Through Nature to God - Fiske John

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God is love indeed, and love creation's final law, how comes it that nature, red in tooth and claw with ravine, shrieks against our creed? If this question could be fairly answered, does it not seem as if the burden of life, which so often seems intolerable, would forthwith slip from our shoulders, and leave us, like Bunyan's pilgrim, free and bold and light-hearted to contend against all the ills of the world?

      Ever since human intelligence became enlightened enough to grope for a meaning and purpose in human life, this problem of the existence of evil has been the burden of man. In the effort to throw it off, leaders of thought have had recourse to almost every imaginable device. It has usually been found necessary to represent the Creator as finite either in power or in goodness, although the limitation is seldom avowed, except by writers who have a leaning toward atheism and take a grim pleasure in pointing out flaws in the constitution of things. Among modern writers the most conspicuous instance of this temper is afforded by that much too positive philosopher Auguste Comte, who would fain have tipped the earth's axis at a different angle and altered the arrangements of nature in many fanciful ways. He was like Alphonso, the learned king of Castile, who regretted that he had not been present when the world was created,—he could have given such excellent advice!

      In a very different mood the great Leibnitz, in his famous theory of optimism, argued that a perfect world is in the nature of things impossible, but that the world in which we live is the best of possible worlds. The limitation of the Creator's power is made somewhat more explicitly by Plato, who regarded the world as the imperfect realization of a Divine Idea that in itself is perfect. It is owing to the intractableness and vileness of matter that the Divine Idea finds itself so imperfectly realized. Thus the Creator's power is limited by the nature of the material out of which he makes the world. In other words, the world in which we live is the best the Creator could make out of the wretched material at his disposal. This Platonic view is closely akin to that of Leibnitz, but is expressed in such wise as to lend itself more readily to myth-making. Matter is not only considered as what Dr. Martineau would call a "datum objective to God," but it is endowed with a diabolical character of its own.

       Manichæism and Calvinism

       Table of Contents

      IIt is but a step from this to the complicated personifications of Gnosticism, with its Demiurgus, or inferior spirit that created the world. By some of the Gnostics the Creator was held to be merely an inferior emanation from God, a notion which had a powerful indirect effect upon the shaping of Christian doctrine in the second and third centuries of our era. A similar thought appears in the mournful question asked by Tennyson's Arthur:—

      "O me! for why is all around us here

       As if some lesser god had made the world

       And had not force to shape it as he would?"

      But some Gnostics went so far as to hold that the world was originally created by the Devil, and is to be gradually purified and redeemed by the beneficent power of God as manifested through Jesus Christ. This notion is just the opposite to that of the Vendidad, which represents the world as coming into existence pure and perfect, only to be forthwith defiled by the trail of the serpent Ahriman. In both these opposing theories the divine power is distinctly and avowedly curtailed by the introduction of a rival power that is diabolical; upon this point Parsee and Gnostic are agreed. Distinct sources are postulated for the evil and the good. The one may be regarded as infinite in goodness, the other as infinite in badness, and the world in which we live is a product of the everlasting conflict between the two. This has been the fundamental idea in all Manichæan systems, and it is needless to say that it has always exerted a mighty influence upon Christian theology. The Christian conception of the Devil, as regards its deeper ethical aspect, has owed much to the Parsee conception of Ahriman. It can hardly be said, however, that there has been any coherent, closely reasoned, and generally accepted Christian theory of the subject. The notions just mentioned are in themselves too shadowy and vague, they bear too plainly the marks of their mythologic pedigree, to admit of being worked into such a coherent and closely reasoned theory. Christian thought has simply played fast and loose with these conceptions, speaking in one breath of divine omnipotence, and in the next alluding to the conflict between good and evil in language fraught with Manichæism.

      In recent times Mr. John Stuart Mill has shown a marked preference for the Manichæan view, and has stated it with clearness and consistency, because he is not hampered by the feeling that he ought to reach one conclusion rather than another. Mr. Mill does not urge his view upon the reader, nor even defend it as his own view, but simply suggests it as perhaps the view which is for the theist most free from difficulties and contradictions. Mr. Mill does not, like the Manichæans, imagine a personified principle of evil; nor does he, like Plato, entertain a horror of what is sometimes, with amusing vehemence, stigmatized as "brute matter." He does not undertake to suggest how or why the divine power is limited; but he distinctly prefers the alternative which sacrifices the attribute of omnipotence in order to preserve in our conception of Deity the attribute of goodness. According to Mr. Mill, we may regard the all-wise and holy Deity as a creative energy that is perpetually at work in eliminating evil from the universe. His wisdom is perfect, his goodness is infinite, but his power is limited by some inexplicable viciousness in the original constitution of things which it must require a long succession of ages to overcome. In such a view Mr. Mill sees much that is ennobling. The humblest human being who resists an impulse to sin, or helps in the slightest degree to leave the world better than he found it, may actually be regarded as a participator in the creative work of God; and thus each act of human life acquires a solemn significance that is almost overwhelming to contemplate.

      These suggestions of Mr. Mill are extremely interesting, because he was the last great modern thinker whose early training was not influenced by that prodigious expansion of scientific knowledge which, since the middle of the nineteenth century, has taken shape in the doctrine of evolution. This movement began early enough to determine the intellectual careers of eminent thinkers born between 1820 and 1830, such as Spencer and Huxley. Mr. Mill was a dozen years too old for this. He was born at nearly the same time as Mr. Darwin, but his mental habits were formed too soon for him to profit fully by the new movement of thought; and although his attitude toward the new ideas was hospitable, they never fructified in his mind. While his thinking has been of great value to the world, much of it belongs to an era which we have now left far behind. This is illustrated in the degree to which he was influenced by the speculations of Auguste Comte. Probably no two leaders of thought, whose dates of birth were scarcely a quarter of a century apart, were ever separated by such a stupendous gulf as that which intervenes between Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, and this fact may serve as an index to the rapidity of movement which has characterized the nineteenth century. Another illustration of the old-fashioned character of Mill's philosophy is to be seen in his use of Paley's argument from design in support of the belief in a beneficent Creator. Mill adopted this argument, and, as a professed free-thinker, carried it to the logical conclusion from which Paley, as a churchman, could not but shrink. This was the conclusion which I have already mentioned, that God's creative power has been limited by some inexplicable viciousness in the original constitution of things.

      I feel as if one could not be too grateful to Mr. Mill for having so neatly and sharply stated, in modern language and with modern illustrations, this old conclusion, which after all is substantially that of Plato and the Gnostics. For the shock which such a clear, bold statement gives to our religious feelings is no greater than the shock with which it strikes counter to our modern scientific philosophy. Suppose we could bring back to earth a Calvinist of the seventeenth century and question him. He might well say that the God which Mr. Mill offers us, shorn of the attribute of omnipotence, is no God at all. He would say with the Hebrew prophet, that God has created the evil along with the good, and that he has done so for a purpose which human reason, could it once comprehend all the conditions of the case, would

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