food; she is love; she is warmth; she is earth. T o be loved by her means to be alive, to be rooted, to be at home." 9 As the child grows this love becomes associated with power and authority. Indeed the parents stand in loco dei to their small child; their love means to him that he is in a fundamentally friendly world and is dealing with superior powers which accept and value him and are intent upon his welfare. His conviction to this effect develops, if he is fortunate in his environment during the early and most formative years, into mental habits of sympathetic interest in others, of hopefulness and 8

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York, 1956), p. 46. Erich Fromm, "Values, Psychology and Human Existence," in New Knowledge in Human Values, ed. Abraham H. Maslow (New York, 1959), p. 155. 9

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readiness to trust, of a positive, appreciative and zestful reaction to his experiences. On the other hand the absence of the basic conviction of being loved tends to build habits of tearfulness, of aggression and aquisitiveness, suspicious and defensive attitudes, a pervading sense of guilt and a negative and pessimistic outlook upon life.10 It is important to note that the child who, in response to a consciousness of surrounding love, develops the more positive traits does not have any motive impelling him to be outward-looking and outward-giving, in the sense of some end at which he aims and to which these attitudes and ways of behaving are seen as means. He is not seeking any reward or avoiding any penalty. In another sense of "motive," however, we may say that he is motivated by love, whilst the child who develops the negative dispositions is motivated by fear—a tearfulness which, like its opposite, love, is a general attitude finding different expressions in different circumstances. By analogy, the adult who believes in the love of God tends to manifest the "fruit of the Spirit" which is "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control." u To enter the kingdom of God is to become, in this respect, like a little child. But there are also immense differences between the child's and the adult's consciousness of and response to the love of the Determiner of Destiny in his cosmos. There are all the differences in complexity that exist between the problems of child and adult life. And, more importantly for ethics, the adult is confronted with and tragically enmeshed in the problem of evil. The adult's world is the 10

For detailed clinical evidence see J. Bowlby, Maternal Care and Mental Health (World Health Organization, 1952); more generally see Ian Suttie, The Origins of Love and Hate (London, 1945)11 Galatians 5:22-23.

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world of Adam and Eve after their expulsion from the garden, whilst the nursery, and to a greater extent the cradle, and to a complete extent the womb, is a state of paradisal innocence.12 The "fallen" nature of man and his world largely determines the content of Jesus' moral teaching by determining the character of the human situations within which the rule of God is to be manifested. The Christian ethic is primarily a frontier ethic, an ethic for the clashing frontier between the ongoing redemptive purpose of God and the life of the world which he is redeeming. I shall say more about this shortly. Recent investigations of the nature of belief have emphasized the close connection, apparently taken for granted in the teachings of Jesus, between believing that suchand-such is the case and acting appropriately to such-andsuch being the case. We have learned that "belief" is largely a dispositional word, referring to tendencies to behave in given circumstances in certain ways or ranges of ways. Formerly it was commonly assumed that believing is a simple mental act, an introspectable operation capable of being observed only by the individual performing it. But there are strong reasons for holding that to be in a state of believing some proposition is, primarily, to possess (or be possessed by) a set of tendencies, liabilities, or dispositions to act in ways appropriate to the truth of that proposition in situations to which the proposition is seen to be relevant. Further, in so far as such tendencies demand and find occasion for expression in overt actions, their existence is a public fact, as readily observable by others as by ourselves. T o believe, for example, that fire burns (and to have the normal human aversion to pain) is to be disposed, amongst other things, to avoid putting one's hand in fire, 12

Cf. C. G. Jung, Modern Books edition), pp. 96-97.

Man in Search of a Soul (Harvest

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eating a lighted cigarette end, and so forth. And in general, to believe that such-and-such is the case is, inter alia, to be liable to behave, in relevant circumstances, on the basis that such-and-such is the case. The criteria which authorize a pronouncement that a given individual believes p are his actions as-if-p, and in many cases these are as accessible to others as they are to the agent himself. His saying, even sincerely, that he believes p, is not conclusive; for he may find out in a "moment of truth," when for the first time circumstances require him to act upon his belief, that he does not in fact believe what he supposed that he believed. "You will know them by their fruits." 13 Our actions alone reveal infallibly what we believe. T o say of someone that he believes p but always behaves on the assumption that not-p would therefore be a misuse of "believe." In philosophical literature, the kind of believing which has been discussed is propositional belief, or believing that. But the dispositional analysis applies equally to believing in. The general bearing of this analysis upon the relation between Christian belief (both "belief that" and "belief in") and Christian behavior will already be apparent, but before elaborating that connection it may be well to establish more fully the account of belief upon which the argument is to rest. John Locke pointed out long ago that as well as the "actual" knowledge, which is currently before an individual's mind, everyone has a vast amount of "habitual" or stored knowledge.14 For example, I believe that the earth is a globe, and I have believed this ever since I was, approximately, five years old. But I have certainly not been holding this proposition continuously in mind throughout the period during which I am correctly said to have believed it. On the contrary, I may have remarked to myself 13

Matt. 7:20.

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Essay, bk. iv, ch. 1, sec. 8.

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or to others that the earth is a globe on the average, say, once in two years, and had the proposition consciously in mind for only a few seconds on each occasion. And yet if at any time since I came to believe that the earth is a globe, and when I was not pondering the matter, someone had asked, "Does Hick believe that the earth is round or flat?" the correct answer would have been "Round." For I had not come to disbelieve it, or even to harbor doubts about it; and the proof of this is that whenever a situation arose to which the belief was relevant, I was ready to take my stand confidently on the globular shape of the earth. In what then has my stored belief consisted? It has consisted in a tendency or disposition to act, in appropriate circumstances, on the premise that the earth is a globe. Such actions may include, for example, asserting, when asked, that the earth is a globe; assenting when others have propounded this doctrine; drawing and acting upon inferences from the globular shape of our planet; accepting as veridical diagrams of the solar system, globe models of the earth, narratives of travelers who claim to have sailed or flown round the world, and so forth. The disposition to act on the basis that the earth is a globe is clearly a highly complex or flexible disposition, whose possible activating conditions and modes of operation cannot -be fully specified in advance. The important point is that to be in a state of believing that such-and-such is the case is to have a dispositional set or stance to act on the basis that such-andsuch is the case. T o turn now to the bearing of the dispositional account of belief on Christian ethics, what does it mean to believe that the God depicted in the sayings and parables of Jesus is real? We see what it meant for Jesus himself by looking at his life, which must accordingly be regarded as an essential part of his revelation of God to the world. For him, to know God meant to serve God with his entire being. In his 249

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case the form of the service was determined by his unique vocation as the one in whom men should see the divine Son. But as well as fulfilling this vocation, and indeed as a part of it, Jesus was concerned to indicate to others what believing in God would mean for them. Perhaps the greater part of his ministry was devoted to this task; and the early traditions concerning it constitute the New Testament content of the Christian ethic. For example, to believe in the heavenly Father is to live without anxiety.15 It is to be merciful to others, for the divine governance of the world is such that "with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get." 16 It is to turn the other cheek and to go the seconu mile, not returning evil for evil but being allinclusive in one's love,"so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven." 17 It is to treat as important those things which Jesus treated as being spiritually momentous—the opposites of love and hatred, faith and despair, spiritual vision and blindness—and as unimportant those things which he declared to be spiritually indifferent—wealth, place, fame, and power. For those who make these latter their overriding aim are destined to find in them no final satisfaction; but on the other hand, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied." 18 The extent to which one believes in the God whom Jesus revealed, and in his wise rule over the universe, is the extent to which one lives on that basis. T o conduct one's life as though God is real is not something additional to believing in God, but is simply that belief in operation. The Christian understanding of God could not be taught, either initially by Jesus or subsequently by the church, without indicating the practical difference which " M a t t . 6:26. is Matt. 5:6. 250

i« Matt. 7:2.

" Matt. 5:45.

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it implies for human living. For only when we know what it is to act on the basis that God exists do we know what manner of being God is. When the prophets declared in the name of the Lord a broadening range and an increasing depth of moral demand upon men's lives, they were proclaiming a greater and deeper understanding of God's nature as a moral Being. And when Jesus revealed yet further the all-inclusive requirements of agape in human life he was disclosing the ultimate character of God as sovereign Agape. It would have been impossible for the prophets or for Jesus to have brought men to an awareness of God as their divine Lord without at the same time making clear to them the practical difference which this awareness makes for the conduct of life. Our actions are the product of two interacting factors— our beliefs about the world, and the aims and desires in terms of which we inhabit the world as we believe it to be. We must now take further account of this second factor, considering at the same time an important objection which might be raised against the view being developed. For it might seem that there is very little scope for differing conceptions of the nature of our environment, but almost endless scope for variations in men's desires and aims, so that any change in a man's way of life must result from a change in his fundamental objectives. However, I believe that in fact the contrary is the case, and that we are all dominated by the same basic desire, which leads to a variety" of types of action because of differing understandings of the nature of our environment. The reasons for this belief can perhaps best be presented through a critique of the contrary position. The view which I wish to criticize may be expanded as follows. Given that our environment is such-and-such, we will act in terms of it in one way if we are dominated by desire x, and in another way if we are dominated by desire 251

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y. For example, if I am shipwrecked with a group of companions on a desert island and, when exploring by myself, discover a hoard of food, I will share my discovery with the others if I desire or value the common welfare more than my private welfare, and I will keep it to myself if I desire my private welfare more than that of the group. The objective facts of the situation are identical in either case, and I proceed in one way or in another according as my dominant desire is for this or for that. In either case I am acting in terms of the same estimate of my environment. It would seem to follow that the moral character of our activity cannot be changed simply by changing our view of the world. For whatever be the nature of our environment, or whatever we may believe its nature to be, there is still a variety of possible ways of behaving within it, from which our dominant aims and desires select a course of action. Whatever the character or the supposed character of the world, it would still be possible to behave in it relatively selfishly or relatively unselfishly. And so it would appear that awareness of environment is the constant factor, and desire the variable which must be altered if the mode of life of an individual or a group is to undergo any significant amendment. "What is to be said about this counter thesis? In the first place, it is undeniable that we do all harbor a multitude of different desires. The desire for food when I am hungry is a different desire from the desire for drink when I am thirsty, and each is different from the desire for the good opinion of my fellows or for a 1967 automobile. At this level, at which desires are directed upon specific objects, so that to be desiring object A is not to be desiring object B, our desires are clearly many and various. But it is equally evident that our multitudinous desires do not all operate on the same level. Some desires are particular expressions of another, more general desire. We 252

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sometimes desire A because we already have a desire for X, and because we see A as a constituent of or a means to X. For example, a man may seek civic office, say that of mayor, because of a prior desire for power. Again, as well as seeking to become mayor, he may desire B, ownership of the local newspaper, as another expression of the same craving for power. In such a case the desires for A and for B both minister to the more general desire for X. We may accordingly speak of higher-level or more general, and lowerlevel or more specific desires. Using this terminology, I suggest that our desires form a hierarchical structure culminating in a single highest-level desire of which all our other desires are expressions at varying levels of concreteness. This highest-level desire is the desire for happiness. T o say that the ultimate goal of man's desire is happiness is of course to make no more than a formal or definitional statement which leaves entirely open the question, In what, specifically, does human happiness consist? However, the formal identification of the final object of human desire is by no means merely trivial. It is the necessary initial move in an inquiry concerning the values for which the Creator has designed us. This step was first taken by an early philosopher whose thought is today receiving increasing attention from ethical analysts. Aristotle proposed as the name of the supreme good eudaimonia, usually translated as "happiness." The adjectival form means literally "looked after by a good daimon, or god," a concept which is obviously capable of being given concrete content in a variety of different ways. Thus in answer to the question, "What is the highest of all the goods that action can achieve?" Aristotle answers: As far as the name goes, we may almost say that the great majority of mankind are agreed about this; for both the multitude and persons of refinement speak of it as Happiness, and conceive "the good life" or "doing well" to be the same thing 253

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as "being happy." But what constitutes happiness is a matter of dispute; and the popular account of it is not the same as that given by the philosophers. Ordinary people identify it with some obvious and visible good, such as pleasure or wealth or honour—some say one thing and some say another, indeed very often the same man says different things at different times: when he falls sick he thinks health is happiness, when he is poor, wealth.19 For man's supreme good, Aristotle points out, will be that which he seeks for its own sake and not as a means to anything else. Now happiness above all else appears to be absolutely final in this sense, since we always choose it for its own sake and never as a means to something else; whereas honour, pleasure, intelligence, and excellence in its various forms, we choose indeed for their own sakes (since we should be glad to have each of them although no extraneous advantage resulted from it), but we also choose them for the sake of happiness, in the belief that they will be a means to our securing it. But no one chooses happiness for the sake of honour, pleasure etc., nor as a means to anything whatever other than itself.20 The Christian cannot follow Aristotle in his conception of the concrete character of man's highest happiness,21 but he can accept Aristotle's semantic stipulation that happiness is that which mankind desires above all else. We all seek happiness as our final goal; and we seek this and that specific objective because we believe or assume that its attainment will minister to our happiness. Now the question as to what will and what will not make for our happiness is a question about how the world 19

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 1, ch. 4; trans, by H. Rackham (London, 1926). 2 « Ibid., bk. 1, ch. 7. 21 For reasons well stated by George F. Thomas in Christian Ethics and Moral Philosophy (New York, 1955), pp. 410-416.

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is. Our specific desires and more proximate goals are thus determined by our understanding of the character of our environment—determined, that is to say, by our judgment as to whether it is so constituted that this or that course of action will lead to happiness. In so far as we believe the world to be such that wealth brings happiness, we will seek wealth; in so far as we believe that the good esteem of our peers is a source of happiness, we will seek that; and so with all our many other specific desires. Within the plurality of our appetites of course conflicts arise. For example, the desire for esteem sometimes operates as a curb upon, say, the avidity for wealth, by inhibiting us from pursuing wealth in ways which would forfeit esteem. Thus our many desires jostle one another, until they fall into a more or less stable pattern, which reflects our conception of the true character of our environment as the locale of our search for happiness. An individual's or a group's distinctive way of life thus reveals, not an idiosyncratic conception of the human summum bonum, but distinctive convictions as to what life-procedures are effective as means to or are elements in the supreme end of happiness. Often a man achieves the specific goals which he has set for himself, only to find that they do not provide the happiness which he had anticipated from them. This experience is impressive evidence for the contention that the basic aim which our nature has set for us is happiness, and that our numerous specific goals are chosen because, too often mistakenly, we assume the world to be so constituted that these things will give us the happiness that we seek. Aristotle suggests that the happiness of any kind of creature consists in its fulfillment of its own telos, or the realization of its given potentialities. Everything, according to Aristotle, is constituted for some end, to achieve which is to fulfill its nature. For example, the telos of a chrysanthemum seed is the full grown flower; and its happiness, if 255

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plant life were endowed with self-consciousness, would consist in its development into a perfectly formed chrysanthemum. Happiness is thus relative to structure, being the fulfillment of a thing's nature, whatever that nature and its fulfillment may be. The happiness of a human being must accordingly consist in his fulfillment of the potentialities of specifically human nature. According to Christianity, the purpose for which human beings exist, and which defines man's telos, lies in a relationship with God. Men are created for fellowship with their Maker; the destiny open to them is that of "children of God" and "fellow heirs with Christ." 22 In this connection Irenaeus' suggestion of a two-stage creation of mankind, linked with his (exegetically dubious) distinction between the "image" and the "likeness" of God, is an attractive speculation which deserves the renewed consideration of theologians today.23 Elaborating Irenaeus' hint, the "image" of God in man is man's character as personal, and God's "likeness" in man would consist in a quality of personal existence which reflects finitely the divine life itself and constitutes the intended perfection of our human nature. Man is already fashioned in God's image, as a center of responsible personal life; and this first stage of the creative process provides the raw material for the further and more difficult stage of drawing men, through their own uncompelled responses, into that likeness of God which is seen in Christ. This similitudo dei, as man's proper end, constitutes the form of the highest happiness of which he is capable. The only addition which should perhaps be made to Aristotle's definition is an enlargement of its scope. Happiness consists in the fulfillment of a conscious being's nature 22 R o m . 8:17. 23

Irenaeus, Against Heresies, bk. iv, chs. 37 and (especially) 38; and Proof of the Apostolic Preaching, ch. 12. 256

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provided that such fulfillment turns out to be in harmony with the determining realities of its total environment. If the structure of human nature were fundamentally in conflict with the wider structure of the universe in which our life is set, the fulfillment of the human telos would not constitute man's ultimate well-being or happiness, but on the contrary his ultimate ill-being and frustration. If the whole nature of things should be either opposed or indifferent to those qualities which constitute man's nature in its perfection, then we should conclude that full human happiness is an impossibility. If, for example, the development and exercise of love is one aspect of the perfection of our nature, and if it should prove that the character of the universe is radically inhospitable to love, then to achieve man's telos would not be to achieve happiness. Aristotle assumed that the human telos is capable of being developed and maintained in the present world. Christianity, claiming that the universe has been created and is ruled by the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, affirms that the divine purpose for man is destined for final fruition, and thereby gives assurance that the highest possibilities of man's nature, glimpsed in Christ, are his most precious heritage. If, then, it is a basic fact of human life that all men seek happiness, and if men pursue this and that concrete goal because they suppose that these will gain them happiness, then different ways of life will arise, not from men setting for' themselves different basic goals (for there is only one such goal, namely happiness), but from their differing beliefs as to the actual paths which lead to that goal. In other words, their views of the nature of the world in which they live will determine the ways in which they live in it. Their ethic will be determined by their interpretation of their environment. And in this case a new ethic will arise only from a new vision of the world, its fundamental nature 257

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and governance. As a "moral reformer" Jesus employed this principle. He set human existence in the transforming light of God's presence, so that seeing their neighbors as fellow children of the heavenly Father, who not only counts the hairs of their heads but has created the worlds and the aeons and guides all things according to his own good purpose, men should be freed from their fears and so enabled to extend to others the respect and value which they automatically accord to themselves. There may seem to be something incongruous or even paradoxical in the thought that Christian ethics is based upon a universal search for happiness. Utilitarianism has generally been rejected by Christian moralists as being opposed to the biblical faith. And certainly the concrete conception of happiness proposed by John Stuart Mill, namely pleasure and the absence of pain, is from a Christian point of view seriously inadequate. A Christian critique of utilitarianism would maintain that its understanding of man's summum bonum is relatively shallow, trivial and impoverished because its perception of the human situation lacks the awareness of a transcendent divine purpose seeking to give to men the supreme gift of a blessedness whose full glory transcends our imaginations. But this is not the most usual Christian objection to utilitarianism. The Puritan instinct finds uncongenial the view that man is made for happiness. When the framers of the Scottish Shorter Catechism asked, "What is the chief end of man?" and answered "Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him for ever," they presumably added under their breaths "and to enjoy nothing else for ever." But their written words are accurately Christian in heralding an enjoyment as the end for which God has created man. In the teaching of Jesus the final state of those who enter the kingdom is one of exultant and blissful happiness, symbolized as a joyous banquet, in which all and sundry rejoice together, and vari258

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ously described as inheriting eternal life, entering into life, tasting immortality. Why should not the church declare to the world that the end for which God has created his human creatures, and toward which he is gradually leading them through all the motley experiences of life as we know it, is the fulfillment of the highest possibilities of our nature in a fellowship stemming from God himself, which fulfillment constitutes the deepest happiness of which our being is capable? All that has been said thus far must now be set in the disturbing light of the central paradox of Christian ethics. This paradox reflects the familiar ambiguity of our human existence—that it is good and yet evil, that Christians are saved and yet sinners, their souls justified and yet wrong, their lives set within the community of faith and yet constantly reverberating to the dynamics of a fallen world. In the New Testament this paradox of good and evil is reflected in two distinguishable, though not always separable, strands in the teaching of Jesus. On the one hand there is the repeated call to a serene trust in God as our heavenly Father. The theme of these sayings is that divine love rules the universe, so that we may inhabit God's earth without anxiety, serene as the lilies of the fields.24 Such sayings urge a life lived in the secure convicton that, in the Pauline phrase, "In everything God works for good with those who love him." 25 On the other hand there are sayings of intense moral demand, whose dominant symbol is riot the flowers and birds of Galilee, cared for by the open hand of God, but the stark cross on Calvary, raised by human hatred. "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." 26 "If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, 25 2* Matt. 6:28-30. Rom. 8:28. 26 Mark 8:34 = Matt. 16:24 = Lk. 9:23.

s

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and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." 27 These sayings are concerned with the vocation of the citizen of the kingdom to deal as God's agent with the evil of the world. They promise him neither provision for his material needs nor safety for his person, but rather want, persecution and a cross. How are these two themes related to one another? What is the connection between a serene trust in the God who clothes the lilies of the field and feeds the birds of the air, and faithful obedience to the Lord who calls us to an unconditional service, counting the cost and then not looking back? The answer would seem to be suggested by a third group of sayings in which the two contrasting threads, the golden thread of joy and the purple thread of suffering, are woven together into a unity; for example, "Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you." 28 The confrontation and the ultimate negation of evil is so central to God's purpose for mankind that no final happiness can come to the citizen of the kingdom that is not associated with the healed scars of his participation in the warfare of light against darkness. The citizen of the kingdom dwells sometimes within the borders of that kingdom, living in joyful dependence upon God's providence; but often his place is out on the frontiers of the kingdom, grappling with evil in the surrounding world. We must now turn to the latter set of teachings, which deal with the relationships between the citizens of the kingdom and the citizens of the world. Many of the most distinctive sayings of Jesus 27 28

Luke 14:26-27 = Matt. 10:37-38. Matt. 5:11-12 = Luke 6:22-23.

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fall under this rubric. "If any one strikes you on the right cheek . . . if anyone would sue you . . . if any one forces you to go one mile. . . ." 2B The same analysis applies to these as to the sayings already considered. In the costing struggle against evil, as in passing through life's green pastures and beside its still waters, living in the way which Jesus describes is a natural outcome of seeing the universe as he depicts it. But now we must add that to see the world as it really is means to see it not only as the domain of a gracious divine providence, but also as the scene of the outworking of God's dynamic purpose; and to be aware of this purpose as it embraces our own lives, acknowledging at the same time the divine sovereignty, is to be committed to serve that purpose. The Christian ethic is the partial specification of this service; it is an exposition in general terms of the way to forward God's designs for mankind. The content of that ethic is determined by the nature of the purpose whose requirements it expresses. That purpose, which we see at work in Jesus, is redemptive in character, seeking to create good out of evil and out of ethical indifference. The divine method, revealed in the life of Jesus, and supremely in his self-giving death, is that of overcoming evil with good. This method is wholly of a piece with Jesus' teachings about the frontier situations. It is the strategy of nonresistance to evil as a physical threat in order to resist it absolutely as a spiritual threat. Jesus resisted the bitter hatred of the scribes and Pharisees, the cynicism of the Roman authorities, and the blood lust of the mob, by answering hatred with a refusal to hate, and by reacting to moral blindness with compassion instead of resentment. T o resist spiritual evil means to repudiate it absolutely, to refuse to adopt it into oneself. For evil is successfully resisted only 2»Matt. 5:39 ff. 261

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by one who does not himself become evil in his reaction to it. This is so far from being easy that the greatest strength of moral evil is its self-propagating character. We have seen Good men made evil wrangling with the evil, Straight minds grown crooked fighting crooked minds.30 In order to overcome evil as a spiritual threat, Jesus had to refrain from resisting the same evil as a physical threat. He had to be willing to die, and had in fact to die, rather than accept the defeat of adding evil to evil. T o have evaded or resisted arrest, or to have abandoned his mission in flight, would have meant relinquishing God's redemptive purpose in favor of self-preservation. There is an obvious agreement between Jesus' own behavior in the face of human evil and the kind of behavior described in the frontier situations cited in the Sermon on the Mount. Turning the other cheek and going the second mile mean, first, nonresistance to the implied physical threat, and second, a complete negation of the evil attitude of the aggressor by resolutely refusing to adopt the like attitude oneself. T o go the second mile with the exploiter is to offer good in return for evil in order if possible to transmute his evil into good. For an exposition of Christian ethics the chief significance of the moral congruence between Jesus' teaching concerning the meeting of evil with good, and his manner of meeting evil in his own life, is not merely that he was magnificently consistent and lived as he taught. The significance is rather that, since in the death of Christ we see God himself at work, reconciling the world to himself, the Christian ethic is guidance for those who are committed to the service of that reconciling purpose. Thus Paul speaks 30 Edwin Muir, "The Good Town," The Labyrinth 1949)262

(London,

FAITH AND WORKS

of God "who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation." 31 The Christian ethic is very largely concerned with the principles and procedures of that ministry. We have examined the fundamental nature of the Christian ethic as presented in the teaching of Jesus. It is a description, with sample illustrations from the circumstances of first-century Palestine, of the way in which one behaves who experiences life as a continuous "dialogue with God." Faith inevitably expresses itself in works, because all men live in the world as they see and experience it; and religious faith is seeing and experiencing the world as being under the ultimate control of sovereign personal Love. si II Cor. 5:18.

263

Acknowledgments

GRATEFUL acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to quote: Longmans, Green & Co., Inc., for A Grammar of Assent by J. H. Newman; Cambridge University Press for Philosophical Theology by F. R. Tennant and Essays in Philosophy by James Ward; the Student Christian Movement Press and The Macmillan Company for New Essays in Philosophical Theology edited by A. G. N. Flew and A. Maclntyre; T. and T. Clark for Faith in God by D. M. Baillie; the Aristotelian Society and Professor John Wisdom for "Gods"; the late Dr. F. R. Tennant for The Nature of Belief; the Epworth Press for permission to use passages from my article "The Will to Believe," first published in The London Quarterly, October, 1952; the editor of Encounter for permission to reprint my article "Belief and Life," which appeared in the Fall, 1959, issue; and the editor of Theology Today for permission to reprint my article, "Theology and Verification," from the April, i960, issue.

264

Index of Names

Aquinas, St. Thomas, 12 ff., 33, 50 Aristotle, 82, 253-254 Arnobius, 33 n., 54 n. Austen, Jane, 127 Austin, J. L., 206 Ayer, A. J., 208 Baillie, Donald, 63 ff., 219, 230 Baillie, John, 30 n. Balfour, A. J., 54 Barth, Karl, 190 Bennett, C. A., 56 n. Blanshard, Brand, 98 Bowlby, J., 246 n. Bradley, F. H., 69 Browning, Robert, 64 Buber, Martin, 23,128

Dilley, Frank B„ 186 n. Ducasse, C. J., 11 Duff-Forbes, D. R., 194 n. Emmett, Dorothy, 32 Farmer, H. H., vii, 134-135, 156-157 Flew, Antony, 167-168, 173 n., 179 n., 194 n. Forsyth, P.T., 235 n. Fromm, Erich, 245 Gibson, James, 77 n. Gwatkin, G. M., 54 Hare, R. M., 151, 162-163 Hepburn, R. W., 189 n. Hobbes, Thomas, 75, 160 Hodge, A. A., 30 Hugh of St. Victor, 140-141 Hume, David, 78, 110-111, 153 n. Huxley, Julian, 27

Cairns, D. S., 45 n. Calvin, John, 30, 136 n. Cargile, James, 34 n. Carnap, Rudolf, 171 n. Christ, Jesus the, 28, 89, 139, 189 ff., 195, 216 ff., 237 ff. Cocks, H.F. Lovell, 5-6 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 141 Cook-Wilson, John, 201, 203 Coplestone, F. C , 211 n. Crombie, I. M., 194 n.

James, William, 33, 34 ff., 53, 205 Jeremiah, 142-143 Joly, Eugene, 23-24 Jung, C. G., 247 n.

D'Arcy, M. C , 16-17, 23 n., 72, 77, 91, 204 Demos, Raphael, 55 n. Descartes, Rene, 77, 201

Kant, Immanuel, 11 n., 57 ff., 112 Kaufmann, Walter, 27 Keynes, J. M., 153 n. Kierkegaard, S0ren,140

Irenaeus, 135, 18411., 256

265

INDEX Knox, John, 223 n.

Price, H. H., vii, 122

Laird, John, 204-205 Leigh, Margaret, 33 n. Lewis, C. I., 179 Locke, John, 17-18, 22, 77-78. 206, 248 Luther, Martin, 29-30, 140

Quinton, Anthony, 183 n.

Martin, C. B., 160 n. Matson, Wallace I., 152 n. Mevrodes, George, 196 n. Mill, John Stuart, 85 Moore, G. E., 198 n. Muir, Edwin, 262 Napoleon, 84 Newman, John Henry, 22,69 ftNewton, Isaac, 79 Nielsen, Kai, 196 ft. Noiiy, Pierre Lecomte du, 152 n. Ogden, C.K., 97 n„ 98 Oman, John, 7, 116, 121-122, 128 n 137 n. Origen, 54 n. Otto, Rudolf, 116 Pap, Arthur, 153 n. Pascal, Blaise, 33 ff., 139, 141 Paton, H.J., 59, 159 n. Paul, St., 180 Peirce, Charles, 152 Pieper, Josef, 12 n. Pontifex, Mark, 23 n. Popper, Karl R., 174 n.

266

Ramsey, Ian, 216 n. Randall, J. H., 162 ff. Rhine, J. B., 161 n. Richards, I. A., 97 n., 98 Richardson, Alan, 55 n. Robertson, F. W., 64 Robinson, Richard, 27 Russell, Bertrand, 210-211 Ryle, Gilbert, 72, 180 Schlick, Moritz, 179 Schmidt, Paul F., 1720Skinner, John, 142-143 Smith, George D., 18 Smith, N. Kemp, 99 Socrates, 127 Suttie, Ian, 246 n. Taylor, A. E., 200, 203-204 Taylor, Vincent, 231 Temple, William, 28, 96 Tennant, F. R., 33, 44, 45 n., 47 ff., 154 n. Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 64 Thomas, George F., 254 n. Thompson, Samuel M., 32 Tolstoy, Leo, 64 Trethowan, Illtyd, 23 n. Tyrell, George, 68 Ward, James, 44 ff. Weigel, Gustave, 24 Wisdom, John, 81, 144, 164-165 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 143

Index of Subjects

Agnosticism, 2 Assent, 70 ff. Atheism, 2, 144-145 Belief as disposition, 247 ff. Bible, 3-4 Bliks, 151, 162 ff. Christian ethics, 237 ff.

William James, 35 ff. Kant, 61 ff. Pascal, 33 ff. Reformed, 29-30 F. R. Tennant, 46 ff. Thomist, 12 ff. James Ward, 44 ff. as a wager, 33 ff. and the will, 11, 14-15, 328., 53, 121 ff.

Duty, 58 ff. Evil, 157-158, 233 ff., 261-262 Existentialism, 105-106 Faith: as cognitive, 3-4, 12 ff. in the evolutionary process, 45-46 and freedom, 133 ff. and the illative sense, 69 ff. as knowledge, 200 ff. as moral postulation, 61 ff., 150 and the moral sense, 57 ff., 88-89 and probability, 85 ff., 151 ff. as a propositional attitude, 11 ff., 26 ff., 90 and reason, 25 ff. and religious experience, 95 ff. and science, 48 ff., 53 ff. as trust, 3-4 and verification, 50 ff., 165 ff., 169 ff. views of: D. M. Baillie, 63 ff.

as will to believe, 35 ff. Falsification, 173 ft. Freedom, cognitive, 127 ff. God: arguments for, 4-5, 57 Beatific Vision of, 95 definition of, 3 as deus absconditus, 135 existence of, 1 as personal, 128 ff. Happiness, 59-60, 253 ff. Heilsgeschichte, 27-28 Holy Spirit, 227-228 Interpretation: defined, 101-102 ethical, 111 ff. religious, 113 ff. sensory, 98 ff., 108 ff. Jesus the Christ, 216 ff., 237 ff.

267

INDEX Jesus the Christ (cont.) death of, 230 ff., 261 ff. Incarnation of, 140, 190-191, 198199,2198. teaching of, 224-225, 237 ff.

Revelation, 25, 28-29

Naturalism, 144-145, 159 ff-. 162 ff.

Scholasticism, 4, 12 ff. Significance: defined, 98 moral, 111 ff., 125 natural, 108 ff., 124 object-significance, 100 ff. religious, 107 ff., 113 ff. situational, 106 ff. Situation, definition of, 106 Solipsism, 109-110

Old Testament, 142-143, 193-194, 209, 217

Telepathy, 130 n.

Kingdom of God, 225, 238 ff. Knowledge, 200 ff. Miracle, 160

Parapsychology, 160-161 Prayer, 160-161 Probability, 151 ff. Rationalism, 77 ff. Religion, nature of, 136 ft. Resurrection of the body, 180 ff.

268

Vatican Council I, 13, 23, 25 Vatican Council II, 25 Verification, 169 ff. eschatological, 176 ff., 193 ff. Westminster Confession, 30