A RATIONAL FAITH FOR OUR TIMES
By J. SEELYE BIXLER¹

So many of the things happening today seem just plumb crazy that we are beginning to feel that craziness is the rule of life and that we must be a little crazy ourselves if we are to meet experience on its own terms. This is at least what I read into the statements of many of our leaders of religious thought who are urging on us the virtues of a faith based on the “irrational” and even “absurd”. To most of us it would seem as if there were enough absurdity in life already, without adding to it by making irrational faith an attitude to be desired and cultivated. I have wondered whether it would not be wise to take stock of the health that is in us --- limited as it may be --- and to see what we can do to counter the tide toward both irrationalism and disillusionment running so strongly today. An ominous sign of the extent to which we have capitulated is seen in the way we take our creeping pessimism almost as a luxury. “I can’t tell you,” remarked a student the other day, “what satisfaction I feel in this ontological despair!” Despair is of course always popular in some student circles. Label it “ontological” and it becomes practically irresistible. But we can hardly call it reasonable because the student, after all, didn’t know how to describe either his satisfaction or the despair itself. The plain fact is that he didn’t know what he was talking about.

Like other periods of disillusionment ours is a time of introspection. But ours has both the advantages and disadvantages of a well developed science of psychology. On the one hand we know more about ourselves than ever before. But on the other we know more about how natural it is to be queer. Psychological research concentrates on abnormality because by studying the extravagances of behavior it can learn how to avoid them. Through observing sickness we learn how to promote health. But we who read psychological books find so much space devoted to pathology that inevitably we begin to believe it is only normal to feel funny and to do funny things. So we go to a psychiatrist. C. P. Snow lecturing at Wesleyan last week remarked that of his thousands of friends and acquaintances in Britain only two had been in a psychiatrist’s office, compared with hundreds whom he knew on this side of the ocean. “Should one conclude,” he asked with gentle irony, “that you are either happier or wiser than we?”

Our obsession with the abnormal is seen clearly in those areas where our underlying ideas are brought out on the public stage and paraded for our inspection. What, for example, has happened to our theater? Recently one of our leading playwrights protested against the charge that his characters were too deeply immersed in morbid introspection by asking if the same was not true of Hamlet. His question seemed to show an unhappy lack of appreciation for the genius of Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s characters may indeed at times direct their gaze inward but the stage is set for greatness and however they themselves may feel and think we know that great ideas are in the offing. Shakespeare’s characters for the most part do not live meanly or die in vain. By contrast many of the figures on our modern stage seem the victims of their own perverted desires. Too often they appear to be wrestling not so much with a problem as with a disease.

The prevailing trend toward an exaggeration of our helplessness has affected even our philosophers and theologians, with the result that they offer us dogmatically assertive statements of the limitations to our knowledge instead of confident affirmations of faith in our ability to reach the truth. On the one hand philosophy has gone over to “Logical Positivism”, a creed which insists that knowledge is confined to sense experience alone. All attempts to think on the great themes of God and human destiny are thus ruled out from the start as technically and literally “nonsense”. Logical Positivism has won great victories in the field of analysis and should receive our plaudits for its accomplishments as a specialized science. Yet while its finely ground axes may help to sharpen other axes it fails to touch the giant redwoods of human concern. On the other hand our theologians, feeling unable to apply reason to the mysteries of religion, seem not only to affirm the fact that we must be “irrational” but actually to glory in it. “There can be no Christian philosophy,” says one of the most influential of them, “for if it is philosophy it is not Christian and if it is Christian it is not philosophy.” This is dogmatism from the other side --- an attempt to rule out by definition all efforts to apply reason to faith.

Why this sudden hopelessness about reason and its power? There appear to be two causes: first, we face the real possibility of imminent death; second, we have a new realization of the depths of human evil. But we should recover our sense of balance and see, first of all, that neither of these is really new. Men have always faced imminent death. The scale of destruction today is indeed unparalleled, but to a man in battle confronting death the scale is less important than the quality of the experience itself. And the quality of the experience remains the same. Death, tragedy, suffering, and the frustration of his dearest hopes have always characterized man’s life. Nor are we the first generation to fear that the end of the world might come in our time. And as to human evil-even Hiroshima and Buchenwald, in all their frightful terror, unspeakable as it is, fail to reveal anything essentially new about human nature. Hiroshima is a product of war and war has always been inhuman and irrational. What is new is today’s widespread protest against war. Buchenwald, it is true, gives us pause because we had not supposed cruelty of its type possible in a civilized nation. But to generalize from it and claim, as some have done, that this reveals irremediable evil in the nature of the people that permitted it is to overlook two facts. First, many of the countrymen of the sadistic jailers who perpetrated the abuses lost their lives resisting Naziism and its attendant evils. Second, to affirm a flaw in human nature as such is to assert dogmatically that no kind of education, no sore of training, and no type of social and political environment could have produced a different result.

What is really new is the shock these experiences have produced on us and this shock has come because our supposed security and our actual comfort had made us blind to the hazards life always presents. The hazards are there and it is well that we have waked up to them. But we must not use them as an excuse for generalizations that overlook such reason as we have and interfere with the kind of confidence on which we must draw.

It is fashionable today to decry progress and to label the belief in it as fatuous optimism. Yet what we actually see is immense, almost stupefying progress in some areas accompanied by an appalling lack of ability to keep up in others. We should be clear also that the advance is moral ---not only scientific. To use only one example --- any reader of the remarkable article by Dr. Alice Hamilton in the September Atlantic Monthly must be impressed by the enormous advance in the lifetime of one woman so far as the public attitude toward public health and the living and working conditions of labor is concerned. It is true that our failure in the international field is both frustrating and very dangerous. But the first need is for more enlightenment and understanding as to what is involved. Over and over again we have been shown that the public will rise to meet its problems if it sees clearly what they are. Baffled though we may be by the conflicts of our age it is yet true that we have resources for meeting them and the first of these is education.

Our educational system today is good but the important truth is that it could be much better . . . First, we must cultivate on the part of our own public a respect it does not now have for scholarship as such and for the practicing scholar and teacher. Second, we must stiffen the work of our schools This will not be easy, and I do not think our aims will be accomplished simply by making assignments longer. We must secure the increase in both quality and quantity that will come only when parents and students alike see the surpassing importance --- for the life of the student and for the cause of world peace itself --- of what the schools are trying ro do. Our high schools are in a crucial position. They deserve all our sympathy and our most intelligent and active support. For they must accept the enormous numbers demanding admission and, with full recognition of their diverse backgrounds, mold them into a unified body of citizens with common aims. Their task is really threefold. They must (1) prepare the gifted student for college and make certain that he has all the stimulus needed to bring out his superior talents; (2) provide the “non-college type” with the training necessary for a useful life; and (3) offer to all at least the rudiments of an understanding of what life in a democratic society requires. Much more than new buildings will be needed for this. Speaking as a former college administrator I should like to point to one area where improvement is needed at once, that is, the area of guidance and counseling. Too often, for example, a boy comes to college after a comparatively easy senior year, having dropped his language study and his mathematics and spent his time on subjects less solid and less important, at least at this stage in his career. Actually, senior year ought to be the hardest and ought to provide the momentum for college work. Further, it ought to provide continuity in subjects like mathematics and language where a gap or a vacation often spells disaster.

All of us hope that our schools will build character but there is more than one way of doing it. We should never forget the kind of character training that comes from a concentrated attack on a difficult subject. I know that this smacks of a return to the older, now outmoded idea of “disciplinary” training. Bur the plain fact is that in our well-meaning attempts to cultivate student “interest” and “purpose” we have lost sight of the effectiveness of education that is indirect. Sometimes we can best encourage moral interest and purpose by giving students work that is both difficult and important, and insisting that it be well done. Much of our instruction in school will most capably influence character if it aims at something else. Only confusion has resulted from the separation of “student-centered” from “subject-centered” education. Often we can most effectively show a concern for the student by making him show an intelligent concern for the subject to be mastered. And when the subjects themselves are of such preeminent importance for our life today as are mathematics, physics, English, and a foreign language, we have every reason to concentrate on them and to be unflagging in our insistence that they be really learned.

Furthermore, while we are demanding more of our students we should not forget to require more of our teachers in the way of preparation and training. When an American travels abroad the question always asked by foreign educators is: “Are you preparing your teachers as you should? Are you prescribing a thorough training in the sciences and the liberal arts?” The question is embarrassing because all of us have a strong suspicion that by and large we simply have not given our teachers what they ought to have. Of course any teacher can profit by a knowledge of educational methods. Much is known today about child psychology and the learning process and we should be foolish to neglect it. Yet no one can deny that in far too many cases we have allowed our teachers to specialize in these subjects at the expense of the sound substantial disciplines any good college of liberal art can provide. This is one area where obviously we must raise our sights.

Aside from our great educational system, with its dedicated teachers and a growing public will to improve it, we have a great resource in our students themselves. A recent trip to colleges in both New England and the middle West has convinced me that our students are not only worthy of the very best we can offer but wholly able to take advantage of it. Poised, alert, eager, thoughtful, undismayed, our students are far ahead of where we were at their age and it is hard to believe that their superiors can be found anywhere on earth. Yet before we congratulate ourselves with too much complacency, we should pause to remember that the best student always teaches himself and that the worst we can do will hardly hold him back. Our real task is with the average student, and particularly the “late bloomer” who by good teaching can be stimulated to play “over his head” in the classroom and to develop capacities he did not know he had, just as good coaching brings out latent ability on the athletic field.

What has this to do with a “rational faith”? My point is simply that a rational faith can be ours if we will fix our attention on the things we are able to do, and the means we have for doing them, instead of retreating into easy generalities about the hopelessness of our lot and the helplessness of our reason. We should first of all face the fact that we confront a common problem with a common goal which is, the good life for all on earth. Today we are much more aware than ever before of the fact that this is within our grasp and that with hard work, hard thinking, disciplined desires and especially with disciplined education, it can be accomplished. The evils to which our eyes have been opened are serious. But they themselves have revealed the depths of human suffering with, it is true, the lower reaches of brutalization, but also the heights of nobility that may be attained. “Suffering,” says the Spanish writer Unamuno, “is the life blood that runs through us all and binds us together.” Having been brought face to face with the range and the intensity of suffering that our generation has known we should be aware of the common elements in our human lot and the need for a common attack upon our problem.

In the next place I think we should have been made aware of the direction where the sources of a rational faith will be found. We must have faith in ourselves if we are to have faith in what is more than ourselves. How strange it is, as one looks at history, to find that what are called creative periods for faith are often described as uncreative in other respects, and how particularly strange that so many writers today should insist that the path to God lies through a renunciation of reason. That God ministers to our weakness is true, but our weakness must have a certain strength of its own if it is ever to recognize the God who ministers to it. By the same token, an eager, confident readiness to look for truth will not be satisfied until it has found the solution to religious as well as scientific problems . . . Why should not an age which develops the techniques for space exploration cultivate also the sensitiveness needed to explore what is not spatial and is beyond the stars themselves? Today we have methods of attaining truth undreamed of by our forebears. But what is the demand for truth if not a demand laid on us by the Author of our being? What is the intellectual passion itself if not a gift from the Source of our Values? To say that faith must be irrational, that we must leave our minds outside when we enter the temple, and that our aim should be consistent thought in all areas except that of the supreme experiences of the spirit is to show an inconceivably stubborn unwillingness to face up to the obvious facts of human life. Even those who despair of philosophy in religion write philosophical books to provide reasons for their despair. Particularly at a time when science has shown the extraordinary achievement that is possible when men are able to shed their parochialism as they attack a common problem with the universals that only reason can provide, it is fatuous to claim that the methods of reason are irrelevant or actually antagonistic to inquiry in any area of human concern. In the field of human behavior, human motivation, human aspiration, hope, and faith we need more reason instead of less, more reflective consideration and more rigorous thought than ever before. Instead of interfering with the special feelings that religious faith rightly considers its own, reason will provide the only basis worthy for them.

I have recently been rereading some of the work of the man whom I believe to be the greatest philosophic mind our country has produced . . . William James lived before the wars and horrors of the twentieth century, but he understood and described the tragedy, yet ultimate optimism of human life as have few writers before or since. James is sometimes called an “irrationalist”, but the word can be applied to him only in a limited and very technical sense for his real interest was in the achievements to which rational life can look forward and the possible conditions for a rational faith. James was a philosopher of the will, but the will he described was far from an irrational will. What he had in mind was the will to realize to the fullest the potentialities of life. By faith in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not assured in advance, said James, we can bring into being creative forces which otherwise would lie dormant. If faith is then itself a contributory cause in realizing spiritual truths, if it helps good results to come which could not have come without it, instead of calling it “irrational” why should we not hail it as a truly creative factor in the good life and as effecting the kind of full-bodied and well-rounded rationality it should be our dearest wish to attain? The point is, of course, that this calls for courage and a kind of reckless daring far removed from the sophisticated, skeptical skittishness which in our day encourages a mood of hopelessness and self-distrust. “The will,” said James, “is our deepest organ of communication with the Nature of things.” I believe he was right, and that what we need today is a more adventurous will to seek out the evidences of present and future advance that surround us and to make effective the truth they imply. The thing to remember is that the decision is in our hands and without us the victory is not assured. James himself reminds us of the words with which Henry IV greeted the tardy Crillon after a great victory had been gained. “Hang yourself, brave Crillon! we fought at Arques, and you were not there.”

As I grow older I find myself thinking more, not less, about my college classmates who 43 years ago were lost in the First World War. Their death before they had entered into manhood and had known the experiences of a congenial profession and a devoted family circle is what really poses the problem of irrationality. How can we call a world rational or have a rational faith, where such things can be? The answer, I think, comes from the effort to meet the special challenge to our view of rationality posed by the universal facts of suffering and death. The truth is that we do not live in a secure world or an essentially happy one. And the further truth is that we have to face it as we can and match our ambitions to it as we must. There is a finely translated epigram in Greek anthology which reads:

A shipwrecked sailor buried on this coast

Bids you set sail.

Full many a bark, when we were lost,

Weathered the gale.

It might have been written for my classmates --- or yours. Their bidding is that we set sail and make such intelligent and courageous provision for the danger as we can.

The story is told of William James that one evening he looked out from his house at 95 Irving Street in Cambridge and across the street saw the members of the seminar in the house of his colleague Josiah Royce break up and prepare to go home. James said to his wife: “Let’s invite them in.” “Oh no,” she replied, “it is late and they won’t want to come.” “Well,” said James, “anyway I’ll leave the door open.” The story is characteristic of his eagerness to maintain an open door for the new, the not-yet-experienced, the un-stereotyped and unclassified. James always wanted the novel experience to blow through the musty halls of conventional philosophy and to bring the freshness of its own unique and individual appeal. His faith is what we need today. For it was faith that whatever comes can be met and can be made to show its capacity for creative advance if faced with reason and resolve.

_____________________