The Life of Reason by George Santayana (best black authors txt) 📖
- Author: George Santayana
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The horror with which an idealistic youth at first views the truculence of nature and the turpitude of worldly life is capable of being softened by experience. Time subdues our initial preferences by showing us the complexity of moral relations in this world, and by extending our imaginative sympathy to forms of existence and passion at first repulsive, which from new and ultra-personal points of view may have their natural sweetness and value. In this way, Saint Augustine was ultimately brought to appreciate the catholicity and scope of those Greek sages who had taught that all being was to itself good, that evil was but the impediment of natural function, and that therefore the conception of anything totally or essentially evil was only a petulance or exaggeration in moral judgment that took, as it were, the bit in its teeth, and turned an incidental conflict of interests into a metaphysical opposition of natures. All definite being is in itself congruous with the true and the good, since its constitution is intelligible and its operation is creative of values. Were it not for the limitations of matter and the accidental crowding and conflict of life, all existing natures might subsist and prosper in peace and concord, just as their various ideas live without contradiction in the realm of conceptual truth. We may say of all things, in the words of the Gospel, that their angels see the face of God. Their ideals are no less cases of the good, no less instances of perfection, than is the ideal locked in our private bosom. It is the part of justice and charity to recognise this situation, in view of which we may justly say that evil is always relative and subordinate to some constituted nature in itself a standard of worth, a point of departure for the moral valuation of eventual changes and of surrounding things. Evil is accordingly accidental and unnatural; it follows upon the maladaptation of actions to natures and of natures to one another. It can be no just ground for the condemnation of any of those natural essences which only give rise to it by their imperfect realisation.
The Semitic idea of creation could now receive that philosophical interpretation which it so sadly needed. Primordially, and in respect to what was positive in them, all things might he expressions of the good; in their essence and ideal state they might be said to be created by God. For God was the supreme ideal, to which all other goods were subordinate and instrumental; and if we agree to make a cosmogony out of morals and to hypostasise the series of rational ideals, taken in the inverse order, into a series of efficient causes, it is clear that the highest good, which is at the end of the moral scale, will now figure as a first cause at the beginning of the physical sequence. This operation is what is recorded and demanded in the doctrine of creation: a doctrine which would lose its dogmatic force if we allowed either the moral ideality or the physical efficacy of the creator to drop out of sight. If the moral ideality is sacrificed, we pass to an ordinary pantheism, while if the physical efficacy is surrendered, we take refuge in a naturalistic idealism of the Aristotelian type, where the good is a function of things and neither their substance nor their cause.
To accept the doctrine of creation, after it had become familiar, was not very hard, because the contradiction it contains could then be set down to our imperfect apprehension. The unintelligibility of matters of fact does not lead us to deny them, but merely to study them; and when the creation was accepted as a fact, its unintelligibility became merely a theological problem and a religious mystery, such as no mortal philosophy can be without. But for Saint Augustine the situation was wholly different. A doctrine of the creation had to be constructed: the disparate ideas had to be synthesised which posterity was afterward to regard as the obvious, if not wholly reconcilable, attributes of the deity. The mystery could not then be recognised; it had to be made. And Saint Augustine, with his vital religion, with his spontaneous adoration of God the ideal, could not attribute to that ideal unimpeded efficacy in the world. To admit that all natures were essentially good might dispel the Manichean fancy about an Evil Absolute engaged in single combat with an Absolute Good; but insight into the meaning and the natural conditions of evil could only make its presence more obvious and its origin more intimately bound up with the general constitution of the world. Evil is only imperfection; but everything is imperfect. Conflict is only maladaptation, but there is maladaptation everywhere. If we assume, then, what the doctrine of creation requires, that all things at first proceeded out of the potency of the good—their matter and form, their distribution and their energies, being wholly attributable to the attraction of the ultimately best—it is clear that some calamity must have immediately supervened by which the fountains of life were defiled, the strength of the ideal principle in living things weakened, and the mortal conflict instituted which not only condemns all existent things ultimately to perish, but hardly allows them, even while they painfully endure, to be truly and adequately themselves.
Original sin, with the fall of the angels and of man for its mythical ground, thus enters into the inmost web of Augustinian philosophy. This fact cannot be too much insisted upon, for only by the immediate introduction of original sin into the history of the world could a man to whom God was still a moral term believe at all in the natural and fundamental efficacy of God in the cosmos. The doctrine of the fall made it possible for Saint Augustine to accept the doctrine of the creation. Both belonged to the same mythical region in which the moral values of life were made to figure as metaphysical agents; but when once the metaphysical agency of the highest good was admitted into a poetic cosmogony, it became imperative to admit also the metaphysical agency of sin into it; for otherwise the highest good would be deprived of its ideal and moral character, would cease to be the entelechy of rational life, and be degraded into a flat principle of description or synthesis for experience and nature as they actually are. God would thus become a natural agent, like the fire of Heraclitus, in which human piety could take an interest only by force of traditional inertia and unintelligence, while the continued muttering of the ritual prevented men from awaking to the disappearance of the god. The essence of deity, as Augustine was inwardly convinced, was correspondence to human aspiration, moral perfection, and ideality. God, therefore, as the Manicheans, with Plato and Aristotle before them, had taught, could be the author of good only; or, to express the same thing in less figurative and misleading language, it was only the good in things that could contribute to our idea of divinity. What was evil must, therefore, be carried up into another concept, must be referred, if you will, to another mythical agent; and this mythical agent in Saint Augustine's theology was named sin.
Everything in the world which obscured the image of the creator or rebelled against his commandments (everything, that is, which prevented in things the expression of their natural ideals) was due to sin. Sin was responsible for disease of mind and body, for all suffering, for death, for ignorance, perversity, and dulness. Sin was responsible—so truly original was it—for what was painful and wrong even in the animal kingdom, and sin—such was the paradoxical apex of this inverted series of causes—sin was responsible for sin itself. The insoluble problems of the origin of evil and of freedom, in a world produced in its every fibre by omnipotent goodness, can never be understood until we remember their origin. They are artificial problems, unknown to philosophy before it betook itself to the literal justification of fables in which the objects of rational endeavour were represented as causes of natural existence. The former are internal products of life, the latter its external conditions. When the two are confused we reach the contradiction confronting Saint Augustine, and all who to this day have followed in his steps. The cause of everything must have been the cause of sin, yet the principle of good could not be the principle of evil. Both propositions were obviously true, and they were contradictory only after the mythical identification of the God which meant the ideal of life with the God which meant the forces of nature.
It would help us little, in trying to understand these doctrines, to work over the dialectic of them, and to express the contradiction in somewhat veiled terms or according to new pictorial analogies. Good and evil, in the context of life, undoubtedly have common causes; but that system which involves both is for that very reason not an ideal system, and to represent it as such is simply to ignore the conscience and the upward effort of life. The contradiction can be avoided only by renouncing the meaning of one of the terms; either, that is, by no longer regarding the good as an absolute creator, but merely as a partial result or tendency in a living world whose life naturally involves values, or else by no longer conceiving God as the ideal term in man's own existence. The latter is the solution adopted by metaphysicians generally, and by Saint Augustine himself when hard pressed by the exigencies of his double allegiance. God, he tells us, is just, although not just as man is, nor as man should be. In other words, God is to be called just even when he is unjust in the only sense in which the word justice has a meaning among men. We are forced, in fact, to obscure our moral concepts and make them equivocal in order to be able to apply them to the efficient forces and actual habits of this world. The essence of divinity is no longer moral excellence, but ontological and dynamic relations to the natural world, so that the love of God would have to become, not an exercise of reason and conscience, as it naturally was with Saint Augustine, but a mystical intoxication, as it was with Spinoza.
The sad effects of this degradation of God into a physical power are not hard to trace in Augustine's own doctrine and feeling. He became a champion of arbitrary grace and arbitrary predestination to perdition. The eternal damnation of innocents gave him no qualms; and in this we must admire the strength of his logic, since if it is right that there should be wrong at all, there is no particular reason for stickling at the quantity or the enormity of it. And yet there are sentences which for their brutality and sycophancy cannot be read without pain—sentences inspired by this misguided desire to apologise for the crimes of the universe. "Why should God not create beings that he foreknew were to sin, when indeed in their persons and by their fates he could manifest both what punishment their guilt deserved and what free gifts he might bestow on them by his favour?" "Thinking it more lordly and better to do well even in the presence of evil than not to allow evil to exist at all." Here the pitiful maxim of doing evil that good may come is robbed of the excuse it finds in human limitations and is made the first principle of divine morality. Repellent and contorted as these ultimate metaphysical
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