Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher by Sir Henry Jones

Chapter 5 OPTIMISM AND ETHICS THEIR CONTRADICTION.

Word Count: 11385 | Released on: 01/12/2017

s oft in our

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Well that

r in the sensational and moral pessimism of Byron and Carlyle. In other words, through the re-interpreting power which lies in this fundamental thought when it is soberly held and fearlessly applied, he sought to reconcile man with the world and with God, and thereby wit

upon it by the misery and wickedness of man, and the apparently purposeless waste of life and its resources. There was in it a deliberate earnestne

ive mind, before it can follow out the application of an optimistic theory to particular facts. Now, Browning's creed, at least as he held it in his later years, was not merely the allowable exaggeration of an ecstatic religious sentiment, the impassioned conviction of a God-intoxicated man. It was deliberately presented as a solution of moral problems, and was intended to serve as a theory of

these difficulties, and then proceed to

eauty and worth. Particular existences would seem to be illusory and evanescent phenomena, the creations of human imagination, itself a delusive appearance. The infinite, on this view, stands over against the finite, and it overpowers and consumes it; and the optimism, implied in the phrase that "God is all," turns at once into a pessimism. For, as soon as we inquire into the meaning of this "all," we find that it is only a negation of everything we can know or be. Such a pantheism as this is self-contradictory; for, while seeming to level all

destiny in solitude, and to give him supreme and absolute authority over his own life; so that any character which he forms, be it good or bad, is entirely the product of his own activity. So far as his life is culpable or praiseworthy, in other words, so far as we pass any moral judgment upon it, we necessarily think of it as the revelation of a self, that is, of an independent will, which cannot divide its responsibility. There may be, and indeed there always is for every individual, a hereditary predisposition and a soliciting environment, tendencies which are his inheritance from a remote past, and which rise to the surface in his own life; in other words, the life of the individual is always led within the larger sweep of the life of humanity. He is part of a whole, and has his place fixed, and his function predetermined, by a power which is greater than his own. But, if we are to call him good or evil, if he is to aspire and repent and strive, in a word, if he is to have any moral character, he cannot be merely a part of a system; there must be something within him which is superior to circumstances, and which makes him master of his own fate

benevolent miracle. Nor is this collision of pantheism and freedom, nay of religion and morality, confined to the theoretical region. This difficulty is not merely the punishment of an over-bold and over-ambitious philosophy, which pries too curiously into the mystery of being. It lies at the very threshold of all reflection on the facts of the moral life. Even children feel the mystery of God's permitting sin, and embarrass their helpless parents with th

God's beneficence or power, and divide the realm of being between Him and the adversary: nor, on the other hand, does he limit man's freedom, and stultify ethics by extracting the sting of reality from sin. To limit God, he knew, was to deny Him; and, whatever the di

e by side with his doctrine that there is no failure, no wretchedness of corruption that does not conceal within it a germ of goodness, is his sense of the evil of sin, of the infinite earnestness of man's moral warfare, and of the surpassing magnitude of the issues at stake for each individual soul. So powerful is his interest in man as a moral agent, that he sees nought else in the world of any deep concern. "My stress lay," he said in his preface to Sordello (1863), "on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study. I, at least, always thought so-you, with many know

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im into his age or race. And although the poet ever bears within him the certainty of victory for the good, he calls his fellows to the

itanism, nor the peaceful evolution of Goethe's artistic morality: it is valour in the battle of life. His code contains no negative commandments, and no limitations; but he bids each man let out all the power that is within him, an

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to the poet, the worst of sins. "Go!" sa

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lashes out upon us. Even Pompilia, the most gentle of all his creations, at the first prompting of

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rior priest as Caponsacchi himself, and his matured experience only muffles his vigour. Wearied with his life-long l

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though it be but one day before he himself is called before the judgment seat. The same energy, the same spirit of bold conflict, animates Guido's adoption of evil for his good. At all but

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take a definite stand and resolute for either virtue or vice; the hesitancy and compromise of a life that is loyal to nothing, not even to its own selfishness. The cool self

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on and "range from Helen to Elvire, frenetic to be free," let him rise into a decisive self-assertion against the stable order of the moral world, and he cannot fail to discover the nature of the task he has undertaken, and the meaning of the power without, against which he has set himse

he praise of m

oth right to get a

at the Fai

hich leads into evil, ultimately leaves the self assertion futile. There is the disappointment of utter f

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and the security of the "Towers," is the text of Red Cotton Nightcap Country. The sordid hero of the po

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nd the retention of "the first falsehood," ar

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e "hate," as Pompilia said, "was the truth of him." In that very hate we find, beneath his endless subterfuges, something real, at last. And since, through his hate, he is f

te sure tha

Satan; who

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pathetic lines in which he condemns the Lost Leader, who broke "From the van and the fr

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fortiter' finds in him powerful expression." Browning is emphatically the poet-militant, and the prophet of struggling manhood. His words are like trumpet-calls sounded in the van of man's struggle, wafted back by the winds, and heard through all the din of conflict by his meaner brethren,

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the service of the good; the joyous venturing forth on a new war under new conditio

evil, and of the complete victory of the good? Again and again we have found him pronounce such victory to be absolutely necessary and inevitable. His beli

e is, a sun

cloud earth e

Last, return

compass roun

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arent

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n we condemn them? Must we not plainly either modify our optimism and keep our faith in God within bounds, or, on the other hand, make every failure

weakness in a

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t slumbers within it, except as resisting evil? Are not good and evil relative? Is not every criminal, when really known, working out in his own way the salvation of himself and the world? Why

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minence in moral beauty, and in what is she

in His

ht with t

eal is actual, and that every detail of life is, in its own place, illumined with divine goodness. But morality is the condemnation of things as they are, by reference to a conception of a good which ought to be. The absolute identification of the actual and ideal extinguishes morality, either in something lower or something higher. But the moral ideal, when reached, turns at once into a stepping-stone, a

postulates the absolute and universal supremacy of God, and morality, which postulates the absol

the "Either, Or" of discrepant conceptions, to a position which grasps the alternatives together in a higher idea. It is at bottom the question, whethe

tory, and the complete independence of the moral consciousness. He refused to degrade either God or man. In the name of religion, he refuses to say that "a purpose of reason is visible in the social and legal structures of mankind"-only "on the

nt merely "on the whole," leaving within His realm, which is unive

which one health

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him, the consciousness of opportunities neglected, arrested gro

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ot so decisively reject. At least, in a passage of wonderful poetic and philosophic power, which he puts into the mouth of C

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Book-Giuseppe Capo

the suddenness of Guido's fate," and hopes that the truth may "be flashed out by the blow of death, and Guido see one instant and be saved." Nor is his

inal,-Christ,

t breaks through t

ill you let t

g it, has begun to feel it. The cry, like the intercession of

hich is the last for most me

t my face, n

obscure sequ

akes but to r

st in vain: whic

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rrefragable conviction of the poet himself. The same faith in the

my life, O s

shall ever p

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urse, the new pa

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the Seek-Pompi

o His power, or stultify by failure the end implied in all God's work, nature no less than man himself-to wit, t

ousness threatens the existence of the moral life. At times, indeed, he seems to teach, as man's best and highest, a passive acqu

fast, why passiv

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and use

at flaws

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bi Ben

, whose air is very sweet and pleasant, where he may solace himself for a season." But, "the way lies directly through it," and the pilgrim, "being a little strengthened and better able to bear his sickness,"

worm mu

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the Book-Pompi

the need of progress towards an

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wings nev

vidence of coming triumph, "the spark which disturbs our clod," these are the essence

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bi Ben

ore God's best in man. The struggle upward from the brute, may, indeed end with death. But this onl

in other live

this life's meaning, stored

I have proved the past;" an

s and un

age batt

select, what a

one. There is no limiting here of man's possibili

e! cry 'Speed,' f

as h

ords which cam

help in philosophy. They do not solve the problem of the relation between morality and religion, but merely continue the antagonism between them

o some serene sphere, where man will lead an angel's life, which knows no imperfection and therefore no growth. He refuses to make morality an accident in man's history and "to put man in the place of God," by identifying the process with the ideal; he also refuses to make man's struggle, and God's achievement within man, mutually exclusive alternatives. As I shall show in the sequel, movemen

Its very essence and verve is the conviction that the ideal is not actual. And the higher a man's spiritual attainment, the more impressive is his view of the evil of the world, and of the greatness of the work pressing to be done. "Say not ye, there are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? Behold I say unto you, 'Lift up

hat we seem ever "To mock ourselves in all that's best of us." The beginning of the spiritual life s

t of Caponsacchi; from the time when Pompilia

ng how

der me-broken

ap 'twixt what i

abysm the so

e Book-Giuseppe Ca

him something of the grandeur of goodness, and led h

o with nothin

eternal-and th

urrent of the

xperiences

e particular h

t only by a

irth-not by th

Christ. All thi

n, meet for a m

d. 208

is such a life, that he finds him

s his

tarch, puts h

n; draws the pat

ld I fight, save o

gly, conten

solitary no

Book-Giuseppe Capo

ing him "be perfect as his Father in heaven is perfect" had destroyed his peace, and made imperative a well n

t, good God!

tituted, as we have seen, the characteristic attitude of Carlyle; and it re

deduce, from the transcendent height of the moral ideal, the impossibility of attaining goodness, and the failure of God's purpose in man. And this is what Carlyle did. He stopped short at the consciousness of imperfection, and he made no attempt to account for it. He took it as a complete fact, and therefore drew a sharp line of distinction between the human and the divine. And, so far, he was right; for,

we may add, has not enough of the generalizing faculty, often mistaken for a philosophical one, to extend this condemnation over the whole of "th

eal must fall within the real or intelligible world, do what the pessimists will; and a condemnation of man which is not based on a principle realized by humanity, is a fiction of abstract thought, which lays stress on the actuality of the imperfect and treats the perfect as if it were as good as nothing, which it cannot be. In other words, this way of regarding human life isolates the passing phenomenon, and does not look to that which reveals itself in it and causes it to pass away. Confining ourselves, however, for the present, to the ideal in morality, we can easily see that, in that sphere at least, the actual and ideal change places; and that the latter contrasts with the former as the real with the phenomenal. For, in the first place, the moral ideal is something more than a mere idea not yet realized. It is more even than a true idea; for no mere knowledge, however true, has such intimate relation to the self-consciousness of man as his moral ideal. A mathematical axiom, and the statement of a physical law, express what is true; but they do not occupy the same place in our mind as a mo

ized in it. It is for this reason that the moral agent sets himself against it, and desires to annihilate all its claims upon him by undergoing its punishment, and drinking to the dregs its cup of bitterness. Thus his true life lies in the realization of his ideal, and his advance towards it is his coming to himself. Only in attaining to it does h

same individual life. Man cannot, therefore, without injustice, condemn himself in all that he is; for the condemnation is itself a witness to the activity of that good of which he despairs. Hence, the threatening majesty of the moral imperative is nothing but the shadow of man's own dignity; and moral contrition, an

been already suggested in a previous chapter, the authority of the moral law over man is rooted in man's endowment. Its imperative is nothing but the voice of the future self, bidding the present self aspire, while its reproof is only the expression of a moral aspiration which has misu

ut the tendency may remain unfulfilled. Men have some ideals which they never reach, and others which, at first sight at least, it were better for them not to reach. The goal may never be attained, or it may prove "a ruin like the rest." And, as long as man is moral, the ideal is not, and cannot be, fully rea

plain self-contradiction. For moral good has no meaning except in so far as it is conceived as the highest good. The question. "Why should I be m

zing activity. Intellectual and moral life is progress, although it is the progress of an ideal which is real and complete, the return of the infinite to itself through the finite. The cessation of the progress of the ideal in man, whereby man interprets the world in terms of himself and makes it the instrument of his purposes, is intellectual and mora

"The beyond," for knowledge and morality, is the Land of Promise. And the promise is not a false one; for the "land" is possessed. The recognition of the fact to be known, the statement of the problem, is the first step in its solution; and the consciousness of the moral ideal not attained is the first step in its self-actualizing progress. Had man not come so far, he would not have known the further difficulty, or reco

s in itself is evil, the ideal it seeks is evil, and therefore the condemnation of the actual by reference to it is absurd. And, on the other hand, to postulate as best the identity of ideal and actual, so that no process is necessary, is to assume a point of view where both optimism and pessimism are meaningless, for there is no criterion. As Aristotle teaches us, we have no r

known and a better to be achieved. The negative implies the affirmative, and is its effect. Man's confession of the limitation of his knowledge is made on the supposition that the universe of facts, in all its infinitely rich complexity, is meant to be known; and his confession of moral imperfection is made by reference to a good which is absolute, and which yet may be and ought to be his. The good in morality is necessarily supreme and perfect. A good that is "merely human," "relative to man's nature," in the sense of not being true goodness, is a phantom of confused thinking. Morality demands "the good," and not

language of Emerson, is "too good not to be true." If such an ideal be latent in the nature of man, it brings the order of the universe over to his side. For it implies a kinship between him, as a spiritual being, and the whole of existence. The stars in their courses fight for him. In other words, the moral ideal means nothing, if it does not imply a law which is universal. It is a law which ex

it brings with it as phases of its growth, are witnesses of the presence, and the actual product of an absolute

ualizes itself in man. It is true that the ideal cannot be identified with the process; for it is the principle of the process, and therefore more than it. Man does not reach "the last term of development," for there is no last term to a being whose essence is progressive activity. He does not therefore take the place of God, and his self-consciousness is never the absolute self-consciousness. But still, in so far as his life is a progress towards the true and good, it is the process of truth and goodness within him. It is the activity of the ideal. It is God lifting man up to Himself, or, in the language of philosophy, "returning to Himself in history." And yet it is at the same time man's effort after goodness. Man is not a mere "vessel of divine grace," or a passive recipient of the highest bounty. All man's goodness is necessarily man's achievement. And the realization by the ideal of itself is man's achievement of it. For

and forget that it is of its essence to communicate itself. And goodness and truth do not become less when shared; they grow greater. Spiritual possessions imply community wherein there is no exclusion; and to the Christian the glory of God is His communication of Himself. Hence the so-called religious humility, which

lized God's

ikest God in

the Book-Pompi

eligious feeling that it abolishes all sense of separation. It removes all the limitations of finitude and lifts man into rapturous unity with the God he adores; and it gives such completeness to his life that it seems to him to be a joyous pulse of the life that is absolute. The feeling of unity may be an illusion.

le theology and philosophy are often occupied with the vain task of bridging a chasm between the finite and the infinite, which they assume to be separated, the supreme facts of the life of man as a spirit spring f

ding

ld by, God, an

t dread point

ace, for it re

th in th

perc

w man, by some

unication

finiteness i

Hohenstiel

s also implied that the divine being can be known only as revealed, and incarnated, if one

edgment of G