7/17/2019 Communism is Neo-Christianity http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/communism-is-neo-christianity 1/238 10/12/2015 Communism is neo-Christianity https://www.facebook.com/notes/wesley-lysander/communism-is-neo-christianity/835356356562639?pnref=lhc 1/16 "The history of early Christianity has notable points of resemblance with the modern working-class movement. Like the latter, Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: it first appeared as the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights, of peoples subjugated or dispersed by Rome. Both Christianity and the workers' socialism preach forthcoming salvation from bondage and misery; Christianity places this salvation in a life beyond, after death, in heaven; socialism places it in this world, in a transformation of society. And in spite of all persecution, nay, even spurred on by it, they forge victoriously, irresistibly ahead. Three hundred years after its appearance Christianity was the recognized state religion in the Roman World Empire." -- Frederick Engels "Marxism borrows some deep assumptions from theology, especially its prophetic criticism of the present world order (capitalism) and its eschatological projection of a future world that is qualitatively different. It is not so well known that when Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party they did so at the request of a group that had not long beforehand been known as the League of the Just. The curious thing about the League of the Just, which had been formed by German workers in Paris in 1836, was that it was an organisation with a substantial religious flavour, propagating utopian socialist and communist ideas and practices on the basis of the Bible. Some of the leading figures of the old League of the Just argued for a violent communist revolution and pictured not merely Christ as the fore-runner of communism, but communism as Christianity without all its later developments. If a religious person declared she or he had become a socialist, then the assumption is that that person had lost his or her faith. It doesn’t help matters when the major churches also declared communism to be ‘God-less’. But these are, or at least should be things of the past." -- Roland Boer WESLEY LYSANDER · SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2015 Communism is neo-Christianity
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Stage One is the original state of the pre-creation cosmic blob, with man and God in happy
and harmonious unity, but each rather undeveloped. Then, the magic dialectic does its work,
Stage Two occurs, and God creates man and the universe. But then, finally, when the
development of man and God is completed, Stage Two creates its own aufhebung, its
transcendence into its opposite or negation: in short, Stage Three, the reunion of God and
man in an 'ecstasy of union,' and the end of history.
Gerrard Winstanley, in early 1649, had a mystical vision of the ideal communist world of the
future. Originally, according to this vision, a version of God had created the universe; but the
spirit of 'selfishness,' the Devil itself, had entered into man and brought about private
property and a market economy. Soon, declared Winstanley, universal 'love' would eliminate
private property, and would thus restore the earth to 'a common property as it was in the
beginning … making the earth one storehouse, and every man and woman to live … as
members of one household.'
Soon, however, he realized, in the completed draft of his utopia, that all wage labor and all
commerce would have to be prohibited on the penalty of death. Winstanley was quite willingto go this far with his program. Everyone was to contribute to, and take from, the common
storehouse, and the death penalty was to be levied on all use of money, and on any buying or
selling. The 'sin' of idleness would of course be combated by forced labor for the benefit of the
communist community.
'All punishments that are to be inflicted … are only such as to make the offender … to live in
the community of the righteous law of love one with another.' Education in 'love' was to be
insured by free and compulsory schooling conducted by the state. The stage was set for Karl
Marx.
To the extent that we know its operations at all, 'the Kingdom of God on Earth' is depicted as
a communist society, lacking work, private property, or the division of labor. In short,
something like the Marxian communist utopia, except run by a cadre, not of the vanguard of
the proletariat, but of theocratic saints. This gospel of total rule went hand in hand with the
social doctrine of many of the 14th-century: a communistic assault on the institution of
private property. In a sense, communism was merely a thinly camouflaged cover for the right
to commit theft at will.
The 14th century brought the first attempt to initiate the Kingdom of God on Earth, the first
brief experiment in totalitarian theocratic communism. For the Last Days are coming, and
the Elect must go forth and stamp out sin by exterminating all sinners. Those notorious
centers of luxury and avarice, must be exterminated. The Elect must impose communism (a
society lacking the sin of private property) on the rest of the world. At night, they raided the
mainland — in forays they called a 'Holy War' — to rob everything they could lay their hands
on and to exterminate their victims.
The monasteries of Muhlhausen were seized, and all property was declared to be in common;
as a consequence, a contemporary observer noted, the regime 'so affected the folk that no one
wanted to work.' As under the Taborites, the regime of communism and love soon became, in
practice, a systemic excuse for theft: when anyone needed food or clothing he went to a rich
man and demanded it of him in Christ’s name, for Christ had commanded that all should
share with the needy. And what was not given freely was taken by force.
The ruling clergy of the state exempted themselves from taxation, while imposing heavy taxes
on the rest of the populace. With every person in the city drafted for siege work, Jan Matthys
launched his totalitarian-communist social revolution. The first step was to confiscate the
property of the expellees. All their worldly goods were placed in central depots, and the poor
were encouraged to take 'according to their needs,' the 'needs' to be interpreted by seven
appointed 'deacons' chosen by Matthys. Wages were doled out in kind by the only employer:
the theocratic Anabaptist State.
Food was confiscated from private homes, and rationed according to the will of government
deacons. Also, to accommodate the host of immigrants, all private homes were effectively
communized, with everyone permitted to quarter themselves everywhere. Compulsory
communal dining halls were established, where people ate together to the readings from the
Old Testament.
The wives of the expellees became fair game, and they were forced to 'marry' good
Anabaptists. The confiscated gold and silver was now minted into ornamental coins in honorof the new king. All horses were confiscated for the king’s armed squadron. Names in
revolutionary Münster were also transformed; all the streets were renamed; Sundays and
feast days were abolished; and all newborn children were named personally by the king in
accordance with a special pattern.
At all times throughout the siege the king and his court managed to eat and drink well, while
famine and devastation swept through the town , and the masses ate literally anything, even
inedible, they could lay their hands on.
The first secularized communists appeared in mid-18th-century France. The major focus was
to insist that all men are 'perfectly' equal and uniform, one and the same everywhere.
Children are to be brought up communally, and absolutely identically in food, clothing, and
training. Philosophic and religious doctrines are to be absolutely prescribed; no differences
are to be tolerated; and children are not to be corrupted by any 'fable, story, or ridiculous
fictions.' All trade or barter is to be forbidden by 'inviolable law.' Occupations are to be
limited and strictly assigned by the State.
It should be clear that these are debased, secularized versions of the visions of the Christian
millennialists. Carl von Eckartshausen developed the idea that the inner church of the Elect
had existed backward in time to Abraham and then went forward to a world government
ruled by these keepers of the divine light. Saint-Martin was also influential through his
leadership of the Scottish Rite Masonry in Lyons, and was the major figure in what might be
called the apocalyptic-Christian wing of the Masonic movement. The point was that the
people are incapable either of regeneration by themselves or of designating the people who
should direct the regeneration.
While the Welshman Robert Owen was the first to use the word 'socialist' in print in 1827,
and also toyed with 'communionist,' the word 'communist' finally caught on as the most
popular label for the new system ...neo-Christian messianism.
Karl Marx was born in Trier, a venerable city in Rhineland Prussia, in 1818, son of a
distinguished jurist, and grandson of a rabbi. Indeed, both of Marx’s parents were descended
from rabbis. Marx’s father Heinrich was a liberal rationalist who felt no great qualms about
his forced conversion to official Lutheranism in 1816. What is little known is that, in his early
years, the baptized Karl was a dedicated Christian. Going first to the University of Bonn and
then off to the prestigious new University of Berlin to study law, Marx converted to militant
atheism, and shifted his major to philosophy.
Marx thundered in the fourth of his 'theses on Feuerbach,' 'One must proceed to destroy the
‘earthly family’ as it is both ‘in theory and in practice.' In particular, declared Marx, true man,
as Feuerbach had argued, is a 'communal being' (Gemeinwesen) or 'species being'
(Gattungswesen): 'In the same way as woman is to abandon marriage for general [i.e.,
universal] prostitution, so the whole world of wealth, that is, the objective being of man, is to
abandon the relation of exclusive marriage with the private property owner for the relation of
general prostitution with the community.'
In short, in the stage of communalization of private property, what Marx himself considers
the worst features of private property will be maximized. Not only that, but Marx concedes
the truth of the charge of anticommunists then and now that communism andcommunization is but the expression, in Marx’s words, of 'envy and a desire to reduce all to a
common level.' Far from leading to a flowering of human personality, as Marx is supposed to
claim, he admits that communism will negate that personality totally. Thus Marx wrote: 'In
completely negating the personality of man, this type of communism is really nothing but the
logical expression of private property. General envy, constituting itself as a power, is the
disguise in which greed reestablishes itself and satisfies itself, only in another way…. In the
approach to woman as the spoil and handmaid of communal lust is expressed the infinite
degradation in which man exists for himself.' The triumph of unity over diversity means that,
for the utopians, including Marx, 'civil society, with its disturbing diversity, can be abolished.'
Finally, at the apex of Marxian messianic communism is a man who fuses all the tendencies
and strands analyzed thus far. A blend of Christian messianist and devoted Marxist-Leninist-
Stalinist, the 20th-century German Marxist Ernst Bloch set forth his vision in his recently
translated three-volume phantasmagoria The Principle of Hope. As J.P. Stern writes, Bloch’s
Principle of Hope contains such remarkable declarations as 'Ubi Lenin, ibi Jerusalem'
[Where Lenin is, there is Jerusalem], and that 'the Bolshevist fulfillment of Communism' is
harm. On the contrary, they prospered and expanded you. You owe your pre-eminence in the
world to them. But the upheaval which brought Christianity into Europe was - or at least may
easily be shown to have been - planned and executed by Jews as an act revenge against a
great Gentile state. And when you talk about Jewish conspiracies I cannot for the world
understand why you do not mention the destruction of Rome and the whole civilization of
antiquity concentrated under her banners, at the hands of Jewish Christianity.
It is unbelievable, but you Christians do not seem to know where your religion came from,
nor how, nor why. Your historians, with one great exception, do not tell you. Your Bible, you
chant over but do not read. We have done our work too thoroughly; you believe our
propaganda too implicitly. The coming of Christianity is to you not an ordinary historical
event growing out of other events of the time, it is the fulfilment of a divine Jewish prophecy
- with suitable amendments of your own. It did not, as you see it, destroy a great Gentile
civilization and a great Gentile empire with which Jewry was at war; it did not plunge
mankind into barbarism and darkness for a thousand years; it came to bring salvation to the
Gentile world!
Yet here, if ever, was a great subversive movement, hatched in Palestine, spread by Jewish
agitators, financed by Jewish money, taught in Jewish pamphlets and broadsides, at a time when Jewry and Rome were in a death struggle, and ending in the collapse of the great
Gentile empire. You do not even see it, though an intelligent child, unfuddled by theological
magic, could tell you what it is all about after a hasty reading of the simple record.
Let me in very brief recount the tale, un-embroidered by miracle, prophecy or magic. The
time is roughly 65 B.C. Up to the present the two states have had little or no contact with one
another. Then without solicitation on her part Rome was suddenly asked take a hand in
Judean affairs. A dispute had arisen between two brothers over the succession to the petty
throne, and the Roman general Pompey, who happened to be in Damascus winding up bigger
matters, was called upon to arbitrate between the claimants. With the simple directness of a
republican soldier, Pompey exiled one of the brothers, tossed the chief priesthood to his rival,
and abolished the kingly dignity altogether. Not to put too fine a point on it, Pompey's
mediation amounted in effect to making Judea a Roman dependency. The Jews, not
unnaturally, objected; and Rome appointed a king of her own choosing. He was the son of an
excise-man, an Idumean by race, named Herod. But the Jews were not placated, and
continued making trouble. Rome thought it very ungrateful of them. Above all, they wanted
back a king of their own royal line.
Among the masses the rebellion took the form of a revival of the old belief in a Messiah, a
divinely appointed savior who was to redeem his people from the foreign yoke and make
Judea supreme among the nations. Claimants to the mission were not wanting. In Galilee,
one Judas led a rather formidable insurrection, which enlisted much popular support. John,
called the Baptist, operated in the Jordan country. He was followed by another north-country
man, Jesus of Nazareth. All three were masters of the technique of couching incendiary
political sedition in harmless theological phrases. All three used the same signal of revolt -
'the time is at hand'. And three were speedily apprehended and executed, both Galileans, by
crucifixion.
Personal qualities aside, Jesus of Nazareth was, like his predecessors, a political agitator. He
began preaching a primitive form of populism, socialism and pacifism. The effect of this
Jewry, doing the job they were designed to do, namely: confuse and confound the white
man's intelligence so that he himself will help the Jew in destroying the white race.
In comparing the two we find that they are strikingly similar, and not opposites. In fact, there
are so many similarities in the two programs and in the philosophy of these two creeds that
the hand of the same author can easily be detected. That author is the international Jewish
network. They and they alone wrote both the creed of Christianity and the creed of
communism. Both communism and Christianity preach against materialism. Communism
designates those productive and creative forces of our society to which we owe in such large
part the benefits of a productive white civilization, as 'bourgeois.' It then lashes out with
unparalleled fury at the bourgeois and tells us over and over again that they must be
destroyed. Instead of giving credit where credit is due, it slanders and vilifies these
constructive and productive elements, namely the bourgeois or the capitalists, as the ultimate
in evil. Christianity tells us basically the same thing. It tells us that it will be more difficult for
a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven. It tells us
that we should 'sell all thou hast and give it to the poor': an insidious piece of advice that, if
followed, would make us all a pack of roving bums and beggars. It would most surely cause
the breakdown of our society. Christianity further tells us 'lay not up treasures on earth, but
lay up treasures in heaven.' Throughout, the implication is clear. Don't accumulate unto yourself any of the good things in life. If, through hard work, you've already managed to
accumulate some wealth, get rid of it, give it away, give it to the poor, above all, give it to the
Church, they'll take it, with relish. The net result of this fantastically bad advice, of course, is
that it will more easily pass into the hands of the Jews, who do not subscribe to such
foolishness. They hope to make fools of us, knowing very well the old saying 'A fool and his
money are soon parted' is only too true.
The other side of the coin is that the leaders of both Christianity and communism themselves
are fantastically materialistic. When we look at the Catholic Church on down through the
ages, we find that whereas they were extracting the last mite from the poor widow, the church
itself was gathering up and hoarding gold, silver and precious gems in unbelievable
quantities. Not only was it taking in and gathering all the gold, silver and precious stones that
it could, but it acquired huge amounts of real estate, and the Catholic Church today is
undoubtedly the most fantastically wealthy institution on the face of the earth. Even through
the Dark Ages when poverty was widespread, mostly because of Christianity itself, we find
these huge and fabulously rich cathedrals, built in the midst of poverty, with gold encrusted
altars and apses and vaults and columns and walls. The leadership of the Church caused to be
built huge and great Basilicas, Cathedrals, Abbeys, Baptisteries, Mausoleums, Convents, and
Churches. Practically all of these were so lavish and so huge in comparison with the meager
surroundings of the times, that they flamboyantly stood out as the main repository of all the
material wealth — gold, silver and architectural lavishness — of both their era and their
geographical location. The church never has bothered to explain why it was so necessary to
have such lavish wealth on display to the worshipping faithful, who were told time and again
that it was evil to 'lay up treasures.' Unto this day, churches are built to be flamboyant, garish
and bizarre. Money seems to be no object.
The Vatican, that citadel of 'spiritual' leadership, which also preaches, 'lay not up treasures
on earth,' does not practice what it preaches. On the contrary, what it practices is indeed the
height of hypocrisy, and the antithesis of spirituality. It goes all out for laying up treasures on
earth. It has amassed unto itself a portfolio of 5.6 billion dollars in stocks alone, not to
their gospel of Love. When the communists came along and used physical torture as one of
their instruments of conquest, they had very little left to invent but what the Christians had
already utilized before them. And this is as can be expected, since it was Jewish fiendishness
that designed the means of torture for both. Nor did the Church hesitate to use wholesale
warfare to batter down whole nations that did not submit to their religious dictation. In fact
during the 16th, 17th and 18th century the main causes of war were religious dissentions in
which one religious group sought to force their beliefs on their opposites by wholesale
warfare and slaughter. The communist record of using wholesale terror, both psychological
and physical, is so recent, so widespread and so well known that we need hardly review it
here.
In Russia alone the Jewish communist regime used terror on a scale unknown before in the
annals of history. In order to exterminate the best of the white race in Russia, namely the
white Russians, the Jews slaughtered some 20,000,000. The terror, the killings, the murders
defy the imagination of the average white man's mind. In any case, both communism and
Christianity are using, and have used, terror extensively, both psychological and physical, to
subjugate their victims. Whereas the Christians excelled in psychological terror, the
communists excel in physical terror. But in both cases the Jews were experts in using
whatever type of terror best accomplished their ends. Both communism and Christianityhave a book that presumably lays down the creed of their movement. Christianity has the
Jewish bible which was written by Jews, mostly about Jews, for the purpose of uniting the
Jewish race and for destroying the white race.
The communist bible is Karl Marx's Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto, written by
Karl Marx in conjunction with Friedrich Engels, both of whom were Jews. Both of these
Jewish creeds, communism and Christianity, are highly destructive, and when followed, tear
down the fabric of the society that has fallen victim to them. Christianity teaches the evilness
of man, that he is a no-good, unworthy sinner, that he is born in sin and that his every
instinct is evil. Communism preaches that the productive, creative element of our society,
namely the 'bourgeois' as they call them, is rotten and evil, and must be destroyed. It can be
safely said that any sound, healthy society that turned either to complete Christianity and
practiced all of its principles, or any society that practiced pure communism, would soon
destroy itself. Again we want to vigorously point out that contrary to what these kosher
konservatives are always telling us, communism is by no means the same as socialism or
collectivism. The latter are basic constructive elements of any healthy society, but
communism is an undisguised Jewish slave-labor camp. Both communism and Christianity
preach the equality of man. Christianity preaches that we are all equal in the eyes of the Lord,
whereas the communists preach that we all must become equal in the communist society.
The white race will be leveled down to where they are all equal to a horde of miserable slaves,
whereas every Jew, on the other hand, will be a king. Not only do both communism and
Christianity preach the equality of the individual, but they also preach the equality of races,
another vicious lie thrown in the face of Nature. Christianity and communism both have had
their schisms. In the case of Christianity, the followers that differed were called heretics and
in the case of communism, those that stray from the official line are called deviationists. In
the case of Christianity, the Great Schism, of course, was during the Reformation when the
Protestant segment developed and broke away from the Catholic Church. It then proceeded
to split and splinter in a thousand different directions from there on out, all to the detriment
Typos — p. 37: Contributon [= Contribution]; p. 47: psycho-analyists [=psycho-analysts]; p. 49: ill-favourd [=ill-favoured]; p. 50: uniniated [=uninitiated]; p. 61: Puritnaism [= Puritanism]; p. 70: emanicipated [=
emancipated]; p. 99: phychological [= psychological] p. 103: tenour [=tenor]; p. 106: perseverence [= perseverance]; p. 117: favouritsm [=favouritism]; p. 119: auhorized [= authorized]; p. 122: Scopenhauer [=Schopenhauer]
- p. 36 -Chapter III
Christianity Not the Thoughtful Man's Religion — I
When examining the answers Christianity gives to the questions manincessantly asks about himself, life and the Universe, it is essential toremember that these answers were made for a remote generation of menwhose knowledge, credulity, capacity for criticism and tendency tosuperstition, bear little resemblance to those of modern civilized people.Satisfying and meaningful as the myths and doctrines of Christianity mayhave proved to the populace in the early centuries of our era, it would beunrealistic to expect them to be accepted now with the same meek,unquestioning faith.
A generation that no longer believes in devils, demons and thedemoniacal etiology of disease; that has difficulty in imagining the transferof devils from two men into a herd of swine, and even more difficulty inbelieving that these very devils pleaded to be so transferred; a generationthat doubts the possibility of parthenogenesis in human beings, and haslong ago dropped the practice of "whipping boys", cannot see any sensein vicarious punishment, and is therefore unable to take on trust the storyof an Omnipotent Deity who could feel appeased and propitiated for thesins committed by beings he has himself created, by the death in agony of
his own beloved and only-begotten son — to such a generation, hardlyone aspect of the Christian mythology and the supernatural events itincludes appears to have even tolerable plausibility, let alone cogency. It would, therefore, be most astonishing if Christianity, instead ofbeing, as Professor A. N. Whitehead declares "in decay" (R.I.M. Chap. I, 7and IV, 3), were repeating the giant strides which marked its progressthroughout the Middle Ages. "Whence does ecclesiastical authority," Professor McDougalI asks,"derive the views it seeks to impose? — the answer is that they are
founded upon alleged historical events of a remote age,
- p. 37 -events of just such a nature as psychical research is concerned toinvestigate at first hand as contemporaneous events. However we regardthe evidence of these remote events, we can hardly claim that the lapse of
two thousand years has made the evidence of them less disputable, and inany case it is clear that mankind in general is ceasing to find that evidencesufficient". (R.S.L. Chap. V). This sums up the position very well and, in view of the vast library thatnow exists on the reasons for Unbelief — books which, from the works ofIngersoll to those of J. M. Robertson and Bertrand Russell, are easilyaccessible in most of our large towns — it seems unnecessary to dwell onthis aspect of the question. The intell igent reader who wishes to becomeacquainted with the attitude to Christianity of the Rationalists and
Agnostics, must however be warned against two forms of attack to whicheveryone embarking on a course of this kind lays himself open. The first,from the quarter of all Christians, no matter what their denomination, is tocharge the budding or accomplished Rationalist with hostility to all religionand with a total lack of any religious feeling whatsoever, as if to be anti-Christian must mean that a man rejects everything that the word "religion"suggests — a charge as impudent and absurd as to accuse a hostile criticof abstract and ultra-modern art of being inaccessible to the appeal of anyart at all. An example of this sort of charge may be found to be at least
implied in Mr. B. Lund Yates' article on Dr. Buchman's "Contributon toContemporary Thought" in H. October 1958. The second usually hails from the quarter of highbrow philosophicapologists of Christianity, who are wont to dwell voluptuously on theadmitted limitations of scientific knowledge and on all the latestinconclusive researches of scientists into the most obscure problems oflife, whether in the realms of physics, astronomy, geophysics, biology orgenetics; and who argue as if every scientific failure to reach certainty,which is honestly acknowledged by the scientists themselves, necessarily
adds to the score of Christian truths. This form of attack is admirablydenounced by Professor J. B. Pratt as follows: "Nor should we easily bedriven, by the temporary failure of science, into the arms of thesupernatural. . . . So great have been the achievements of science in thepast, so repeatedly has she brought forward explanations of the seeminglyinexplicable for those who
- p. 38 -waited patiently upon her, that the burden of proof is certainty on those
who urge us to flee to the supernatural — the burden, namely, of showingus that no scientific explanation is possible" (T.R.C. Chap. XX. See alsoS.A.R. Chap. I, where Sir J. Arthur Thomson makes a similar attack onthose who would make the limitations of science an argument for God). Meanwhile, these same apologists do everything possible and useevery debating room device, to obfuscate and bewilder the aspiringRationalist by means of torrents of more or less incomprehensibleverbiage, aimed at discrediting scientific discoveries and theories, anddefending the more obscure and more assailable tenets of the faith. Take, for instance, the churchmen's defence of the doctrine ofAtonement. I have already indicated the incredible features of this doctrinewhich today seems even more extravagantly fantastic than it did in 1889,when Bishop Lyttleton tried by the sweat of his brow to make it look likesense (see L.M.). For to us of the twentieth century, removed by well overtwo thousand years from the age when the ancient Israelites, believing inthe principle of vicarious suffering, practised animal sacrifice to propitiate
God for their sins, there is something so alien to common sense in thenotion of an all-powerful deity being able to derive any satisfaction fromwhipping-boy blood rites of this kind, and above all in his feeling placatedby them, that, not our reason alone, but every one of our sentiments ascivilized moderners, revolts against the whole conception of theAtonement as a relic of savage superstition. We even wonder whether aman like St. Paul, in the first century of our era, could have been altogethersane when, addressing the Romans, he said: "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; being
justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:whom God hath sent to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, todeclare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, throughthe forebearance of God". (Romans ii i, 23–26). This extraordinary doctrine is more lucidly and succinctly stated in thelatter part of the second of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of Englandas follows: "Christ, very God, and very man, who truly suffered, was crucifieddead and buried, to reconcile his Father to us, and to
- p. 39 -be a sacrifice not only for original guilt, but also for all actual sins of men." It is referred to again in Article XV, where we read of Jesus: "He cameto be the Lamb without spot, who, by sacrifice of himself once made,should take away the sins of the world." In Article XXVIII, we read that theLord's Supper is a sacrament "of our redemption by Christ's death", whilstin Article XXXI we are told that "The offering of Christ once made is thatperfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction, for all the sins of the
whole world both original and actual". The fact that this doctrine has been embarrassing churchmen moreand more with every fresh advance, however slight, of that enlightenmentwhich has been one of the few real blessings of the last hundred years,may be gathered from the spate of treatises which, ever since the middle oflast century, have been produced to defend and rationalize it where itclashes most violently with modern conceptions. Of these defences, it would be impossible here to sketch even thebarest summary; but the book by the Right Rev. A. C. Headlam, late
Bishop of Gloucester (The Atonement , 1935), is worth reading asexemplifying the extreme difficulty modern theologians obviouslyexperience in trying to explain away the redemption of human sin astraditionally related by St. Paul and the Church, and also their habit ofbaffling the potential Rationalist with reams of more or less relevantverbiage in defence of their doctrines. "It seems very difficult to accept a theory", says Bishop Headlam,"which seems to represent the loving kindness of the Son appeasing byhis sacrifice the wrath of the Father" (Chap. II, 1). Yes, indeed! though whatthe Bishop really means is that whereas centuries ago it was child's playto gain acceptance for such a theory, today it is not so easy; and he admitsthat "there have been more theological differences" on this matter "than onany other Christian doctrine" (Introduction). Yet, in spite of 191 pages ofthe most painstaking and tortuous pleading, it cannot be said that the LordBishop extricates himself with much success from the awkward net ofimprobabili ties. He never attains to the straightforward clarity of F. J.
Sheed, for instance, who, in Theology and Society (1947, Chap. XVIII, 1),says outright that Jesus "offered himself as a sacrifice to God for the sins ofthe race"; and after reading and rereading the more important
- p. 40 -passages of the book, especially the last chapter, it is still difficult tounderstand how he can feel sufficiently satisfied with his explanation toconclude as follows: "The Atonement through Christ was the revelation through the cross,
and in no other way could it be accomplished save by the sacrifice of loveand obedience as revelation of the nature of God; it was the only powerthrough which sin could be taken away and therefore it was propitiation forsin, and therefore Christ died for our sins and bore the whole weight of oursins upon the cross" (Chap. III, 5). I hope many, more acute and intellectual than I can claim to be, wil lalso find it hard to grasp the logical justification of these two "therefores".Surely it is this sort of vague, confusing verbiage that has done most todiscredit theology in the minds of sensible folk. The fact of the crucifixion is
not disputed, the further fact that it was a propitiation for sin is also notcontested by the learned prelate. The logical conclusion must therefore bewhat Bishop Headlam and others like him do their utmost to circumvent —namely, that some authority, presumably God the Father, required to beappeased and propitiated for the sins of man by the death of his belovedand only-begotten son on an ancient Roman torture machine. ProfessorW. H. Griffith Thomas, D.D., for instance, in a chapter on the second of theThirty-nine Articles, acknowledges that "expiation" seems "to be decidedlytruer to the Biblical conception" of the crucifixion than mere communion
(The Principles of Theology , 1930). But if this is so, some authority musthave required expiation for men's sins. Who was this authority? And howdid Christ's death constitute the expiation, unless it was a vicarious form ofpunishment that was thought necessary? Is not the straightforward answerto this that God himself required the expiation and consequently it was topropitiate him that it was done? Why not admit it? Because thesetheologians know that modern thought can no longer accept it — that'swhat explains their tortuous, prolix and mostly obscure spates of verbiage. Another typical instance of the same kind is an earlier work by Canon
B. H. Streeter, called Reality (1929). He, too, tried to explain away thepalpably incredible aspects — to the modern mind at least — of Christ'sdeath on the cross to save mankind from the consequences of their sin.Evidently aware of the great difficulty intelligent contemporaries must havein accepting the
- p. 41 -idea of a loving god whose wrath over the sins of his own creatures couldbe appeased by the cruel death of his son. Canon Streeter takes eightpages to try to accomplish what Bishop Headlam attempted to do in awhole book. But, apart from its commendable brevity, it cannot be said thathis explanation is more satisfactory than the Bishop's. After wanderingaimlessly and with unflinching prolixity over wholly irrelevant side-issues,and expatiating upon matters which only an indulgent chairman of debatewould allow to pass, he leaves the reader, now tapping both feet withimpatience, without any frank and unequivocal answer to the one most
pressing question: "Was the crucifixion a means of propitiating God for hisown creatures' sins?" Unless the frank answer is felt by modernchurchmen to be damaging to the credibility, and hence to the prestige, oftheir religion, why do they thus hesitate to give it? Finally, after having reached no conclusion which a fair mindedreader could reasonably judge as at all illuminating, Canon Streetermakes the very self-revelatory and, I submit, significant statement: "The simple Christian", he says, "who is content to look on thesacrifice of Christ as just a 'mystery' is here wiser than the theologian who
insists on analysing its intellectual content. Such a conception, if true at all,is so because of the truth of quality it represents; and the more it isenvisaged, not as logic, but as a picture, the richer the truth it will convey"(Chap. VIII). It is very sensible of this divine, to leave the matter unsolved in thehands of the "simple Christian". It was certainly the best escape, althoughit wil l be noted that even to the very end, when he has contrived thisrelease for himself, he is still incapable of clear unequivocal language. No reader who turns to the books I have quoted wil l, I believe, find that
I have misrepresented them; and anyone who ventures, as I have done, toconsult other cognate works, will I think discover little to modify in the claimI have made that today churchmen are not only deeply embarrassed by thetraditional view of the Atonement as set forth by St. Paul and the second ofthe Church of England's Thirty-nine Articles; but, despite the moststrenuous efforts, are also at a complete loss to make any sense of it, or atleast to make it appear sensible to the modern enlightened mind. Thus, when St. Paul told the Romans: "God commendeth his
- p. 42 -love towards us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved fromwrath through him" (Romans v. 8 and 9), he hardly foresaw the manydifficulties he was preparing for twentieth-century divines. For, when weask, "Whose wrath is here meant?" and, "How are we justified by hisblood?" we receive no plain, straightforward and satisfying answer fromthe modern theologian, but merely involved make-believe explanationswhich rather obscure than shed light on the problem.
When with deep disappointment we turn the pages of the learnedtreatises where the Christian myths and doctrines, which once seemedunobjectionable and eminently credible, are polished up, refitted andchastened by skilful experts to attract a more enlightened and criticalgeneration, we have the uncomfortable feeling that, instead of aconspiracy of silence, a conspiracy of noise and blustering verbosity isunder way, and that its object is less to illuminate, elucidate and explain,than to give the impression that such is being done; for, to the simple manand woman. Canon Streeter's "simple Christian" in fact, it must seem thatsuch volumes of verbiage cannot possibly be without substantial content.Even when they fail to see it, they feel persuaded that some unmistakableand satisfying conclusion must be lurking somewhere amid all thosewords, and therefore that none of their confidence need be forfeited. This is the snare against which aspiring Rationalists have to bewarned. Not that one fails to sympathize with these desperate apologistsof a creed which, according to B. Lund Yates, is "crumbling" (H. October
1958. Article: Dr. Buchman's "Contribution to Contemporary Thought"). Onthe contrary! As one reads these panting paragraphs, in whichtheologians, on the point of exhaustion from their fruitless labours, try bypiling up words and endlessly analysing side issues to give theimpression that they are offering a plain answer to a plain question, it isimpossible not to feel rather sorry for them. Nevertheless, when we compare the "explanation" of the Atonementby a divine, such as the Rev. and Hon. Arthur Lyttelton, which coversthirty-nine pages of (L.M. Chap. VII), with the later and more sophisticated
explanations just examined, we are at once struck by the greater naïvetéand frankness of the former — probably an indication of the fact that thewriter in Lux Mundi , some seventy years ago, was less acutely aware thanare our
- p. 43 -modern divines of the revolt felt by modern minds at the idea of anomnipotent God's being propitiated by the blood of his only-begotten sonfor the sins of his own creatures.
Thus the Rev. Arthur Lyttelton openly acknowledges the connectionbetween Christ's sacrifice on the cross and "the ideas inspired by the[Mosaic] law" — i.e. "the sacrificial system of the Old Testament". He alsoacknowledges its propitiatory character. But because for some reasonwhich he does not clarify, "as propitiation, therefore, and as reunion [withGod] the Atonement must come from without and cannot be accomplishedby those who themselves have need of it", the sacrifice must be vicarious.The propitiatory sacrifice", he says, "which is to effect our reunion must, forwe are powerless to offer it, come from without."
Then he adds, "If the redemptive work of Christ satisfies theseconditions it is evident that it is not a simple but a very complex fact." Verytrue! And he honestly concludes, "that of this complex fact no adequateexplanation can be given". Nevertheless, he makes no attempt to dodge the issue. He admits that"The death of Christ is, in the first place to be regarded as propitiatory"."On the one hand", he says, "there is man's desire, natural and almostinstinctive, to make expiation for his guilt [is this instinctive in Man? Surelyonly in a few men in the civil ization of the West!]: on the other, there is the
tremendous fact of the wrath of God against sin. The death of Christ is theexpiation for those past sins which have laid the burden of guilt upon thehuman soul and it is also the propitiation of the wrath of God." So here we have a full and complete admission by an eminentChurch of England divine, writing in 1889, of all I have claimed about theAtonement, and what follows in his argument really does not alter thematter. It is merely the usual rather lame, circumlocutionary rigmarole withwhich theologians try to make the Atonement appear sensible. Stil l, thecontrast between the Rev. Arthur Lyttelton's frank admissions in 1889 andthe wriggling and writhing apologetics of more modern divines who areprobably more alive to the revolt felt by twentieth-century minds against thewhole idea of an omnipotent God needing, and being propitiated by, avicarious sacrifice for human sin — surely this contrast is very revealing. Meanwhile, those members of the public who are still faithful
to the Church, continue to believe that "through Christ crucified, Christianshave found peace with God" and "have tasted the joy of forgiveness forpast sin" (E. J. Bicknell: A Theological Introduction to the Thirty-nine
Articles of the Church of England , 1925, Section on Article II), and stillupholding what Bishop Headlam stigmatizes (by means of invertedcommas) as the "orthodox" view of the Atonement (op. cit., Introduction) —namely the view that the Rev. Arthur Lyttelton accepts — those samemembers of the general public continue, according to Professor W. H.Griffith Thomas, to lift up their voices and persist in saying and singing: "In
the cross of Christ I glory!" The more vulgar, though not the less ardent believers in the"orthodox" view, sing with louder voices:
"Whiter than the snow! Whiter than the snow! Wash me in the blood of the Lamb And I shall be whiter than the snow."
Be this as it may, my object in making this long digression on the
subject of the Atonement was less to expose the doubtful aspects of thedoctrine in question, than to show by means of a striking example the wayin which the pleadings of modern theologians may baffle and bewilder thepotential Rationalist by the sheer weight of words alone, and give him atleast the impression of having been offered a satisfying answer to his moreawkward questions.
* * * *
There is, however, no need to dwell on the more palpableimprobabili ties of the faith in order to be convinced, in the first place, thatChristianity cannot have been revealed by an omnipotent deity. Creator ofAll that is; secondly, that it has not that authenticity, that dateless, enduringvalidity which would have made it hold good for all time and proveacceptable to the men of all ages. For, not only are the canonical books ofthe holy scriptures, which constitute its authority, riddled with examples ofsuperstitious beliefs, exploded theories about natural phenomena, andfalse psychology, inconsistent with divine knowledge and wisdom andtherefore also with the alleged supernatural provenance of the sacredliterature; but all of them, full of errors as they are, also at once reveal thekind of audience to which they were suited and to whose standards ofcriticism,
- p. 45 -knowledge and enlightenment, they were adjusted — an audience, that isto say, less civilized and less cultivated than were the educated minorityeven in the early eighteenth century. These features alone, by dating much of the appeal of these "sacred
writings" and restricting their credibility to an age much more primitive thanour own, seem to dispose at once of the claim that they have divineauthority; and that this claim is indeed made, is shown by the Church'sdenial of this authority to the so-called "apocryphal" books. In view of the many treatises, including above all Bertrand Russell 'sWhy I Am Not a Christian , in which the innumerable Biblical errors,
whether in astronomy, geophysics, biology or physiology, are exposed,further examples of the kind seem unnecessary here. But the sort ofhowlers that are much less often exposed by Rationalists — if at all — arethe more interesting and, as reflecting on the alleged divine provenance ofthe Bible, more damaging psychological ones, which recent discoverieshave helped to reveal, but which are glaring enough to have struckintelligent readers at any time. It is indeed surprising that thinkers likeMontaigne and Voltaire should have failed to notice this kind of Biblicalerror, especially as the major instances of it are allegedly perpetrated by
God the Father and his Son. To save time and space I shall confine myselfto these. Their importance will relieve me of the necessity of dwelling onthe discrepancies usually adduced by Rationalists. The first important instance occurs in the fifth commandment: "Honourthy father and thy mother that thy days may be long in the land which theLord thy God giveth thee." Here the howler consists in ascribing to volition an attitude of mindunamenable to the will and only the reaction to a suitable stimulus. Honourcan no more be summoned at will than admiration or respect. One may
pretend to comply with the command and go through the motionsdisplaying admiration or respect; but the effort is only histrionic, and thesame may be said of honour. Thus, in order to ensure the end this commandment contemplated, itshould read, "Parents make yourselves honourable in the sight of yourchildren, that they may honour you." Difficult as this achievement may be,it is at least possible, whereas the other behest cannot possibly be obeyedwhen its appropriate stimulus is lacking. If, therefore, the commandmentwas accurately reported by Moses (which Christians may say is not
- p. 46 -certain) the God of the Old Testament must be charged with an elementaryhowler in psychology. The same comment applies to God's commandment to the Israelitesin Deuteronomy vi. 5, which reads, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God withall thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might." Now, in Markxii. 30 and 31, Jesus, in what he calls the "first commandment of all",repeats his father's psychological error and, in his second commandment,
adds an error of his own, which I shall explain in a moment. But, beforedoing so, it is essential to discuss the error common to both of thesecommandments. I have commented on the error of supposing that people can becommanded to honour a fellow-being. But in the case of love, theinefficacy of any command to generate the required feeling must be evenmore apparent. For, besides embodying honour, love is a feeling of muchgreater depth and range. It involves above all a sense of attachment, ofdevotion, reciprocity and warmth, of which honour may be destitute withoutinjury. Therefore, to assume that it can be evoked by a behest is apsychological error even more elementary than that already noted inregard to honour; and it at once disposes of any attempt to establish thedivinity of him who could be guilty of it. But what is not so immediatelyapparent is the tragic amount of misery and misunderstanding which thismajor error in psychology has been causing ever since it was firstpreached to Europeans, stamped with the exalted authority of their God.
For, when once we are told that love is volitional, we naturally regardany diminution, any cooling off, and above all any cessation of it, in afriend, relative, or spouse — which, especially in married couples owing tothe normal abatement of passion, is the inevitable sequel to extravagantlyoverrated attachment — as a deliberate act, as an intentional withholdingof a feeling which, if the inconstant person liked , could be continued atwhite heat. Very naturally, therefore, it is interpreted as a wanton insult, apersonal injury, the outcome of malice prepense. And that is precisely howtoday every Western man and woman regards any decline in love which
may unwittingly occur even in wholly admirable and normal folk. Nor, iflove is thought of as a product of the will, is it anything but understandablethat any sudden or insensible abatement of it, should seem an affront anda heartless attempt to wound the once loved fellow-being.
- p. 47 - It would be impossible to compute the number of tragedies, divorces,separations, family feuds, and poisoned lives, that have resulted from thewidespread inculcation of this one fundamental error in psychology, to
which Christianity gave currency throughout the civilized world —especially as St. Paul thought fit to aggravate the Lord's error by saying tothe unfortunate Colossians and Ephesians, "Husbands, love your wives"(Colossians ii. 19; Ephesians v. 25). It is moreover typical of Christianity'sfalsification of human psychology that, commenting on this passage, theRev. Hubert Northcott should remark: "It is the advice of a wisepsychologist. If it had been always followed the psycho-analyists wouldhave had empty consulting-rooms" (V.O.P. Chap. VI). The very converse istrue!
Average men and women cannot be expected to judge matters ofpsychology accurately, let alone objectively, and if from childhood theyhave been led to believe on the highest authority of all that love is anemotion that can be conjured up at wil l, they are unlikely to view withcomplacency its gradual or sudden withdrawal by one who has hithertoprofessed it for them. As that astute psychologist, Stendhal, so aptly observed, "L'amour
nait et s'éteint sans que la volonté y ait la moindre part" (De l'Amour , 1822,Chap. I. "Love is born and dies without the will playing the smallest part in
the matter"); and thirty years later, Proudhon echoed the point of viewwhen he said, "L'amour est entièrement soustrait à la volonté de celui qui
l'éprouve" (Amour et Mariage , 1860, Chap. II. ix. "Love is whollyindependent of the will of him who feels it"). Less explicitly, but issuingfrom the same idea, Shakespeare makes Julia remark that "love will not bespurn'd to what it loathes" (The Two Gentlemen of Verona , Act V. Sc. II).But it would be unfair to expect commonplace folk so completely toovercome what they have imbibed about will and love at Sunday school,as to reach similarly sound conclusions. This does not mean, however,that it would be unfair to expect a deity to arrive at them. But Jesus's second commandment — "Thou shalt love thy neighbouras thyself" — is open to a further criticism; for it assumes that the love ofself may be postulated of everyone, which is quite untrue. Indeed in timeswhen much defectiveness, morbidity, deformity and failing stamina is rife,self love is extremely rare; and it might well be argued that misanthropy
- p. 48 -has its origin in self-hatred. Hence, if a happy world is the object to beachieved, the first prerequisite would be the breeding of a people free fromall possible causes of self-hatred and self-contempt — or from what Adlercalled "inferiority feelings", which I think he rightly maintained were alwaysthe outcome of a sense of organic inferiority. The alert observer of mankind knows that what causes the cripple, theincurable invalid, and all defective and very ugly people, to feel bitterabout humankind, to be difficult to live with, and to burst with resentment at
the slightest provocation, is at bottom their invincible dissatisfaction withthemselves. Bacon was aware of this; but by applying his observationsonly to the deformed he appears to limit them only to extreme examples ofsubnormality, although we know that to a lesser degree resentment of akind is likely to be felt even by less ill-favoured creatures (see his essay onDeformity ). His accurate reading of the mind of the deformed, however,shows him as belonging to an age of far deeper psychological insight thanour nineteenth century, in which a Charlotte M. Yonge had the intellectualperfidy to depict her defectives and incurables as saints (see, for instance,
her Pillars of the House and other novels). The heartache felt by the afflicted, even when they are most cultivatedpeople, inevitably generates feelings of envy if not always of resentment,and as they are denied self-contentment and self-love, it is difficult for themto feel benevolent to others. De Quincey was well aware of this, for heremarked of Gifford, "a deformed man with the spiteful nature sometimestoo developed in the deformed" (Posthumous Works , 1891, XIII). Indeference to popular sentiment, he is careful to say "sometimes"; but, hadhe known Adler's thesis, he would probably have omitted it. Thus, by
neglecting human biological realities and thereby promoting themultiplication of the ill-favoured, the beliefs that have governed Europeanconduct for two millenniums have created conditions which deprive man ofthe capacity for self-love and hence of the very velleity to the love of hisneighbour. Goethe knew this and, referring to the European's general lack ofgoodwill towards his neighbour, and of love and kindliness in socialintercourse, he said, "How can anyone have kindly feelings for others andbehave kindly to them when he is il l at ease with himself?" (G.G. 12.3.
1828. "Wie soll einer gegen andere Wohl-
- p. 49 -fallen empfinden und ausüben wenn es ihm selber nicht wohl ist?" ).Will iam Hazlitt, a year earlier, had expressed the same idea when hewrote, "Those people who are uncomfortable in themselves aredisagreeable to others" (Essays, On Disagreeable People , 1827). In short,no good psychologist can doubt that the ill-favoured, who incessantlyresent their wretched plight, never cease to whisper in their hearts: "II me
faut prendre ma revanche sur ma honte" (Le Roman Inachevé , by M.Aragon, 1958. "I must avenge myself for my shame"), and cannot thereforefeel even goodwill, much less love, for their better conditioned neighbours.That great realist, Aristotle, implied much the same idea when he said, "Aperson is incapable of happiness if he is absolutely ugly in appearance orlow-born" (Nicomachean Ethics , trans. by J. E. C. Welldon. Book I. Chap.IX).
Thus, apart from the misery Western beliefs have caused, by thelegion of defectives they have fostered and bred, we have to reckon withthe misery resulting from the malaise every ill-favourd creature inevitablyfeels. When, therefore, Jesus said, "Love thy neighbour as thyself", he notonly failed to appreciate that love cannot be enjoined, but also failed toforesee that, by linking this teaching with the racially lethal precepts of thedecadent Greek, Socrates, his followers would one day make hiscommand doubly unrealizable by debilitating the creatures to whom it was
addressed. In this way the religion that enjoined love of the neighbourupon its believers, ended in ensuring nothing but hate. This, however, in no way completes the charge of deficientpsychological insight against the holy family; for we have yet to considerJesus's attitude to the child. Indeed, for many years it has been my privateopinion that most of the mischief due to excessive child adulation andchild spoiling, which has at last culminated in well-nigh suppressingdiscipline in all Christian communities, has sprung from Jesus' allegedremark in Matthew xix. 14: "Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to
come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." To the faithful, who could hardly be expected to dismiss it as a young,inexperienced bachelor's shot in the dark, this remark has meant centuriesof the most disastrous misunderstandings and distortions of juvenilepsychology. Narrowly scrutinized by anyone with a tolerably retentivememory, it reveals itself at once as an amiable fiction; for, if the traditionalview of the
- p. 50 -
kingdom of heaven be accepted as correct and the years of childhood areaccurately remembered, it is obvious that the child, even the most normaland civilized, would be quite out of place in it. Thus the human world could only accept Jesus's statement aboutchildren as true, if it had utterly forgotten the period of its immaturity. Given some knowledge of the new psychology and the presentscientific view of children, we must conclude that when Jesus spoke aboutchildren's fitness for the kingdom of heaven, he was either utterly ignorantof children's true nature, or else had in mind a region completely
abandoned to amorality — i.e. where everyone displayed habitualaggressiveness, sadism, duplicity, cunning, obscenity, sexual curiosityand play, hate, vindictiveness and homicidal jealousy, compounded withegoism, egotism, mendacity and the reckless exercise of the will to power-not to mention coprophil ia, coprolangia and other strange traits, all ofwhich normal (not merely average) children are known to display. Nor am I here referring to mere infants, but to children up to seven oreight years of age, in whom scientific psychology has found all the above-mentioned traits more or less conspicuously manifested. (For abundantscientific documentation of these statements which, to the uniniatedEnglish reader will seem at least startling, if not actually malicious, see myThe Child: An Adult's Problem , 1948.) We have therefore to choose between accepting the view of akingdom of heaven as a repository of souls anathematized by all we knowof traditional Christian morality, in which case Matthew xix. 14 has somevalidity; or else as a place fit only for the haute volée of Christian "good
people", in which case Matthew xix. 14 is nonsense. Unfortunately for the Christian world, it appears from the earliest daysnever to have understood Jesus as holding the first view, which is the onlyone that would have made sense of his remark. On the contrary, inferringfrom the fact that Satan had been fired from the kingdom of heaven, that itcould be no place for creatures anything like him, Christians everywherefavoured the second view and consequently concluded that children must
be, if not actually saints, at least angelic enough to be candidates forcanonization.
- p. 51 - We have but to read the Apocalypse of Peter , of the year A.D. 170, tofind that this was so even at that early date. Heaven is there described asa place where, apart from its divine hosts, only such souls as hadbelonged to "high priests" and "righteous men" could be encountered. Nordid St. Paul, or the Church Fathers, from Clement to Augustine, hold anyother view. It is true that Augustine in his Confessions admits having seen some
disquieting traits in children, incompatible with Jesus's estimate of them.He therefore tries to smooth over the difficulty by suggesting that thepopular idea that children are "innocent" was to be understood, not as adisinclination to hurt and harm, but as a physical, or merely muscular,inability to implement the inclination to hurt and harm. And he supports thissuggestion with evidence that might have been lifted almost word for wordout of works by Aichhorn, Miss Susan Isaacs, or Freud himself (seetranslation by William Watts, 1912 Loeb Classical Library, Book I. Chap.VII).
But St. Augustine is an exception among the Church Fathers andeven among Christians in general, and we can only assume that hissurprising honesty accounted for unguarded remarks of the kind I havequoted. In any case, the Christian world that has had access to the HolyScriptures very naturally argued as follows: "As heaven is a place whitheronly the pure and the rigid observers of Christian morals can expect to go,children who, according to Jesus, are its natural personae gratae , must bespotless and innocent." This conclusion was certainly contingent on completely forgetting
one's own childhood and one's childhood's contemporaries. But badmemory for unpleasant truths is not uncommon and, as psychologicalinsight is a rare gift, it is not astonishing that Jesus's remark about childrenshould have grown by tradition into meaning that children are morallysuperior to adults — a belief still widely held by English spinsters inparticular (unconsciously revealed by the awed tones with which theyusually address young children) and by all puritans. For Jesus's statementappears to such people to be abundantly borne out by the single fact thatchildren are supposed to know nothing of our "dirty secrets". In any case, Wordsworth, like the whole of his generation, wascompletely hoodwinked by Jesus's remark and, in his Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1806),
- p. 52 -which, if we forget its false psychology, must strike us as one of the finestpoems in the English language, assured his generation that, "Heaven lies
about us in our infancy", and that as children we "trail clouds of glory" from"God who is our home". But, in addressing his fellow men and women withthis poem, he was preaching to the converted; for hardly anyone inEngland in those days doubted the truth of Jesus's pronouncement. Thirty-three years before Wordsworth's famous poem was published.Dr. Johnson, thanks probably to his prodigious memory, had all in vainflatly contradicted Jesus's dictum and thus, by anticipation, denied theWordsworthian view of children (B. 14.9.1773). But, for some reason orother, nobody appears to have taken the slightest notice of Johnson's
remark. It is even possible that, when he made it, even he himself wasunaware of having joined issue with the founder of his religion. Not untilsome threescore years after Johnson's death did a shrewder reader of thehuman, and above all of the child's, heart than ever Wordsworth was,openly contradict the latter, although he too did so in vain; for the readingpublic in every age asks only for the confirmation of its many illusions andsuperstitions. Thus, when Browning published his Soul's Tragedy , eventhe bare handful of English readers of poetry were not moved to modifytheir assumptions about children. Besides, how in 1846 could Browning,
unsupported by the scientific psychology that has since established hispoint of view, avail against Wordsworth standing on the New Testament?Spencer in 1861, in Chapter III of his Education , certainly lent Browningpowerful support; but at a time when psychological insight was perhaps atits lowest ebb, what could he do against Jesus and Wordsworth? It was probably about the same time, or only a very little later, thatEugène Delacroix in Paris, voiced much the same view as Johnson,Browning and Spencer about children and, although we know the Frenchto be gifted psychologists, Delacroix no doubt owed much of his
psychological flair to his father, Talleyrand, just as Browning probablyowed his to his German mother. At all events, Baudelaire quotes the famous French painter as saying:"Je me souviens fort bien que quand j'étais enfant j'étais un monstre . . . ce
n'est que par la douleur, le châtiment, et par l'exercice progressif de la
raison que l'homme diminue peu à peu sa méchanceté naturelle"
(L'Oeuvre et la vie d'Eugène
- p. 53 -
Delacroix , 1863. "I remember very well that, as a child, I was a monster . . .only through suffering, through being punished for one's trespasses, andthrough the exercise of reason, does man reduce by little and li ttle hisnatural wickedness"). Commenting on this passage, Baudelaire says, "ainsi, par le simple
bon sens, il faisait un retour sur l'idée catholique, car on peut dire que
l'enfant en général est relativement à l'homme en général, beaucoup plus
rapproché du péché original" (Ibid . "Thus, by sheer common sense, he[i.e., Delacroix] reverted to the Catholic point of view; for it may well besaid that children in general, compared with men in general, stand muchcloser to Original Sin"). It is impossible now to dwell on the enormous amount of injury thedivine error in psychology which we have been considering has done tosocial l ife, especially in England and America. Suffice it to say that, bymaking children sacrosanct and representing them as morally superior toadults, whereby the adult's sense of authority has been undermined, it has
led to scandalous excesses in paedolatry and child-spoiling, with theresult that an end has been put to all proper discipl ine both in the homeand elsewhere. For the discoveries and doctrines of modern psychology,with their confirmation of Johnson, Browning, Spencer, Delacroix andBaudelaire, and their refutation of Wordsworth, have not yet spreadbeyond a limited circle; and meanwhile every puritan in England andAmerica, like every ignoramus elsewhere, continues to look on Jesus'smisleading view of the matter as final and conclusive. Perhaps the oddestfeature of at least the English situation in regard to this capital error about
the child, is the fact that Wordsworth actually described his great butwholly mistaken poem as written "From Recollections of Early Childhood";so that he added the faults of a feeble memory to the cardinalpsychological fault of his deity. Be this as it may, it can hardly be claimed that psychological insight isa strong point with the Holy Family, and although this aspect of Christianmyth and teaching is never dwelt upon by Rationalists and Agnostics, itsurely cannot be denied that the few grave errors in psychology which Ihave shown to have been committed by the Christian gods constitute,
apart from any other considerations, a serious objection to the claim thatChristianity has been supernaturally revealed.
- p. 54 - Referring to the Bible, Will iam James suggests that it would bepossible in the light of one theory of revelation to "allow that a book maywell be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and deliberate humancomposition, if only it be a true record of the inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of their fate" (V.R.E. Lecture I).
But, however ready we might be to concede this point when the errorsin question are traceable to human ignorance, we surely cannot do sowhen these errors are, as I have shown, not only those of the divine sourceof the alleged revelation itself, but have also formed an essential andprecious part of the very teaching peculiar to the religion founded by thatdivine source. To this the reader may object that even the errors which Ihave here attributed to the deity and his putative son, might also be humanin origin and result from either false reporting or inaccurate transcriptionsof reports. True enough! But, in that case, there is an end to scriptural
authority for any doctrine whatsoever, and we can no longer rely on theaccuracy of any statement attributed to the deity himself, whethercompatible or not with modern knowledge; and the claim that our religionand the scriptures constituting its authority are revealed ceases to haveany validity. Since, moreover, James never specifies the sort of errors thatfall short of discrediting the claim that a book has been supernaturallyrevealed, and certainly makes no allusion to the psychological errors onthe part of the Holy Family, to which I have called attention, his plea maysafely be dismissed as unimportant except as it relates to the kind of errorsin Holy Writ to which Rationalists chiefly allude.
- p. 55 -Chapter IV
Christianity Not the Thoughtful Man's Religion — II
In Chapter II it was shown how falsely restricted is that view of religionwhich identifies it with a particular code of morals and thereby overlooksits essential feature — man's relationship to the power or powers behindphenomena; and the implication was that the mind capable of holding thisfalse view must be unable to imagine the awfulness of the invisibleinfluences at work in the wings, as it were, of the world stage. Yet, no onewho has lived in a Protestant country can fail to have noticed theimpressive regularity with which people adopt this view, especially if they
are Nonconformists, among whom its popularity is due, in addition to thesources already suggested, probably to some extent to their Puritanism,their tendency to use morality as a means of hindering the expression ofevery normal human passion and the satisfaction of every normal humanappetite. A long acquaintance with such people who, nowadays in England atleast, are preponderatingly "lower middle class", compels the conclusionthat with them, as with the sophist, Socrates, morality is an obsession. Itprovides them with an ideal cathartic for relieving their unconscious, pent-
up hatred and envy of their fellow-men; a weapon with which to tormentthem without incurring the risk of retaliation. For even at the hands of anonlooking crowd, a moral persecutor of his neighbour runs little risk ofeither censure or abuse. Thus Puritans can bask securely in the glow ofsocial approbation whilst freely venting man's common but secret hatred ofmankind. For, as Pascal once observed: "Tous les hommes se haïssent
naturellement" (P. Ière Partie, Article IX. ix), and many years later Humeremarked, "In general i t may be affirm'd that there is no such passion inhuman minds as the love of mankind" (A Treatise of Human Nature , Book
III, Part II, Sect. I). No wonder Puritans
- p. 56 -revere morality with fervour and set it above what is the major factor in alltrue religion. Aware of this unpleasant feature of Puritanism, Macaulay denied thatPuritan wrath at bear-baiting was prompted by humanitarian feeling.Puritans hated it, he says, "not because i t gave pain to the bear, butbecause it gave pleasure to the spectators". (History of England , Ed. 1849,
Vol. I. Chap. II). Despite what has often been alleged about Puritan hypocrisy andinsincerity, moreover, Puritans as a body were not invariably two-faced intheir insistence on their self-denying moral code. Apart from a fewTartuffes, on the whole they practised what they preached and were aspainstaking in blighting their own as other people's lives. And this is stillso, as may be seen, above all, in their own sex-relations. For the fact that,in their restrictive lusts as occult misanthropists, they naturally pay mostheed to man's deepest and most urgent passion, cannot have escapedanyone familiar with their character. Indeed, the very word "Puritan" hasnow come to bear a chiefly sex-phobic connotation. Seizing on those features of Christianity which suggest hostility tosex, they use them to thwart and harass their fellows where they knowfrustration most hurts, and in this they usually exceed the severity withwhich they restrict gastronomical and other pleasures. Yet when we studytheir own way of life we have to acknowledge that, in the choice of their
partners in sexual pastimes and in the choice and preparation of their food,they spare themselves as little as they do their fellow-men. From the time of Cromwell the inferiority of their culinary arts has beenproverbial (see A Short History of Social Life in England , by M. B. Synge,1906, Chap. XVI), and the Englishwoman's black record as a cook mayperhaps with justice be ascribed to the fact that in England the moralclimate has for centuries, independently of denominational differences,been tainted with Puritanism. The self-denial in venery, which the Puritan tries to force on his fellow-
men, however, he imposes no less rigorously on himself. Indeed, few whohave lived among low church. Nonconformist and dissenting communitiesin England, can have failed to notice the painful regularity with which themen choose their spouses less for their sex-appeal than for theirqualification to wean them from venery altogether. It is as if the Puritan,obsessed with the Lord's disapproval of sexual intercourse, hoped
- p. 57 -to mitigate his Maker's wrath by demonstrating beyond a doubt that he had
done all he could reasonably be expected to do to make his carnalsatisfactions as unpleasant as possible. For, when we see the kind ofwomen whom, especially in rural areas, he is wont to take to his bosomand make the mother of his children, we hardly know which to admire themore, the intensity of his religious zeal or the courage of his carnal lust. Be this as it may, whilst Christian doctrine, except according toJames, the Jansenists and Protestants in general, can hardly be helddirectly responsible for the prevalent view, in countries professing theReformed Faith, that religion is only morality, no doubt whatsoever exists
about the deep Christian roots of the sex-phobia that has polluted Westerncivilization for the last two thousand years. Indeed, this charge is amongthe more prominent that modern historians and sociologists usually bringagainst the religion; and although, as we shall see, it may not be thegravest, it is sufficiently important and peculiar to Christianity to justify, byitself alone, serious doubts concerning the alleged supernaturalprovenance of the religion. When Nietzsche declared that Christianity had "made somethingimpure of sexuality and defiled the very source and quintessential
condition of our life" (The Twilight of the Idols , Sect. 10, 4), he said nomore than the plain truth. Bertrand Russell, referring to the consequencesof Christianity's sex-phobia, observes, "Almost every adult in a Christiancommunity is more or less diseased nervously as a result of the taboos onsex knowledge when he or she is young" (Rationalist Annual , 1930).Heine, from whom Nietzsche undoubtedly obtained many a valuable hintconcerning this and other aspects of Christianity, says of it: "Being unableto do away altogether with material and earthly things, Christianity haseverywhere tarnished and defiled them. It has disparaged and slanderedthe noblest pleasures, so that mankind's sensuality, obliged to dissemble,led to the birth of falsehood and sin. . . . According to the Christianstandpoint the material side of life is evil per se , which, after all, is veritablynot only slander but hideous blasphemy" (D. Buch II: "Das Christentum,
unfähig die Materie zu vernichten, hat sie überall fletriert, es hat die
adelsten Genüsse herabgewürdigt, und die Sinne müssten heucheln, und
es entstand Lüge und Sünde. . . . Nach ihrer Weltanschauung ist die
Materie an und für sich böse, was doch wahrlich eine Verleumdung ist,
eine entsetzliche
- p. 58 -Gotteslästerung" ). In an earlier work, Heine, speaking of Christianity, says,"in one of its first dogmata, there is a damnation of all flesh; and it not onlygrants the spirit supremacy over the flesh, but would also fain deaden theflesh altogether in order to exalt the spirit" (Die Romantische Schule , 1833:"Ich spreche von jener Religion, in deren ersten Dogmen eine Verdamnis
alles Fleisches enthalten ist, und die dem Geiste nicht bloss eine
Obermacht über das Fleisch zugesteht, sondern auch dieses abtödten
will, um den Geist zu verherrlichen" ). But the witnesses to this prurient and negative character ofChristianity are legion and the charge they make now is a commonplace.Yet many English divines and Christian apologists, staking on theignorance and gullibili ty of the majority, have in recent years strivenanxiously to defend Christianity against the charge. Aware of the markedchange that has come over public opinion during the last few decades,
precisely on the proper attitude to the sexual l ife — a change to no smallextent due to the wide dissemination of the new psychology, supported bya general revolt against the Puritanism of Victorian England — thesedivines and Christian apologists, wishing to shield the Church and its faithfrom the unpopularity likely to be incurred by a continued enforcement ofChristianity's traditional sex-phobia, have for many years now had thedisingenuousness to maintain that no religion on earth has been moreconsistently broadminded and liberal concerning sexuality thanChristianity itself.
A typical example of these intrepid, last-minute efforts to rescue thefaith is Christopher Dawson's Christianity and Sex (1930), where thechampionship of Christianity against Bertrand Russell 's attacks, thoughunlikely to impress anyone except a fanatical partisan, is undertaken withall the resources of a skilled debater, conscious of addressing a none toolearned or critical audience. Another is G. W. Coutts's The Church and the
Sex Question (1926), in which the author tries to dodge the whole issue byconcentrating on Jesus's ipsissima verbs alone. But even were we ready to debate the point with Mr. Coutts on his
own chosen ground and abide strictly by what Jesus is reported to havesaid, the argument in his book would receive but scant support; for, on theauthority of St. Matthew (xix. 12), we are assured that Jesus once said,"There be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for thekingdom of heaven's sake."
- p. 59 - Assuming that he ever said something of the kind, we naturally askhow could he have admitted such a possibility unless it had seemed tohim at least feasible? Like most Christians in a similar dilemma, Mr. Couttstries to burke the issue by pleading that the words do not mean what theyread as meaning. But, apart from the fact that, on that principle, any specialpleader is at liberty to put whatever interpretation he fancies, however far-fetched, on every passage in the Bible, who is likely to be least mistakenin this matter, Mr. Coutts, desperately holding on to a position he knows tobe sapped by the ceaseless flow of well-documented criticism, or St.
Cyprian who, far from being on the defensive, felt secure in his orthodoxy?At all events it was the saint who took every word of Jesus's statement asreported in Matthew xix. 12 so literally that upon it he based his plea forcelibacy and rigid continency (see Treatise of St. Cyprian on the Dress of
Virgins , trans. by Rev. Ch. Thornton, p. 118). Dr. Cyril Alington is another who labours to persuade us thatChristianity beams benignly on human sexuality, and, in replying to thecharge of sex-phobia against his religion, says in effect: "Nonsense! Thatis all vieux jeu. Christianity now takes a wholly different view." Then, rather
disingenuously, he sums up his denial by saying, "No sane Christiantoday shares the horror of any sexual relationship" (The Fool Hath Said ,1933, pp. 124–125). Then are we to assume that most, if not all, Christian missionaries areinsane? For we should have liked to ask Dr. Alington when this allegedChristian volte-face took place and on whose authority it was performed.Turn to the reports about missionaries now engaged in spreading the verycreed your Alingtons, Inges, Couttses and Dawsons try to defend, and youfind that no matter what may be the attitude of apologists arduously striving
to acquit their religion of the charge of sex-phobia, their attitude is certainlynot shared by their representatives abroad, who still cling fanatically to atleast that aspect of sex phobia made up of an abhorrence of the organs ofsex. They still teach the innocent savage to feel ashamed of theprocreative organs given him by the God he is invited to worship. They stillteach the women of Africa, Melanesia and Polynesia to conceal thebreasts given them by the Christian God to suckle their offspring —"Cachez ce sein que je ne saurais voir. Cela fait venir de coupables
pensées!" And this teaching is so consistent that,
- p. 60 -even in the tropics, their efforts to make the savage shroud his nakedness,and the diseases this causes, are a constant source of complaint on thepart of explorers, anthropologists and ethnologists. Is this perhaps whyMary Kingsley "was convinced that the teaching of the missionaries [inAfrica] did more harm than good"? (See Oliver Campbell's Mary Kingsley ,1957, especially Chap. VI. See also: Felix Bryk, Neger Eros , 1928, pp. 6,51–52; J. R. Baker, Depopulation in Espirita Santo, New Hebrides , Journ.
Roy. Anthrop. Inst. VIII. p. 79; the Rev. W. J. Durrad's Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia , 1922, pp. 8–10; and W. A. Robinson's Deep
Water and Shoal , 1932, Chap. XVIII; and many besides.) More recent testimony to the same effect wil l be found in Blackwood's
Magazine for October 1958, where in an article entitled "The Fort", bySurgeon Commander A. G. Bee, we are told that, "Missions are horrifiedby nakedness." The author says, "I do not know why"; but if he had studiedChurch history and its long record of sex-phobia, he would haveunderstood. Referring to the mission of Iambi, he says, "One day themissionaries sent word to the chiefs that every adult, male and female,must buy a yard of 'Americani', American cloth, and wear it in Christiandecency. The chiefs took necessary action, and everyone bought a lengthof cloth. Coming proudly to the mission upon occasions, each wore asmart turban and every part except the head was bare, every charmexposed both fore and aft, jingling with rings to give them emphasis." This testimony, read in conjunction with Dr. Alington's cry of "vieux
jeu!" shows to what desperate shifts Christian apologists are driven, evenbefore an ill-informed gallery, when trying to exculpate their faith of thecharge of sex-phobia. If capable of thought at all, theirs could be butslovenly; but if capable of anything better, they must deserve a moredamaging charge; because, apart from the evidence of the Scriptures,even a superficial acquaintance with European history can leave no one inany doubt that Christianity has always frowned on sex and sexualintercourse. From the story of the Fall of Man to the idea of the ImmaculateConception as related in the New Testament, we are repeatedly made to
feel that sexual intercourse is rather disreputable, impure, not to betolerated for the procreation of any creature reputed to be holy. As Dr. J. F.Hecker remarks, There can be no doubt that organized religion knowsitself to
- p. 61 -be on the defensive" (R.A.C. Chap. IV); and only this fact can account forthe frequently disingenuous efforts of modern churchmen to repudiateperfectly legitimate charges made against their religion. Their denial of
Christian sex-phobia is only one among many such repudiations. "Behold I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceiveme" (Psalm li. 5). Whether David wrote this or not is immaterial, for whatconcerns us is to note the strong strain of sex-phobia that informs thepassage. But if David did write it, it is such a gratuitous vilification ofhuman procreation — because as far as we know David was the childneither of a common prostitute nor of a debauchee father — as to compelthe inference that Puritnaism was an early manifestation among thepeople from whom the Founder of Christianity derived. Nor can the fact
that Christianity ultimately inherited this Semitic Puritanism be denied byany candid churchman. John Cowper Powys maintains that the OldTestament "suggests no ascetic implication that the pleasures of sex areunlawful" (P.O.L. Chap. "The Bible as Literature"). He evidently hadforgotten both the story of the Fall and Psalm 51, to mention no otherpassages. Logan Pearsall Smith records that his great-great grandmother, whohad nine children, wrote in her diary in the years 1760–62: "If it is a sin toget children, how comes so much of it is done? It is a great mystery to me"
(Reperusals and Recollections , 1936, Chap. VIII). Her hardly surprisingperplexity reveals the extent to which verse 5 of Psalm 51 expresses asentiment evidently widely inculcated in Christian England of theeighteenth century. "It is good for a man not to touch a woman", said one of Christianity'searliest saints; "it is good for a man to remain a virgin", and "he who givesa woman in marriage does well; but he who gives her not in marriage doesbetter". (I Corinthians vii. i, 26, 32). St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (A.D.340–397), solemnly declared that, "Every married woman knows she hascause to blush with shame" (quoted in P. J. Proudhon's Amour et Mariage ,1860, Dixième Étude, Chap. V. XLV). So deep is Christianity's sex-phobia,that even the custom of eating fish on holy days and fast days owes itsexistence to the fact that, as fish do not copulate, they are held to be freefrom the foulness that pollutes all animals quae copulatione generantur.
Thousands of early Christians, moreover, who took Jesus's
- p. 62 -words in Matthew XIX. 12 quite literally (as they were perfectly entitled todo when there were no Couttses, Dr. Alingtons, and Dean Inges to tellthem that Jesus did not mean them to be taken literally), proceededwithout delay to carry them into practice and, among the leaders of theChurch, Origen (A.D. 185–253) was the first to castrate himself for thekingdom of heaven's sake. Indeed, such was the enthusiasm of thesevolunteer eunuchs that it actually became necessary to forbid theirextreme application of Christ's words, lest the Church's congregation
should wholly disappear. But this did not prevent sex-phobia fromcontinuing to infect the faith and, according to the Christian Fathers,original sin was declared to be nothing more or less than concupiscence,or carnal passion. Methodus of Olympus, who came after Origen, taughtthat the cunning serpent had excited man to the sin of concupiscence, andhe gave no other account of original sin (Otten: Manual of the History of the
Dogmas , Vol. I, p. 360). Hilary, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Pation of Barcelona — allregarded St. Paul's sentiments in Romans viii. 6 and 8, as essential to a
proper Christian attitude of mind. Sextus Philosophus, of the third century,openly recommended castration to everybody, and as late as the twelfthcentury, Robert Pulleyn, Peter Lombard and Pope Innocent II followedAugustine in holding that concupiscence was the root of all evil. TheCouncil of Trent (1545–63) settled the matter for the whole future of theCatholic Church when it set virginity and celibacy above matrimony (seeCanon X). Nor did Protestantism improve the position. On the contrary, it made itworse; for, in its ugliest creation, the Puritans, it produced a sect whose
most bitter regret was that, at the creation, they had not been at God's sideto suggest a more drawing-roomy method of propagating species than theone he proposed to use. Indeed, Martin Luther's poor opinion of this aspectof the creation found emphatic expression, for on one occasion, he said,"Had God consulted me in the matter [of human procreation] I should haveadvised him to continue the generation of the species by fashioning themwith clay in the way Adam was fashioned" (T.T. DCCL. II. p. 307). This one feature of Christianity, as Bertrand Russell implies, wroughtuntold havoc in the Western world. Besides causing widespread individual
misery and frustration, it has filled our
- p. 63 -asylums, multiplied the occasions for domestic strife and incompatibility,branded with shame and infamy the exercise of a natural andindispensable function, together with the normal passions that promoteand accompany it; and, what is perhaps worst of all, supplied the enemiesof their species with the means both subtle and ruthless wherewith tooppress and torment their fellows without any risk of incurring condignretribution. Although it may not, as we shall see, constitute the gravamenof the enlightened man's charge against Christianity, it would aloneabundantly justify his gravest doubts concerning the claim advanced bychurchmen that their religion was supernaturally revealed and is stilldivinely led.
Christianity Not the Thoughtful Man's Religion — III
In the previous chapter it was suggested that the most serious chargeagainst Christianity still remained to be stated and in this and the ensuingchapters a summary will be made of the modern thinker's conclusivereasons for rejecting the old religion both as an interpretation of the
unseen powers behind phenomena, as a description of our relation withthem and as a guide to mankind's way of life. As many of the reasons advanced to support this most serious chargemay strike the average reader as strange and not even adumbrated by thegenerally familiar attacks made by the Rationalists, the present argumentmay suffer from all the drawbacks which naturally attend the uncustomaryand unprecedented. For, in the history of anti-Christian thought, variousforms of hostile criticism are found, not all of which have reached thegeneral public of any civil ized country, and some of which appear for the
first time in these pages, or in works of mine already published (see, forinstance, my Choice of a Mate , 1935; and Enemies of Women , 1948). The best-known form of attack, popularized in innumerablepublications throughout the nineteenth century, especially during its latterhalf and after, is that adopted by Thomas Huxley in his controversy withDr. Wace. It confines itself to casting doubt on the authenticity of theScriptures, on Christian dogma and legends, and concludes by statingwhy Agnosticism is the only honest and tenable attitude towardstranscendental problems. Incidentally, it denies the divinity of Jesus (some
Rationalists, including J. M. Robertson, deny even his historicity) without,however, adducing many of the compelling reasons which I have alreadystated in Chapter III supra; and questions all the alleged miraculous eventsconnected with his name, including, of course, his birth and resurrection.
- p. 65 - It is essential, however, to note the significant fact that none of theseRationalist attacks ever go beyond questioning the supernatural claims ofthe religion. They never impugn its morality. On the contrary, afterdemolishing all the mythical and metaphysical ground-work of the religion,they not only leave Christian morals unassailed, but also usually advocatethem and endeavour to establish them on a sounder and morephilosophical foundation than that of their alleged divine provenance. Inpursuing this end, moreover, they resort to every possible device, andwhilst some have tried to prove the validity of these morals by ascribingthem to an innate "moral sense", or to expediency and utility, others havetried to base them upon a so-called "categorical imperative", or on theneeds created by man's social existence. But all, without exception,endeavour, as the Rev. the Right Hon. Professor R. Corkey expresses it,
"to discover sure foundations for our ethical principles ". (H. Oct. 1958). In other words, despite their unbelief, Rationalists, like churchmen,take the morality of Christianity for granted as the only morality. So deeplyingrained have become the impulses, judgments and prejudicesconditioned by two millenniums of Christian indoctrination, that they tendto infer from their subconscious readiness to think and feel in a Christianly
moral manner that Christian morality is self-evident and needs only to beplaced, as Professor Corkey says, on "sure foundations" in order tobecome acceptable to all mankind. To this extent was Macaulay justifiedwhen he said, "To almost all men the state of things under which theyhave been used to live seems to be the necessary state of things". (Essayon Southey's Colloquies on Society , 1830). But the reader may object that, if Macaulay is right in this, why wereeven the supernatural and mythical aspects of Christianity assailed? Thiswas most probably owing to the fact that whereas recent scientific
discoveries, popularized in thousands of publications, have informedmodern mankind of the increasing incredibility of the lore and myth ofChristianity, no equivalent scientific discoveries have so plainly exposedthe doubtfulness of either the authority, validity, or desirability of Christianmorals. Thus the task of recognizing and upholding this form of scepticismwas necessarily left to thinkers penetrating and independent enough toapproach Christian morals, unin-
- p. 66 -
fluenced by the forces to which Macaulay called our attention. But suchmen are inevitably rare and unlikely to be popular; or, if popular, liable toforfeit public esteem when they question what their fellow-men regard ashallowed by custom and tradition. The few, however, who did have thecourage to incur this kind of unpopularity reasoned more or less asfollows: "It was unlikely that much harm could overtake people who cared tobelieve in fairy-tales. Provided they could keep sane, where was thedanger in believing — say, in a Holy Ghost, in the Holy Trinity, in Jesus's
virgin birth, in his divinity and resurrection, and in an almighty, all-knowingGod, whose anger over the sins of his own creatures could be appeasedby the death after prolonged torture of his beloved and only-begotten son?If they did not adversely affect his conduct, what harm could such beliefspossibly do a man?" "But was the case the same with Christian morals? Could mankindwith the same impunity believe in and practise them? Were these moralsconducive to human prosperity and to the perpetuation of humanity in adesirable form? Or did they affect humanity unfavourably? If they did, then
all the pother about the supernatural aspects of the creed was insignificantcompared with the more vital question concerning the wisdom and safetyof continuing to believe in and practise Christian morality." Among the first to argue in this way was Heinrich Heine, and althoughhe never stated it as explicitly as it is stated in the foregoing paragraphs,he set forth its essentials plainly enough to enable others to follow hislead. (see D. Erstes Buch , where he animadverts on the unwholesomestress Christianity lays on the attributes of the "soul", its correspondingneglect of bodily considerations, and the general "hospital atmosphere" —Lazarethluft — it has consequently spread throughout Europe). What, above all, he placed on record as early as 1834 was hisdiscovery that the Rationalists were really barking up the wrong tree and,whilst busily discarding one transcendental feature of Christianity afteranother, continued to cling tenaciously to its least desirable aspect — itsmorality. (D. zweites Buch , where in discussing Christianity and theRationalist attitude to it, he says: "Zuerst wurde ihr [i.e., Christianity] zur
Ader gelassen, alles abergläubische Blut wurde ihr langsam abgezapt; um
mich bildlos auszudrücken, es wurde der Versuch gemacht, allen
historischen Inhalt aus dem Christentume heraus-
- p. 67 -zunehmen und nur den moralischen Teil zu bewahren." "At firstChristianity was bled and all its superstitious blood was slowly drainedaway. In fact, to drop metaphor, the attempt was made to rid it of all itshistorical content and to retain only its morals.")
These pioneer criticisms of the Rationalist attitude on Heine's part areworthy of the highest praise; for he blazed a trail which it would have beenwell for Europe and, above all, for England to have followed.Unfortunately, it was not until Spencer (who as far as I know had neverread Heine) appeared in England, and Nietzsche (who had both readHeine and pillaged him without acknowledgment) appeared in Germany,some forty to fifty years later, that Heine's valuable hints bore any fruit. Spencer was certainly the first Englishman who, whilst undoubtedlybelonging to the Rationalist school, yet had enough originality to question
those elements in Christian morality which, by neglecting biologicalconsiderations, placed those ulteriorly endowed on an equal footing, asregards worthiness, with the superiorly endowed, and thus inaugurated theprinciple of sacrificing the greater to the less. Because, in the end, thispolicy did in fact burden the biologically superior with the dead weight ofhuman defectives and unfortunates of all kinds. In addition, by elevating,promoting and cherishing them at the cost of the sound and biologicallydesirable, this policy naturally helped the undesirable to survive andmultiply.
Perceiving this deplorable consequence of Christian morality, whichthe Rationalists, far from recognizing and condemning, actually defended.Spencer at least sounded a warning note. It was not a rousing call,calculated to summon his generation to reluctant but instant attention, andits importance has not been appreciated by the majority even to this day.But, considering the age in which it was uttered, it was a courageouspronouncement and may account for his not having been buried inWestminster Abbey. That it was allowed to pass unnoticed shows howdeeply subconscious two thousand years of Christian indoctrination had
caused Christian modes of reasoning and judging to become in the peopleof the Western world. So spontaneous and impulsive are such modes ofreasoning and judging in modern men and women, that when anunusually profound anti-Christian note happens to be struck, hardlyanyone ever catches, understands, or attempts to act upon it. In the 'seventies of last century. Spencer wrote: "Any arrange-
- p. 68 -ments which in a considerable degree prevent superiority from profiting bythe rewards of superiority, or shield inferiority from the evils it entails —any arrangements which tend to make it as well to be inferior as to besuperior, are arrangements diametrically opposed to the progress oforganization and the reaching of a higher life" (Data of Ethics , 1879, Chap.XI). In a later work, he wrote: "A society which takes for its maxim, 'It shallbe as well for you to be inferior as to be superior', wil l inevitablydegenerate and die away in long-drawn miseries" (Principles of Ethics ,
1891–92, Vol. II. p. 281). The fact that the maxim Spencer here condemns is now put intopractice by all societies observing Christian morals, and nowhere withgreater recklessness than in present-day England, and the fact that thesource of the said maxim lies in the over-emphasis Christianity lays on"soul", at the cost of body attributes, makes this passage in the SyntheticPhilosophy one of the boldest pioneer assaults on Christian morality. For,in applying the principle of disregarding bodily attributes in assessinghuman worth, Christianity tends to promote policies which, by furthering
the welfare and multiplication of the biologically ill-favoured and unsound,in the end cause the deterioration of human stocks. Because, even if thepresence of the army of defectives does not contaminate and infect thesounder elements (which is doubtful), it handicaps them, imposes limits ontheir capacity to multiply, and thus jeopardizes their survival. Theinsensible decline of Christianity as a living faith, into a mere moralinfluence signalized chiefly by exorbitant benevolence towards thebungled and the botched, is probably what Macneile Dixon had in mindwhen he wrote: "Christianity or what remains of it . . . is fast melting, if it
has not wholly evaporated, into humanitarianism." (T.H.S. Chap. II). Spencer recognized this evil and tried in vain to rouse indignationabout it. As this was a century ago, and its effect on the thought andsentiment of the English people has to this day remained undetectable, weobtain some idea of the grip one of the most harmful of Christianinfluences has fastened on the minds of civilized mankind. For, in thisconnection, it is important to remember that millions of the very people whotoday may be classed as unbelievers, nevertheless profess their whole-hearted approval of the maxim Spencer selects for his particular
reprobation. To this extent have the morals of Christianity
- p. 69 -survived its metaphysics and legends in the hearts of modern Europeans.John Cowper Powys is one of the few Englishmen who seems to beaware of this fact. Speaking of the "undertones and overtones" of PaulineChristianity, in which "all we Western nations are, willy-nilly, soaked", headds that this is true of "unbelievers often more completely than believers".(P.O.L. Chap. VII).
By diverting the eye and the taste of mankind from the visibleattributes of a fellow-being, and by minimizing the significance of thesevisible attributes, the insistence on soul qualities alone necessarilyprotected the ill constituted from the aloofness, not to say the repudiation,which, both in ordinary human intercourse and, above all, in matrimony,would otherwise have caused them to be eschewed as procreators of therace. One has but to observe the marked frequency with which "love"today stages dysgenic and obviously undesirable matings, in order toappreciate the extent to which the undue stress on soul qualities numbsmodern people's sensibilities towards all those physical stigmata,blemishes, defects, which, under a wholesome regimentation of taste and
judgment, would provoke aversion and repugnance. Among the most disastrous results of Christianity's disregard ofbiological attributes in the estimation of human worth, has been Westernmankind's adoption of the exact converse of the farmer's point of view andpractice. Instead of uprooting and discouraging the weeds and noxious
growths in order to spare, protect, and avoid the sacrifice of the noblermore valuable plants, we allow the weeds to flourish and multiply, alwaysat the cost of the more desirable and more promising denizens of thehuman garden. We have conditioned our natures to react compassionatelyto what is misshapen, inferior and defective. Never do we dream ofextending "pity" to those fast-diminishing stocks in the population, which,owing to their biological superiority, constitute the only guarantee we haveof our race being able to survive in a desirable form. The very idea ofchampioning these all-too-rare superior stocks as the husbandman
champions his more valuable plants, because of the dangers and burdensthreatening them from the quarter of weeds and fungi, would evoke nomore than a puzzled stare, even if it did not actually provoke a laugh. Yet ifwe ask why, by what sophisticated reasoning on justice, it should havebecome an accepted
- p. 70 -convention to confine solicitude to the ill-favoured, the unsound and thesuperfluous, even when biologically superior stock are diminishing in our
society, there is but one answer, which is that Christianity enjoins thispractice. John Cowper Powys candidly admits this; yet such is hisunconscious acceptance of the morals of Christianity that he says, the"only real progress our Western humanity has made" has been in thedirection of "pity and sympathy". Never does he appear to see anyanomaly in the fact that this "pity and sympathy" should be concentratedon the sickly, the misshapen and the defective. The same remarks apply to the principle of sacrifice. Why should it beregarded as right and de rigueur always to sacrifice the greater and more
precious to the less, rather than the other way round? Can it be thatChristianity's most sacred symbol — the god nailed to the cross for thesake of the mob — has, as a spectacle contemplated for twenty centuries,at last made Western humanity accept as incontrovertible and self-evidentthe principle i t thus gruesomely illustrates? In his essay (E.E.) Thomas Huxley asks: "What would become of thegarden if the gardener (acting on the 'golden rule', Do as you would bedone by) treated all the weeds and slugs and birds and trespassers as hewould like to be treated if he were in their place?" (Prolegomena, IX). But,
in replying to his own question, as we shall see, he displays so limited anunderstanding of the means whereby, in our advanced civilization, thehusbandman's and the gardener's solicitude for their nobler plants mightbe applied to humanity without any of the violence which he thinksindispensable to such a policy, that he hardly rises above the level of theclassical Rationalist, of whose restricted vision enough has been saidalready. Deeply absorbed by the purely economic condition of the population,and the charitable and legislative measures adopted to allay distress —measures admittedly due to Christian agitators and reformers — themodern world, although emanicipated by Science and Rationalism fromthe thraldom of superstition, never thought of that other form of charitywhich would have consisted in relieving posterity of the burdens,unwholesome influence, and depressing spectacle, of human morbidity,defectiveness and ugliness, which every generation now shamelesslybequeaths to its successors. Even the thought that this duty entails
- p. 71 -sacrificed to their ill -favoured contemporaries; purging the white races oftheir present biological depravities, and framing measures for theirregeneration — even this thought seems never to have struck the vastmajority, whether in England, France or the United States. The very factthat in England a minute minority movement like that of the Eugenistsmakes no headway and is as good as unknown by the masses, indicates
the extent of public indifference to the kind of charity I have described. I have already mentioned that it was only with the appearance ofNietzsche's works that, after a time-lag of some forty-five years, Heine'svaluable hints concerning the danger of Christian morals were effectivelytaken up; for even if we must deny Nietzsche originality in this matter, itwas he, more than any other European, who clearly perceived the seriousmenace to humanity which, as Heine had pointed out, lurkedunrecognized by the modern world in the morality of Christianity. With extraordinary vividness he grasped that when once unseen and
often merely presumed attributes are allowed to eclipse and supersedevisible attributes in assessing the worth of a human being, the doors wereopened wide to every possible deterioration of human stocks.Henceforward all the tainted, the unwholesome and morbid of the worldwould be held equal or actually superior to the sound and biologicallydesirable. Henceforward the measure of a man's worth would not be thepromise he gave of being able to perpetuate the race in a form desirablefrom both the mental and physical point of view, but the degree of hisconformity to certain "soul" standards, arbitrarily established without any
reference to biological quality. In stirring language, Nietzsche denounced this topsyturvification of allmankind's healthiest instincts and impulses, and with exceptionalbrilliance and an un-German absence of sentimentality, he called Europe'sattention to the danger of a morality consistent with, if not authorized by, St.Paul's ill-considered utterance in Chapter IV of the Second Epistle to theCorinthians: "We [i.e., the Christians] look not at the things which are seen, but atthe things which are unseen; for the things which are seen are temporal;
but the things which are not seen are eternal." Although conditions in respect of health and stamina were alreadyalarming enough in his day, Nietzsche did not live to see the highincidence of morbidity, physical defect and insanity now
- p. 72 -reached in every European country and, above all, in England. He did notknow as we do the endless queues waiting in all the large towns ofWestern Europe for accommodation in hospitals and lunatic asylums. Buthe knew, like Heine, that Lazarethluft would inevitably spread whereverthe morals of Christianity prevailed, and he prophesied that very soon allthe people of the West would be either invalids or invalid-attendants. "We must not embellish or deck out our Christianity," he exclaimed, "ithas waged a deadly war against the higher type of man; it has set a banupon all the fundamental instincts of this type. . . . Christianity has takenthe pan of everything weak, low and ill-favoured; it has made an ideal out
of antagonism to all the self-preservative impulses and promptings ofvigorous, healthy life" (The Antichrist , 5). Elsewhere he says: "The sickly are the great danger of man: not thewicked, not the beasts of prey. They who are ill-shaped, prostrated andwrecked from birth, they, the weakest , are the people who most underminehuman life, who most dangerously poison and question our confidence inlife, in man, in ourselves" (Genealogy of Morals , III, 14). In Thus Spake Zarathustra (XVI; Neighbour Love), the thought of whatmankind's future must be if Christian morals were to continue dominating
us, he expressed as follows: "Do I advise you to love your neighbour? . . . Higher than love for yourneighbour is love of the most remote man of the future; "It is the more distant (your children and your children's children) whohave to pay for your love of your neighbour!" And he concludes his long indictment of the old religion by declaring:"this eternal accusation of Christianity I would fain write on all walls,wherever there are walls. I call Christianity the one great curse, the oneenormous and quintessential perversion. . . . I call it the one immortal
blemish on mankind" (The Antichrist , 62). But it would be a grave error to suppose that Nietzsche's luciddemonstration of Christianity's rôle in favouring the multiplication of the illfavoured and biologically corrupt, and in thus plotting the deterioration ofall human stocks, was taken up with any eagerness — at least in England.Sentimentality, the power of the churches, the indoctrination of centuries,and the influence of the sickly and defective themselves, were tooformidable. The
- p. 73 -very fact that thirty years and more ago, a Church of England prelate wastolerated at the council table of the Eugenic Society, shows, how, even incircles well informed enough to see the need of eugenic propaganda,there was still no understanding of the essentials of the problem. Incidentally, I may mention that when, some three or four decadesago, I was invited to join the society in question and I declined, I gave asmy reason that I saw no chance of realizing the society's aims so long asits council could retain Dean Inge on its board.
Here and there, thinkers have appeared far-seeing enough torecognize the urgency of questioning Christian morals; but they have beentoo few to make much impression, and, except for Bradley, their protestshave been too timid and lacking in candour. Margaret Mead, for instance, in Male and Female (1949, Part II, Chap.IV), acknowledges that "We are trained by our society to keep our bodiesout of our minds". But it is significant that she should say "by our society"and does not dare to mention the exalted religious source and authority forthis training. Dr. G. A. Dorsey is certainly a little more outspoken; for, thirtyone years after Nietzsche's death and a century after Heine published hisDeutschland , he said of the Christians: "their religion was incompatiblewith mens sana in corpore sano. They exalted faith in God above suchhuman qualities as health, loveableness, etc." (C. Chap. IX, v). But by far the most remarkable and penetrating attack on Christianmorals was that made as long ago as 1894 by that most brilliant of Englishphilosophers, F. H. Bradley.
"When we modify and depart from the workings of natural selection,"he said, "I urge that we ought at least to proceed on some kind of principle.. . . The laws of past progress must, I admit, be qualified through progressitself, but it is not likely that these laws have become wholly invalid. And,at any rate, to assume this without grounds seems plainly absurd. But inour morals and politics this absurdity is dominant. . . . We compel thehigher type to stand by helpless and to be outbred by the weaker and thelower, and we force it to contribute itself to the process of its own extrusion. . . on the main point, the suppression of undesirable types, we appear
ready to entrust our destinies to Providence. . . . And we ourselvesdeliberately, we know, may
- p. 74 -frustrate the old providential working . . . if so, in perhaps the supremeproblem of politics, our general frame of mind must be called deplorable. Itis full of blindness, cowardice, superstition and confusion unspeakable. . . .I am disgusted at the inviolable sanctity of the noxious lunatic. The right ofthe individual to spawn without restriction his diseased offspring on the
community, the duty of the State to rear wholesale and without limit anunselected progeny-such duties and rights are to my mind a sheer outrageon Providence. A society that can endorse such things will merit thedegeneracy which it courts". (S.R.P.). When we reflect that this was written by an erudite Englishman who,as far as I am aware, had never heard of Nietzsche's expression of thesame sentiments in similar language, it seems incredible that today, sixtyfour years after Bradley wrote this notable essay, the vast majority of eveneducated English people should still feel no misgivings about the dangers
of Christian morality. For — to single out but one of the old religion'sdisastrous features — the cruelty perpetrated against posterity and thebiologically superior that still manage to survive, by Christian pity for thedefective, the biologically shoddy of all kinds and the demented; surelythis cruelty should suffice to make all rational humanitarians at leastdubious about the religion. There have of course been others who have voiced views similar toBradley's; but none who has equalled, much less surpassed, the cogencyand passion of his protest. The nearest approach to his sentiments is to be
found in Professor William McDougall 's R.S.L. written exactly forty yearsafter the essay on Punishment. In Chapter IX of this book McDougall says:"At the present time the State not only does nothing to promote a relativelyrapid multiplication of the intrinsically superior elements of the population,but it actually maintains an extensive and unjust system by which itrestricts the multiplication of these elements." It is, however, typical of modern scientific publicists that even whenthey are in favour of reforms antagonistic to the sentiments established byChristian morals, and even when their erudition leaves us in no doubtconcerning their awareness of the source of the evils they expose, they areusually scrupulously careful to avoid any direct allusion to it. In regard tothe foregoing quotation from McDougaIl, for instance, it will be noticed that,
just as
- p. 75 -Margaret Mead speaks of our being trained "by our society" to neglect our
bodies, and never so much as whispers the word "Christianity" in thisconnection, so also does McDougall speak of "the State" as restricting themultiplication of the biologically desirable, without ever hinting thatChristian morality and not the State is chiefly responsible for this practice. The objection usually raised, especially by Englishwomen of allclasses, to any eugenic policy or any suggested modification of thepresent practice of favouring the biologically unsound at the cost of thesound and promising, is generally expressed by exclaiming, "Ah, poorthings! They can't help it!" So often have I had this plea addressed to me
when I have been lecturing on the physical deterioration of the Englishpeople, and it is so likely to be on the tip of many of my readers' tongues,that it cannot be left unnoticed, especially as it reflects in a striking manneron the character of our present-day morality. The objection, framed more carefully, is as follows: "Although it isadmitted that the diseased, defective, demented and deformed are now asevere burden on the sane, hale and hearty in the nation, gravely depletethe latter's resources, restrict their ability to multiply and to regenerate thecountry's population, and, by constituting foci of further racial pollution and
corruption, exercise a twofold dysgenic influence on society, it mustnevertheless be conceded in all fairness that, after all, it is not the fault ofthese unfortunates that they are thus ill-favoured. They cannot help beingbiologically shoddy and depraved." Now the remarkable and arresting feature of this objection, with itsimplied defence of a form of parasitism which presents the gravestproblems for the future, is that in our civilization it is raised only and
exclusively in respect of the sickly, the degenerate and the physiologicallybungled and botched. It is never even whispered in any other connection.
One never sees the members of any women's organization, chainingthemselves to railings, destroying old masters in the National Gallery,stopping Royal horses at the Derby, or heckling and assaulting CabinetMinisters (after the manner of the Suffragettes fighting for the futile Vote), inorder to call Government attention to the appalling loss of child life on ourroads every year. One never hears such women protesting that littlechildren cannot help being little children and that therefore it is inhuman toallow lethal machines like modern road vehicles to
- p. 76 -mow them down, especially as they are presumably normal children, or atleast not asylum or hospital cases. One never hears anyone, man or woman, protesting that lambs,sheep, pigs and bullocks cannot help being what they are and shouldtherefore be accommodated on our hearth-rugs as pets, instead of beingwantonly butchered. Nor, during the two world wars, did I ever hear anyEnglishwoman, however sentimental, protest that our sound and healthyyoung men could not help being what they were, and therefore it wasunfair to pack them off to the Front to face the enemy's light and heavyartillery. Indeed, during World War I, despite the appalling loss of youngmale life, the women of England, as I have already shown in many of mymost unpopular publications, were, to the astonishment of men like JohnCowper Powys, Norwood Young and Arnold Bennett, not only busypressing their men friends to get into khaki, but were actually unanimous inwishing to prolong the war "to the last young man". The most egregious of
these ardent sacrificers of sound young men was Christabel Pankhurstand the disgraceful audiences she used to address every week at thePavilion in Piccadilly. When did anyone during World War I hear the sort of woman whomost vociferously champions what Bradley called "lower human types",express the kind of horror felt by Bertrand Russell at the slaughter ofsound, healthy English youth on the Western Front? "I used to watch," hesays, "young men embarking in troop trains to be slaughtered on theSomme because Generals were stupid. I felt an aching compassion for the
young men" (H. Oct. 1958). I never heard any such remark from a woman during the whole ofWorld War I. Yet, when it is a matter of sacrificing the unsound, the tainted,the sickly, the defective and the deformed, for the good of those of theircontemporaries who in their persons present some promise ofperpetuating the race in a desirable form, there is not a woman in thewhole length and breadth of the land, and not a man debilitated by femaleinfluence, who, in anguished tones will not expostulate: "Ah! poor things!They can't help it!"
The gratuitous and arbitrary reservation of this compassionate plea forthe least precious specimens in the nation, is surely suspicious, andshould open the eyes of impartial judges to the powerful hold Christianmorality has fastened on the impulses
- p. 77 -and sentiments of modern people. It is all the more suspicious because, asa plea, it implies a disregard of the claims of all those members of thecommunity who are daily being sacrificed and exploited in order to
preserve and protect their psycho-physical inferiors.
- p. 78 -Chapter VI
Christianity Not the Thoughtful Man's Religion — IV
To all but unobservant people, unused to a courageous and realisticattitude to life, it should now be painfully clear that, if we are to avert thefate foretold by seers like Heine, Nietzsche and Bradley, the time is ripe fora radical change in our outlook and in the rules that govern our lives. Thatwe should waste no time in spreading, especially throughout the ignorantmasses, a more wholesome and, above al l, more fastidious taste in theassessment of human worth than that now prevailing, is indicated by somany ominous warnings, that only wilful blindness would seem to accountfor the present culpable postponement of this urgent duty. We have but to look at the present cost of our National Health Servicewhich, in the twelvemonth 1957–58 amounted to £585,000,000, i.e.
£50,000,000 more than the previous year (B.M.J. 23.8.58), and to learnthat even twelve years ago it was already dispensing 228,879,170prescriptions, whilst its dentists, in the five years between 1947 and 1952,distributed 10,500,000 dentures; in order to appreciate the magnitude ofthe morbidity we have now reached. With about 280,000,000 work dayslost every year through illness (The Times , 6.9.57), and the incidence of
sickness increasing every year, the question arises whether, apart from thematter of our future as a race, we shall be able to carry on at all in a fewyears time. We are told, for instance, that the number of patients treated inhospital rose by some 54,000 to 3,793,000 in 1957, and yet by the end ofthe year about 490,000 — 9,000 more than in the previous year — wereawaiting admission. The question regarding the future is all the more pressing, seeing thatthe figures quoted not only exclude the vast population of defectives,cripples, incurables and insane now housed in private institutions, but also
give no complete idea of the total
- p. 79 -amount of illness and defect in the nation. Recent surveys covering theyears 1943–52 and 1944–47, carried out by Dr. W. P. D. Logan, Mr. E. M.Brooke and Dr. Percy Stokes, show "the large amount of ill-health whichpeople suffer but which does not lead them to seek medical advice, or atany rate not frequently. . . . At any age and in any month, at least 50 percent of adults who were asked about their health complained of an illness
of some kind or another. Amongst the elderly the proportion was at least75 per cent ". And Dr. Logan and Mr. Brooke conclude by saying, "Thesefigures cannot be dismissed as unimportant, and represent a problem thatrequires investigation and a challenge that will in due course have to bemet." In Dr. Stokes's survey, it was found "that but of 100 personscomplaining of some illness during an average month, 77 of them did notvisit a doctor. "It is evident," he concludes, "that with less than a quarter ofsick persons visiting their doctor in a month, only an incomplete picture of
total morbidity can be obtained from medical records" (Studies in Medical Population Subjects : Study No. 12, 1957, and Study No. 2, 1942). But when we reflect on the chronic invalidism and morbidity hiddenaway in private houses, in nursing homes and similar places, weappreciate that official records of illness and defect furnished by the HealthService, even when the picture they present is amplified by such surveysas those above-mentioned, still give us only an inadequate idea of thenation's total ill health and biological abnormality. We know that blindness, deaf-mutism and mental defect are
everywhere increasing; whilst downright dementia, even if only of atemporary kind, is becoming every day more general. Over twenty yearsago. Dr. Frances Harding declared that "if the growth of insanity continuesat its present rate every man, woman and child will probably be mad by theyear 2039" (Daily Press , 8.11.36); whilst Dr. A. J. B. Griffin, the Officer ofHealth of Worcester, in his report of 23rd September 1958, said that soon"it will be a distinction not to have at any time been an in-patient in amental hospital" (i.e., the modern euphemism for a "lunatic asylum"adopted in order to spare the tender feelings of our gullible masses, highand low). In view of these and many similar facts that could be adduced, is notthe complacency of the authorities and the general public astonishing?How is it to be explained? For we surely need little
- p. 80 -further evidence officially furnished to feel persuaded that the eleventh
hour for drastic action has long since struck. I speak of evidence officially furnished, but which of us who keeps hiseyes and ears alert requires documentary proof of our deplorablecondition? Do we need more than a few minutes of careful attentionwherever our fellow men and women congregate, in order at once to beconvinced that sickness, disease, defect and deformity today pass for theordinary, customary — aye! expected , lot of all human beings? Withendless queues waiting for beds at all our hospitals and with our lunaticasylums scandalously overcrowded, who can doubt our parlous
condition? "At present," Allendale Sanderson writes, "there are 20,000more patients in mental hospitals than they should hold," and, as onesmall fact illustrating the burden now thrust on the sound and healthy bythe biological scum of our society, he mentions that the present cost ofcaring for 150,000 mental patients and 60,000 mental defectives in the 400mental hospitals in the United Kingdom, is £1,000,000 per week (T.M. May1956; article: Mournful Numbers). Nor is there much of a prospect of anyalleviation of this burden; for, according to R. C. Cook (Human Fertility:
The Modern Dilemma , 1951, Chap. XII), "The present pattern of
reproduction, if continued for another generation, may halve the number ofscholarship ability and double the number of feeble-minded." The talk of every couple, of every group, in train, coaches, buses,streets, halls and private houses, is always about the illness, operation,defect, or at least hospitalization, of some relative, friend, acquaintance, orof the speaker him- or herself. Yet nobody turns a hair! It is all taken forgranted. Least of all is it ever felt as shameful, or nauseating. How many ofus can truthfully claim that we know one — only one — thoroughly healthyperson, including ourselves? According to the B.M.J. (29.2.36), the
Pioneer Health Centre at Peckham, carried out a survey which revealedthat 90 per cent of persons over 25 years of age in the families of theartisan class investigated, had some physical defect. Yet, very seldom does any leading politician or scientist commithimself to a public expression of his alarm at this state of affairs. Evenwhen he does, however, his remarks are so temperate and indicative ofhis "sense of humour", that they leave things as they are and confirm thepublic in their comfortable blindness. Is this craven restraint deliberate? Anexample of it is to be found
- p. 81 -in Dr. William McDougall's R.S.L. (Chap. VII), where he says, "We, thehuman race, are very ill-bred when compared either with the races ofanimals that live in a state of nature, or with those which man hasdomesticated and modified for his own purposes. Among them oneseldom sees a creature that is not graceful, healthy, efficient in allrespects, full of vigour and vitality, beautiful according to its own type. Howdifferent is the lot of the human race. In every civilized land one seesamong all classes a large proportion of men, women, and childrenburdened with defects of nature that derogate from their humanity; defectsranging from mere clumsiness of l imbs or disharmony of features to grossdeformities of structure." —Yes! But there follows no hint about the moral doctrines fostering allthis human uncomeliness and defect; nor, in view of the urgency ofreforming our sentiments, can Dr. McDougall 's statement be regarded as
very challenging. What can explain this relative equanimity among ourleaders and the masses, high and low, and the unshaken self-esteem ofthe English generally, in the presence of all this visible, audible andimportunate human morbidity and abnormality, unless it be the habit ofmind inculcated upon all by centuries of Christian teaching, that the bodyand its conditions matter so little compared with the soul, that all of us havebecome insensitive, indifferent, to human repulsiveness and biologicaldepravity? "D'où vient qu'un boiteux ne nous irrite pas," Pascal asked,
somewhere about the middle of the seventeenth century, "et qu'un esprit
boiteux nous irrite?" (P. Ière Partie, Article VIII, ix: "How is it that the haltand the lame do not annoy us, and that the halting and lamed minddoes"?). Pascal's answer is fanciful; for the truth is that even in his time, threecenturies ago, the European's habit of mind had already been conditionedto take human physical defects, however repulsive, for granted, and toregard only so-called "spiritual" ones as worthy of censure. It is conceivable, apart from the prevalence today of what might be
termed merely "medicated survival", that one of the more important factors,next to centuries of Christian indoctrination, which may account to someextent at least for the strange indifference of the British public towards theirprevailing morbidity and abnormality, is the prominent rôle that improvedtransport facilities have played in the last century and a half throughout
- p. 82 -the civilized world. As long as freedom of movement remained contingenton physical soundness and the capacity to endure prolonged exertion and
fatigue, people were naturally made more immediately and dramaticallyaware of any bodily defects which hampered independent locomotion,especially over what were formerly considered long distances. In the course of hardly a century and a half, however, such markedand steady progress has occurred in all kinds of mechanical transport, andthe present age has seen such a spectacular and wide distribution of bothpublic and private conveyances that enable the feeble, the decrepit, andeven the incapacitated, to travel at speeds which, little more than half acentury ago, were confined to the railways, that the inevitable result has
been a successful, but nevertheless insidious, masking of most physicalfailings, feebleness or bodily flabbiness. And this mitigation ofsubnormality or morbidity, which formerly hampered mobility and could notescape attention, is nowhere more effectual and more deceptive than inthe use of the "internal combustion engine"; for here, the dizzy speedswhich can be attained even by the most debilitated and cachectic ofdrivers, merely by pressing the accelerator, gives the person at the wheela sense of power and efficiency so illusory, so spurious, that a totally falsepicture of his or her condition is impressively and constantly presented. The high speeds attainable in a car may be the principal factor, notonly in masking the prevailing morbidity, but also in relieving thepullulating feelings of inferiority which naturally afflict a people riddled withorganic defects. This was certainly the view of Dr. Lampériere who, in adiscussion with other doctors, said that the desire for speed was amongother things "a compensation for feelings of inferiority and of inadequacy inadults" (B.M.J. 8.9.56); whilst Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge, speaking of the
modern man and his car, says, "With such power at his disposal, theweakest feel strong, and the poorest-spirited, formidable" (T.T. Chap. IV,vii). Thus, it seems legitimate to conclude that, among the less thoughtfulmembers of the populations of the West, which are the great majority, afalse sense of self-satisfaction arises. At the very least, they have theirattention powerfully and constantly diverted from their physicalshortcomings, including their failing stamina, by the profusion ofmechanical aids now put at their
- p. 83 -service; whilst some of these, like the motor-car, give them in addition, afactitious sense of strength and efficiency, which dissipates any doubtsthey might entertain about their bodily condition. "Then what is your remedy?" the reader asks; and, in the defiance ofhis tone, I sense his assumption that he knows my answer and has theappropriate retort ready. What he expects me to say is, "A lethal chamberfor the human rubbish we are salvaging at the cost of the dwindling
minority of the sound and promising," and if I hint at such a thing, he isprepared at once to retort that the decent English public would nevertolerate such "Nazi" or "fascist sadism". Incidentally, it should be noted that when the average personformulates this sort of reply, he not only shows himself incapable of goingfurther back in history than World War II — as if thought on this questionbegan then — but also betrays his expectation of immediate applausefrom every moron in the nation, whose alleged inability to suffer the violentelimination of even selected lower-grade defectives, is compounded with
the patient, not to say, cheerful, endurance of the death of thousands ofquite unselected and presumably sound adults and children on ourhighways every year. — No wonder a thinker like Macneile Dixon, comparing thesuspicious fortitude of the public in regard to the slaughter on our roadswith the hysterical fuss made over the deaths due to war, felt compelled toexclaim, "Will someone be good enough to tell me why the one kind ofkill ing is condoned, the other condemned?" (T.H.S. Chap. IX). But let that pass, for I have no intention of proposing to the English
public, corrupted by centuries of Christian sophistries, anything so painfulto their tender sensibilities and so welcome to their dialectical powers, asa lethal chamber for the most hopeless of our hospitalized population. I amtoo well aware that if this were the only alternative to their present policy oflaisser aller , it would but rivet them more tightly to their determinationindefinitely to postpone all attempts at grappling with the problem,especially along such lines as the compassionate farmer follows to protecthis more precious plants. It is, therefore all the more surprising that thinkers like Thomas Huxleyand F. H. Bradley should both have had only some such remedy in mindwhen, confronted with the mounting
- p. 84 -incidence of disease, defect, dementia and deformity, and the crushingburdens it imposes on the vanishing remnant of sound and promisingstocks, they began to think of practical methods of dealing with it. This is
the more regrettable in Huxley's case, because it made him reject a priori
any solution involving the violence which the remedy in question implies;and, by his rejection, associated him with the vast body of modern Englishpeople who would gladly put off, if possible for good, any inquiry into themeans whereby present-day biological corruption may be combated. Thus, in discussing the conflict of Christian morality with Nature'swholesome practice of sloughing off from the main body any diseased orrotten member, Huxley had to face the question how the present tendencyto preserve and foster the defective and ill-favoured may now be corrected.
Unable to grasp the iniquity of withholding all pity and protection from themeagre minority of the sound and promising, whose multiplication andvery existence are imperilled by the soaring claims of the biologicallydepraved, he plunges immediately into a discussion of the possible moralconsequences and repercussions of such a method, as they would affectthe character and the domestic and social virtues of any population thatadopted it. "I do not see," he says, "how such selection could be practisedwithout a serious weakening, it may be the destruction, of the bonds whichhold society together. It strikes me that men who are accustomed to
contemplate the active or passive extirpation of the weak, the unfortunate,and the superfluous; who justify that conduct on the ground that it has thesanctity of the cosmic process, and is the only way of ensuring theprogress of the race [why did he not say, "the preservation of the race"?] . .. on whose matrimonial undertakings the principles of the stud have thechief influence; whose lives, therefore, are an education in the noble art ofsuppressing material affection and sympathy, are not likely to have anylarge stock of these commodities left" (E.E. Prolegomena, XII). The argument against the violent extirpation of tainted, defective and
ill-bred human beings, including monsters and raving maniacs, couldhardly be stated with more vigour and less judicial impartiality; for, apartfrom the fact that Huxley adduces no evidence to show that sympathy andthe bonds holding society together were destroyed by the ancient Spartancustom of hurling ill-favoured infants into the place called Apothetae , adeep
- p. 85 -cavern near Mount Taygetus, or by the ancient Roman custom of hurling
similarly i ll-favoured infants over the side of the Tarpeian Rock, there isnothing in the passage quoted to indicate that he ever paused to think ofthe suppression of affection and sympathy which our morality imposestowards those few remaining human specimens who are still capable ofperpetuating the race in a desirable form. Yet, if we are not to continue
jeopardizing posterity's happiness and health, let alone survival, byfostering the tainted and defective and allowing them to multiply, it wouldseem imperative to kindle compassion for those who still give promise of avigorous and comely progeny. Nor is it either fair, realistic, or even logical, to assume that because acouple marry only after careful enquiry and scrutiny have shown them tobe sound and free from defect, that therefore their union must of necessitybe destitute of affection and mutual devotion. Such expressions as"principles of the stud", which, as Huxley well knew, suggest the breedingof pigs and kine, when applied to the wise and prudent selection of a goodmate, may be relied upon to arouse indignation in the ignorant, the
thoughtless and the sentimental; but they are surely unworthy of a socialphilosopher, earnestly concerned about the future well-being of his fellowmen. When we read that the ancient Hindu legislator, Manu, insisted on allblemishes being declared before marriage, and on the infliction of suitablepenalties if this were not done (Laws , VIII, 8), are we to infer that there wasnever any affection between the couples who complied with this ruling? According to an ancient Jewish law, "If some previously unknowndefect was found in the wife after marriage, she was divorced without
receiving back her marriage settlement," which implies that defects had tobe revealed in advance; whilst people "with an hereditary taint in thefamily are discouraged from marrying". (Talmud , Kethuboth, 92b and 75a).Are we to assume on Huxley's authority that this law destroyed all thenatural affection felt for each other by young Jewish couples? An oldIcelandic law obliged the giver in marriage to hand over the bride "freefrom all physical blemish" (Das Weib in der Natur und Völkerkunde , byDrs. A. Ploss and M. P. Bartels, 1927, Vol. II, p. 229); whilst the Burmeselaw "compelled the father of the bride to call the bridegroom's attention to
any blemish in the maiden, and the marriage contract was cancelled ifimportant
- p. 86 -defects had been concealed at the time of the betrothal" (Ibid .). According to an interesting Jewish provision made by the Talmudsages, a husband was not allowed to repudiate his wife for a hidden bodilyblemish, unless there was no bathing establishment in the town where thecouple belonged. For if such an establishment existed, the husband
"would be able to have her seen there by his (female) relatives beforemarriage" (Talmud , Kethuboth, 75r, p. 242). It was probably with the sameintention that in former times in Russia, "a girl, about to be married,exhibited herself naked to her future husband's friends" (E. P. deSénancourt: De L'Amour , 1805, p. 182, note: "jadis, en Russie, une fille,
au moment de se marier, se montrait nue aux amis de celui qui devout
l'épouser" ). The Jewish people are alleged (very sensibly!) to have included evenfoul breath among 145 defects disqualifying a woman from marriage (The
Jewish Child , by Dr. W. M. Feldman, 1917, p. 44). Would Huxley havebeen justified, had he inferred from these facts that all Icelandic, Burmeseand Jewish couples married without any affection, or with feelings ofaffection less ardent than those possessed by that gangrenous couple ofconsumptives described by Lytton in Pilgrims of the Rhine ? Do themarriages of our diseased, tainted, defective and neurotic couples inEngland today, none of whom have been married according to the"principles of the stud", turn out happier and more lasting than those ofcouples whose families have observed these principles? If so, is not ourpresent average annual total of 32,757 marriage failures rather strange? It seems, therefore, highly probable that, in the passage quoted fromHuxley's Evolution and Ethics , he was not so much playing to thesentimental gallery which, in the England of his day, as in ours at thepresent time, was packed to suffocation-for I consider him above trying toappeal to popular prejudice — as unconsciously expressing that deeply-rooted European hatred of taking physical attributes into account in
assessing human worth; a hatred conditioned by centuries of Christianindoctrination. For, as Canon Oliver Chase Quick so ingenuouslyconfesses: "True Christian faith always puts the health of the spirit first"(Christian Beliefs and Modern Questions , 1924, Lecture VII). Huxley wastoo intelligent and well informed really to believe that what he called "theprinciples of the stud" applied to matrimony, would inevitably destroyaffection. But fundamentally these principles
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deviated from what his Christian instincts told him was right, and thisirrational and deeply ingrained bias dominated his judgment. Thus,despite his Rationalism and Agnosticism, he voiced the sentiments of theChristianity-infected crowd who would gladly postpone sine die thesolution of the problem of Western man's degeneracy, and, through theirreluctance to grapple with it, cling stubbornly to the assumption that violentextirpation is the only means of solving it; for they know that with thisscarecrow they can be sure of scattering any group displaying alarm at thesoaring incidence of human rottenness and the burdens it imposes.
F. H. Bradley, like Huxley and most modern people, could also seebut one solution — violent extirpation. But, unlike the sentimental mob,high and low, which remains callously indifferent to the injustices andcruelties inflicted on the sound by the hosts of human defectives, he doesnot cling to this solution in the hope of indefinitely postponing all attemptsto apply a remedy. On the contrary, he accepts the consequences of thisdrastic solution with a clean conscience; calls it "moral surgery", andcannot understand why it should not be applied forthwith. Far from sharingHuxley's qualms about emulating the farmer's policy of ruthlessly
preventing the weeds from choking the more precious plants, he believesthat this would have only favourable results. "Against the unlimited right ofthe moral organism," he says, "to dispose of its members, is there anythingto be set? There is nothing so far as I see, but superstition and prejudice,"and he stresses the need of what he terms "ethical surgery". "Our remedy",he declares, "would have to utter and enforce the sentences, 'You and youare dangerous specimens, you must depart in peace.' It would probablyadd, "There are some children here over and above what we want, andtheir origin, to say the least, is suspicious. We utterly decline to rear these
children at the public cost and, so far as we can judge, to the public injury;"and his freedom from any subconscious Christian promptings is shown byhis denial of the Christian principle of "the sacredness of human life" whenit is but Biological Brummagem (S.R.P.). Now, F. H. Bradley is acknowledged to have been one of the greatestEnglish philosophers of the late nineteenth century. But he was Huxley's
junior by twenty-one years, and this altered his outlook. Huxley was stillunaware of his powerful Christian bias; whilst Bradley had so successfullypurged his system of it as to
- p. 88 -feel able to question the very sacredness of human life when it was fouland jeopardized posterity. Another courageous advocate of extirpation is the Americanpsychiatrist. Dr. Cole Davis. Addressing the Rotary Club, Atlantic City, in1934, he said: "We probably wil l not live to see the day, but it is coming. It
wil l become necessary both to protect society and ease the burden whichis threatening to swamp us. . . . Incurables and idiots should berecommended for destruction by the superintendents of institutions afterlong observation and with the consent of families, then examined byboards of psychiatrists." Then speaking of the insane, he added, "Theincrease of such persons is at the rate of 10,000 a year; a few years ago itwas only 3,000 a year" (Daily Mail , 1.1.34). In his Theory of Morals (1928, Chap. III), E. F. Carritt says of thevirtues of the superior man that "he wil l be more just, more merciful and
more self-sacrificing" than other men. William James also observes, "Aman is nothing unless he is capable of sacrifices." Here again, werecognize a powerful unconscious Christian strain; for, unless we knowwhat sort of sacrifice is meant, these statements lie under the suspicion ofbeing merely the Christian principle of expecting the sacrifice of thegreater for the less; particularly as it is here demanded of the superior man.Yet, the very last thing a world disinfected of Christian influence wouldrequire, would be the sacrifice of the superior man. Why is it always assumed by Christians that if sacrifice is demanded
at all, it must always be of the greater for the less? Has the duty of self-sacrifice ever been preached to the biologically hopeless? I believe not.But if that is so and we have no record of their refusal to perform it, why is italways gratuitously assumed that they are quite incapable of it and,provided that they were mentally capable of reasoning at all, woulddecline to exercise it if exhorted to do so; whilst, on the contrary, thebiologically superior are always assumed to be ready and eager self-sacrificers? It has certainly never been satisfactorily explained why thefastening of the duty of self-sacrifice upon the desirable and the promising
alone, was thought to be a more lofty moral principle than its converse. Noris it easy to understand how the general public can continue to be blind tothe state of biological emergency to which this policy has led. In war-time we make it a matter of glory and nobility to
- p. 89 -sacrifice our healthiest and best youths for the nation's safety and survival.Can it, therefore, be so extraordinarily inhuman to sacrifice our "lowertypes", à la Bradley , in peace-time, so that the nation may continue to
flourish in a desirable form? Can it be so very heartless to wish to relievethe best and most promising stocks of the crushing burdens, let alone theracial dangers, which the multiplication of human biological inferiorityinflicts upon them? We raise the cross displaying a god immolated for the mob andexclaim, "In hoc signo vinces!"; and the masses high and low do notunderstand that the sign spells, not conquest for all that a tasteful peopleshould hold most high, but victory for pollution and purulence. So that evenif there were no other remedy than Bradley's for the scourge of humandecay and degeneracy, we should agree with him that there is nothing tobe said against it. Nevertheless, we are no more ready to accept it for ridding our worldof its rotten elements than we are ready to agree with Huxley's reasons forrejecting it. Nor should we be inclined to favour even the method known as"Voluntary Sterilization", recommended by the Departmental Committeeon Sterilization, by which mental and physical defectives could be
deprived of their capacity for parenthood, although this does not mean thatwe agree with Dr. H. P. Newsholme's far-fetched, romantic and whollyunconvincing reasons for disapproving of it (C.E. Chap. VIII). For there liesto hand a more effective, more certain, though perhaps slower, remedy inthe method advocated in masterly fashion by Nietzsche. I refer to The
Transvaluation of Values , which has not yet been understood by threegenerations of Nietzsche-readers, and which I shall try to explain oncemore in the next chapter.
* * * *
In conclusion, a word must be said about the incidence of morbidity andphysical defect in our modern world and the amount of suffering it causes,both among the ill-favoured themselves, and those connected or in contactwith them. The Rationalists claim that all this suffering is incompatible withthe Christian concept of a Creator who is a God of Love, a Loving Father. To this churchmen reply that as man's suffering is always due
- p. 90 -to his own or someone else's sin, the suffering in the world is punishmentfor sin and therefore not incompatible with the concept of the deity as aGod of Love. Thus, the Rev. J. R. Illingworth says of the "Problem of Pain"(L.M. III), "To begin with its simplest if lowest aspect, pain is punishment . .. without committing ourselves to the statement that suffering wasintroduced into the world by sin, which is not a Christian dogma, though itis often thought to be so, a vast amount of the suffering in the world isobviously punishment."
When, against this, the Rationalists argue that punishment seems tofall on the innocents just as much as on the guilty, all he can say is, "it maybe the call to higher things". Besides, it is not accurate to say that "the statement that suffering wasintroduced into the world by sin is not a Christian dogma", seeing thatevery child in a Christian country is taught about the Fall of Man and God'ssharp rebuke to Adam and Eve after their sin, and his promise of harshtribulation to both of them on account of it (Genesis iii . 16–19). It istherefore difficult to avoid the inference that sin did introduce suffering intothe world. The Rev. Harold Anson does not attempt to hedge. He says outright,"if we knew all the circumstances which surround every case of suffering,we should always be able to point to the sin which caused it. . . . If sin wereto cease today, suffering would also cease. . . . It is wrong anddishonouring to God to say that it is His will that there should be sufferingin the world". (C.P. Chap. XI). There is undoubtedly much truth in this Christian retort to theRationalists. Every day we see some form of human suffering that is theresult of an error of judgment or behaviour. But, if we are to be fair in
allotting the blame, we must distinguish between what in the Christiansense is "sin", and what is merely an ignorant breach of a natural law, orthe outcome of obeying some mistaken, but superior authority. When, in the old days, the father of a family squandered his earningson drink and deprived his wife and children of sustenance so that they alldied of the consequences of starvation (tuberculosis, for instance), that
was clearly innocent suffering through guilt and sin. When he himselfsubsequently died of General Paralysis of the Insane, his was clearly acase of suffering through sin; for he would not have contacted G.P.I. hadhe
- p. 91 -not indulged in unwise fornication. When, on the other hand, a group ofchildren die through eating deadly-nightshade berries, the case is merelyone of sinless ignorance.
But when the whole of a Christian people, as I have shown, grow evermore and more tainted, diseased and defective, through too faithfullyfollowing the Socratic precepts implicit in Christianity, which lead everygeneration, when assessing human worth, to consider only invisiblequalities, this is surely sinning, and the biological corruption that ensues isclearly condign punishment for sin. But it is certainly not sinning from theChristian point of view. On the contrary, it is no more than the practicalapplication of the rule laid down by St. Paul in Chapter 4 of the SecondEpistle to the Corinthians.
Even in the case of the drunken syphilitic father aforesaid, however,the Rationalists might still discern factors conflicting with the hypothesis ofa God of Love; for they might argue that although the father's dipsomaniawas a sin, had the micro-organisms of disease not existed in the creation,neither his children nor he himself would have suffered the punishments Ihave described. Nevertheless, I think we may safely grant the Christians' claim that asubstantial amount of human suffering is the outcome of either deliberateor careless violations of a natural law; although, even if it were possible to
multiply the instances of breaches a thousandfold, they would still notabsolve the Creator of his responsibility for an enormous amount of humansuffering unearned by sin. It would be impossible, for instance, to compute the enormous amountof suffering, unprovoked by either sin or even ignorance (culpable orotherwise), that humanity has undergone and in some parts of the world isstill undergoing, from the attacks of wild animals-the carnivores, reptilesand rodents; of insects, poisonous or disease-bearing; of parasites,whether internal or external, and the micro-organisms of lethal il lnesses.
Nor can we form any adequate estimate of the pain and mortality causedby such natural calamities as floods, droughts, volcanic eruptions,earthquakes and tempests. The terrible earthquake of Messina in 1908, forinstance, which caused the deaths of 77,283 people, led many so-called"simple" Christians to question their faith in the Almighty's benevolence.The devastations of insect and other pests, alone, must be accountable inthe history of mankind for
- p. 92 -the deaths of vast multitudes from starvation and want. Even the crueltiesperpetrated against their fellow-beings by men themselves, mayreasonably be ascribed in ultimate analysis to the propensity to crueltyimplanted in their nature; nor do we need to be acquainted with more factsthan we may cull from Gibbon's Decline and Fall , or Winwood Reade'sMartyrdom of Man , in order to be persuaded of the reality of this propensityin the average human being.
It would be difficult by any process of reasoning, however subtle, toattribute the pain and mortality which have been the outcome of thesevarious agencies, to the deliberate sinfulness of those who were theirvictims, and the Rev. Harold Anson's statement to the effect that "if sinwere to cease today, suffering would also cease", cannot therefore besustained. Moreover, when we come to consider the essential rôle playedin the formation of character and in the determination of behaviour, by ahuman being's endocrine glands and his particular genes, we may oftenseriously hesitate about whom to blame, man or his Maker, for even the
most revolting of human actions. Thus, Macneile Dixon, speaking of Dante's assigning "humancreatures to heaven or hell for their behaviour in this life", and implying thatthe great Italian poet was ignorant of the influence of endocrine glands andof hereditary genes on mankind's conduct, exclaims: "Eternal damnation following upon deficiency in phosphorus oriodine, upon some hereditary twist!" (T.H.S. Chap. II). The argument against the Rev. Anson's claim, however, acquiresmuch added strength when it is extended to the suffering of animals;
because here there can be no question of sin, retribution and punishment,and the agonies daily endured by countless creatures of all kinds, whetherfrom the quarter of predatory foes or from that of parasites and insects,since the moment when sentient beings first began to inhabit our earth,must be as far beyond our power to imagine as they are whollyunaccountable. From prehistoric times to the present day, the number andvariety of diabolical monsters that have been ruthlessly preying on more orless defenceless species, and the toll of terror, torture and violent deathsfor which they have been answerable are quite incalculable. All we know
for certain is that, from the first moment of organic life on earth, slaughterand mutilation under the cruellest conditions and often without
- p. 93 -even the motive of hunger — as with ferrets and cats — have been thegrim order of the day in the animal world. "To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times," saysWill iam James, "is hard for our imagination. Yet there is no tooth in anyone of those museum skulls that did not daily throughout long years of the
foretime hold fast to the body struggling in despair of some fated livingvictim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to their victims, if on a smallerscale, fill the world about us today. Here on our very hearths and in ourgardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot birdfluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at thismoment vessels of life as real as we are . . . and wherever they or otherwild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitatedmelancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation" (V.R.E.Lectures VI and VII). Evidently pondering the same facts as these, Bertrand Russell ,commenting on Hugh Miller's Testimony of the Rocks , says, "Hugh Millerdescribes vividly, with a certain horror, the instruments of death and evenof torture employed against each other by species of animals which wereextinct before man existed . . . a benevolent Creator could not havecreated such monsters" (R.S. Chap. III); and, referring to this world, hesays (W. Chap. 4), "if it is the outcome of deliberate purpose, the purpose
must have been that of a fiend". In a like vein, Macneile Dixon, referring to Nature, exclaims, "Youcannot instruct her in any of the torturer's or the executioner's arts. There isno benevolence in the forest. If you complain that men are a cruel breed,you need not inquire whence they derive the propensity. It is inherited, andfrom the mother's side" (T.H.S. Chap. IV). John Cowper Powys takes much the same view. He says, "Let us beless cruel than God," and in the following chapter, he exclaims, "Deep,deep in the heart of God, must be implanted the love of causing suffering"
(D.S. Chap. VI). These are not the idle jibes of frivolous voluptuaries; but, as we knowfrom their work and lives, the ripe judgments of profound and soberthinkers who, not in the impulsive ardour of rebellious youth, but in thecalm autumn of their years, thus summed up their views about the sufferingwhich they found so prominent a feature of existence. Nor do I think thatany satis-
- p. 94 -
factory reply can be made on behalf of Christianity's "God of Love" whichwould invalidate what they jointly claim. Powys put their point of view vividly before us when he wrote: "Theworld we live in is so full of appalling cruelties and oppressions . . . that theidea of a loving Father being behind all this and responsible for all this,strikes an unobsequious and healthy mind as a horrible and evil mockery.. . . The excuse for God usually put up by believers is the excuse used byZeus in Homer, namely that all the evil in the world is due to the free will ofman. But this excuse hardly applies to the abominable sufferings of the
animal world or even to the decidedly unpleasant things that go on in thevegetable world" (P.O.L. Chap. "The Bible as Literature"). There is, I fear, no answer to this, and it would seem as if only thewilfully blind could refuse to see its implication, which is once more thatthe Christian "God of Love" cannot be accepted as a possibility by thethoughtful man. Even Joad, in his vindication of Christianity, says of thesufferings of animals, "The problem is for me unresolved" (R.O.B. Chap. I). Churchmen have tried their utmost to counter the argument of theRationalists against a Loving Creator; but hardly with success; and to have
to resort at this time of day to the escapist ruse of invoking a bogey in theform of an evil spirit contending with a benevolent deity, is surely evidencerather of desperation than of calm reflection. Canon B. H. Streeter, for instance, discussing "God and the World'sPain", says, "God is able to bring good out of evil, but to see the hand ofGod in evil itself is an error. . . . If men are taught to see the hand of Godwhen they ought to see the power of Satan, they inevitably form a falseconception of the nature and character of God — and to worship Godunder a false conception, is the same thing as to worship a false God"(C.P. Chap. 1). We ought perhaps to remember in reading such a passage that it waswritten in 1916; but after all this was far from being the Middle Ages. WorldWar I was already in its second year; Victoria had been dead fifteen years;Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Nietzsche and Van Gogh had been deadsixteen years; Bernard Shaw, Conrad and Thomas Hardy were already intheir dotage, and Victoria's grandson was already on the throne.
But perhaps the least sincere, least convincing and mostdisingenuous clerical reply to Powys's charge of cruelty against the
- p. 95 -Christian God, comes from the Rev. J. R. Illingworth, whose viewsregarding suffering and sin have already been quoted. Faced with theawkward fact of appalling suffering in the animal world, which noconvenient appeal to sin and punishment can possibly explain, he says,"No reasonable man doubts that they suffer. But the degree and intensity
of their suffering is almost entirely a matter of conjecture. We speak of, andare affected by the mass of animal suffering; but we must remember that itis felt distributively. No one animal suffers more because a million sufferlikewise" (L.M. III). — No! But a million animals dying in agony surely adds up to morepain and anguish than one animal who so dies. Nor can it be any solace toa particular animal, borne off in the jaws of some carnivore, to know that amillion other defenceless fellow-creatures have suffered similarly. The reverend gentleman then argues that, since the amount of
suffering animals undergo is only a matter of conjecture and "apresumption of the imagination" for "the nature of the case cannot possiblybe verified" and such presumptions "admit of being met by as probablepresumptions on the other side we decline to arraign our Creator for adeed which we have not even the means of knowing that he has done"(L.M.). So it amounts to this: because we cannot get under the skin of ananimal on the point of being devoured by a beast of prey, and because weare able only to infer from our own experience of violent handling and from
the signs of anguish and pain in the victim — not to mention the fact thatwe know it to be equipped with a complicated nervous system not verydifferent from our own — that suffering of an acute kind is being endured,we are, according to the Rev. J. R. Illingworth guilty of a "presumption ofthe imagination" in assuming that there is suffering of a terrible kind in theanimal world and that this suffering cannot be regarded as punishment. We can understand the Christian's dilemma about the Evil in Creationand can sympathise with his perplexity when faced with the problem ofdemonstrating that his God of Love who is all goodness cannot have been
responsible for it. But, before reading the Rev. Illingworth's defence of theLoving Father, we had no idea that Christian apologists could findthemselves in such dire straits as to have to resort to the sophistries weare offered in the chapter on pain in Lux Mundi ; and we can hardly wonderif,
- p. 96 -under the protection of such feeble and bankrupt advocates, beside whomDickens's Serjeant Buzfuz is a dialectical genius, the Church should havewilted and declined. No less ardent a Christian than Pascal had the wisdom frankly toapprove of Antonin Diana's dictum that "tout mal excepté le péché est
envoyé de Dieu" (Lettres Provinciales , 10th Letter: "All evil except sin hasbeen sent by God"); and it is more consonant with the dignity and prestigeof a great Faith for its believers, even whilst professing mystification, toacknowledge the justice of a well-grounded and yet damaging charge
against it, than to descend to such shifts as those with which this Church ofEngland cleric tries to defend his God of Love. No profound thinker, confronted by the seamy side of the Creation andthe character attributed to its Creator by Christianity, has ever failed todiscern a discordant note. Goethe himself refers to a distinguished lawyer,Hofrat Hüsgen, whom he very much admired and who one day admitted tohim that "even in God he discovered faults" (Auch in Gott entdeck ich
Fehler" : A.M.L. Erster Teil, Viertes Buch ); whilst Goethe acknowledgesthat he too was "daring enough to believe that there were things in God
which he felt he must forgive" (Ibid. Zweiter Teil, Achtes Buch : "ich war
kühn genug zu glauben dass ich ihm einiges zu verzeihen hätte" ). We must remember that these views were expressed before sciencehad done much to shake the foundations of the Faith; but today fewthoughtful people wil l feel much astonishment at these relatively mildadmissions. They sense a fatal antinomy in the postulation of a LovingGod who is the embodiment of goodness, as the Creator of a world suchas the realist recognizes this one to be; and in once more rejecting theChristian religion as a proposed solution of the riddle of the Universe, they
wil l feel more than ever persuaded that only a deep subconsciouscomplex, strong enough to overpower the intellect, can possibly accountfor the many men of unquestionably high intell igence who, their goodbrains notwithstanding, have professed a belief in the guesses Christianityoffers about the mystery of life and the Universe. It is this consideration thatlends the colour of probability to the claims of investigators like ProfessorLeuba and his fellow-psychoanalysts, who see in the impulse to religionan unconscious urge deriving its dynamism from the deeper instincts of thehuman organism and owing nothing to any supernatural agency.
- p. 97 -Chapter VII
Christianity Not the Thoughtful Man's Religion — V
Nietzsche's proposed correction of the wrongs Christian doctrine hasinflicted on mankind, can only be understood when we have examined thesource of that part of Christian doctrine responsible for the biologicaldamage the religion has wrought among civilized human stocks. In Chapter V it was shown how Heine had been one of the first torecognize that the most dangerous feature of Christianity was its exorbitantemphasis on the soul and the soul's attributes (assumed, objectivelydetermined, or merely professed) and its corresponding neglect, not to saycontempt, of the body. This deliberate and unwarranted division of man'spsycho-physical organism into two parts, which Christianity declared so farindependent of each other as to justify the exaltation of the one and thedisparagement of the other, no matter how commendable any particular
body might be biologically, inevitably led, as I have sufficiently shown, todeplorable abuses. For, besides making the mere profession of belief, faithor piety, without the necessity of any accompanying biological excellence,a passport into the élite , this gratuitous and pretentious dualism by onestroke confined the estimation of human worthiness to invisible attributesalone — a method of appraisement highly advantageous to all ill-favoured,
tainted, repulsive and defective creatures. By means of it, every kind ofhuman biological trash, all the psycho-physical riff raff of our homes fordefectives, maniacs and monsters, acquired parity with the highestexamples of the species, a parity in which lurked the direst peril formankind, if only because of its deleterious effect on the taste and judgmentof both male and female in their choice of a mate. In fact, as thatincorrigible romantic, Edward Carpenter, madly and gladly proclaimed:"To be ungainly or deformed shall after all be no hindrance". (Towards
Democracy , 1892, Chap. LXIII). No wonder a
- p. 98 -modern philosopher like C. E. M. Joad, speaking of the "dysgenicinfluences" of our civilization, felt entitled to say, "we may, therefore,ultimately see our civil ization go the way of its predecessors through thedeterioration of the biological quality of its members" (Guide to Modern
Wickedness , 1939, Part III, Chap. 12). It is, however, typical of even theboldest among modern publicists that he should speak of "our civilization"and not of "our Christian morality" in this connection, thus displaying the
proverbial timidity of most latter-day English thinkers vis-à-vis of theChurch, the dissenting bodies, and more or less earnest Christians all overthe country. Now, how did this extraordinarily corrupt doctrine arise? For it ispossible to place a finger on the very moment in European history when itfirst took shape. In order to grasp the full enormity of the innovation — for it was acomplete innovation — we must glance at Greece of the fifth century B.C.which, according to Edward Freeman and Findlay, was already in a state
of rapid decline (The Chief Periods of European History , 1886, p. 21). It iswell to bear this in mind, because otherwise we cannot understand how adoctrine so alien to the best and healthiest Hellenic instincts was firstpromulgated and subsequently allowed to take root in the ancient world. Decadent as the ancient Greeks may have been at the close of thefifth century B.C., they still held to certain traditional beliefs protecting themfrom the worst ravages of their decaying culture. For instance, they couldnot grant that the worth of men and women could be assessed on thescore of their psychological or invisible attributes alone. They believed
man was one, an indivisible whole, and that his visible and invisibleattributes were inseparable and interdependent. To estimate the worth of ahuman being chiefly, let alone solely, from his invisible attributes, was apractice either unknown to them, or, where known, condemned as absurd.And here they resembled the whole of the known world of the period. Modern science has wholly vindicated this ancient Greek attitude, andwil l not countenance any gratuitous and imaginary division of a humanbeing into soul or mind, and body or physique. In An Introduction to Personality (1950, Chap. IX, 6), ProfessorRaymond B. Cattell observes that "Personality can
- p. 99 -definitely be shown to be related to physique". In his Rede Lecture for1952, Sir W. Russell Brain, speaking on the "contribution of medicine to
our idea of the mind" , said, "There can hardly be any body state whichdoes not to a greater or less extent influence the mind, and there can
hardly be any state of mind which does not in turn influence in somedegree the functions of the body." Dr. Franz Boas, in Race, Language and
Culture (1940, p. 8), says, "There is no doubt in my mind that there is avery definite association between the biological make-up of the individualand the physiological and psychological functioning of his body. . . . Thereare organic reasons why individuals differ in their mental behaviour." In hisbook entitled What I Believe (1925), Bertrand Russell showed himself wellaware of Christianity's fatal error in separating the body and soul [mind] ofman, which he stigmatized as a "metaphysical superstition". In Why I Am
Not a Christian , he returns to the question and again repudiates Christiandualism. F. H. Bradley, in Appearance and Reality (1920, Chap. XXIII),demonstrates the inseparability of body and "soul" (mind); and ProfessorG. A. Dorsey (C. Chap. XIII) argues with equal cogency against thegratuitous separation of psychology and physiology. Professor F. H.Hankins, in the Racial Basis of Civilization (1926, p. 291), declares that "Ifthere are physical differences [between men] we seem on safe ground ininferring that there must be mental differences also"; whilst A. E. Taylor,throughout his book, The Problem of Conduct (1901), speaks of man as "a
psycho-physical organism". Over a century ago, moreover, in his essay onPersonal Beauty (1854), Herbert Spencer implied a similar rejection of theChristian belief in the independence and separateness of man's body and"soul" (mind). We have also the testimony of that able and distinguished Frenchpsychologist. Dr. Roland Dalbiez, who, in his scholarly treatise, La
Méthode Psychoanalytique et la Doctrine Freudienne (1936, Vol. II, Chap.V, i), observes that "Il est impossible d'admettre l'existence chez l'homme
de phénomènes psychologiques sans conditions physiologiques" . (It is
impossible to admit the existence in man of phychological, withoutcorresponding physiological, phenomena.") Centuries before this was written, however, that amazing Frenchwizard, Montaigne, whose genius anticipated many of the psychologicaldiscoveries of modern times, observed: "Ce n'est pas une âme, ce n'est
pas un corps qu'on dresse, c'est un
- p. 100 -homme, il n'en faut pas faire à deux." (Essais , Livre I, Chap. XXVI. "It is not
a soul, nor is it a body that we train, but a man. There is no question ofdealing with two entities.") No wonder Pascal thought poorly ofMontaigne's piety! But the very fact that I should think it necessary, for the benefit ofmodern English readers, to quote all these authorities, in order to reestablish what any ancient Athenian, or any sensible man of antiquity,would quite properly have regarded as a ridiculous platitude hardly worthstating — namely, that man is a whole, indivisible into body and "soul"(mind) — proves how deeply we have become influenced by Christianity'sbequest to posterity of the misleading and unrealistic psychologicalconclusions of Socrates. At any rate, the reunion of body and soul into one single unity, has atlast become a commonplace even of modern medicine, and as early as1937, we find a medical man stating that the human organism "isdescribable only in terms of function as 'body-mind' or 'mind-body'." Hethen adds, "This definition is generally accepted. . . . Thus there is no
longer any way of distinguishing a category of human distress or mat-adjustments which is spiritual . . . and there is no sort of physical disorderwithout some psychological concomitant or effect" (L. 31.7.37). It has taken us over two thousand years to get back to this positionand to restore the ancient Greek's sane and wholesome view of man as apsychosome, whose visible and invisible attributes cannot be judgedapart. Meanwhile, such is the havoc that has been wrought by the falsedualistic teaching of Christianity that, could an ancient Greek-saySophocles, or even Aristophanes — be placed at some vantage point in
the main shopping centre of any one of our modern cities, he would hardlybelieve his eyes when, gazing in astonishment at the milling crowds, hewas solemnly assured that they were in fact not only human beings, butalso creatures who believed themselves to be the dernier cri of CosmicEvolution. Although the rigid monism of the ancient Greek world is now generallyaccepted as valid by modern science, it is very far from having reached theteeming crowds just referred to. Probably not more than two or threeEuropeans per mill ion have as yet purged themselves of the corrupt habit
of overlooking and condoning "merely" physical defect, deformity,sickliness and the taint of disease, and of remaining unshocked byhereditary and
- p. 101 -actually visible afflictions and blemishes even in their prospective mates,provided always that the young person in question is a "good sport",believes in no colour bar and in democracy, has pinkish leanings and,above all, has a "sense of humour".
Thus, to maintain that good taste in the assessment of humanworthiness, even in mating, has, through two millenniums of Christianinfluence, become extinct, is simply to record a fact that must be patent toall. At what time then, and by what concatenation of regrettablecircumstances, did the sane and wholesome Greek concept of man as anindivisible whole, whose visible and invisible attributes were equallyimportant and interdependent — at what time and how did this wise andsanitary attitude make way for the morbid dualism of Christianity?
Strange to relate, long before Christianity was known, the tendency toassess human value merely from invisible attributes, to regard these asunrelated to visible attributes, and to hold the visible as negligiblecompared with the invisible — this tendency permeated the degenerateancient Greeks and most of the people inhabiting the region whichbecame the cradle of the Christian religion. Indeed, it was in ancientGreece itself that man's good taste and discrimination in judging hisfellows' worthiness veered irrevocably to the attitude now almost universalin the Western world, which either wholly ignores, or else depreciates,biological and aesthetic attributes in favour of "soul" or invisible qualitiesthat can be verified by no objective standards. How did this deplorable change come about? — Various attempts had been made by some of the more decadentGreeks, even as early as the seven century B.C., to supplant the oldMonism by a thoroughgoing dualism. Xenophanes was one of the earliestagitators in favour of this reform. The Orphic cults (never too respectable),
Pythagoras and Empedocles, had also tried to exalt "soul" above bodyattributes; and these tendencies were rooted in an ancient Animism, theconnection of which with nascent Greek dualism it would take too long,under the guidance of a scholar like Rhode, to examine. At any rate, untilthe end of the fifth century B.C., this dualism never really "got across". Themajority of Hellenes were still too healthy to accept it, and continued tobelieve that a good, desirable human being must be one whose visible,were as commendable as his invisible, qualities. Thus no one could passas desirable who was not bio-
- p. 102 -logically and aesthetically so. Hence, the old Greek expression for a goodman was "good-looking and good". The good as a classwere the "the good-looking and the good", and this principleendured among the majority of Hellenes until the end of the fifth centuryB.C. But, about 428 B.C., there suddenly appeared among these people, aman much more highly endowed as a canvasser of public support for his
personal views than ever Xenophanes had been. Unfortunately, hehappened to be so ungainly that friends, when introducing him, felt obligedto apologise for him; and he was naturally subjected to much contemptand ridicule on that account. Although possessed of some noble qualitiesand known to have an excellent military record, he was too exorbitantlyconcerned about safeguarding his self-esteem to accept with equanimitythe situation his physical shortcomings created. When, however, we bearin mind the tremendous store the Greeks of his day set by personal, andindeed al l forms of, beauty; when moreover we remember how inextricably
they connected personal comeliness with general desirability, it willperhaps strike us as less odd that a man with his forbidding appearanceshould have felt uneasy, not to say, afflicted. If even in our own day, whenpersonal looks are far from being as highly valued as they were in ancientGreece, men like Walter Pater and Tolstoy could feel downcast owing totheir excessive plainness, how much more must Socrates have felthumiliated in late fifth-century Athens by his unattractive exterior. Inaddition, he by no means belonged to the haute volée of the city; he wasalso steeped in many of the unhealthy elements of Greek thought, and is
said to have been the catamite of Archelaus. In a city, renowned throughout the ancient world for its transcendentbeauty, and thronged with people who held good looks, especially in themale, in the highest esteem (for their love of male beauty, see Plato'sCharmides , Chap. 3, p. 154; Lysis , Chap. 2, p. 204; and Protagoras , Chap1, p. 309a), Socrates naturally felt at a grave disadvantage. Judgedaccording to prevailing standards, he was condemned at sight. It is almostimpossible for modern Europeans to understand this; for today their worldso pullulates with ungainly people that to take exception to this fact would
argue cranky eccentricity. At all events, Socrates appears to have been unwilling to submit insilence to his unhappy destiny — at least, such is the infer-
- p. 103 -ence I venture to draw from some of the principal doctrines he ultimatelytried to propagate. He was determined, if possible to rescue his ill-
favoured personality from the censure it everywhere provoked. Impelled byhis inferiority feelings, he therefore set to work à la Adler to improvisemeans of making his invisible attributes redeem his visible ones. Nay,more-he threw an even wider net; for what he ultimately aspired to was toconvince his contemporaries that, after all, visible attributes were of much
less value and significance in estimating human worth than Hellenictradition held them to be. On the basis of Adler's penetrating findings, we need not assume thatSocrates was conscious either of the deeper motives for his procedure, or
for its apologetic character; for the will to power operates largely in thedark. Be this as it may, he certainly lighted with extraordinary precision onthe means best calculated to effect his self-vindication, and, withunparalleled brill iance, he proceeded to apply them. Appreciating that thefundamental belief damaging to his prestige and good repute, was theHellenic view of the oneness of man, he imagined, probably quitesincerely, that this belief must be fake and untenable. We have no reasonto suppose that he was aware of hoodwinking his fellow men when hetried to persuade them in and out of season that appearance counted for
nothing in estimating human worth. Such subjective forms of reasoning arecommon even among enlightened moderns; then why should we deny himthis infirmity? Those Greeks who valued the traditional Hellenic monism — men likeAristophanes — despised him for his newfangled doctrines. The merelyconventional hated his heterodoxy. Hence ultimately the charge ofcorrupting the nation's youth and perverting their faith, was brought againsthim, and he was condemned to death. Unhappily for posterity, however, two of his apprentices, Xenophon
and Plato, survived him. Both had been impressed by his arguments, andunder their spell had come to believe that the old wholesome Greekteaching of the oneness of man was false. Worse still, both of them had aproselytizing mania that induced them to hand on to following generationsthe full tenour of their master's doctrines. What, in fact, were the positions Socrates ultimately seems to haveestablished in the minds of these two disciples? They were:
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(a ) The duality of man — i.e., his bodily aspect ( ) on the one hand,and his "soul" or mind aspect ( ) on the other. (b ) The complete independence of these two aspects of man. (c ) The superiority of the "soul", over the body, aspect. (d ) The despicableness of the body. (e ) The immortality of the soul. Where does Plato enunciate these five positions of Socrates? First ofall in the Apology , where he makes Socrates say: "I spend my whole life ingoing about and persuading you all to give your first and chiefest care to
the perfection of your souls, and not till you have done that to think of yourbodies" (Trans. by F. J. Church, 30, AB.). In the Symposium Plato alsomakes Socrates pay grudging lip-service to bodily beauty and condemnugliness; but shows that he looks on this attitude as low and transitory, andthen makes him quote with approval Diotima's words: "But man's next advance will be to set a higher value on the beauty ofsouls than on that of the body, so that however little grace that may bloom
in any likely soul, it shall suffice him for loving and caring . . . that finally hemay be constrained to contemplate the beautiful as in the observance ofour laws, and to behold it all bound together in kinship and so estimate thebody's beauty as a slight affair" (Trans. by W. R. M. Lamb, 210, B and C). How plainly the reasoning of an ugly man, striving to rid himself of thestigma of ungainliness, is displayed in this passage! Yet, strange as it mayseem — and I assure the reader unfamiliar with the relevant literature thatthis is no idle boast — as far as I am aware, I am the only student ofSocratic doctrine who has ever pointed out the probable connection
between his forbidding appearance and his philosophy. I can only assumethat the modern scholar, inured to the ugliness of modern people andunable to transport himself in imagination to an environment like that ofancient Athens, where bodily beauty was regarded as essential to goodrepute, has been unable to appreciate the pressing private motivesSocrates had for teaching his contemporaries that bodily beauty was of noconsequence. At the same banquet as that already mentioned, when Alcibiades triesto praise his bosom friend Socrates, he confirms his master's principles as
follows:
- p. 105 - "I tell you all the beauty a man may have is nothing to Socrates; hedespises it more than any of you can believe" (Trans. by W. R. M. Lamb,216, B.D. and E.). How vividly this recalls Gibbon's penetrating remark onbeauty when, after referring to Mahomet's personal comeliness, he says, itis "an outward gift which is seldom despised except by those to whom ithas been refused" (Decline and Fall , Chap. L).
We also have the very self-revelatory dialogue in which Socratespersuades Alcibiades that his love for him is deep and true: " "If anyone", says Socrates, "has fallen in love with the person ofAlcibiades, he loves not Alcibiades, but the belongings of Alcibiades. . . .But he who loves his soul is the true lover. The lover of the body goesaway when the flower falls. But he who loves the soul goes not away. . . . Iloved you for your own sake, when other men loved what belongs to you;and your beauty, which is not you, is fading away, just as your true self isbeginning to bloom" (Alcibiades , Trans. by Jowett, 131).
Thus did Socrates try to prove the complete separation of man'svisible and invisible components — as if the two really could be separated — and always emphasized the superiority and greater importance of theinvisible or "soul" attributes. Finally, in the Phaedo , he reaches the logicaloutcome of all his reasoning and, summoning to his aid his emotionalrepugnance to the wholesome Greek attitude to the body, he says: "If we are ever to do anything purely, we must be separated from thebody . . . and thus being pure and separated from the body, we shall knowthe whole real essence and that is probably the truth. . . . For purificationconsists in this, in separating as much as possible the soul from the body. .. . And does not holding the passions in contempt and keeping them insubjection — does not this belong to those only who must despise thebody?" (Trans. by Henry Carey, 66D, 67A and 68C). It would be difficult to find in pre-Reformation literature, ancient andmodern, a more eloquent statement of extreme Puritanism. Yet we areconcerned with a man and his faithful Boswell, who existed over four
hundred years before St. Paul echoed his sentiments. (See the passagefrom the Second Epistle to the Corinthians , Chap. 4, quoted in Chap. Vante .) Thus, not only were bodily attributes and their differences in differentpeople, to be held of no account — a useful view for all
- p. 106 -ill-favoured people, but the whole of the bodily side of life was also to bedespised. The perseverence with which Socrates laboured to establish
these principles in order to vindicate himself in the eyes of hiscontemporaries, can be appreciated only by those who are familiar withPlato's dialogues. Thenceforward, not only was Socrates no longer to bescorned and disparaged, but all his like, all the ill-favoured, sickly, andphysiologically bungled and botched, all Nature's lame and uglyducklings, were promoted to equality with, if not actually superiority over,her more desirable biological specimens, provided their assumed "soul"attributes were judged more holy, more "pure", or more orthodox. Indeed,bodily defects actually imparted a certain respectability and even sanctity
to those who were afflicted with them; for Socrates, addressing Glaucon,declared, "If there be any merely bodily defect in another," he said, "we willbe patient of it and will love the same" (Republic , Trans. by Jowett, 11,402). The reader's attention is called to the significant word "merely" in thiscontext. It is not surprising that when once these doctrines came to beaccepted, man's visible aspects, his body, should have fallen under a ban.These were the disreputable components of his personality.Thenceforward a "pure soul" was to justify even foul breath, and a
biological assessment of human quality ceased to be regarded asrelevant. Low-bred defectives became as desirable as creatures offlourishing life. For on Socratic principles, it could always be argued —and of course was argued — that physical stigmata, the blemishes ofdisease and hereditary taints, were not the individual man himself, andthat his real self, his "soul", more than redeemed these merely bodilyshortcomings. This was wonderful for Socrates and his like. But for the biologicalélite of mankind — ultimate pollution! Can one wonder that William James
felt able to inform us that the lives of certain Christian Saints "are full of asort of revelling in hospital purulence"? (V.R.E. Lectures XI, XII, and XIII).But how many people who have read this passage in James's famouswork, see the connection between the sentiment it describes and Socrates'remark to Glaucon, which I have quoted? What evidence have we that Socrates was the original broadcaster ofthese parlous doctrines? There are three witnesses in the case ofSocrates versus Wholesome, Comely Manhood — Plato, Xenophon andAristophanes; and Mr. St. George Stock
- p. 107 -tells us that "Widely different as these three pictures are, they have yet nounlikeness which is fatal to the genuineness of any" (Introduction to theApology , 1907, p. 7). But Grote, our greatest authority on Socrates, calls Xenophon "thebest witness about his master" (History of Greece , 1854, Vol. VIII, p. 262,
Note 1); and of the Platonic dialogues, he says, "The Apology, Crito andPhaedo appear to be examples of what can safely be accepted as arecord of Socrates' opinions". (Ibid. Vol. VII, p. 84). This is importantbecause of the passages from Plato which I have quoted, the Apology andPhaedo constitute the chief sources. Of supreme importance in thisquestion, however, is the fact that, concerning Socrates' insistence on adualistic view of man, on the disparagement of the body and its beauty,and on exalting the "soul" above the body — all cardinal points in hisdoctrine — Xenophon, "this best witness about his master", wholly bears
Plato out. In Xenophon's Symposium , for instance, Socrates tells Antisthenes: "Ifear you are not enamoured with [sic ] the beauty of my soul, but with that ofmy body" (Trans. by J. Welwood, 1913). Further, he says, "The vulgarinspires mankind with the love of the body only, but the celestial fires themind with the love of the soul." Then again, in reply to a remark byHermogenes, he says: "I will endeavour to prove that the love of the soul isincomparably preferable to that of the body," which he proceeds to do(Ibid .).
— So much for the first-hand witnesses. But in the ancient andmodern authorities on the period under notice, we find abundantconfirmation of our belief that Socrates and not Plato, was the originaladvocate of the exclusively spiritual approach to man's worth. To beginwith, it cannot have escaped the reader's notice that the positions I havedescribed as established by Socrates, all became fundamental inChristianity. — Nay more, the attentive reader must have observed howrepeatedly, as I enumerated these positions, he himself felt, as if byinstinct, that my quotations of Socrates' own words evoked more
agreement than opposition in him, and how often he began wonderingwhether it was not I rather than Socrates who was perverse. Nor is itunlikely that in thus reacting to my thesis, the reader in question may havefelt himself all the while fancying that the Socratic views I condemned, andof which he (the reader) approved, represented his own original opinions,the children of his own independent
- p. 108 -thought and judgment. To this extent have Socratic attitudes of mind
become inveterate and spontaneous in all modern people, especiallywomen. If what I suspect did happen, and the reader knows it happened, hehas further proof of the thoroughness with which European man, during thelast two thousand years, has become conditioned to accept Socraticdoctrines as axiomatic. It cannot surprise us that the five principal positions, includingdualism, which Socrates established, should have become basic inChristianity; for most of the leading early Fathers of the Church-men likeClement and Origen were Alexandrians, schooled in Greek philosophy;and they wholly confirm my claim that Socrates was their doctrinal master. In Justin Martyr's Apology , the fact that Socrates and the Socraticswere Christians before Christ is constantly implied. In the Stromateis ofClement of Alexandria, there is the same implication. Among the moderns the Socratic influence on Christian doctrine isopenly acknowledged. Dr. C. E. Robinson says: "The creed of the
Christian Church was formulated in terms drawn from the Greekphilosophers". (Everyday Life in Ancient Greece , 1933, Conclusion).Marsilio Ficino, writing in 1479 about Christianity, said, "The life ofSocrates is a continued symbol of the life of Jesus," so that "the doctrinesof the one are identical with those of the other". In his Table Talk (1830)Coleridge is reported to have remarked to Crabb Robinson, "Jesus was aPlatonic philosopher"; whilst Professor A. E. Taylor, one of the leadingauthorities on Socrates, says, "Socrates created the intellectual and moraltradition by which Europe has ever since existed. . . . It was Socrates who .
. . created the conception of the soul , which has ever since dominatedEuropean thinking . . . the direct influence, indeed, which has done most tomake the doctrine of Socrates familiar to ourselves is that of Christianity"(Socrates , 1922, pp. 132, 133). Dean Inge, in his essay on religion in The
Legacy of Greece (1924, p. 31), went so far as to declare that "Socratesshould be reckoned as a Christian". Finally, the most conclusive moderntestimony to Socrates' rôle as the founder of dualism, is Professor J.Burnet's The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul (1916). There, he showsbeyond any reasonable doubt that Socrates was the first who succeeded
in establishing this new belief. But, strange to say, even Professor Burnet,throughout
- p. 109 -his scholarly monograph, never hints at the subconscious and personalmotives that most probably prompted Socrates to perform this feat. In this,however, he resembles all those, even Nietzsche, who have dealtexhaustively with the problem of Socrates. From what has been said, we ought now easily to understand how the
Socratic attitude to the body and its beauty, to disease and defect, and toall i ll-favoured humanity in general, came to be universally accepted asaxiomatic by the people of Western civilization. Even our tendency to exalt"soul" above bodily attributes and thus to incline to the practice ofsacrificing the sound to the unsound, becomes comprehensible whenonce we grasp what Socrates achieved in reversing mankind's oldest andmost wholesome standards of judgment. And when we reflect that thistremendous upheaval in the moral sphere, was in all probability but theoutcome of inferiority feelings in the person of one of the most resourceful
and able propagandists of history, we feel compelled to acknowledge thatif only his achievement had been less injurious to humanity, it woulddeserve to rank among the loftiest performances of human genius. Any suggestion that Socrates was a conscious humbug in inculcatinghis dangerous credo , has already been disclaimed. But that he wascertainly capable, whether consciously or not, of giving his morehumiliating experiences a twist which made them seem triumphs ratherthan routs, is suggested by various anecdotes concerning him. For instance, everybody knows that he made a disastrous choicewhen he married Xantippe. Like many a man before him, he committed abad blunder. She used to nag him unmercifully, humiliate him in public,drench him with water; and once, in full view of the crowd in the marketplace, she tore off his coat (Diogenes Laertius , II, 36, 37). Now any ordinary man, similarly situated, would have franklyacknowledged his mistake and deplored it. Not so Socrates. Where hisself-esteem was involved, he was a genius at making the inferior appear
the superior plight, and he actually tried to persuade his friends that he haddeliberately chosen a virago and a shrew in order to promote his ownmoral edification. Thus, he told Antisthenes that he had set his heart onXantippe so that her shocking temper might make him more easily put upwith all sorts and conditions of men (Xenophon: Symposium , 11, 10).
- p. 110 -He also tried to convince people that just as horsemen prefer spiritedsteeds because, having mastered them, they can more easily cope with
others, so he had purposely chosen Xantippe for wife (Diogenes Laertes ,11, 37). — Unless we can believe in the genuineness of these pleas, theysurely lend much colour to my interpretation of the motives impelling him toattack and finally to overthrow the ancient Greek belief in the oneness ofman. Nor is it unimportant, in forming an estimate of his character and therevolution he inaugurated, to remember his mistaken judgment in thechoice of a mate, his apparent lack of psychological insight, and his
inability to stand up to a termagant like Xantippe and to stop her hen-pecking. It is therefore perhaps no coincidence that, under the sway of hisfalse views about humanity, the sudden resurgence of his influence afterthe Reformation (see on this Chap. VIII infra ) should have led to the rise offeminism, which has been chiefly instrumental in shattering the lastvestiges of ancient wisdom in our civilization, and in spreading anarchywherever the influence of the Western European and Christian hasreached. (For the connection between the Socratic doctrines andfeminism, see my Enemies of Women , 1948.)
- p. 111 -Chapter VIII
Christianity Not the Thoughtful Man's Religion — VI
Speaking of the "House of Socrates" (Domus Socratica , according toHorace), composed of the "old gentleman himself" and Plato andXenophon, de Quincey says, "We acknowledge a sneaking hatredtowards the whole household, founded chiefly on the intense feeling weentertain that all three were humbugs" (Collected Writings , Vol. X, pp.180–181). This interesting condemnation of Socrates as a humbug is only aremote echo of the hostili ty he aroused among the wiser members of hisnation and the more enlightened among later generations. Among themost formidable of his opponents was his spiritual grandchild, Aristotle.Besides attacking Plato's Communism, Aristotle insisted on restoring tocredit the ancient Greek belief in the oneness of man, and in the
impossibility of assessing his worth except by judging both his visible andinvisible attributes. Thus, in flat contradiction of the "Christian beforeChrist", he said, "It appears to me that the soul and the body sympathisewith each other; and when the habit of the soul suffers a mutation inquality, it also changes the form of the body. Again, the form ( ) of thebody, when changed in quality, changes also the habit of the soul"
(Physiognomy , Trans. by T. Taylor, Chap. VI). Earlier in the same book,Aristotle says, "An animal is never so generated as to have the form of oneanimal and the soul of another; but it has always the body and soul of thesame animal; so that a particular disposition must necessarily follow aparticular body" (Ibid. Chap. 1). He again displayed his marked differencefrom Socrates when he observed (Politics , Book VIII, 1334b), "The bodynecessarily demands our care before the soul, next the appetite for thesake of the mind, the body for the sake of the soul." It is a proof of Aristotle's great genius that, in the second part of this
last passage, he should have anticipated Freud's dis-
- p. 112 -coveries concerning the injurious effect of sex-repression on the mind; buteven more important to us is the principle enunciated in the first and thirdclauses of the passage; because, lucidly for Catholic Europe, it was thisaspect of Aristotle's teaching that saved medieval people from at least themore damaging effects of Socrates' attack on old Greek Monism. For,when Aristotle's influence, which steadily increased throughout the youth
of the Church, finally achieved complete dominion over her doctrines earlyin the thirteenth century, a saner, more wholesome and more paganattitude to the human body contrived to survive in Catholic Europe, in spiteof the Socratic elements tincturing the faith. When therefore we find Montaigne, in the late sixteenth centurysaying: "J' approuve celui qui ayme moins son enfant d'autant qu'il soit
teigneux ou bossu, et non settlement malicieux, mais aussi quand i l est
malheureux et mal nay" (Essais, Livre troisième , Chap. IV: "I approve ofhim who loves his child less if it be either scrofulitic and scabby or
hunchback, and not only malicious, but also ill-favoured and ill-constituted."); and when we find a Frenchman like Vauvenarguesdeclaring as late as the first half of the eighteenth century: that "Il faut
entretenir la vigueur du corps pour conserver celle de l'esprit" (Pensées et
Maximes , 1746, LXXIX: "We must maintain the body's vigour in order topreserve that of the mind"), we have but two latter-day reverberations ofAristotle's beneficent influence on the Holy Catholic Church during theMiddle Ages. Regarding the nature of this influence which, through the Church,
affected the thought and feeling of all Europeans in medieval times, it isinteresting to quote a passage from Edwin Wallace (O.P.A. p. 39) whichstates clearly what Aristotle's position was. "Soul", says Wallace, "isdefined by Aristotle as the perfect expression or realization of a naturalbody — a realization further, which is in its first stage, and which istherefore explicit. It follows that there is the closest connection betweenpsychical state and physiological processes — we need no more askwhether the soul and body are one, than whether the wax and theimpression stamped upon it are so; the very error of the pre-Aristotelianpsychologists [Socrates and his dupes] lay in discussing the soulabstractedly without any regard to the bodily environment." This passage explains sufficiently for the present purpose the
- p. 113 -most important distinction between Aristotle and his spiritual grandfather. Itreinstates the wholesome ancient Greek view of the oneness of man, and
enables us to understand how, despite her morbid Socratic heritage,Europe contrived — certainly up to the Reformation — to act and thinkwholesomely enough to be capable, as we shall see, of many a wisemeasure in regard to the human body, recalling the best of the old paganbeliefs. Even if she was not wholly and universally successful in this, andSocratic influence continued here and there, to percolate poisonously intothe social organism, it is nevertheless true to say that medieval, was muchmore successful than post-Reformation, Europe in resisting Socraticinfluences. For, at bottom, the Reformation, besides constituting a revival
of many primitive Christian features, also staged a re-enthronement ofSocrates and a corresponding revolt against Aristotle. This explains why, after the Reformation, there should have arisen,not only Puritanism, together with an increasing tendency among bothhigh and low to neglect bodily considerations, but also a steady andsubstantial decline in the beauty and stamina of Europeans and their kinall over the world. For, thanks to the keen rivalry between the old universalChurch and the various reformed sects, there came about, as is usualwhen large organizations engage in a struggle for power, a habit of mutual
imitation, together with exaggerated divergence, which, although notthoroughgoing, was at least persevering enough to effect someapproximations and some wide deviations in the doctrines and moral toneof the two sides. In this way, even the Holy Catholic Church, to thedisadvantage of the regions where it held its sway, forfeited a certainamount of its Aristotelian outlook and temper; whilst, on the side of theReformers, there was a trend towards ever fiercer forms of Socraticism, inorder to emphasize their estrangement from the original Church. "At the time of the Protestant Reformation", says Edwin Wallace, "it
[i.e. Aristotelianism] was subjected to much violent depreciation" (Op. cit.,p. 5). Luther said of Aristotle, "If Aristotle had not been of flesh, I should nothesitate to affirm him to have been truly a devil" (Aristotle and the Christian
Church , by Azarius, 1888, p. 14); he also called him "a hypocrite, aslanderer, a damned pagan, a leisured donkey, a heathen beast, a vicioustrickster, and a poisonous and deadly destroyer of piety" (Luther and
Aristotle , by Dr. Fr. Nitzsch, 1883, Sec. I); whilst, in his
- p. 114 -
Table Talk (LIX) we find Aristotle spoken of as a "heathen". Lutherdeclared that no man could be well-versed in the school of Aristotle and atthe same time a follower of Christ; and Zwingli, Bucer, Peter Martyr andCalvin concurred. This was only the beginning; but it inaugurated a fundamental changein the religious attitude towards Greek philosophy; and, to the misfortune ofthe Western world, Protestantism re-established the authority of Socrates,who thenceforward prevailed throughout all those areas where theReformation had found acceptance, and to some extent even where theHoly Catholic Church still held sway. In view of what has been said, we cannot be surprised at finding muchevidence in the life of the Middle Ages and even later, of an attitudetowards the body, which Socrates would have profoundly deprecated andfor which only the benign influence of Aristotle was responsible. We have seen that, by his contempt for the body and his exaltation ofdisease to an object of love, Socrates created the morbid Christian
sentiment which ultimately made it good form, if not de rigueur , not only tocondone defect, deformity, disease and morbidity in man, but also, andconsequently, to commend the sacrifice of the healthy, sound andpromising, for the sake of the ill-constituted and tainted — in short, thegreater for the less. As for a policy of protection for the sound,safeguarding them from the purulence of the polluted, and above all, fromlimitations scandalously imposed on their multiplication and welfare by thesacrifices forced upon them by the unsound — such an idea ceased tohave any currency in Europe, and, from the dawn of the Reformation
became extinct in England. Incidentally, so general and deep-rooted, particularly in the BritishIsles, was the morbid Christian sentiment we are examining, that in manya lecture I delivered in the interval between the two world wars, I felt ableto prophesy with complete confidence that, if ever another war were tobreak out and there arose a shortage of milk or any other vital commodity,the authorities would not hesitate to force back the multitude of sound andpromising elements in the population, whilst lorries under military escortbore the milk and other precious supplies to the hospitals, and the homes
for defectives, half-wits and maniacs. Indeed, in a book published in 1927,I described this sort of action as indicated by both official and publicsentiment. (See my
- p. 115 -Man: An Indictment , Chap. VI.) And, if the reader is old enough toremember, this is exactly what did happen the moment war broke out inSeptember 1939. Any newspaper of that period will bear this out. But the like could not have happened in the Europe, or even in the
England, of pre-Reformation days, when Aristotle's influence stillprevailed. And, as a proof of how the Christian point of view remainedwholesome and sanitary before the influence of Socrates was revived, wemay instance the many acts performed by medieval authorities, throughoutCatholic Europe, which the people and particularly the women of modernEngland would condemn out of hand as thoroughly "un-Christian". Acts of a similar kind, as we shall see, were committed much laterthan the Middle Ages, especially in areas still dominated by Aristotle'sinfluence. But, in due course, such acts grew ever more and more scarce.
It is true that, apart from the beneficial effects of Aristotle's restorationof the pre-Socratic Greek attitude to defect and deformity, there were othersources from which Europeans of the post-Hellenic period could havederived confirmation of humanity's natural healthy aversion from its ill-favoured and diseased specimens — an aversion mingled with a sense ofthe shamefulness and disreputability of biological trash. The fact that thisaversion has now so completely disappeared that, today, all Europeansand their kin overseas, including even royalty and the nobili ty, vie witheach in honouring and smarming over the biologically worthless and insacrificing everything to them, is a recent and tasteless development forwhich a much crueller penalty will one day be exacted than any which ourpresent perverted charity now inflicts on the hale and sound of our society. In the ancient laws of the Israelites, for instance, we find the followingmost revealing passage, the pre-Socratic spirit of which was neverallowed, after the rise of Christianity, to influence Western man's conduct.Indeed, the passage itself is often found to be unfamiliar to many life-long
practising Christians: "And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying. Speak unto Aaron, saying.Whosoever he be of thy seed in their generation that hath any blemish, lethim not approach to offer the bread of his God.
- p. 116 - "For whosoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach;a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or anything superfluous, "Or a man that is broken-footed, or broken-handed,
"Or crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or bescurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken; "No man that hath a blemish of the seed of Aaron the priest shallcome nigh to offer the bread of his God . . . "He shall not go in unto the vail, nor come nigh unto the altar, becausehe hath a blemish, that he profane not my sanctuaries, for I the Lord dosanctify them" (Leviticus xxi, 16–23). The staggering un-English, non-European wholesomeness of thispassage is something so alien to our culture that the average modern
reader will wonder what God could possibly have meant by the words,"that he profane not my sanctuaries"; and I can hear him and especially hiswomenfolk exclaiming in utter perplexity, "How can people with bodilyblemishes profane anything?" Yet this is a sentiment so universal in a tastefully healthy people thatwe find it displayed even in ancient Peru, where, in the fourteenth century,when the Inca, Jahurai Huacoe attended the feast of Citua, "all citizenswho were sick, hunchback or in any way abnormal, were driven from thecapital (Cuzeo) so as not to offend the goddess by the sight of them" (Inca
Adventure , by Bertrand Flornoy, 1956, Part II, Chap. VIII). Even as late as the sixteenth century in England, this same feelingstill survived — the Reformation being only a few decades old — andElizabeth I refused "the place of a gentleman usher to an unexceptionalperson for no other objection than the lack of one tooth, and whenever shewent abroad, all ugly, deformed and diseased persons were thrust out ofher way by certain officers . . . at Kenilworth in 1575, she refused to look ata bridal dance because the bride was ugly" and "seldom could be inducedto bestow an appointment, either civil or ecclesiastical on a mean-looking
person" (The Queens of England , by Agnes Strickland, 1868, Chap. VIand VIII). Two hundred years later, much the same feeling still survived incertain quarters of Europe, for Goethe, describing the arrival of MarieAntoinette at Strassburg in 1770, to become the wife of the Dauphin,observes: "Before the arrival of the Queen [sic ] the authorities had quitereasonably arranged that no deformed
- p. 117 -people, no cripples and no victims of any loathsome diseases should beallowed to show themselves along her route." (A.M.L. 2ter Teil, Neuntes
Buch : "Vor Ankunft der Königin hatte man die ganz vernünftige Anordnung
gemacht dass sich keine missgestaltetten Personen, keine Krüppel und
ekelhafte Kranke auf ihrem Wege zeigen sollten."
Today, as everybody knows, the first thing royalty would do onarriving in a strange foreign city would be to pay their respects precisely to
the biological inferiors and the defectives of the place. It will, however, benoticed that Goethe reveals his own good taste in this matter by referring tothe regulation in question as "quite reasonable". But what he adds to thepassage also shows that he actually anticipated Heine in recognizingChristianity's reversal of the old wholesome attitude towards deformity,disease and defect; for he says of the Strassburg town council 's"reasonable" measure, "People joked about it, and I wrote a short Frenchpoem in which I compared the advent of Christ who appears to have cometo this world chiefly for the sake of the sick, the halt and the lame, with the
arrival of the Queen, who scared these unfortunates from her path." [Ibid :"Man scherzt hierüber, und ich machte ein kleines französischess Gedicht
worin ich die Ankunft Christi, welcher besonders der Kranken und Lahmen
wegen auf der Welt zu wandeln schien, und die Ankunft der Königin,
welche diese Unglücklichen verscheuchte, in Vergleichung brachte." ) As to the policy of protecting the sound and promising from theparasitism, contamination and depressing ugliness of the unsound, thesickly and the defective, the people of the Middle Ages were also verymuch more humane and compassionate than are the people of the
Western world today. Owing doubtless to the benign influence Aristotle exerted through theChurch, and probably, too, to the fact that medieval populations wereengaged chiefly in agriculture and horticulture and therefore knew theessential needs of flourishing life and the dangers threatening it from allsides, a widespread realism prevailed which forbade all sentimental,unreasoning and callous favouritsm being shown to anything that wasdefective and biologically depraved. It was, for instance, well recognizedthat, in times of famine and epidemics, the sound had to be considered
first. If sacrifice was called for, it was the unsound and those who could give no promise of perpetuating the race in a desirable
- p. 118 -form , who were regarded as the obvious victims. Thus, in periods ofdistress, the populace would clamour for the extirpation of useless mouths
— that is to say, all lepers, cretins and idiots (Paul Lacroix: Science et
Lettres au Moyen Age et à L'époque de la Renaissance , 1877, p. 178); sothat there should be enough to sustain the sound and all those biologically
precious to the community. Superstition admittedly too often played a partin these outbreaks, and when an epidemic was ascribed to the presenceof the ill-constituted in the community, the charge was often groundless.But at least the superstition worked to the advantage of the race and wasalways prompted by compassion for the sound and valuable elements inthe population, rather than for those who could with profit be spared. Nor were medieval people quite as blindly superstitious as manybelieve; for we should remember that it was the princes of the Middle Ageswho, without our medical knowledge and our repertory of therapeutics andprophylactics, extirpated leprosy in Europe. The measures they applied,because inspired by compassion for the sound, were often of a kind whichwe, with our ingrained callousness towards the sound, would considerharsh and cruel; but they were effective and triumphantly successful; for,by the end of the sixteenth century, leprosy had died out, at least innorthern Europe. Not only were lepers proscribed from society, but whenever they
trespassed on an inhabited area they were obliged to give warning of theirapproach by ringing bells or brandishing rattles. It was a sensible rule, forit enabled mothers to snatch their children from the infected people's path,and other adults the chance of giving them a wide berth. In England andWales a law was promulgated in 1346, compelling lepers, within fifteendays of contracting the disease, to isolate themselves in some remote ruralarea, away from cities. Inspired by the Mosaic laws, the authorities in factcast the leper out of society and, wherever possible, confined him in alazaretto. Attired in a distinctive garb and a voluminous cloak, he was
forbidden to mix in crowds and, as one modern authority declares(obviously with a lump in his throat) "he was excluded even from church",or, if admitted, "a special seat and basin of holy water" were assigned tohim. But, once more, what could possibly have been more sensible?Would it have been fair to the rest of the congregation to allow him tomingle freely with them?
- p. 119 - When we learn that at one time in France there were some twenty
thousand lepers, or one to every two hundred of the population, and that inthe end leprosy was to all intents and purposes extirpated in Europe by theend of the sixteenth century, we can but feel grateful to these remoteancestors of ours for having been so "uncharitable" and so "inhuman" tothe contaminated and polluted as to free us from the scourge of theirdisease. For, as I need hardly mention, every modern historian whoreports these facts about medieval leprosy, recoils in horror; from the"cruelty" of the kind of regulations I have enumerated, although in his verynext breath, he may admit that they effectively rid Europe of the disease.
(See, for instance: Man Against Microbe , by Dr. Jas. W. Bigger, 1939, PartIII, Chap. XIX; The Control of Communicable Diseases , by Dr. Hugh Parel,1952, Chap. 38; Pomp and Pestilence , by Dr. Donald Hare, 1954, Chap.V; and A Short History of Medicine , by Dr. Charles Singer, 1928, Chap. III,para. 6; from which the above-mentioned facts were taken.) Furthermore, inhuman as it may sound to our modern ears, attunedonly to the merciless sacrifice of the healthy and promising, there was inmedieval England a regulation to the effect that an almoner who, after acoronation or any other important celebration, had the duty of distributing
alms to the crowd, was auhorized to burn alive any leper who, in hiscupidity, not only dared to force himself into a crowd of sound people, butwent so far as "to raise a knife against a neighbour" (Mediaeval England ,by Mary Bateson, 1903, Part II, Chap. VII). Unlike our present perverse and callous practice of reserving all thatis best for the sickly, the defective and the insane, and leaving what isinferior for the sound and promising in the community; when, in medievaltimes, market inspectors condemned any meat, it was, as a matter ofcourse, consigned to the asylums and the lazarettos. There is a ScottishAct of Parliament of 1386 containing the following passage: "Gif ony manbrings to the market corrupt swine or salmond to be sould, they sall betaken to the bail ie, and incontinent, without any question sall be sent to thelepper folke, and gif there be no lepper folke, they sail be destroyedutterlie." There was a similar regulation at Oxford in the fifteenth century.No wonder that, although a few cases of leprosy still occurred in thefifteenth century, the disease had by then considerably declined. (See
- p. 120 -G. G. Coulton, 1921, Chap. X, and English Life and Manners in the Late
Middle Ages , by A. Abram, 1913, Chap. XIV.) Now if we turn from these medieval customs to the spirit that animatedthem, it should at once be clear that they represent no wanton display ofbrutality, as many otherwise sane historians would have us believe, butmerely a view of charity and of its appropriate object, wholly different from
our own. Only centuries of Christian indoctrination under the spell ofSocrates rather than of Aristotle, could bl ind us to this fact. For againstevery act allegedly "uncharitable" towards the lepers, our forebearsshowed themselves compassionate and charitable towards thebiologically precious. In observing their behaviour, we see no gratuitousacts of ruthlessness but only the inevitable consequences of their charitytowards those in the community they deemed fit to perpetuate their kind ina desirable form. Their choice was, therefore, not between charity or nocharity, but only between the objects to which charity should in wisdom be
shown. This, although palpably obvious, is so persistently misunderstoodby every modern publicist, that we are forced to conclude that even themost wide-awake of our contemporaries are made unamenable to reasonby a wholly uncontrolled orientation towards Socratic morality. Incidentally, it is this state of modern man's mind that accounts for thefact that Nietzsche's condemnation of Christian pity has everywhere beenunderstood and denounced as an attack on pity per se.
It was really only the unfortunate resurrection by the Reformation ofthe influence of Socrates, that led to the reversal of the husbandman's
attitude to life, especially in Protestant Europe; hence Nietzsche'sreiterated assertion that only the pre-Socratic Greeks, to whom Aristotlewas in some respects a throwback, were worthy of our admiration. JohnCowper Powys, independently I believe, came to the same conclusion; forhe says: "The only wise human philosophers are the early pre-SocraticGreeks" (D.S. Chap. IV). What then caused this change from a tasteful, discriminating exerciseof charity, to its converse — i.e., charity shown only to the least admirable,least promising and, from the point of view of posterity, most dangerous
elements in the population? — Undoubtedly the morbid, unaesthetic and perverted Socraticprinciples deeply rooted in Christianity, with their predilection
- p. 121 -for the foetid air of hospitals (Heine's Lazarethluft ), and their weakness forthe bitter taste of corpses. Only rarely do we hear a modern voice raised against this state ofaffairs. As we have seen, F. H. Bradley, over sixty years ago, was one ofthe few whom it roused to indignant protest. A little later on, W. Cecil D.Whetham and C. D. Whetham admitted that "Of late years, the duty of thestate to support the falling and the fallen has been so much emphasizedthat its still more important duty to the able and the competent has beenobscured" (The Family and the Nation , 1909, Conclusion). Themoderation observed in making this important admission over fifty yearsago and the fact that the policy it condemns has meanwhile only been
intensified, shows how hopeless the practice of understatement can bewhen advocating urgently needed reforms. Not more than six years ago, asimilar protest came from Professor D. W. Harding. In his Social
Psychology and Individual Values (1953, Chap. XIII), he says: "We arestruck with the vast amount of psychological knowledge, advice, andtrained personnel that are available for aiding the mentally or physicallyhandicapped child compared with the meagreness of the interest taken inthe exceptionally able. For one thing, there is no doubt that in our culturemost people's sentiments are organized in a way that makes it easier to
lavish attention on the unfortunate than to help the gifted to make the mostof themselves. Either effort requires great emotional discipline . . . but ourculture gives more encouragement to the effort towards helping theunfortunate." This important and courageous statement by a Professor ofPsychology at London University, ought to have been given wide publicity;because, although in milder terms, it exactly echoes Nietzsche's andBradley's charge against modern moral valuations and refers to modernerrors of judgment not even mentioned by Bradley, its purely English
provenance robs both churchmen and unconsciously Christian-feelingRationalists of the easy and ready retort that, after all, "only a mad Germanis speaking". Yet, had I not read Harding's book, I should never haveknown that he had made any such remark — to this extent are establishedmorbid prejudices protected by our Press from any attack, howeverauthoritative and well deserved. I have suggested the resurrection of the Socratic spirit as the probablecause of the reversal of the husbandman's policy towards humanbiological inferiority, especially in North-Western
- p. 122 -Europe after the Reformation. But another possible factor is that meantendency latent in all human breasts, but particularly in the breasts of theill-favoured, to feel humiliated by the spectacle of any form of superiorityand, above all, by what is popularly called "physical" superiority. Coleridge once said to Hazlitt, "It is a tax upon people's good natureto admit superiority of any kind, even when there is the most evident proofof it" (Table-Talk , W. Hazlitt, 1921 Ed. Chap.: On the Disadvantages of
Intellectual Superiority. It would have been more accurate to say"especially when there is the most evident proof of it"). Johnson alsospeaks of "That natural jealousy which makes every man unwilling toallow much excellence in another". (Life of Edmund Waller ). Crabbe expressed much the same idea when he wrote:
"I have heard of some, Who, if unnoticed, grew perversely dumb, Nay, different talents would their envy raise: Poets have sickened at a dancer's praise; And one, the happiest writer of his time, Grew pale at hearing Reynolds was sublime." (Tales V , "The Patron")
The allusions here are doubtless to Goldsmith. (See StephenGwynn's Oliver Goldsmith , 1935, Chap. XI, and Crabbe's Works edited by
his son.) Goethe also believed that it was natural to humanity to feelreluctant to praise a fellow-being; for he declared that "When we honourother people we necessarily dishonour ourselves." ("Wenn wir Andern
Ehre geben, Müssen wir uns selbst entadeln." West-Oestliche Divan:
Rendsch Nameh, Buch des Unmuts .) Scopenhauer took a similar view;for, besides claiming that envy is natural to man, and that no one is freefrom it, he maintained that "Humanity is not in the least disposed to praiseand extol; but rather to blame and find fault; by which means it indirectlyexalts itself." (Parerga und Paralipomena , Vol. I, Aphorismen Zur
Lebensweisheit , Chap. V, 10: "Neid ist dem Menschen natürlich" ; and Vol.II, Chap. VIII, "Zür Ethik" , where he says of envy, "ich befürchte dass
keiner ganz frei davon befunden werden wird ". Finally, in Vol. II, Chap.XX, "Ueber Urtheil, Kritik, Beifall u. Ruhm," he says, "Die Menschen sind
zum Loben und Rühmen gar nicht geneigt und angelegt, wohl
- p. 123 -aber zum Tadeln und Lastern, als durch welches sie indirekt sich selbst
loben." )
Byron wholly agrees. He denied by implication that even friendshipprevented envy, and he refers to it as "an universal passion" (Letters toMurray on Boules's Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope , 2ndFebruary 1821). The Rev. C. C. Colton, in Lacon and Sheridan in The
Critic both appear to sympathise with this view of mankind — a viewalready familiar to classical antiquity. (See Tacitus: History , Book II.) It may very well be, therefore, that even if Socrates had never existed,and Christianity never been preached, the reluctance with which themajority of men acknowledge superiority and their corresponding
readiness to see it either reduced, humbled or even destroyed, would inany case have exposed humanity to the sort of mass conspiracy in favourof inferiority (which arouses no envy and wounds no vanities) that hasculminated in our present plight — at least in the biological sphere.Besides, are we not all too familiar with the kind of person who feelsirresistibly drawn to invalids and small children because they are theeasiest human creatures to acquire power over? In a chapter on Shakespeare, John Cowper Powys ascribes the manyattempts made by critics to deprive Shakespeare of the glory of having
written the plays, precisely to the human intolerance of superiority in afellow being. He speaks of "a curious subterranean jealousy getting itsmorbid pleasure in a devastating iconoclasm". He refers to it again as"jealous scepticism" (P.O.L. Chap. on Shakespeare); whilst ProfessorLouis Schneider remarks of Western man that, harassed by his feelings ofinferiority, he suffers from "an incapacity of tolerating signs of excellence inothers" (The Freudian Psychology and Veblen's Social Theory , 1948,Chap. 6, iii). Is it possible therefore, that in the mass movement in favour of all thatis il l-constituted and ill-favoured, we have a post-Reformation expressionof a tendency much more congenial and natural to humanity than is thatother tendency peculiar to the pre-Socratic Greeks and, to some extent tothe Europe presided over by Aristotle, and that the rôle of Socrates andChristianity was less that of originating, than of sanctioning and liberating,a passion that had long been straining at the leash? Can it be that allSocrates and Christianity did, was to give men a clean conscience in
favouring the less superior and the frankly inferior, a
- p. 124 -practice which otherwise they might have indulged only with misgivingand a sense of guilt? In other words, may we assume that what the ancientIsraelites, the Egyptians, the pre-Socratic Greeks, and their late heir — theStagyrite — did, was rather to curb the low, envy-inspired denigrators ofhuman biological and aesthetic superiority, than to give rein to afundamentally human preference for psycho-physical excellence in their
fellow creatures? If we did assume this, we should be at pains to account for thewidespread existence of biological and aesthetic superiority ininnumerable primitive races all the world over, and our difficulty would notbe diminished by the fact that we could hardly expect mere savages orbarbarians to be moved by nobler, more magnanimous and more civilizedsentiments than we ourselves are (although this is by no meansnecessarily inconceivable). If, therefore, we tend to leap at opportunitiesfor scorning and neglecting biological excellence in our fellow-men, and
for pampering and pandering to the biological inferior, we mightlegitimately expect primitive people to do likewise. As we do not findamong primitive people this enhanced form of superiority-disdain,especially in connection with biological and aesthetic excellence, is itpossible that the failing to which Coleridge alludes, which wouldabundantly account for our own tendency to sacrifice the biologicallygreater to the less (especially now that Christianity has given us carte-
blanche in the practice), is not a fundamental human infirmity, but ispeculiar only to modern civilized man?
Before concluding from the historical, anthropological andethnological evidence that it cannot be a basic human infirmity, but merelya late manifestation of civil ization, it is, however, important to rememberthe vis major which works in favour of human biological excellence inprimitive races and even among the peoples of early forms of civilization,who are unequipped with those lethal weapons of warfare which minimizethe dependence upon bodily vigour and excellence. Physicalfaultlessness in such circumstances is esteemed as the indispensableinsurance against extermination, and a powerful motive for stifling man's
instinctive reluctance to acknowledge superiority in another consequentlydominates the judgment of the population. The moment, however, that adequate protection ceased to be
- p. 125 -merely a matter of biological quality — a change which set in soon afterthe invention of firearms insensibly reduced the demand for fine powerfulbodies — it is conceivable that the brake theretofore exerted upon man'smeanest passion, by being first slackened and later so completelywithheld that even women could usefully function as mechanics behindlethal engines, led to a complete release of that rancour and uneasinessnaturally felt in the presence of biological excellence, which finds itsdeepest solace in fostering, pampering and generally championing thephysically or mentally handicapped and ill-constituted. Coupled with theultimate reinstatement of Socrates and the dethronement of Aristotle, it isnot, therefore, surprising that, today, the duties of charity and pity,
conceived as exclusively reserved for the ill-favoured, should havebecome standardized throughout all Anglo-Saxon and Lutherancommunities, and, by imitation and emulation, though never with equalvirulence, have been spread even to those countries still to some extentunder the sway of Aristotle.
* * * *
Churchmen have, of course, done their best to try to refute these
allegations. Most disingenuously, for instance, Dean Inge denied thatChristianity had been instrumental in causing any deterioration in thequality of human stocks. Well aware though he was of the data adduced inthese latter chapters, he tried to make the English public believe thatChristianity was the eugenic religion par excellence (Christian Ethics and
Modern Problems , 1930, Chap. V). Nowhere does he attempt to show that Christianity teaches any otherpolicy than the sacrifice of the greater to the less; or to contest the claimthat his religion teaches the converse of the farmer's form of pity and trains
its converts to keep their bodies "out of their minds" as Margaret Mead soaptly remarks (Male and Female , 1949, Part II, Chap. IV). Nor does heonce try to convince us that no consequences adverse to flourishinghuman life could result from St. John's and St. Paul's doctrines in I John ii,15–16 and Romans viii, 6–13. It will be remembered that St. John, orwhoever wrote in his name, says, "Love not the world, neither the thingsthat are in the world. If any man love the world the love of the Father is notin him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of theeyes, and the
- p. 126 -pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world"; whilst St. Paul,addressing the Romans, said: "Flesh is death. Spirit is life and peace. Thebody is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness.If ye live after the flesh, ye shall die; but if ye through the Spirit do mortifythe deeds of the body ye shall live." Dean Inge does not attempt to argue that these doctrines have had noinfluence on Christian peoples. Yet, the very fact that in verse 13 of the 8thchapter of Romans , "body" has a small "b", whilst "spirit" has a capital "S",shows how even the translators accepted and sensed the implications ofthe text, with its denigration of the physical side of man; for there is noindication in the Greek that spirit should be thus distinguished. But even without the typographical honour paid to spirit, these textssufficiently emphasize the immense superiority of the Spirit over the body,a valuation Christianity inherited from Socrates; and it is impossible not togain the impression that the burden of the message contained in the texts Ihave quoted, is that people afflicted with bodies which render themincapable of loving the world and feeling the lust of the flesh and, above
all, the pride of life, are nearer to the Christian ideal than those morenormally and vigorously endowed. But Dean Inge eschews the dangerous ground he would have to treadif he tried to dissuade us from reaching this conclusion. He does notventure to persuade us that the Christian attitude towards the body,inculcated upon scores of generations, has not had the results we suggest.
Nor does he once endeavour to explain how St. Paul's statement to theCorinthians (I Corinthians i, 20 et seq.) could avoid giving at least theimpression that human rubbish is more pleasing to the deity thanthoroughbred stock. It wil l be remembered that St. Paul said: "God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise;and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the thingsthat are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which aredespised hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to
nought things that are, that no flesh should glory in his presence." Could anyone, least of all Dean Inge, be so naïf as to suppose that thebiologically inferior would for a moment hesitate to apply the moral ofthese doctrines to themselves, or that even the
- p. 127 -biologically superior would doubt that these texts from Holy Writ enjoineda policy of protection, preservation and preference towards the ill-favoured,the defective and the insane?
As a single conclusive proof of this, he might have pondered thesignificance of the epithet "un-Christian" as used by every modern personin condemnation of any policy akin, however remotely, to thehusbandman's form of pity. Then how does he pretend to be able tosupport his claim that Christianity is the eugenic religion par excellence ? — He does so by quoting the three following Gospel texts, which aregiven the whole burden of proving his case: "Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?" (Matthew vii. 16). "A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree
bring forth good fruit" (Ibid. 18). "Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and castinto the fire" (Ibid. 19). Now, apart from the fact, perfectly familiar to Dean Inge, that thesestatements did not even refer to the arts of forestry or arboriculture, letalone to animal or human breeding, but were intended to warn Jesus'sfollowers against false prophets and their "fruits", i.e. corrupt doctrines, afact well understood by all those to whom the words were addressed, thereis in the whole chapter of St. Matthew and in the four gospels no indication
that Jesus either wished or intended the rules he thus laid down to bearany relation to human breeding or to selection in human mating. Nowherein the gospels, in fact, do we find any pronouncement as biologicallysound in its bearing or eugenics as that I have quoted from Leviticus xxi.16–23; nor do we find any warning against the danger to the race ofalways neglecting the body in order to concentrate upon and exalt thesoul. Moreover, Dean Inge never attempts to support his claim, as he mightreasonably be expected to do, by exonerating his religion of allresponsibil ity for the widespread morbidity and defectiveness of modernhumanity. He evidently hoped that the texts he quoted would make hisclaim appear sufficiently plausible to satisfy at least the converted. How much more candid and therefore respectable is the attitude of theRev. A. R. Osborne, the minister of one of the large New York Citychurches. Speaking of the conditions prevail ing in a former Age, in respectof humanity's subnormals, defectives
- p. 128 -and victims of mental instability, and stigmatizing the present multiplicationof the ill-favoured as "a social evil" which "has become serious", he says:"In former times many of these unfit died through neglect, physicalweakness, and improper or insufficient food"; now they are protected andpreserved. "It would be distinctly contrary to the principles of Christianethics to return to the old state of affairs. Yet there is a certain irony in thefact that our very altruism is causing race deterioration, and that we arediscriminating against the fit in favour of the unfit" (Christian Ethics , 1940,
Part II, Chap. II). This is the plain honest truth, and this recent admission by a Christianpriest of New York, makes one wonder whether, owing to our senility, ourlong subjection to feminine dominion, our decadence, or all these threeinfluences together, we of the old Mother Country, may not have grown toomealy-mouthed, too cravenly mendacious, and too unmanly to be accurateand capable of facing and acknowledging awkward and unpleasant facts.
* * * *
Having tried to the best of my ability, and as briefly as possible, tomake clear the complicated position regarding modern psycho physicaldecay, and the conditions — particularly those of Christian origin —favouring and promoting it, I can now return to the question that made thislengthy digression necessary, and again ask, in what way doesNietzsche's suggestion for remedying the present state of affairs differ fromother suggested remedies, particularly those involving violent interferencewith l ife, and thus rise superior to them.
It wil l be remembered that, as the "lethal chamber" solution is the onlyone popularly conceived as possible for relieving society of the crushingburden consisting of its biological trash and dregs, and of cleansing thenational stock and protecting it from further contamination, nothingwhatsoever is done about it, and for the simple reason that modernsensibil ities, although able with unwavering fortitude to tolerate the massslaughter of chiefly sound adults and children on our roads, cannot endurethe thought of sacrificing so much as a single hair of a raving maniac'shead. Thus the problem of purifying our stock and relieving the preciousminority of the sound, of the crippling burdens imposed on them by theprevalence of sickness, defect,
- p. 129 -incapacity, deformity and dementia, through which their own desirablemultiplication and survival are imperilled — this problem remains unsolvedand, year after year, the task of dealing with it continues to be postponedsine die.
In facing this problem Nietzsche saw that at bottom it was one ofvalues. What had happened was that the pre-Socratic and wholesome
values relating to man had been reversed, turned upside down, and thatalthough, as we have seen, other influences may have contributed to thisvolte-face , the principal present agency causing these topsy-turvy valuesstill to exert their sway, was Christianity with its baneful Socratic heritageconcerning body and soul, health and sickness, pity and altruism. Thus Nietzsche proposed, as the most practical non-violent means
modern legislators can command for recovering a sane and sanitaryattitude, what he termed A Transvaluation of Values — i.e., the restorationof the pre-Socratic view of man as a psycho-physical whole, and of thepre-Socratic criteria for assessing his worth. No longer should commonplace folk be taught that the body is inferiorto the "soul", and that its condition and appearance are unimportant inassessing a person's worth. On the contrary, their taste in appraisinghumanity should be purged of this depraved Socratic influence and theyshould hold no human being as desirable on the score of his invisible
aspects alone, least of all for matrimony. No longer should we be eager — aye, impatient — to sacrifice thegreater to the less. On the contrary, at every moment of our lives we shouldschool ourselves to sacrifice the less to the greater. The policy ofpenalizing the sound and biologically superior for the support andpreservation of those whose debility, defect, or dementia, was more thantransitory, should be looked upon as cruel, sadistic and odious. Pity andcharity should therefore no longer be blindly restricted to the wasteproducts of every generation. This bottomless sack into which all our
magnanimity, vigour and health have hitherto been poured, must belooked upon as a criminal device. Men must learn again to feel in their hearts contempt and repugnancefor biological depravity; and when this lesson has been learnt and thetaste displayed in mating has been correspondingly chastened, there willbe no need to quarrel over the pros and cons of a lethal chamber forhuman rubbish, for mor-
- p. 130 -
bidity and defect will insensibly and inevitably diminish to the extent ofceasing to be a social problem. A few generations reared on these pre-Socratic values would greatlyimprove the quality of Western man and, with the permanent dominion ofthe new morality, mankind would slowly and surely acquire a differentmien. Moreover, as three-quarters at least of both public and domesticstrife and friction arises from feelings of inferiority in the parties concerned,the ultimate supersession of health and biological excellent would put anend to much of the conflict and discord which today are the outcome of bad
health and failing stamina, conditions which contribute substantially to theruin of social and international relations. The one formidable obstacle to this urgently needed non violentmeans of combating degeneracy is Christianity, with its malignant core ofSocratic uncharitableness towards everything beautiful, sound, sweet,wholesome and clean; and until we rid our world of this two thousand-year-old pestilence, there can be no hope, much less any guarantee, ofour regeneration. But the hostility of Christianity to any such reform asNietzsche's Transvaluation of Values, is certain to be bitter, desperate anddetermined; nor will it be any less implacable for having on its side all themassed legions of the sickly, the purulent and the gangrenous; all theuncomely, misshapen and ill-favoured, who will fight tooth and nail andwithout mercy in order to preserve their present parasitical dominion overcivilized societies; whilst the fact that they will most certainly be backed bythe whole vast personnel running our present Health Service, a personnelwhich today makes disease a vested interest, wil l by no means facilitate
the task of any reformers aiming at effecting the transvaluation in question. The reader may object, "But since, as is alleged by Professor A. N.Whitehead, "far less than one-fifth of the population are in any senseChristians today" (A.I. Chap. XVIII), what does the hostility of Christianity tothe proposed reform matter? — This objection seems reasonable only if we forget the argumentadvanced in Chapter V ante , where it was pointed out that, prone asmodern people may be to reject the myths and supernatural claims ofChristianity and to declare themselves Rationalists, Agnostics, Free
Thinkers, or even Atheists, acknowledging allegiance to no denominationof the Christian faith, deep down in their instincts and the emotionsresulting from them, Christian
- p. 131 -morality still dominates their impulses. Very rarely do we meet a man orwoman who, whilst emphatically repudiating every tenet of the old religionalso impugns its morality; for the majority of these professedlyemancipated Christians are still subconscious champions of at least the
most deleterious of Christian moral precepts. They still believe in findingevery possible excuse for human biological trash and shoddy; they stilldeprecate the practice of drawing any adverse inferences from deplorablevisible attributes, and still show no understanding of what is meant by"Charity for the sound and promising". All of them, without exception,would resist any attempt to instal the husbandman's conception of pity inthe place of that which they make it their pride to practise. Thus, despite the probable truth of Professor Whitehead's estimate ofthe proportion of Christians in our midst, the opposition to any reform along
the lines I have suggested, which is likely to come from the quarter ofconscious Christians, would most probably be multiplied a thousandfoldfrom the ranks of those moderns who are unwittingly Christians at heart.
“imaginative work inspired by CG Jung”. It is one of many.
Jung repeatedly stated that he was writing his own personal myth which cast him in a prophetic
rather than a merely psychological role. His own brand of psychology thus becomes dogma and
every aspect of religious belief is interpreted in its light. The following sections are intended to
summarize his findings with regard to religion.
JUNG ON RELIGION
Jung claimed that he was interested in religion from a psychological perspective. Psychology
“opens peoples’ eyes to the real meaning of dogmas”. For Jung religious experiences and ideas are
found in the human psyche and not in the supernatural. He developed a particular interest in
gnosticism and claimed that the Gnostics were great psychologists – the highest compliment
possible.
From 1920 onwards he became fascinated by the I Ching, the Chinese oracle book. While
practising it he claimed that all sorts of remarkable phenomena occurred. He explained the
“ghosts” he saw during seances as “exteriorizations” of archetypal images within his mind,originating in the collective unconscious of the human race. At the core of Jungian therapy lies the
occult.
He had an obsession with alchemy, the maternal darkness that compensates for Christianity’s
paternal light. To become whole, we need light and darkness made one.
Jung claimed to have identified Three Stages of religious evolution. The first stage was the archaic
age of Shamans. This was followed by the ancient civilization of prophets and priests. Then came
the Christian heritage of mystics. At every stage of religious history all human beings share theinner divinity, the “numinous”. Within the psyche, the divine and the self merge.
It can be seen that for Jung, the archetypes of the collective unconscious are the true sources of
the supernatural. He had absolutely no interest in objective truth. What matters for the individual
is to create his own personal “myth” in order to gain wholeness. His own psychology developed
from contact with his spirit-guide who he named Philemon.
In 1916, Jung’s house felt haunted, his daughters had seen ghosts and he saw a crowd of spirits
bursting into the house. As the ghosts disappeared he went into a three day state of automatic
writing, leading to the production of his work “The Seven Sermons”. He was already far beyond
the realms of psychology.
JUNG ON THE TRINITY
For Jung the doctrine of the Trinity is replete with psychological meaning. The Father symbolizes
the psyche in its original undifferentiated wholeness. The Son represents the human psyche and
the Holy Spirit the state of self-critical submission to a higher reality.
Not surprisingly Jung found similar Trinitarian ideas in the Babylonian, Egyptian and Greek
mystical traditions. However, he believed in a quaternity, the fourth person being the principle of
evil: without the opposition of Satan, who is one of God’s sons, the Trinity would have remained a
unity. In Jungian terms, without the opposition of the shadow (the “fourth” person) there would be
no psychic development and no actualisation of the self.
Jung perceived the dogma of the Assumption as the Church’s attempt to create a quaternity
without shadow, without evil, for the devil had been excluded. The Gnostic Jung, however,
believed that the principle of evil had in fact been introduced into the Trinity by the material
presence of the Mother of God. From a Gnostic perspective, Mary becomes a diabolical presence,
the maternal darkness, within the Trinity.
In his essay on Job, Jung contends that Yahweh desired the love of mankind but behaved like athoughtless, irritable tyrant who is indifferent to human misery. Like Adam, who is mythically
married to both Lilith, daughter of Satan, and to Eve, so is Yahweh married to Israel and to
Sophia, who compensates for Yahweh’s behaviour by showing human beings the Mercy of God.
Her appearance in the visions of Ezekiel and Daniel leads to a fundamental change: God
transforms Himself by becoming man. Yahweh has wronged the creatures who have outdone
Him and only by becoming man can he atone for His injustice.
THE CHRIST FIGURE
Maintaining a tradition put forward by Gnostics, Jung believed that Christ is the symbolic
representation of the most central archetype, the self. He may be compared to other Mythic Gods
who die young and are born again.
The sublime goodness of Christ means that from a psychological perspective, He lacks archetypal
wholeness. Missing is the dark side of the psyche, the element of evil. Christ receives wholeness
in the person of the Antichrist. The Incarnation leads to the Apocalypse and the unleashing of evil
by an inexorable psychological law.
Christ’s death and Resurrection are full of psychic meaning, representing the human drama of
following the hard road of individualism, allowing the ego to be put to death in order that the self
– the Son of God – may become incarnate within.
JUNG ON THE MASS
In his essay on the Roman Mass, Jung wrote that the liturgy arose from the psychic process
underlying other ancient pagan rituals. Transubstantiation occurs symbolically in the bread and
wine but more authentically in the participant who is transformed, exalted and self-enhanced.
The Mass is the outcome of a process that began in ancient times with gifted Shamans whose
isolated experiences gradually became universalized with the progressive development of
consciousness.
The Church teaches that Christ died in order to save us. For Jung, this is a misleading
rationalisation for an otherwise inexplicable cruelty: the angry Yahweh of the Old Testament is full
of guilt and in need of atonement. Jesus dies on Calvary to expiate the sins of God the Father.
The masculine wine and feminine bread represents the androgynous nature of Christ, signifying
the union of opposites within Him. What is sacrificed is nature, Man and God, all combined in the
symbolic gift.
In Jungian terms, the heart of the Mass lies in the rich, emotional experiences encountered by the
participants. A man-centered liturgy enables the mystery of the Eucharist to transform the soul of
empirical man into his totality.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF JUNGIAN THERAPY
It should come as no surprise to learn that Matthew Fox sees Jung along with Teilhard de Chardin
and a select few others as founders of the New Age Movement. Barbara Hannah of the CG Jung
institute writes that visualization is considered the most powerful tool in Jungian psychology for
achieving direct contact with the unconscious.
Father John Dourley, a professor of religious studies and a Jungian therapist has written that a
religious myth should not be reduced to historical fact and that the Christian mysteries belong to
the human psyche. Upholding Dourley’s view that the Resurrection should be seen in Jungian
symbolic terms is the Episcopalian minister, Wallace Clift, who sees a new age of consciousness
brought about by a reinterpretation of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
The Episcopalian theologians John Sanford and Morton Kelsey – both Jungian therapists – see
religious practice as a healing inner-journey towards wholeness and meaning and dreams shouldbe seen as sources of religious insight. Kelsey writes that witchcraft, sorcery and other forms of
Shamanism are not evil in themselves but can be used for good. Clairvoyance, telepathy and
other forms of ESP are manifestations of the power of God. In typical Jungian fashion, he
concludes that spiritual reality is ultimately a construct of the human unconscious.
Logically enough, the Jungian who goes to Confession would wish to accept himself as he is and
to integrate the good and evil aspects of his personality. Acceptance replaces absolution”. (ln this
context, it is of interest to note the number of priests who have left the priesthood in order to
marry and become psychotherapists).
The homosexual who has the courage to “come out”, for example, is welcoming and integrating
the darker and opposite-sex side of the personality. There can be no moral condemnation when
wholeness is achieved.
CONCLUSION
Wholeness for Jung means the union of good and evil. As the notion of good and evil are central
to Jungian doctrine, he cannot be assessed purely as a psychologist.
Throughout his life, Jung made a number of remarkable predictions which came true. A famous
example occurred on 4.4.44 when he predicted the death of the doctor who was treating him.
This followed a dream that he had of the doctor’s “primal form”. On the day of the prediction, the
doctor took to his bed and did not leave it again. One wonders whether Jung’s interest in the
paranormal and his participation in seances had paid off in unexpected ways.
In sum the teachings of Jung are wholly at variance with the Church. There is little scope for
dialogue and none for a Christian-Jungian synthesis.
Understanding Wotan Consciousness September 24, 2015 4
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4 Comments on "Carl Gustav Jung: Enemy of the Church"
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Accepting the Jungian reading applied above, there is still another mystery…assuming some of these myths are
embedded in some of Hebrew literature, and that is it appears by all accounts that we are dealing with twodifferent god-like figures. One from the Adam through the Noah to Moses at which point the god-figure ceases to
be universal. The god-like figure for Moses and Hebrews, Muslims, and Christians was for an exclusive group,
acquired immediately after the Hebrew mass migration out of Egypt when the character of the god-like figure
undergoes a vast change in character, nature, symbols,… Read more »