The ethical problem of religion may be more important than the metaphysical one, as previously observed, but it cannot be solved without a reorientation of the present philosophical basis of religious conviction. The Western world has had a slight advantage over the East in the tentative dualism of Christianity, but this advantage has been lost by the inevitable drift toward pantheism in Western thought. Pantheistic tendencies are potential perils to moral values in practically all religions. By identifying God and the natural world they either persuade men to resign themselves to the inadequacies of nature, under the illusion that divine sanctity has rendered them immutable, or they blind the eye to the imperfections of nature and thus destroy the moral sensitiveness of religion. The Orient has usually derived a morally enervating pessimism from its pantheism, while the Occident has chosen the other horn of the monistic dilemma and fallen into a sentimental optimism. Both alternatives are as untrue to the facts as they are inadequate to men’s moral needs.

In the Western world religious optimism has been gradually destroyed by the advance of science which discredited the moral overestimate of the cosmic order, implicit as one of two tendencies in pantheism. The practical and tragic realities of its international and industrial life have added to the disillusionment and made men as sceptical of human as of cosmic virtue. Thus the cynicism of disillusioned intelligence is added to the despair of an outraged conscience to unite in a pessimism which questions both the rationality of the universe and the morality of man. The despair of the West is even more devastating to moral values than the pessimism of the East, for the Orient is prompted by its religion to a serene resignation while the West spends itself in blind fury or sensual excess. When all confidence in moral values is destroyed, the strong express themselves by asserting their power or resenting their seeming impotence, while the weak sink into an easy indulgence of natural appetites. The real history of Western society is being written by Nietzschian and Marxian cynics who have subdued every scruple which might qualify their contest for power. Meanwhile their conflict is lazily witnessed by vast hordes whose main purpose in life is to gratify their senses and who give their sympathy to one or the other side according as it offers least hindrance to their enjoyments. In such a situation religion is easily relegated to the position of restraining the petty and obscuring the major vices of the small minority which still profess it. This is particularly true when optimism and sentimentality, such as characterize modern religion, make it incapable of a realistic evaluation of the forces which reveal themselves in human society.

Albert Schweitzer⁠[20] interprets the whole moral bankruptcy of Western civilization as a pessimistic reaction to the extravagant optimism of its traditional religions and philosophies. While other factors, such as the complexity and the impersonal nature of industrial society, have been contributory factors to the disillusionment of the age, it is probably true that men are inclined to expect too little of the world and of man mostly because too much has been claimed for them and extravagant hopes have been disappointed. A regeneration of the ethical life of Western society must depend, therefore, upon the revival of a religion in which the Scylla of pantheism and the Charybdis of pure naturalism are avoided. While the Orient has a serenity which will contribute much to the art of living in a unified world civilization, there is no health for our sickness in its religious philosophies. Its pantheism cannot be maintained in the scientific atmosphere of the West, and if it could, as it is in rare instances, it would only present us with the impossible choice between the moral ennui of pessimism and the sentimentality of an unqualified optimism. The youthful exuberance of the Western mind invariably inclines it to the least defensible of these two bad alternatives, the optimistic one. When the West borrows religion from the East, as for instance in theosophy and Christian Science, it is used to support optimistic illusions so palpably absurd that they flourish only in those circles of society in which life is extremely comfortable and not too intelligent.

The only fruitful alternative to a monism and pantheism which identifies God and the world, the real and the ideal, is a dualism which maintains some kind of distinction between them and does not lose one in the other. Dualistic solutions to the riddles of life are not new in the history of religious thought. They are in fact as numerous as pantheistic ones, but their metaphysical limitations have usually outweighed their moral advantages and shortened their life. In Zoroastrianism, the noblest of purely Aryan faiths, Ahirman the spirit of evil exists independently of Ormuzd the good spirit. The influence of this Persian dualism is seen in both Hebrew and Christian thought. The satanology of the Old Testament is partly derived from it; and Manichæism, through which Augustine passed before he embraced and elaborated Catholic orthodoxy, is a compound of Persian and Christian religion. Mythology is filled with efforts to do justice to the conflicts which the world reveals as obviously as its unities, as for instance in the myth of Prometheus and Zeus. Even Plato, from whom most Western pantheism has been indirectly derived, held that God’s perfect goodness was thwarted by the intractableness of the materials with which he worked.

Early Hebrew religion was naïvely dualistic, and that is one reason why it has been so potent in the history of religion. God was indeed conceived of as omnipotent; that conception was the path that led to monotheism. But the idea of omnipotence was elaborated dramatically rather than philosophically. The heavens might declare his glory and the firmament show his handiwork, but he was revealed in national history and (according to the conception of the later prophets) in personal experience more than in natural phenomena. Even a very early prophet discovered that the still small voice rather than the earthquake or the fire was the symbol of his presence. The Genesis account of the fall solves the problem of evil upon an essentially monistic basis by making human sin responsible for even the inadequacies of nature and attributing everything from weeds to mortality to the luckless error of the first man. Neither the goodness nor the omnipotence of God is abridged in this naïve but sublime conception in which the human conscience assumes responsibility for more than its share of human ills in order to save the reputation of divine virtue. The monism of this account is, however, qualified by the injection of the tempting serpent, an element which is precursory of the belief in the devil, which the Jews inherited from Babylonia and Persia and which has fortunately qualified all monistic tendencies in Jewish and Christian orthodoxy until this day. A profounder instinct than reveals itself to the casual observer persuades fundamentalism to defend the reality of the devil with such vehemence. It may be metaphysically inconsistent to have two absolutes, one good and one evil, but the conception provides at least for a dramatic portrayal of the conflict which disturbs the harmonies and unities of the universe, and therefore, it has a practical and ethical value. The idea of attributing personality to evil may be scientifically absurd but it rests upon a natural error. When the blind and impersonal forces of nature come to life in man they are given the semblance of personality.

Professor Albert Schweitzer⁠[21] ascribes the moral superiority of prophetic Judaism and Christianity over other world religions to the naïve dualism of the prophets and Jesus, who emphasized the moral rather than the metaphysical attributes of God in such a way as to develop a practical and morally potent distinction between God and the universe, between the ideal of religious devotion and the disappointing realities of life. The distinction between Oriental monism and the practical dualism of Christianity in its unspoiled form is succinctly stated by Professor Alfred Whitehead: “Christianity has always been a religion seeking a metaphysics in contrast to Buddhism which is a metaphysics generating a religion.... The defect of a metaphysical system is the very fact that it is a neat little system which thereby oversimplifies its expression of the world.... In respect to its treatment of evil, Christianity is therefore less clear in its metaphysical idea but more inclusive of the facts.”⁠[22]

In the early Christian church the naïve dualism of Jesus was given dramatic and dynamic force through his deification, so that he became, in a sense, the God of the ideal, the symbol of the redemptive force in life which is in conflict with evil. Since no clear distinction was made between the spirit of the living Christ and the indwelling Holy Ghost, the doctrine of the trinity was, in effect, a symbol of an essential dualism. Orthodox Christianity did indeed renounce the gnostic heresy which tried to give this implicit dualism explicit character by its distinction between the God who was revealed in Jesus and the God of creation. And history has justified the wisdom of its course. The scientific precision necessary to save such theology from essential polytheism was lacking and Christianity was intent upon guarding its monotheism. Yet it preserved enough metaphysical inconsistency to retain dualistic tendencies in its monistic orthodoxy. Its symbols lacked philosophical precision but they did give vivid and dramatic force to the idea of a conflict between evil and the redemptive and creative force in life. Thus it could fulfill the two great functions of religion in prompting men to repent of their sins, and in encouraging them to hope for redemption from them. No mechanical or magical explanations of the significance of the crucifixion have ever permanently obscured the helpful spiritual symbolism of the cross in which the conflict between good and evil is portrayed and the possibility as well as the difficulty of the triumph of the good over evil is dramatized. An absolute dualism either between God and the universe or between man and nature, or spirit and matter, or good and evil, is neither possible nor necessary. What is important is that justice be done to the fact that creative purpose meets resistance in the world and that the ideal which is implicit in every reality is also in conflict with it. The reason why naïve religions are “more inclusive of the facts” in portraying this struggle than highly elaborated theologies is that the latter are always prompted by the rational need of consistency to obscure some facts for the sake of developing an intellectual plausible unity. Religions grow out of real experience in which tragedy mingles with beauty and man learns that the moral values which dignify his life are embattled in his own soul and imperiled in the world. He is inclined neither to obscure the reality of the struggle nor to sacrifice the hope of victory until too much reflection persuades him to believe either that all partial evil is universal good or that destiny makes his struggle futile and his defeat inevitable. That is how morality dies with religion when an age has become too sophisticated.

Naïve Christianity was unable to maintain itself in the Græco-Roman world without making concessions to its intellectual scruples and paying for its conquests by incorporating Hellenic philosophies in its theology. The gospel was diluted with neo-Platonism to make it more palatable for a cultured world. The naïvely and dramatically conceived omnipotence of God was metaphysically elaborated and inevitably betrayed the church into an essential pantheism, which “turns the natural world, man’s stamping-ground and system of opportunities, into a self-justifying and sacred life, endows the blameless giant with an inhuman soul and worships the monstrous divinity it has fabricated.”⁠[23] The process of compounding the simplicities of the gospel with the dialectic achievements of Greek philosophy culminated in St. Augustine who laid the foundation for Christian orthodoxy and made the simple Christian epic the basis of an elaborate theological structure in which God becomes at the same time the guarantee of the reality of the ideal and the actual cause of every concrete reality. Christianity has always anathematized pantheism officially, but probably—as Professor Santayana suggests—because it suspected that it was a suppressed but not entirely quiescent half of its dogma. Vital religion has a way of expressing itself outside the limits of its rationally fixed concepts and the essential pantheism of orthodox Christianity therefore did not destroy the moral vigor of even such resolute determinists as Augustine or John Calvin. Yet in the end the logic of a system of ideas becomes the pattern of human action. A rigorous determinism as well as an unqualified pantheism destroys moral vigor because it either makes the attainment of the ideal too certain or idealizes the real beyond all evidence. If reality only thinly veils the ideal implicit in it, or if the implicit ideal is certain to become real in history, there is no occasion for moral adventure and no reason for moral enthusiasm. In a sense pantheism is naturalism with an unnatural light upon it. That is why the determinism implied in pantheism may lead so easily to a reaction of naturalistic determinism. Thus Karl Marx appropriated Hegel’s determinism and put it to his own use. When the whole wealth of Hegel’s dialectical skill served no better purpose than to deify the Prussian military state, as a kind of ultimate revelation of the counsels of God, it was easy enough to discredit its optimistic illusions without destroying its determinism. The residual determinism became the basis of a new philosophy of history in which natural instinct and economic necessity took the place of divine will as man’s inexorable fate. The reaction from Hegel to Marx is a perfect symbol of the whole course of Western thought in the last hundred years with its change from a supernatural to a naturalistic determinism.

Religion left to itself, even when it elaborates theologies, tries to do some justice to the reality of moral conflict even though it may confuse the issue by a faulty definition of divine omnipotence. But its necessary coöperation with metaphysics drives it inevitably into more and more consistent monisms in which moral enthusiasms are destroyed. The monistic and pantheistic element in Western religion was greatly increased by its intimate collaboration with philosophies which dealt chiefly with the problem of knowledge. For the solution of the epistemological problem the philosophical idealists thought it necessary to posit an all-knowing intelligence. It was this all-knowing absolute which became the support of religion’s faith in God against the attacks of realists and empiricists, though there was little enough affinity between the God of any healthy religious theism and the impersonal absolute of monistic philosophers.

When religious apologists found it necessary to readjust the age-old affirmations of faith to the evolutionary facts revealed by science they usually sank even more deeply into the morass of pantheistic and monistic philosophy. The old and naïve conceptions of a capricious omnipotence working its will upon natural phenomena became manifestly untenable and a way had to be found to relate divine purpose to and discover the area of creativity in the natural and cosmic processes. It was practically inevitable that such a task would be accomplished only by an overemphasis on divine immanence and a consequent betrayal of religion into a sentimental optimism. When defenders of religious faith were borrowing from the quiver of their opponents they would have done well to consult Thomas Huxley more and Herbert Spencer less; for Huxley was morally much more realistic than Spencer. Spencerian doctrines lent themselves more easily to the strategy of linking religious theism with the faith of science in the dependability of the universe; but there was something lacking in Spencerian optimism which is very vital to religion, a sense of the tragic in life and an awareness of the frustration which moral purpose and creative will must meet in nature and in man. The sentimentality of modern religion is of course older than the optimism which it derived from Spencer. Part of it is derived from Rousseau and the romanticism of the eighteenth century. Here again religion suffered the fate of snatching error while it was borrowing truth from its opponents. Renouncing the idea of total depravity which was central in medieval religion, and in orthodox Protestantism for that matter, it evolved a sentimental overestimate of human virtue which is no nearer the truth than the medieval conceptions of original sin. It is a strange irony in history that to-day irreligion, in the form of deterministic psychology, should elaborate doctrines strangely akin to the derogatory estimates of human resources made by medieval theologians. So modern churches are involved in an optimistic overestimate of the virtue of both man and nature at the very time when science tempts men to despair of discovering moral integrity in the one and moral meaning in the other. Modern religion is, in short, not sufficiently modern. In it eighteenth-century sentimentality and nineteenth-century individualism are still claiming victory over the ethical and religious prejudices of the Middle Ages. Meanwhile life has moved on and the practical needs of modern society demand an ethic which is not individualistic and a religion which is not unqualifiedly optimistic.

The practical effects of this lack of contact of modern religion with the real temper of modern life may be gauged by comparing the observations of any average denominational journal of religion upon the events of contemporary history with the realistic analyses of secular journals. The brutalities of the economic conflict, the disillusioning realities of international relations, the monstrous avarice of nations and the arrogance of races, all these sins with which the life of modern society is cursed are treated with an easy complacency by religious observers which contrasts strangely with the frantic anxiety of secular idealists. In a recent world conference of the churches at Stockholm members of the German delegation objected to what they regarded as an identification of the Kingdom of God with the League of Nations made by a good bishop in the opening sermon. National prejudice may have prompted this criticism but the superior perspective lent by bitter experience gave it a measure of justification, and it would be applicable to other sermonic interpretations of current history besides those of the bishop.

The war itself was a disheartening revelation of the moral obfuscation of modern religion when dealing with the tragedies of history. The easy partnership of religious sentiment with patriotic fervor has been previously ascribed to the natural relation between religion and any devotion to an ethical ideal, however imperfect. There is, however, yet another reason for the blindness of religious idealists to the horrors of war. The monistic orientation of modern religion made it necessary for the church to save religious faith by discovering the saving virtues in the great evil. It was therefore unable to view the realities in proper proportion. For a realistic interpretation of the great tragedy modern society had to depend upon secular idealists who did not feel called upon to save either God’s or man’s reputation.

Sentimentality is a poor weapon against cynicism, and idealistic determinism has no way of defeating determinism of the naturalistic type. Since both the latter represent reactions to the former, they can be overcome only by bringing these into closer conformity with the facts. The freedom and moral integrity of man is not an illusion but it is a fact very seriously circumscribed. Transcendent purpose and creative will in the universe may be scientifically validated but do not thereby become the effective cause of every natural phenomenon. What is needed is a philosophy and a religion which will do justice both to the purpose and to the frustration which purpose meets in the inertia of the concrete world, both to the ideal which fashions the real and to the real which defeats the ideal, both to the essential harmony and to the inevitable conflict in the cosmos and in the soul. In a sense there is not a single dualism in life; rather there are many of them. In his own life man may experience a conflict between his moral will and the anarchic desires with which nature has endowed him; or he may experience a conflict between his cherished values and the caprices of nature which know nothing of the economy of values in human life. In the cosmic order the conflict is between creativity and the resistance which frustrates creative purpose. Whether the dualism is defined as one of mind and matter, or thought and extension, or force and inertia, or God and the devil, it approximates the real facts of life. It may be impossible to do full justice to the two types of facts by any set of symbols or definitions; but life gives the lie to any attempt by which one is explained completely in terms of the other. There is no more reason to-day to deny the reality of God than to explain every casual phenomenon in terms of his omnipotent will.

Our interest is in the moral fruits of religious and philosophical ideas rather than in their perfect consistency, but it may be noted in passing that philosophically competent scientists and scientifically competent philosophers arrive at conclusions to-day which are in closer accord with a naïve theism than with the monism of absolute idealism. They do not of course picture a God who is outside of the world and at work upon it as a potter upon his clay; but they do justice to both the purpose and the limitation of purpose in the creative process. Professor Hobhouse writes: “The evolutionary process can best be understood as the effect of a purpose slowly working itself out under limiting conditions which it brings successively under control.... This would mean not that reality is spiritual or the creation of an unconditioned mind ... but that there is a spiritual element integral to the structure and movement of reality and that evolution is the process by which this principle makes itself master of the residual conditions which at first dominate its life and thwart its efforts.”⁠[24] It may be a natural overbelief and an inevitable anthropomorphism if religion attributes all the characteristics of personality to the purpose, “the spiritual element integral to the structure and movement of reality.” But if a place for freedom and purpose in the cosmic order, however conditioned, is discovered the essential affirmation of religious faith is metaphysically verified. The values of personality are related to cosmic facts. Professor Alfred Whitehead defines God as that in reality which is not concrete but the principle of every concrete actuality. He makes the telling observation that while a dynamic view of reality may dispense with God as the prime mover it must substitute for Aristotle’s prime mover a principle of limitation and concretion, since the dynamic nature of reality does not account for the various forms in which it is made concrete.⁠[25] In other words the faith of religion in both the transcendence and immanence of God is given a new metaphysical validation. His unchangeableness is “his self-consistency in relation to all change”; but this does not justify the deterministic conclusion of a “complete self-consistency of the temporal world.” The reality of God and the reality of evil as a positive force are thus both accepted.

There is, in short, no reason why religion should not hold to its faith in God without either identifying him with or losing him in the concrete world. The moral and spiritual values in which religion is interested have a basis in concrete actuality. They are on the one hand not a mere effervescence on the surface of the concrete, and on the other hand they are not the only basis of historical realities. The pluralism of William James, which has been criticized as scientifically inaccurate and metaphysically inconsistent, seems to have both scientific and metaphysical virtues. There is good reason to accept at least a qualified dualism not only because it is morally more potent than traditional monisms, but because it is metaphysically acceptable. It is not to be expected that science will ever invest the concept of God with the attributes which religious devotion assigns to it. But there is no reason why religious and moral experience should not build further upon the foundation laid by science. It is manifestly necessary to have some metaphysical basis for religious conviction, for there is no spiritual vigor in the conscious self-deception of purely subjective religions. But it is not necessary to limit religion to the bare concepts which science establishes. It is in fact better for religion to forego perfect metaphysical consistency for the sake of moral potency. In a sense religion is always forced to choose between an adequate metaphysics and an adequate ethics. That is not to say that the two interests are incompatible but that they are not identical. When there is a conflict between them it is better to leave the metaphysical problem with some loose ends than to develop a religion which is inimical to moral values. The reason why naïve religions have frequently been morally more potent than highly rationalized ones is not because the faith which gave them moral fervor was necessarily inconsistent with the facts, but because they based their affirmations upon facts and experiences which were inconsistent with each other or seemed to be but were equally true and equally necessary for the maintenance of moral and spiritual energy.

The objection to religious dualism comes not only from those who subordinate all advantages to that of rational consistency but also from those who believe that it imperils purely religious values. It robs God of omnipotence (so the argument runs) and the universe of dependability. It gives no certain guarantee of the triumph of personal and spiritual values. It may put a note of challenge in religion, but it also destroys its comforting assurances. The answer to such a criticism is that the moral virtues of dualism are derived from precisely that characteristic. It is not easy to challenge to conflict and to guarantee victory at one and the same time. By dignifying personality religion runs the peril of obscuring the defects of human nature; if it makes the triumph of righteousness certain, it may incline men to take “moral holidays.” Too much emphasis upon the harmonies of the universe may make evil seem unreal. If men are given the opportunity, they will extract comfort from religion and forget the challenge implied in its faith; which simply means that they will use religion to sublimate rather than to qualify their will to live. They will accept the assurance of faith that the frustrations of the natural world are not permanent, but they will not accept the challenge of faith to overcome the corruptions of nature in their own souls.

The perennial conflict between priest and prophet is given in the double function of religion. The priest dispenses comfort and the prophet makes the challenge of religion potent. The priest is more numerous than the prophet because human selfishness is as determining in religion as in other fields. Though the priest always defeats the prophet in the end, the prophet is avenged because his original experience is the reality which makes the priest’s assurance plausible. There is no way of guaranteeing the reality of God if someone does not make him real in experience, and there is no way of declaring the victory of the ideal if someone does not defeat reality in the name of the ideal in history. Religion validates itself in spiritual experience and moral triumph. Speculation and deduction contribute to religious certainty only after experience has laid the foundation for faith. It is not possible to free religion altogether of its priestly corruptions. But anything which will make it more difficult to accept the comforts of faith without accepting its challenges will increase the moral potency of religion and decrease the possibility of its corruption by those who want to use it for the purpose of insuring the dignity of human life without paying the price of moral effort for the boon.

There is no reason why the comforting assurances of religion should be sacrificed completely. Science is not inimical to the assumption of religion that personal and moral values have a basis in the universe itself which insures their permanence and their further refinement. Though God works his will against the inertia of the concrete world and the waywardness of man, neither science nor history justifies the conclusion that his resources are not ultimately equal to the creative task. The intractableness of the world makes the creative and redemptive struggle real but not hopeless. Religion has as much right to preach hope as it has to preach repentance. It fails in its task if it does not save men from despair as well as from undue pride and complacency. There is nothing in either science or history which invalidates either function of religion. But science unites with moral experience in insisting on the reality and the painfulness of the creative process in man and in nature. If the resistance to moral purpose in cosmic history is underestimated, it merely serves to increase that resistance in the life of man by justifying his moral inertia. The needs of a dynamic religion are consistent with scientific fact, though not always compatible with a completely consistent metaphysics. Science may well combine with religion in persuading man that “if hopes are dupes, fear may be liars,” and that he must “work out his salvation with fear and trembling.”