BEYOND TRAGEDY, Chapter
15: The Fulfillment of Life
These closing words of the Apostolic creed, in which the Christian hope of the fulfilment of life is expressed, were, as I remember it, an offense and a stumbling-block to young theologians at the time when my generation graduated from theological seminaries. Those of us who were expected to express our Christian faith in terms of the Apostolic creed at the occasion of our ordination had long and searching discussions on the problem presented by the creed, particularly by this last phrase. We were not certain that we could honestly express our faith in such a formula. If we were finally prevailed upon to do so, it was usually with a patronising air toward the Christian past, with which we desired to express a sense of unity even if the price was the suppression of our moral and theological scruples over its inadequate rendering of the Christian faith. The twenty years which divide that time from this have brought great changes in theological thought, though I am not certain that many of my contemporaries are not still of the same mind in which they were then. Yet some of us have been persuaded to take the stone which we then rejected and make it the head of the corner. In other words, there is no part of the Apostolic creed which, in our present opinion, expresses the whole genius of the Christian faith more neatly than just this despised phrase: "I believe in the resurrection of the body." The idea of the resurrection of the body can of course not be literally true. But neither is any other idea of fulfilment literally true. All of them use symbols of our present existence to express conceptions of a completion of life which transcends our present existence. The prejudice that the conception of the immortality of the soul is more believable than that of the resurrection of the body is merely an inheritance from Greek thought in the life of the church. One might perhaps go so far as to define it as one of the corruptions which Hellenistic thought introduced into biblical, that is, Hebraic thinking. It is, of course, not absent from the Bible itself. Hellenic and Hebraic conceptions of the after-life wrestled with each other in the mind and the soul of St. Paul; and his dictum, "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God," belongs to the Greek side of the debate. Whatever may be the truth about the degree of Greek thought in either the Pauline Epistles or the Johannine literature, there can be no question that the dominant idea of the Bible in regard to the ultimate fulfilment of life is expressed in the conception of the resurrection. This is also true of the entire history of the Christian Church until, at a recent date, it was thought that the conception of immortality was more in accord with reason than the idea of resurrection. This latter prejudice is easily refuted. It is no more conceivable that the soul should exist without the body than that a mortal body should be made immortal. Neither notion is conceivable because reason can deal only with the stuff of experience; and we have no experience of either a discarnate soul or an immortal body. But we do have an experience of a human existence which is involved in the processes of nature and yet transcends them. It is conscious of them and possesses sufficient freedom from them to analyse, judge, modify and (at times) defy them. This human situation is a paradoxical one and it is therefore not easy to do justice to it without falling into the errors of either naturalism or dualism.
I
The idea of the resurrection of the body is a profound expression of
an essential element in the Christian world-view, first of all because
it expresses and implies the unity of the body and the soul. Through all
the ages Christianity has been forced to combat, and has at times
capitulated to, the notion, that the significance of history lies in the
banishment of the good soul in an evil body and in the gradual
emancipation of the soul from the body. Involved in this conception,
which is expressed most consistently in Neo-platonism, is the idea that
finiteness and particularisation are of themselves evil and that only
the eternal is good. Pure spirit is thus conceived as an eternal
principle, which is corrupted by its very individualisation in time.
Salvation is consequently thought of as release from physical life and
temporal existence. In these latter days such conceptions have been
related to modern individualism and made to yield the idea of personal
survival. But in its more classical and consistent forms this dualism
involved the destruction of individuality, so that salvation meant the
release from all particularisation and individualisation and
reabsorption into the oneness of God.In contrast to such forms of dualism it must be recorded that the facts of human experience point to the organic unity of soul and body, and do not substantiate the conclusion, suggested by a superficial analysis, that the evil in human life arises from the impulses of the flesh. Soul and body are one. Man is in nature. He is, for that reason, not of nature. It is important to emphasise both points. Man is the creature of necessity and the child of freedom. His life is determined by natural contingencies; yet his character develops by rising above nature’s necessities and accidents. With reference to the purposes of his life, it is significant that the necessities of nature are accidents and contingencies. Sometimes he is able to bend nature's necessities to his own will; sometimes he must submit his destiny to them. But whether he dominates or submits to nature, he is never merely an element in nature. The simple proof is that his life is not wholly determined but is partly self-determining. This is a very obvious fact of experience which is easily obscured by philosophies, which either lift man wholly out of nature or make him completely identical with it, usually for no better reason than to fit him into a completely consistent scheme of analysis. The soul and the body are one. This fact is more perfectly expressed in the more primitive psychology of the Hebrews than in the more advanced philosophy of the Greeks. The Hebrews conceived the soul, significantly, as residing in the blood. They did not even distinguish sharply between "soul" and "life" and expressed both connotations in several words, all of which had an original connotation of "breath." This unity of soul and body does not deny the human capacity for freedom. It does not reduce man to the processes of nature in which he stands, though yet he stands above them. It merely insists on the organic unity between the two. The mind of man never functions as if it were discarnate. That is, it is not only subject to the limitations of a finite perspective but also to the necessities of physical existence. This very dependence of the soul upon the body might suggest that the finiteness of the body is the chief source of the corruption of the soul. It is because the mind looks out upon the world from two eyes, limited in their range, that it cannot see as far as it would like. And it is because rational processes are related to natural necessities that the mind is tempted to exchange its ideal of a disinterested contemplation of existence for the task of special pleading in the interests of the body in which it is incarnate. But to explain human evil in these terms is to forget that there is no sin in nature. Animals live in the harmony assigned to them by nature. If this harmony is not perfect and sets species against species in the law of the jungle, no animal ever aggravates, by his own decision, the disharmonies which are, with restricted harmonies, the condition of its life. The root of sin is in spirit and not in nature. The assertion of that fact distinguishes Christianity both from naturalism, which denies the reality of sin, and from various types of mysticism and dualism, which think that finiteness as such, or in other words the body, is the basis of evil. Even when sin is not selfishness but sensuality, man's devotion to his physical life and to sense enjoyments differs completely from animal normality. It is precisely because he is free to centre his life in certain physical processes and to lift them out of the harmonious relationships in which nature has them, that man falls into sin. In the first chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans he accurately defines sin, first, as the egotism by which man changes "the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man." But he continues by suggesting that sensuality is a further development in the nature of sin, "Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves." Whatever the relation of sensuality and selfishness in the realm of human evil, whether they are two types of sin or whether one is derived from the other, it is obvious that both are the fruits of the spirit and not of the flesh. It is, of course, true that the peculiar situation in which man stands, of being a finite and physical creature and yet gifted to survey eternity, is a temptation to sin. The persistency of sin is probably derived from the perennial force of this temptation. When man looks at himself and makes himself an object of his own thought he finds himself to be merely one of many creatures in creation, but when he looks at the world he finds his own mind the focusing center of the whole. When man acts he confuses these two visions of himself. He knows that he ought to act so as to assume only his rightful place in the harmony of the whole. But his actual action is always informed by the ambition to make himself the centre of the whole. Thus he is betrayed into egotism. Quite rightly St. Paul suggests that, once he has destroyed his relation to the divine centre and source of life, man may go further and centre his life in some particular process of his own life rather than his own life in its totality. In fact, the second step is inevitable. Since the real self is related organically to the whole of life, it is disturbed in its own unity when it seeks to make itself the centre and disturbs the unity of life. Thus sin lies at the juncture of nature and spirit. If it is untrue that the body is of itself evil while the soul or the spirit is good, it follows that the highest moral ideal is not one of ascetic flagellation of the flesh but of a physical and spiritual existence in which mind and body serve each other. Browning was right in the anti-asceticism expressed in Rabbi Ben Ezra: The body at its best, How far can that project thy soul on its lone way? . . . . . . . . . . . . . Let us not always say ‘Spite of this flesh to-day I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!’ As the bird wings and sings, Let us cry ‘All good things Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!’"
II
The hope of resurrection of the body is preferable to the idea of the
immortality of the soul because it expresses at once a more individual
and a more social idea of human existence. Human life has a paradoxical
relation not only to nature but to human history. Each individual is a
product of the social forces of human history and achieves his
significance in relating himself to them. Most ideals of personal
immortality are highly individualistic. They interpret the meaning of
life in such a way that the individual is able to think of ultimate
fulfilment without any reference to the social process of which he is a
part. This process is interpreted in purely negative terms. It is merely
a part of the whole world of mortality which the immortal soul sloughs
off. In contrast to such an interpretation, it is significant that the
biblical idea of the resurrection grew out of a social hope. The
Messianic kingdom was conceived of as the fulfilment of a social
process, first of all, of course, as the fulfilment of the life of
Israel. The idea of individual resurrection arose first in relation to
this hope. The righteous would be resurrected to participate in this
ultimate triumph. The idea of a social fulfilment was consequently
basic. Not only individual life, but the whole development of the human
race was understood as standing under the curious paradox of pointing to
goals which transcended the possibilities of finite existence. Social
history, in other words, was a meaningful process to the prophets of
Israel. Protestant Christianity has usually been too individualistic to
understand this religious appreciation of the meaning of social
processes. In consequence, the liberal idea of progress as the meaning
of history and the Marxian idea of a revolution which will usher in a
fulfilled history are justified protests against Protestant Christian
individualism. They are both mistaken in not taking the idea of
resurrection seriously enough. They think it is possible for a history,
involved in the conditions and contingencies of nature, to overcome
these by some final act of mind or will and establish a conditionless
goodness in human history. Their Utopia is, in other words, the Kingdom
of God minus the resurrection, that is minus the divine transformation
of human existence. But whatever the defects in these social
conceptions, they restore an important element to prophetic religion.
Any religion which thinks only in terms of individual fulfilment also
thinks purely in terms of the meaning of individual life. But man's
body is the symbol of his organic relationship to the processes of
history. Each life may have a significance which transcends the social
process but not one which can be developed without reference to that
process.In the Cromwellian Revolution a great many sects sprang up, Levellers, Diggers and Anabaptists, who insisted on this old prophetic hope of the Kingdom of God in contrast to the individualism of the churches in which there was no appreciation of the meaning of history. These sectaries felt that the revolution in which they were involved had a religious significance and pointed toward a society in which the hopes of brotherhood aid justice would be fulfilled. Significantly one of the host thinkers of this sectarian movement, a man named Overton, spent time and effort to refute the idea of immortality and establish the conception of the resurrection. It is not apparent from his writings that he consciously connected the idea of resurrection with his social hopes. But it is significant that he had this interest. The idea of resurrection is a rebuke and a correction of all too individualistic conceptions of religion. This individualism is always a luxury of the more privileged and comfortable classes who do not feel the frustrations of society sufficiently to be prompted to a social hope and who are not in such organic relation to their fellows as to understand the meaning of life in social terms. It is true of course that modern men express their social hope in terms other than that of the idea of the resurrection. They are either liberals who believe in progress, or radicals who believe in a classless society on the other side of a revolution. But this secularisation is no advance. It is not, as assumed, a substitution of superior scientific ideas for outmoded religious myths. It is rather the proof of modern man’s blindness to the paradoxes of human existence. He does not understand the hopes of an unconditioned perfection, both social and individual, which beckon the human conscience and which are involved in every concept of the relative and the historical good. He sees them in history but does not see that they point beyond history
III
Strangely enough, and yet not strange to those who think profoundly
upon the question, the body is the mark of individuality as well as of
sociality. Pure nature does not, of course, produce individuals. It
produces types, species and genera. The individuality of human life is
the product of freedom; and freedom is the fruit of the spirit. Yet pure
spirit is pure mind and pure mind is universal. Pure mind expresses
itself in the universally valid concepts of mathematics and logic. These
concepts are universal because they are forms without content. That is
why "spiritual" religions, which may begin with a great degree of
individualism than more earthy and social religions, end by losing the
soul in some eternal and divine unity. All consistent mysticism (which
does not include most Christian mysticism which is not consistent)
regards individuality, egohood, as of itself evil. If Christian
mysticism is not consistent upon this point that is due to the fact that
Christianity, no matter how greatly influenced by more dualistic
thought, never completely escapes the biblical ideas of the goodness of
creation and the resurrection of the body.The fact is that individuality and individualisation are the product of human history; and human history is a pattern which is woven upon a loom in which the necessities of nature and the freedom of the spirit are both required. Perhaps it would be more exact to describe one as the loom and the other as the shuttle. Whenever the significance of history is depreciated the ultimate consequence is also a depreciation of individuality. To believe that the body is resurrected is to say, therefore, that eternity is not a cancellation of time and history but that history is fulfilled in eternity. But to insist that the body must be resurrected is to understand that time and history have meaning only as they are borne by an eternity which transcends them. They could in fact not be at all without that eternity. For history would be meaningless succession without the eternal purpose which bears it. The idea of the fulfilment of life is very difficult, partly because of the dialectical relation of time and eternity and partly because of the dialectical relation of the individual to society. The old classical idealism resolved the difficulties by denying the significance of time and history; and modern naturalism seeks to resolve it by seeking to make time and history self-sufficing. The naturalists divide themselves into individualists and communists. The former destroy the dialectical and organic relation of the individual to his society and produce discrete individuals who have no interest in society or history. The communists on the other hand think it possible to offer the individual a satisfactory hope of fulfillment in terms of an ideal society. They do not understand that individual life always transcends the social process as well as being fulfilled in it. This will be true in the most ideal society. There are aspects of meaning in individual life which will escape the appreciation of even the most just society; and there are hopes of fulfilment which transcend the power of any society to realise. The very genesis of the idea of resurrection lay in this dilemma. The great prophetic movement in Israel promised the fulfilment of Israel’s hopes. But what would become of the individuals who perished before those hopes were realised? The question is put searchingly in one of the great apocalyptic books, Fourth Ezra: "Lo, Lord thou art ready to meet with thy blessing those that survive to the end; but what shall our predecessors do, or we ourselves or our posterity? Couldst thou not have created them all at once, those that are, and those that shall be?" Or again in the same book: "What does it profit us that there is promised us an imperishable hope whereas we are so miserably brought to futility?" Here is a very legitimate individualism. Social and political religions which do not understand it, stand on the level of Hebraic prophecy before the idea of the resurrection of the body answered those questions. It is an individualism which must emerge whenever human culture is profound enough to measure the full depth of human freedom. At such a time it becomes apparent that each individual transcends society too much to be able to regard it either as his judge or as his redeemer. He faces God rather than society and he may have to defy society in the name of God. If an adequate prophetic religion expresses the real relation of the individual and society in terms of a hope of fulfilment in which the individual is resurrected to participate in the fulfilment of society, such a conception is rationally just as difficult as the idea of resurrection itself. The former seems to take no account of a society continually involved in flux just as the latter seems to defy the inevitability of mortality in nature. But that merely means that such a religion is expressing the idea that history is more than flux and that nature is not just mortality. Here, once more, religion is involved in myth as a necessary symbol of its faith. It is important not to press the myth of the resurrection to yield us too detailed knowledge of the future. "It doth not yet appear what we shall be." Every effort to describe the details of fulfilment and to give plans and specifications of the heavenly city leads to absurdity. Such efforts have in fact encouraged the modern man to reject all conceptions either of individual fulfilment or of a Kingdom of God which fulfils the whole human enterprise. But it is instructive that these disavowals of mythical absurdities have tempted modern men to curious rational absurdities. Among the greatest of these is to revel in the relativities of historical flux and yet nourish a covert hope that history, as it is, will finally culminate by its own processes into something which is not history but a realm of unconditioned goodness. Every one who rejects the basic conceptions, implicit in the idea of the resurrection, is either a moral nihilist or an utopian, covert or overt. Since there are few moral nihilists, it follows that most moderns are utopians. Imagining themselves highly sophisticated in their emancipation from religion, they give themselves to the most absurd hopes about the possibilities of man’s natural history. It is significant that there is no religion, or for that matter no philosophy of life, whether explicit or implicit, which does not hold out the hope of the fulfilment of life in some form or other. Since it is man’s nature to be emancipated of the tyranny of the immediate present and to transcend the processes of nature in which he is involved, he cannot exist without having his eyes upon the future. The future is the symbol of his freedom. The Christian view of the future is complicated by the realization of the fact that the very freedom which brings the future into view has been the occasion for the corruption of the present in the heart of man. Mere development of what he now is cannot save man, for development will heighten all the contradictions in which he stands. Nor will emancipation from the law of development and the march of time through entrance into a timeless and motionless eternity save him. That could only annihilate him. His hope consequently lies in a forgiveness which will overcome not his finiteness but his sin, and a divine omnipotence which will complete his life without destroying its essential nature. Hence the final expression of hope in the Apostolic Creed: "I believe in the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting" is a much more sophisticated expression of hope in ultimate fulfillment than all of its modern substitutes. It grows out of a realization of the total human situation which the modern mind has not fathomed. The symbols by which this hope is expressed are, to be sure, difficult. The modern mind imagines that it has rejected the hope because of this difficulty. But the real cause of the rejection lies in its failure to understand the problem of human existence in all its complexity. |
Sunday, December 22, 2013
From Reinhold Niebuhr: On Ultimate Fulfillment
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