SPRING BOOKS 2
Is Goodness Gracious ?
By DAVID DAICHES TN the course of his long academic career at 'Cambridge Basil Willey has put all students 43'..f English literature and history in his debt by his well-known volumes which discuss the in- tellectual and moral background of the seven- teenth, the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.
I have myself found his two volumes on the nineteenth century the most engaging of his books, for it is with problems of nineteenth-
century religious doubt and nineteenth-century resolution of those doubts that he seems to have a special sympathy. A world respectful of science and of secular reformism while at the same time yearning for the numinous and emo- tionally responsive to traditional religious forms and formulations—that is a world familiar to us in Victorian literature and it is the world in Which. Professor Willey moves with real assur- ance. , It is a happy chance that marks his final Year as King •Edward VII Professor of English al Cambridge with the republication in paper- back form of his notable Nineteenth Century 8tittlies.* I wish I could be as enthusiastic about the Publication of the lecturest he has for years Riven at Cambridge for the English Moralists Paper of Part II of the English Tripos. Though written with Professor Willey's characteristic Frace of style and intellectual geniality, these lectures seem to me to be a not wholly success- ful mixture of the arguments of a number of ethical thinkers front Plato.to Coleridge in a has largely unnecessary for anybody who a. as read the works summarised and sometimes 'evolving quite radical over-simplification, and Christian apologetics which often take the form of running criticism of the works summarised in the light of Christian faith. I found myself continually provoked to argu- ment with the author as I read through the book--argument about the adequacy of his statement of the position of a particular moral- ist also argument about the underlying Christian critique which runs through the book. t might have been better, I felt more than once, 1f Professor Willey had (in the manner of that Passionately biased moralist Dorothea Krook, lectures book on the subject also grew out of lectures given for the Cambridge Moralists paper) spoken throughout as a defender of a Particular position rather than as an expounder of others' views who every now and again speaks as though all his readers share the Christian Point of view from which he expounds them. 13 can take up only one or two specific points. human The conventional Christian argument against chapter employed by Professor Willey in his eenapter on Hooker seems to me wholly un- toc)nvincing, because it does not address itself n1 what is really at issue. • The history of the °dem world, he says, proves that a humanism 0:: Peregrine Books (Penguin in association with 3115 )THE and Windus), 12s. 6d. 3(,) )THE ENGLISH MORALISTS. (Chalk/ andWindus,
that concerns itself with human welfare without depending on God `leads downhill . . . towards pride, self-seeking, competition, aggression, race- worship, dictator-worship, olass-worship, and war.' Now, if a doctrine be judged by the be- haviour of those who profess it, obviously Christianity comes off even worse: the violence, persecution, cruelty, and savage class-worship of the Christian centuries, and sometimes the especially appalling behaviour of those who were the most militant Christians (what the Crusaders did to Jews in their path would have made Hitler envious), can hardly be denied. We do not condemn Christianity for this reason; we say that those who professed it were not really obey- ing its tenets. To be fair, we should allow the same concession • to a non-religious humanism.
But there is a further point here: when people talk of Hitler and Stalin as typical products of a, non-religious humanism they conveniently ignore the simple fact that neither of these two tyrants was a non-religious humanist. Hitler was no humanist, but a nationalist fanatic who drew much of his argument from traditional religiOus modes of thinking and feeling, while Stalin elevated the Russian Communist Party into a quasi-religious priesthood and pursued a wholly non-humanist policy. I have never understood why religious opponents of humanism so often trot out these two characters as evidence of the horrors of the view they deplore (Professor Willey doesn't actually mention them, but his argument is that of those who do). The non- religious humanists have, I think, at least as good a record of opposition to the kind of cruelty ' represented by Hitler and Stalin as any religious group, has; indeed, in many respects Christianity has slowly followed the lead of non-religious humanists in opposing actions and institutions that embody man's inhumanity to man.
Of course it is one thing to judge a creed by the practical consequences of accepting it and another to consider whether in fact it is
true. (Professor Willey has elsewhere expressed his agreement with the Coleridgean view that we should not argue about the truth of religion but rather try the consequences of acting as though it were true, and he repeats the point at the end of this book.) Professor Willey sometimes talks about the humanist's rejection of the `orientation towards God' as though it were a wilful refusal to direct his attention to what was there; but the whole question is whether a personal God embodying ultimate ethical ideals and directly accessible to human devotion really exists, and the non-religious humanist is• likely to be honestly and even humbly agnostic on this point. He will be even more agnostic with respect to the specific dogmas of ,Christianity —the incarnation, the resurrection, the ascension, the trinity.
In fact, humanists are not the naïve optimists that Professor Willey suggests: they are all too aware of the horrors in human nature. The de- bate about Original Sin is not these days about whether man is wholly good or seriously flawed : man is clearly capable of fantastic ethical hero- ism and of appalling selfishness and cruelty. The objection to the Christian dogma of Original 'Sin is an objection to the belief that an all- powerful God punished the whole human race as well as all of non-human nature for the sin of one man, the belief that men are guilty (as well as defective) because of Adam's sin. What would, we think of a human judge who. in sentencing a criminal, announced that he would consider all future descendants of that criminal equally guilty and punish them accordingly with eternal torture?
But God foUnd a way out, says the Christian. Yes, but the point is that according to the dogma of Original Sin, God was being particularly loving in finding a way of saving a relatively small proportion of human kind from the con- sequences of a sin they did not themselves commit. It is arguable that only such a view of human destiny fits the facts; but this implies that the divine nature is something much more savage than mere man would tolerate in his own human judges. By all means let us remind ourselves of the dark depths within human nature and search for ways of controlling and sublimating them. The necessity of this search is surely agreed on by both Christian and humanist and cannot be taken as proof of the superiority of the former.
One final point on this topic: Professor Willey's' view that the modern non-religious humanist derives his ethical norms from un- acknowledged religious • sources is partly true, but it is equally true that some ethical norms (e.g. tolerance, political equality) have been adopted by Christianity from• non-Christian sources. In his opening chapter he admitted that most ethical ideals accepted by civilised people have been widespread since pre-Christian times. Yet later he asserts that 'without a religious basis, humanism can find no grounds for the very values it proclaims.' It can certainly find a basis (we need go no further than J. S. Mill here); the real question is, can it find a sanction? The problem of non-religious ethics is not how to demonstrate the basis and value of ethical norms but how, without a universal belief in super- natural rewards and punishments after death, to make their claims accepted as absolute by everybody. People cannot be trusted to behave ethically for ethical reasons; perhaps they need selfish fears and hopes, which religion gives them. Which brings us to Voltaire's position that if God didn't exist it would be necessary to create him. The humanist would, perhaps optimistic- ally, substitute education and environment.
Professor Willey's book turns out to be more provocative than I imagine he intended. But I do not think that he would deplore this effect, or dissent from the view that he has produced (whatever his intention) an item in a continuous debate rather than an objective survey for students. If I welcome it more warmly as a de- bater than as a university teacher, that is perhaps the result of my own bias.
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