UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA LIBRARIES COLLEGE LIBRARY Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from LYRASIS IVIembers and Sloan Foundation http://www.archive.org/details/religionfromtolsOOkauf RELIGION FROM TOLSTOT TO CAMUS BOOKS BY WALTER KAUFMAJVJsT NIETZSCHE (1950) CRITIQUE OF RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY (1958) FROM SHAKESPEARE TO EXISTENTIALISM (1959) THE FAITH OF A HERETIC ( 1 96 1 ) Translator and editor THE PORTABLE NIETZSCHE (1954) JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY: ESSAYS BY LEO BAECK (1958) GOETHE's FAUST (1961) Editor EXISTENTIALISM FROM DOSTOEVSKY TO SARTRE (1956) PHILOSOPHIC CLASSICS: THALES TO ST. THOMAS (1961) PHILOSOPHIC CLASSICS: BACON TO KANT (1961) RELIGION FROM TOLSTOY TO CAMUS (1961) "RELIGION FROM TOLSTOY TO CAMUS Selected^ with an introduction and prefaces, by Walter I^ufmann Harper & Brothers, Publishers, New Tork RELIGION FROM TOLSTOY TO CAMUS Copyright © i(>6i by Walter Kaufmann. Printed in the United States of America. All rights in this book are reserved. Library of Congress catalog card nu?nber: 61-12838. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publishers for permission to use selections from the works indicated: THE BEACON PRESS, BOSTON: Europe and the Jews, by Malcolm Hay, copyright 1950 by The Beacon Press under the title The Foot of Pride. BENZiGER BROTHERS, INC., NEW YORK: "Aetemi Patris" by Leo XIII, in The "Summa Theo- logica" of St. Thomas Aquinas, 191 1; copyright 1947 by Benziger Brothers, Inc. BASIL BLACKWELL, OXFORD: "Gods," in PhUosophy and Psycho-analysis, by John Wisdom, 1957; copyright 1953 by Basil Blackwell. (Grateful acknowledgment is also made of Professor Wisdom's permission.) THE DEViN-ADAiR COMPANY, NEW YORK: Dogmatic Canons and Decrees by Pius IX, 1912. GROVE PRESS, INC., NEW YORK: "Reflections on the Guillotine," in Evergreen Review, Vol. I, No. 3, by Albert Camus, translated by Richard Howard, copyright 1957 t>y Grove Press, Inc. (Grateful acknowledgment is also made of permission by the French pub- lisher, Calmann-Levy, Paris.) HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK: Christian Beginnings, by Morton Scott Enslin, copyright 1938 by Harper & Brothers; Approaches to God, by Jacques Maritain, copyright 1954 by Jacques Maritain; Dynamics of Faith, by Paul Tillich, copyright 1957 by Harper & Brothers. WILLIAM HODGE & CO., LTD., EDINBURGH: The Gestapo Defied, by Martin Niemoller, copy- right 1941 by William Hodge & Co., Ltd. HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY, NEW YORK: "The Dark Side of Religion," in The Faith of a Liberal, by Morris Cohen, copyright 1946 by Henry Holt and Company. (Grateful acknowledgment is also made of the permission of Harry N. Rosenfield, Executor of the Cohen Estate.) LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION, NEW YORK, AND THE HOGARTH PRESS, LTD., LONDON: The Future of an Illusion, by Sigmund Freud, translated by W. D. Robson-Scott, Copyright 1928. THE MACMiLLAN COMPANY, NEW YORK: "The Conception of the Kingdom of God in the Transformation of Eschatology" by Albert Schweitzer, in The Theology of Albert Schweitzer by E. N. Mozley, copyright 1950 by A. & C. Black, Ltd., London. MCGRAW-HILL BOOK CO., INC., NEW YORK: "The Dark Side of Religion," by Morris Cohen, in Religion Today, A Challenging Enigma, copyright 1933 by Arthur L. Swift, Jr. (Grateful acknowledgment is also made of the permission of Harry N. Rosenfield. Executor of the Cohen Estate.) OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW YORK: "A Reply to the Synod's Edict of Excommunication," in On Life and Essays on Religion, by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Ajdmer Maude (World Classics Edition, 1934). RouTLEDGE & KEGAN PALTL, LTD., LONDON: The Way of Man According to the Teachings of Hasidism, by Martin Buber, copyright 1950 by Martin Buber. STUDENT CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT PRESS, LTD., LONDON: Against the Stream, by Karl Barth, 1954- THE VIKING PRESS, INC., NEW YORK: The Antichrist in The Portable Nietzsche, by Fried- rich Nietzsche, selected and translated by Walter Kaufmann, copyright 1954 by The Viking Press, Inc. THE WESTON COLLEGE PRESS, WESTON, MASS.: Humani Generis by Pius XII, translated with commentary by A. C. Cotter, S.J., second edition 1952, copyright 1952 by The Weston College Press. TO HERMAN AND SARAH WOUK WHO LED ME TO LOVE ST. THOMAS, V. L PREFACE Most of the following selections are complete, whether they be short stories, fables, encyclicals, essays, fairy tales, poems in prose, sermons, letters, or even a short book. All deal with religion, some with its truth, some with its relation to morality and society. The point is not to win friends for religion, or enemies, but to provoke greater thoughtfulness. Here are texts that deserve to be pondered and dis- cussed. Some of them I have criticized in other volumes; in such cases, the references are given. But in the present book nothing is included merely to be disparaged, nor is anything offered only to be praised. The hope is that those who read this book will gain a deeper understanding of religion. W. K. COJ^TEJVTS Preface vii 1 . INTRODUCTION Religion from Tolstoy to Camus i 2 . TOLSTOr My Religion ^y The Death of Ivan Ilyitch* 66 How Much Land Does a Man Need?* iiy A Reply to the Synod's Edict of Excommunication* i^o 3 . DOSTOEFSKT Rebellion and The Grand Inquisitor 757 4 . PIUS IX The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception 160 The Eiicyclical Quanta Cura 160 The Syllabus of Errors* 162 The Dogma of Papal Infallibility I'jo 5 . LEO XIII The Encyclical Aeterni Patris* 775 6 • JVIETZSCHE The Antichrist ipi 7 . CLIFFORD The Ethics of Belief* 201 8 . JAMES The Will to Believe* 221 9 . ROTCE The Problem of Job* 239 10 . WILDE The Doer of Good* 2$8 The Master* 2^9 The Nightingale and the Rose* 260 A Letter on Prison Life* 26^ * Complete ix Contents 11 . FREUD The Future of an Illusion 12 . COHEN The Dark Side of Religion* 13 . ENSLIN The Neiv Testament 14 . J^IEMOLLER The Wedding Garment* The Salt of the Earth* Gamaliel* 15 . HAT Europe and the Jews 16 ' EARTH and BR UNNER A Correspondence* 17 . PIUS XII The Dogma of the Assumption The Encyclical Humani Generis* 18 . MARITAIN The Third Way 19 . TILLICH Symbols of Faith 20 . WISDOM Gods* 21 . SCHWEITZER The Conception of the Kingdom of God in the Transformation of Eschatology* 22 . RUBER The Way of Man according to the Teachings of Hasidism 23 . CAMUS Reflections on the Guillotine * Complete RELIGION FROM TOLSTOT TO CAMUS INTRODUCTION : Religion from Tolstoy to Camus The story of religion, whether in Biblical times or in the last three quarters of a century, is not reducible to the superficialities of the masses and the subtle- ties of priests and theologians. There are also poets and prophets, critics and martyrs. It is widely recognized that one can discuss religious ideas in connection with works of literature, but exceedingly few poets and novelists have been movers and shakers of religion. Leo Tolstoy, who was just that, has not been given the attention he deserves from students of religion. With all due respect to twentieth-century poets and novehsts who are more fashionable, it is doubtful that any of their works have the stature of Tolstoy's Resurrection. This novel does not merely illustrate ideas one might like to discuss anyway but aims rather to revise our thinking about morals and religion. To say that Tolstoy was a very great writer, or even that his stature surpassed that of any twentieth-century theologian, may be very safe and trite. But a much bolder claim is worth considering: perhaps he is more important for the history of religion during the century covered in this volume than any theologian; perhaps he has contributed more of real importance and original- ity and issues a greater challenge to us. That is why his name appears in the title of this book, and why he has been given more space than anyone else. Those who follow are a heterogeneous group, selected not to work toward some predetermined conclusion but to give a fair idea of the com- plexity of our story. The work of the theologians has been placed in perspective, no less than that of the literary figures, philosophers, and others who are not so easy to classify. Almost all the men included were "for" religion, though not the popular religion which scarcely any great religious figure has ever admired. Like the prophets and Jesus, like the Buddha and Luther, these men were critical of much that was and is fashionable; but their point was for the most part to purify religion. Only three of the twenty-three represented here wrote as critics of religion without being motivated by an underlying sympathy: Nietzsche, Freud, and Morris Cohen, No effort has been made to give proportional representation to various denominations. As it happens, Roman Catholicism and the Greek Orthodox church, Judaism, atheism, and various forms of Protestantism are all repre- sented by at least one adherent; but with the exception of the popes, these are not spokesmen. The point is not to appease everybody but to provoke thought. The men included disagree with one another on fundamental issues. 1 Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 2 Hence one cannot help disagreeing with most of them unless one refuses to think. These men did not aim to please but to make us better human beings. By wrestling with them we stand some chance of becoming more humane. TOLSTOY It is customary to think of Tolstoy as a very great novelist who wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but who then became immersed in religion and wrote tracts. His later concerns are generally deplored, and many readers and writers wish that instead he might have written another novel of the caliber of his masterpieces. A very few of his later works are excepted: chief among these is The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, which is acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of world literature. And some of those who have read the less well-known fable, How Much Land Does a Man Need? have said that it may well be the greatest short story ever written. But these are stories. Such direct communications as My Religion, with their unmistakable and inescapable challenge, one prefers to escape by not reading them. This makes it likely that most admirers of the stories, and even of Anna Karenina, come nowhere near understanding these works — a point amply borne out by the disquisitions of literary critics. Lionel Trilling, as perceptive a critic as we have, has said that "every object ... in Anna Karenina exists in the medium of what we must call the author's love. But this love is so pervasive, it is so constant, and it is so equitable, that it created the illusion of objectivity. . . . For Tolstoi everyone and everything has a saving grace. ... It is this moral quality, this quality of affection, that accounts for the unique illusion of reality that Tolstoi creates. It is when the novelist really loves his characters that he can show them in their completeness and contradiction, in their failures as well as in their great moments, in their triviality as well as in their charm." Three pages later: "It is chiefly Tolstoi's moral vision that accounts for the happi- ness with which we respond to Anna Karenina." Happiness indeed! Love, saving grace, and affection! Surely, the opposite of all this would be truer than that! After such a reading, it is not surprising that the critic has to say, near the end of his essay on Anna Karenina (re- printed in The Opposing Self): "Why is it a great novel? Only the finger of admiration can answer: because of this moment, or this, or this. . . ." The point is not that Trilling has slipped for once, but that Anna Karenina is generally misread — even by the best of critics. Any reader who responds with happiness to this novel, instead of being disturbed to the depths, must, of course, find a sharp reversal in Tolstoy's later work which is so patently designed to shock us, to dislodge our way of looking at the world, and to make us see ourselves and others in a new, glaring and uncomfortable, light. Even if we confine ourselves to Anna Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 5 Karenina, I know of no other great writer in the whole nineteenth century, perhaps even in the whole of world literature, to whom I respond with less happiness and with a more profound sense that I am on trial and found want- ing, unless it were S^ren Kierkegaard. Far from finding that Tolstoy's figures are bathed in his love and, with- out exception, have a saving grace, I find, on the contrary, that he loves almost none and that he tells us in so many words that what grace or charm they have is not enough to save them. Instead of first characterizing an apparently repulsive character and then exhibiting his hidden virtues or, like Dostoevsky, forcing the reader to identify himself with murderers, Tolstoy generally starts with characters toward whom we are inclined to be well disposed, and then, with ruthless honesty, brings out their hidden failings and their self-deceptions and often makes them look ridiculous. "Why is it a great novel?" Not on account of this detail or that, but because Tolstoy's penetration and perception have never been excelled; because love and affection never blunt his honesty; and because in inviting us to sit in judgment, Tolstoy calls on us to judge our- selves. Finding that most of the characters deceive themselves, the reader is meant to infer that he is probably himself guilty of self-deception; that his graces, too, are far from saving; that his charm, too, does not keep him from being ridiculous — and that it will never do to resign himself to this. The persistent preoccupation with self-deception and with an appeal to the reader to abandon his inauthenticity links Anna Karenina with The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, whose influence on existentialism is obvious. But in Anna Karenina the centrality of this motif has not generally been noticed. It is introduced ironically on the third page of the novel, in the second sentence of Chapter II: "He was incapable of deceiving himself." To trace it all the way through the novel would take a book; a few characteristic passages, chosen almost at random, will have to suffice. "He did not realize it, because it was too terrible to him to realize his actual position. . . . [He] did not want to think at all about his wife's behavior, and he actually succeeded in not thinking about it at all. . . . He did not want to see, and did not see. . . . He did not want to understand, and did not understand. . . . He did not allow himself to think about it, and he did not think about it; but all the same, though he never admitted it to himself ... in the bot- tom of his heart he knew. . . ." (Modern Library ed., 238 ff.) "Kitty an- swered perfectly truly. She did not know the reason Anna Pavlovna had changed to her, but she guessed it. She guessed at something which she could not tell her mother, which she did not put into words to herself. It was one of those things which one knows but which one can never speak of even to oneself. . . ." (268) "She became aware that she had deceived her- self. . . ." (279) "He did not acknowledge this feeling, but at the bottom of his heart. . . ." (334) Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus ^ Here is a passage in which bad faith is specifically related to religion: "Though in passing through these difficult moments he had not once thought of seeking guidance in religion, yet now, when his conclusion corresponded, as it seemed to him, with the requirements of religion, this religious sanc- tion to his decision gave him complete satisfaction, and to some extent restored his peace of mind. He was pleased to think that, even in such an important crisis in life, no one would be able to say that he had not acted in accordance with the principles of that religion whose banner he had al- ways held aloft amid the general coolness and indifference." (335) Later, to be sure, Anna's husband becomes reHgious in a deeper sense; but as soon as the reader feels that Tolstoy's cutting irony is giving way to affection and that the man "has a saving grace," Tolstoy, with unfailing honesty, probes the man's religion and makes him, if possible, more ridicu- lous than he had seemed before. And the same is done with Varenka: she is not presented as a hypocrite with a saving grace but as a saint — until she is looked at more closely. Inauthenticity is not always signaled by the vocabulary of self-deception. Sometimes Tolstoy's irony works differently: "Vronsky's life was particu- larly happy in that he had a code of principles, which defined with unfail- ing certitude what he ought and what he ought not to do. . . . These prin- ciples laid down as invariable rules: that one must pay a cardsharper, but need not pay a tailor; that one must never tell a lie to a man, but one may to a woman; that one must never cheat anyone, but one may a husband; that one must never pardon an insult, but one may give one, and so on. These principles were possibly not reasonable and not good, but they were of unfailing certainty, and so long as he adhered to them, Vronsky felt that his heart was at peace and he could hold his head up." (361) Here, too, we en- counter a refusal to think about uncomfortable matters. Here, too, as in the passage about religion, it is not just one character who is on trial but a civilization; and while the reader is encouraged to pass judgment, he is surely expected to realize that his judgment will apply pre-eminently to himself. Such passages are not reducible, in Trilling's words, to "this moment, or this, or this." The motifs of deception of oneself and others are absolutely central in Anna Karenina. Exoterically, the topic is unfaithfulness, but the really fundamental theme is bad faith. Exoterically, the novel presents a story of two marriages, one good and one bad, but what makes it such a great novel is that the author is far above any simplistic black and white, good and bad, and really deals with the ubiquity of dishonesty and inauthenticity, and with the Promethean, the Faustian, or, to be precise, the Tolstoyan struggle against them. Exoterically, the novel contains everything: a wedding, a near death, a real death, a birth, a hunt, a horse race, legitimate and illegitimate love, and Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus j- legitimate and illegitimate lack of love. Unlike lesser writers, who deal with avowedly very interesting characters but ask us in effect to take their word for it that these men are very interesting, Tolstoy immerses us compellingly in the professional experiences and interests of his characters. The sketch of Karenina working in his study, for example (Part III, Chapter XIV), is no mere virtuoso piece. It is a cadenza in which the author's irony is carried to dazzling heights, but it is also an acid study of inauthenticity. When Tolstoy speaks of death — "I had forgotten — death" (413; cf. 444) — and, later, gives a detailed account of the death of Levin's brother (571-93), this is not something to which one may refer as "this moment, or this, or this," nor merely a remarkable anticipation of The Death of Ivan Ilyitch: it is another essential element in Tolstoy's attack on inauthenticity. What in Anna Karenina, a novel of about one thousand pages, is one crucial element, becomes in The Death of Ivan Ilyitch the device for focusing the author's central message in a short story. And confronted with this briefer treatment of the same themes, no reader is Kkely to miss the point and to respond with "happiness." All the passages cited so far from Anna Karenina come from the first half of the book, and they could easily be multiplied without going any further. Or, turning to Part V, one could point to the many references to dread and boredom, which, in the twentieth century, are widely associated with existentialism, and which become more and more important as the novel progresses. Or one could trace overt references to self-deception through the rest of the book: "continually deceived himself with the theory . . ." (562); "this self-deception" (587); "deceived him and them- selves and each other" (590); and so forth. Or one could enumerate other anticipations of existentialism, like the following brief statement which summarizes pages and pages of Jaspers on extreme situations (Grenzsitua- tionen): "that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary con- ditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it." (831 f.) Instead, let us turn to the end of the novel. "Now for the first time Anna turned that glaring light in which she was seeing everything on to her relations with him, which she had hitherto avoided thinking about." (887) Thus begins her final, desperate struggle for honesty. On her way to her death she thinks "that we are all created to be miserable, and that we aU know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other." (892) Yet Tolstoy's irony is relentless — much more savage, cruel, and hurtful than that of Shaw, who deals with ideas or types rather than with individual human beings. Tolstoy has often been compared with Homer — by Trilling among many others — but Homer's heroes are granted Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 6 a moment of truth as they die; they even see into the future. Not Anna, though numerous critics have accused the author of loving her too much — so much that it allegedly destroys the balance of the novel. Does he really love her at all? What she sees "distinctly in the piercing light" (888) is wrong; she deceives herself until the very end and, instead of recognizing the conscience that hounds her, projects attitudes into Vronsky that in fact he does not have. Like most readers, she does not understand what drives her to death, and at the very last moment, when it is too late, "she tried to get up, to drop backwards; but something huge and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her back." Did Tolstoy love her as much as Shakespeare loved Cleopatra, when he lavished all the majesty and beauty he commanded on her suicide? Anna's death quite pointedly lacks the dignity with which Shakespeare allows even Macbeth to die. She is a posthumous sister of Goethe's Gretchen, squashed by the way of some Faust or Levin, a Goethe or a Tolstoy. Her death, like Gretchen's, is infinitely pathetic; in spite of her transgression she was clearly better than the society that condemned her; but what matters ultimately is neither Gretchen nor Anna but that in a world in which such cruelty abounds Faust and Levin should persist in their "darkling aspira- tion." Their aspirations, however, are different. Faust's has little to do with society or honesty; his concern is pre-eminently with self-realization. Any social criticism implicit in the Gretchen tragedy is incidental. Tolstoy, on the other hand, was quite determined to attack society and bad faith, and when he found that people missed the point in Anna Karenina he resorted to other means. But there are passages in Anna Karenina that yield to nothing he wrote later, even in explicitness. Here is a passage that comes after Anna's death. It deals with Levin. "She knew what worried her husband. It was his unbelief. Although, if she had been asked whether she supposed that in the future life, if he did not believe, he would be damned, she would have had to admit that he would be damned, his unbelief did not cause her unhappiness. And she, confessing that for an unbeliever there can be no salvation, and loving her husband's soul more than anything in the world, thought with a smile of his unbelief, and told herself that he was absurd." (912) Tolstoy's interest in indicting bad faith does not abate with Anna's death: it is extended to Kitty's religion and to Russian patriotism. But in the end Levin's unbelief is modified without any abandonment of the quest for honesty. "He briefly went through, mentally, the whole course of his ideas during the last two years, the beginning of which was the clear con- fronting of death at the sight of his dear brother hopelessly ill." (926) And then his outlook is changed, but not, as some critics have said, into "the effacing of the intellect in a cloud of happy mysticism" {Encyclopaedia Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 7 Britannic a, nth ed.); far from it. The religious position intimated here is articulated with full force in the works reprinted in the present volume. Neither here nor there can I find any "effacing of the intellect" nor even what Trilling, at the end of his essay, calls "the energy of animal intelligence that marks Tolstoi as a novelist." What awes me is perhaps the highest, most comprehensive, and most penetrating human intelligence to be found in any great creative writer anywhere. These remarks about Anna Karenina should suffice to relate The Death of Ivan llyitchy How Much Land Does A Man Need?, My Religion, and Tolstoy's reply to his excommunication, to his previous work. They show that he was not a great writer who suddenly abandoned art for tracts, and they may furnish what little explanation the writings reprinted here re- quire. The world has been exceedingly kind to the author of War and Peace, but it has not taken kindly to the later Tolstoy. The attitude of most readers and critics to Tolstoy's later prose is well summarized by some of our quo- tations from Anna Karenina: "He did not want to see, and did not see. . . . He did not want to understand, and did not understand. . . . He did not allow himself to think about it, and he did not think about it. . . ." What is true of most readers is not true of all. The exceptions include, above all, Mahatma Gandhi, whose gospel of nonviolence was flatly op- posed to the most sacred traditions of his own religion. The Bhagavadgita, often called the New Testament of India, consists of Krishna's admonition of Aryuna, who wants to forswear war when his army is ready for battle; and Krishna, a god incarnate, insists that Aryuna should join the battle, and that every man should do his duty, with his mind on Krishna and the transitoriness of all the things of the world and not on the consequences of his actions. The soldier should soldier, realizing that, ultimately, this world is illusory and he who thinks he slays does not really slay. It would be a gross understatement to say that Gandhi owed more to Tolstoy than he did to Hinduism. Among philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose influence on British and American philosophy after World War II far exceeded that of any other thinker, had the profoundest admiration for Tolstoy; and when he inherited his father's fortune, he gave it away to live simply and austerely. But his philosophy and his academic influence do not reflect Tolstoy's impact. Martin Heidegger, on the other hand, owes much of his influence to what he has done with Tolstoy. The central section of his main work. Being and Time, deals at length with death. It contains a footnote (original ed., 1927, p. 254): "L. N. Tolstoy, in his story. The Death of Ivan llyitch, has presented the phenomenon of the shattering and the coUapse of this 'one dies.' " "One dies" refers to the attitude of those who admit that one dies, but who do not seriously confront the fact that they themselves will die. Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 8 In the chapter on "Death" in my The Faith of a Heretic I have tried to show in some detail how "Heidegger on death is for the most part an un- acknowledged commentary on The Death of Ivan Ilyitch"\ also how Tol- stoy's story is far superior to Heidegger's commentary. And one of the mottos of my book comes from Tolstoy's Reply to the Synod's Edict of Excommunication. This Reply is relevant to the misleading suggestion that Anna Karenina is a Christian tragedy. First of all, Anna Karenina is not a tragedy. Not only is it a novel in form; it is essentially not a tragedy that ends in a catas- trophe but an epic story that continues fittingly after Anna's death to end with Levin's achievement of more insight. Secondly, it is rather odd to hold up as an example of what is possible within Christianity a man formally excommunicated, a writer whose views have not been accepted by any Christian denomination — a heretic. Tolstoy drew his inspiration in large measure from the Gospels. His in- telligence and sensitivity were of the highest order. And whether we classify him as a Christian or a heretic, his late writings remain to challenge every reader who is honestly concerned with the New Testament or, generally, with religion. We shall return to Tolstoy again and again in the following pages. Other writers one can take or leave, read and forget. To ignore Tolstoy means impoverishing one's own mind; and to read and forget him is hardly possible. DOSTOEVSKY Asked to name the two greatest novelists of all time, most writers would probably choose Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. They were contemporaries, Russian to the core, at home in English, French, and German literature, and deeply concerned with Christianity. But their interpretations of Christianity were as different as their temperaments and their artistic techniques. Tolstoy thought the Christian message involved a radical criticism of society, and his conception of the gospel was social. Dostoevsky's novels, on the other hand, urge the individual to repent of his sins; to accept social injustice because, no matter how harshly we may be treated, in view of our sinfulness and guilt we deserve no better; and not to pin our faith on social reforms. This message is particularly central in his last and greatest novel. The Brothers Karamazov. Mitya, the victim of a miscarriage of justice, ac- cepts his sentence willingly as a welcome penance. And his brother Ivan, though also legally innocent, considers himself no less guilty than the murderer. Unlike Anna Karenina and Resurrection and most great novels. The Brothers Karamazov contains a sequence of two chapters which, though an integral part of the work, can also be read separately without doing an Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus ^ injustice either to this fragment or to the novel: the conversation be- tween Ivan and Alyosha in which Ivan tells his story of the Grand In- quisitor. These chapters help to characterize the two brothers, and the views of the Grand Inquisitor are emphatically not the views of Dostoevsky: on the contrary, what is intended is an indictment of the Roman Catholic church — and probably also of such men as Jefferson and Mill and of the ideal of the pursuit of happiness. When "The Grand Inquisitor" is read out of context, the immediately preceding chapter is generally ignored; but the story is more likely to be understood as it was meant to be by the author, if one includes the conver- sation that leads up to it. Moreover, Ivan's vivid sketches of the sufferings of children deserve attention in their own right, and they help to place Royce's attempt to solve the problem of suffering, reproduced later in this volume, in perspective. Oscar Wilde, too, will be found to develop some of the themes introduced here. What makes the story of the Grand Inquisitor one of the greatest pieces of world literature is, first of all, that outside the Bible it would be hard to find another story of equal brevity that says so much so forcefully. More- over, the story challenges some of the m^ost confident convictions of Western Christians. Reading the story merely as a diatribe against the Roman Catholic church and supposing that it stands or falls with its applicability to one religion is almost as foolish as supposing that the Inquisitor speaks the au- thor's mind. What is presented to us, backed up by powerful though not conclusive arguments, is one of the most important theories of all time, for which it would be good to have a name. I shall call it benevolent totalitaria?!- ism. By totalitarianism I mean a theory which holds that the government may regulate the lives of the citizens in their totality. Whether this is feasible at the moment is not essential. For political reasons or owing to technological backwardness, a totalitarian government may not actually regulate the citizens' lives in their totality: what matters is whether the government believes that it has the right to do this whenever it seems feasible. In this sense, the governments of Hitler and Stalin were totalitarian; and their conduct explains, but does not justify, the popular assumption that totalitarianism is necessarily malignant. Ivan Karamazov submits that a man might honestly believe that, in the hands of wise rulers, totalitarianism would make men happier than any other form of government. The point is of crucial importance: what is at stake is the dogmatic and naive self -right- eousness of Western statesmen who simply take for granted their own good faith, benevolence, and virtue and the lack of all these qualities in statesmen from totalitarian countries. Dostoevsky's point is not altogether new: the first book on political Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus lo philosophy, written more than two thousand years ago — ^Plato's Republic — presents a lengthy defense of benevolent totalitarianism. Some writers balk at calling it totalitarianism, mainly because they associate the word with malignancy. Others, seeing clearly that the doctrine of the Republic is totalitarian, have charged Plato with malignancy. A reading of Dostoevsky's tale shows us at a glance where both camps have gone wrong. Plato, moreover, develops his arguments over roughly three hundred pages, introducing a great wealth of other material, while the Grand In- quisitor takes less than twenty. This chapter, then, is one of the most im- portant documents of social philosophy ever penned, and any partisan of civil liberties might well say, as John Stuart Mill did in his essay On Liberty: "If there are any persons who contest a received opinion, ... let us thank them for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoice that there is some one to do for us what we otherwise ought, if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality of our convictions, to do with much greater labor for ourselves." Still, it may not be at all clear how the tale, if it is aimed at the Vatican, could also be aimed at Mill and Jefferson; and how, if it does not stand or fall with its applicability to Catholicism, it is important for religion. Both points depend on Dostoevsky's repudiation of the pursuit of happiness. The ideal of the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number — which, though this formulation is British, is nothing less than the American dream — seemed to Dostoevsky to justify benevolent totalitarian- ism. He thought we had to choose between Christ and this world, between freedom and happiness. Dostoevsky might have echoed Luther's words: "Even if the govern- ment does injustice . . . yet God would have it obeyed. . . . We are to regard that which St. Peter bids us regard, namely, that its power, whether it do right or wrong, cannot harm the soul. . . . To suffer wrong destroys no one's soul, nay, it improves the soul."^ Or this quotation, also from Luther: "There is to be no bondage because Christ has freed us all? What is all this? This would make Christian freedom fleshly! . . . Read St. Paul and see what he teaches about bondsmen. ... A bondsman can be a Christian and have Christian freedom, even as a prisoner and a sick man can be Chris- tians, even though they are not free. This claim aims to make all men equal and to make a worldly, external kingdom of the spiritual kingdom of Christ. And this is impossible. For a worldly kingdom cannot exist unless there is inequality among men, so that some are free and others captive. "^ In his politics, Dostoevsky, like Luther, was a radical authoritarian '^Treatise on Good Works (1520), in Werke, Weimar ed., VI, 259; Works, Phil- adelphia ed., I, 263. 2 Cited in Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (191 2), 581, note 282. Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 1 1 and an opponent of social reforms. His Christianity is concerned with the individual soul and its salvation; it is metaphysical, brooding, and preoc- cupied with guilt; it is otherworldly and content to give unto Caesar what is Caesar's. While Tolstoy wants to prepare the kingdom of God on earth, Dostoevsky seeks the kingdom only in the hearts of men. The tale of the Grand Inquisitor is meant as an indictment of all who "would make Chris- tian freedom fleshly." Tolstoy staked his message on his reading of the New Testament, and his interpretations and assumptions are answered to some extent by various later writers in this volume, especially Enslin and Schweitzer. Dostoevsky's bland assumption, on the other hand, that the pursuit of happiness must lead to totalitarianism, and that his Inquisitor is the nemesis of democracy, is not criticized by any of the other writers in this book and should therefore be questioned briefly at this point. If democracy meant majority rule pure and simple, it would be com- patible with totalitarianism. For democracy so understood, the men who framed the American Constitution held no brief, any more than Mill did. They were afraid of the possible tyranny of majorities and, to guard against that, devised an intricate system of checks and balances, a Consti- tution, and, amending that, a Bill of Rights. The whole point of the Bill of Rights is that the government may not regulate the lives of the citizens in their totality — not even if the majority should favor this. It might be ob- jected that the Bill of Rights could be repealed. But that could be done only if the overwhelming majority of the people, and not those in one part of the country only, should insist on it over a long period of time; and in that case, of course, no framer of a constitution could prevent a revolutionary change. Any change of that sort, however, was made as difficult as possible. What is incompatible with totalitarianism is not majority rule but belief in the overruling importance of civil liberties or human rights. You can have majority rule without civil liberties. Indeed, no country with effective guarantees of free speech and a free press is ever likely to accord its govern- ment the kind of majority endorsement which is characteristic of countries without free speech and a free press, from Hitler's Germany to Nasser's Egypt, with their 99 per cent votes for the Leader. But it may well be the case that, conversely, you cannot long protect the people's civil liberties without introducing checks and balances including popular participation. With this in mind, two answers could be given to Dostoevsky's tale. First, human nature may be different from the Inquisitor's conception of it. Three quarters of a century after the story first appeared, the people in West Germany were happier than those in East Germany. Freedom and happiness are compatible, and loss of liberty is likely to entail a great deal of unhappiness. Suffice it here to say that this is arguable — and that there has been a disturbing lack of argument. On the whole, democrats have con- Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 12 sidered this answer to the Inquisitor to be self-evident. Reading the tale again may convince at least some readers that it is not, and that much might be gained, even internationally, by developing this answer carefully instead of merely reiterating it dogmatically. ^ Second, one might answer, at least partly in Dostoevsky's spirit: If a choice had to be made between freedom and happiness, we should choose freedom. But precisely for that reason I carmot agree with Dostoevsky's and Luther's authoritarian politics. I believe that freedom and happiness are compatible, but I should not base the case for freedom on this point. If a vicar of Christ or a secular Caesar or a drug discoverer found a way to give men happiness conjoined with imbecility and slavery, I should hold out for liberty. Instead of saying that such an attitude "would make Christian freedom fleshly," one might argue that in the New Testament Jewish freedom is made otherworldly; and it is noteworthy that both Luther and Calvin as- sociated any attempt to realize freedom in this world with Moses and Juda- ism. For quotations and discussion, see The Faith of a Heretic. PIUS IX AND LEO XIII At just about the time when Dostoevsky penned Ivan Karamazov's great attack on the Catholic church — the complete novel appeared in 1880 — Pope Leo XIII issued one of the most important encyclicals of modern times, Aetertii Patris (1879). A revival of interest in St. Thomas Aquinas was under way even then, here and there, and the Pope decided to put the full weight of his enormous authority behind it. St. Thomas, incidentally, had supported the Inquisition with arguments, but emphatically not with the reasons of Ivan Karamazov's Grand Inquisitor; rather, to save souls from perdition. Leo XIII became pope in 1878, and this encyclical was one of his first. It has to be understood against the background of some of the momentous proclamations made during the papacy of his predecessor; and Ivan's attack, too, may be understood more fully in this perspective. When Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti became pope in 1846 and as- sumed the name of Pius IX, his temporal dominion reached from Terracina, roughly halfway from Rome to Naples, in the south, to the banks of the Po river in the north. He was the ruler not only of Rome but also of Ferrara and Bologna, Urbino and Rimini, Spoleto and Civitavecchia, to name only a few of the towns in this area. When he died in 1878, his temporal power was gone, and the lands over which he ruled had become part of the new kingdom of Italy, very much against his will. But even as he lost Rome, in 1870, the Vatican Council, which he had convened — the first church council Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus i^ since the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century — proclaimed the pope's infallibility. It is widely agreed that Mastai-Ferretti was a liberal when elected pope. At that time, Venetia and Lombardy were part of the Austrian empire, Tuscany was governed by a Hapsburg, the kingdom of Naples, comprising all of Italy south of the pope's state, was all but an Austrian protectorate, and Metternich, Austria's great arch-conservative statesman, used to guiding the temporal policies of the papacy, was appalled at the accession of a liberal. But the new Pope's outlook changed quickly. In March 1848, there were popular uprisings in Milan, Venice, and Rome; and Austria's troops were expelled from the first tu^o cities. A provisional government was set up. The king of Sardinia marched into Lombardy and was hailed as the liberator of Italy. On April 8, the Sardinian army defeated the Austrians at Toito. On April 29, the Pope proclaimed his neutrality. On the following day the Sardinians won another battle, at Pastrengo. Then the tide turned: the Austrians triumphed at Vincenza and Custozza, an armistice was signed August 9, and Lombardy and Venetia were restored to Austria. Italian resentment against the Pope, however, mounted; Count de Rossi, who was trying to develop a moderately liberal policy for the Pope's government, was assassinated; a radically democratic ministry was forced on the Pope; his Swiss guard was disbanded; and his protection was entrusted to the civil militia. Disguised as an ordinary priest, the Pope fled to Gaeta, in the kingdom of Naples, in November, and appealed from there for foreign in- tervention. The French sent troops into Italy. At first, they were defeated by Garibaldi; but in July 1849 the French were able to announce the restoration of the pontifical dominion, and in 1850 the Pope returned to Rome, no longer a liberal. The idea of Italian unity, of course, was far from dead; the fight continued; in i860 the Pope was deprived of most of his state, and in 1870 he lost the rest. Yet this loss of territory and temporal power was not accompanied by any corresponding loss of spiritual power and influence; and this was largely due to Pius IX, who plucked victory from defeat, vastly increasing the prestige of the papacy. This increase is not adequately reflected in the concordats negotiated by Pius IX. One concluded with Spain in 1851 proclaimed Roman Catholi- cism the sole religion of the Spanish people, to the exclusion of every other creed; another, signed with Ecuador in 1862, was similar; a third, with Austria, signed in 1855, abolished all kinds of previous reforms and en- trusted the supervision of schools and the censorship of literature to the Catholic clergy; and concordats were also concluded with various German states. But some of these agreements were soon revoked by the countries concerned. '1 '^^< The permanent importance of Pius IX is tied to his proclamation of the dogma of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary (1854), to the Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus i/f Syllabus of Errors (1864), and to the doctrine of the pope's infallibility "when he speaks ex cathedra,''^ defining "a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the universal Church" (1870). These documents are offered here, along with the encyclical Aeterni Patris, issued by Leo XIII. Many Catholic scholars have taken pains to point out that papal encycli- cals are not necessarily infallible. Neither are they just ordinary human pronouncements. Father Thomas Pegues explained the matter in an article in Revue Thomiste (1904) which is quoted by Anne Fremantle in her edition of The Papal Encyclicals in Their Historical Context (1956): " 'The authority of the encyclicals is not at all the same as that of the solemn definitions ex cathedra. These demand an assent without reservations and make a formal act of faith obligatory.' He insists, however, that the au- thority of the encyclicals is undoubtedly great: 'It is, in a sense, sovereign. It is the teaching of the supreme pastor and teacher of the Church. Hence the faithful have a strict obligation to receive this teaching with infinite respect. A man must not be content simply to not contradict it openly ... an internal mental assent is demanded." In sum, while a formal act of faith is not obligatory, an internal mental assent is demanded. Etienne Gilson, widely considered the leading Thomist scholar of the twentieth century, tells us "How to Read the Encyclicals" (in The Church Speaks to the Modern World: The Social Teachings of Leo XIII): "When a Pope writes such a document ... he knows very well that each and every sentence, word, noun, epithet, verb, and adverb found in his written text is going to be weighed, searched, and submitted to the most careful scrutiny by a crowd of countless readers scattered over the surface of the earth. And not only this, but the same anxious study of his pronouncements will be carried on by still many more readers, including his own successors, for generation after generation. This thought should be to us an invitation to approach these texts in a spirit of reverence and of intellectual modesty. . . . When it seems to us that an encyclical cannot possibly say what it says, the first thing to do is to make a new effort to understand exactly what it does actually say. Most of the time it will then be seen that we had missed . . . [something crucial]. . . . When one of us objects to the pretention [sic] avowed by the Popes to state, with full authority, what is true and what is false, or what is right and what is wrong, he is pitting his own per- sonal judgment, not against the personal judgment of another man, but against the whole ordinary teaching of the Catholic Church as well as against her entire tradition. . . . The Church alone represents the point of view of a moral and spiritual authority free from all prejudices." Not only most non-Catholics but also millions of Catholics think of papal pronouncements and of the positions of the church as more monolithic and far simpler than they generally turn out to be on close examination. In the encyclical Aeterni Patris, reprinted here, the reader should not overlook Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus zj that the Pope qualifies his call "to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas" by explaining: "We say the wisdom of St. Thomas; for it is not by any means in our mind to set before this age, as a standard, those things which may have been inquired into by Scholastic Doctors with too great subtlety; or anything taught by them with too little consideration, not agreeing with the investigations of a later age; or, lastly, anything that is not probable." The pervasiveness of this dijSiculty, that texts do not necessarily mean what they seem to say at first glance, is well illustrated by an issue that engendered controversy in the twentieth century. "All the principal beliefs of Catholicism are summed up in the Profession of Faith which is made by converts on their entrance into the Catholic Church and by all candidates for the priesthood before ordination. It is a fitting conclusion for this book," says John Walsh, S.J., before reprinting it at the end of This is Catholicism (1959). The profession comprises less than three whole pages, but is very compact and rich in content, as the following sentence may show: "I hold unswervingly that purgatory exists and that the souls there detained are aided by the intercessory prayers of the faithful; also that the saints who reign with Christ are to be venerated and invoked; that they offer prayers to God for US; and that their relics are to be venerated." The final para- graph begins: "This true Catholic faith, outside of which no one can be saved. ..." A little earlier in the book, on page 359, we are similarly as- sured that "membership in the Catholic Church, the mystical body of Christ, is the solitary means of salvation. Apart from the Church, exclusive of it, independently of it, there exists absolutely no possibility of attaining heaven." But immediately after these seemingly unequivocal assurances, the question is raised, "Does this signify that all who are not actually members of the Catholic Church will be lost?" and the answer is: "Certainly not." The difiiculty is promptly explained: "One does not contradict the other. When a person . . . makes an act of perfect contrition, he must simultaneously determine, as we saw, to accomplish everything which he judges necessary to attain salvation. Now since the Catholic Church is, in fact, the sole means of salvation, a non-Catholic's resolve to do everything needful to gain heaven is, objectively considered, exactly equivalent to a resolve to belong to the Catholic Church. The two resolves automatically merge; one coincides with the other. A non-Catholic is unaware, certainly, of the identity of the two. . . . He may never have heard of the Catholic Church. Or he may ... be quite indifferent to it. Or ... he may be quite hostile to it and consequently would indignantly deny that his desire to please God coalesced in any way, shape, or fashion with a desire to join Catholicism. Such subjective misapprehensions on his part would not alter the objective fact, however. A sincere desire for salvation coincides nec- essarily with a desire to belong to the Catholic Church. . . . Strange as it may seem, therefore, a non-Catholic who sincerely yearns to do everything Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus i6 necessary for salvation (even vi^hen he believes that one of the requisites for salvation is to condemn Catholicism!) (Jn. 16:2) is, all unconsciously, long- ing to be a Catholic. Now this unconscious longing God recognizes as a substitute for belonging ... as the equivalent of real membership. . . . The answer . . . , then, still stands: outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation." It is not only the Imprimatur at the beginning of Walsh's book that as- sures us that this is not contrary to the doctrines of the church. When Leonard Feeney, S. J., insisted that there was literally no salvation outside the church, and that only Catholics could be saved, and he persisted. Archbishop Cushing of Boston suspended him from the priesthood in April 1949, and the Jesuits expelled him in October 1949. And when he did not follow a summons to the Vatican, he was excommunicated in February 1953. By assembling excerpts from official pronouncements, one is quite apt to mislead the reader seriously. Even when we read entire encyclicals, we have to keep in mind that they must be studied with uncommon care, and that they have given rise to a large exegetic literature. Nor do the commentators always agree. These cautions apply also to the Syllabus of Errors, issued in 1864. De- tails of interpretation may be arguable, but the documents offered here indicate at the very least the direction in which Pius IX and Leo XIII sought to influence the church of their time, and it is doubtful whether any later pope has equaled their influence. Critics of the Roman Catholic church have called these documents symp- toms of reaction. In the literal, nonpejorative sense, they certainly repre- sent a reaction to much that is modern and the emphatic advice to ponder the attainments of a former age. But if this is called reaction, Protestant theology in the twentieth century has also been marked by reaction. If, on the other hand, the Protestant theologians are called neo-orthodox, it might be fairer to say that the Roman Catholic church spearheaded neo-orthodoxy. There are in the twentieth century many Catholic theologians who emphatically do not consider themselves Thomists. There is a good deal of discussion, and not all of it is concerned with matters of exegesis, though most of it is. But the kind of radical re-examination of century-old tra- ditions for which Tolstoy called has been altogether ruled out. NIETZSCHE With Friedrich Nietzsche we suddenly encounter an altogether different atmosphere: instead of criticizing Christendom, he attacks Christianity itself; and he does this with less inhibitions and greater passion than any major writer before him. For all that, his Antichrist, written in 1888 and first pub- lished in 1895, shows the influence of both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus ij Not only the content of the following remark (§29) but also the image of the key recalls Tolstoy's My Religion: " 'resist not evil' — the most pro- found word of the Gospels, their key in a certain sense." But this saying is not interpreted as Tolstoy interpreted it, as a social programme. On the contrary, Nietzsche's conception of Jesus is derived from Dostoevsky, of whom Nietzsche said in his Twilight of the Idols, completed just before The Antichrist, that he was "the only psychologist, by the way, from whom I have learned something." (§45) Nietzsche pictured Jesus in the image of Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin, the hero of The Idiot — one of the most lov- able and saintly characters of world literature, albeit deeply pathological. Nietzsche's critique of Christianity is so detailed and complex that no brief selection can give any adequate idea of it; but one cannot for that reason omit him altogether. For he strikes a new and epoch-making note. A detailed analysis of "Nietzsche's Repudiation of Christ" will be found in Chapter 12 of my Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. My own views of Jesus and Paul, which differ sharply from Nietzsche's, are developed in Chapter 8 of The Faith of a Heretic. Here it may suffice to remark that Nietzsche's conception of Jesus seems to me highly im- plausible, but that I should say as much of most reconstructions of Jesus' character. At least, Nietzsche's is more thought-provoking than most. But if I had to pick a single section from The Antichrist to give some idea of Nietzsche's importance as a critic of Christianity, I should select section 45, the last one of those reprinted here. No thoughtful reader will accept all of the points Nietzsche makes, any more than most readers will accept all of Tolstoy's and Dostoevsky's points; but here Nietzsche raises questions which are raised all too rarely. JAMES AND CLIFFORD With the possible exception of John Dewey, no American philospher is better known than William James. Many people who are interested in religion are uneasy about Dewey, who was clearly a humanist, while they like James. Unlike Dewey, he is even forgiven his pragmatism; and his Principles of Psychology (2 vols., 1890) and his Varieties of Religious Ex- perience (1902) are often praised extravagantly. That he was a fine human being, there seems to be no doubt; but whether he was a ^reat thinker is another question, and most philosophers would probably agree that he fell shQrjL-of being first-rate. Of his essays on religion, none has attracted more attention and dis- cussion than "The Will to Believe." It represents an attempt to defend against the inroads of agnosticism what James later wished he might have called "the right to believe." He himself did not happen to believe in the God of Christianity but rather, as he explained in A Pluralistic Universe Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus i8 (1909), in a "finite god" — a force for good that lacks omnipotence, omnis- cience, and perfection. In the section on "Faith, evidence, and James" (§37) in my Critique, I have tried to show by way of a detailed analysis that "James' essay on 'The Will to Believe' is an unwitting compendium of common fallacies and a manual of self-deception." The reason for nevertheless including the essay here is that it raises some of the most interesting problems about religious beliefs, and anyone who cares to give himself an account of the demands of intellectual integrity can hardly do better than to reflect critically on James' argument. To include the essay only in order to tear it down would not be in keep- ing with the spirit of this volume. But what is entirely in keeping with that spirit is to include the essay that prompted James' attack: William Kingdon Clifford's article on "The Ethics of Belief." That way, the reader gets two different views of the same problem and is led to ask himself: which, if either, of these men is right — and what do I myself think? James' essay has often been reprinted; but though he explicitly refers to Clifford's piece, few indeed have read that; and it is not easy to find unless one has ready access to a large library. Here, for once, the two essays are offered together. ROYCE Josiah Royce was James' younger colleague in the Harvard Philosophy De- partment, and it was characteristic of James that he brought Royce to Har- vard, knowing that Royce's position differed markedly from his own. Royce was an "Idealist," in the tradition of Hegel; and the butt of many of James' attacks on "Hegel" was really his friend Royce. In fact, Royce was no out- and-out Hegelian, and his interpretations of Hegel are often questionable if not clearly wrong. James criticizing "Hegel" is sometimes closer to the real Hegel than Royce was. In his time, around the turn of the century, Royce was extremely influ- ential as a member of the dominant school of American philosophy. While Idealism was then no longer in fashion in Germany, it was the philosophy of the age in England and the United States. But before long, a reaction set in, spearheaded by G. E. Moore's paper, "The Refutation of Idealism," published in England in 1903; and by the middle of the twentieth century hardly any English-speaking Idealists were left. The problem of suffering is one of the most important and interesting issues of religious thought. It is powerfully presented by Ivan Karamazov in our selection from Dostoevsky. Royce's critical survey of unacceptable solutions is certainly impressive. His own attempt at a solution is typical of the manner in which many Idealists sought a holy alliance with Chris- Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus ip tianity and invites comparison with the procedure of many theologians: instead of openly repudiating Christian theism and embracing pantheism, Royce, when denying that God is separate from this world, assures us that this denial is "the immortal soul of the doctrine of the divine atonement." Like most people, Royce did not read the Book of Job very carefully; and when he claims that "Job's problem is, upon Job's presuppositions, simply and absolutely insoluble," Royce is surely mistaken. He assumes falsely that God's justice and moral perfection are among Job's presupposi- tions. In fact. Job emphatically denies both, and the Lord in the end says twice that Job has "spoken of me what is right." My own views of the problem and of Job and Royce may be found in Chapter 6 of The Faith of a Heretic: "Suffering and the Bible." WILDE Oscar Wilde, famed for his wit and frivolity, lacks the stature of the men whom we encountered at the outset, though he need not fear com- parison with James and Royce; but in a book dealing with religion his ap- pearance may seem more surprising. Yet his fairy tales and poems in prose raise the question whether anyone between Tolstoy and Buber has written more memorable religious parables. And the letter reprinted here, protesting against cruelty to children in British prisons, recalls Ivan Karamazov's con- versation with his brother Alyosha and may be read appropriately after Royce's "solution" of the problem of suffering — and before we come to Camus. Most people assume that their own country is superior to all others. Great writers, who know some of the things actually done in their own country, and who are more sensitive than most people, often assume the opposite: Dostoevsky and Wilde are cases in point. In the twentieth century it has become more obvious than ever that conditions that such men considered the shame of their own countries are not exceptional but are the shame of humanity, if not part of the human condition. The selections here made from Wilde's writings are by no means un- representative of his work. There is much that is closer to the material presented here than to his bright comedies; for example, the other fairy tales and poems in prose, another letter on prison reform. The Picture of Dorian Gray, De Frofundis, and Wilde's most famous poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. A GENERATION OF SCHOLARS With one small exception, the selections considered so far belong to the late nineteenth century. In 1901 Leo Tolstoy was formally excommunicated Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 20 by the Greek Orthodox church, and the first Nobel Prize for literature was given to Rene F. A. Sully Prudhomme. During the following years, while Tolstoy was still alive, the prize went to such men as Bjornson, Mistral, Sienkiewicz, Carducci, Kipling, and Eucken. Dostoevsky, who had died earlier, did not come into his own until after World War I. James and Royce were soon eclipsed by newer philosophic schools; and while Nie- tzsche's ideas were widely discussed, no other philosopher at the beginning of the new century followed in his footsteps. A gap developed between careful academicians who avoided big questions and more popular but philosophically unimportant writers of inspirational literature, like Eucken. All this does not mean that nothing of importance was written about religion during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Far from it. But the major contributions of this period were made by scholars who did not write short pieces that could be included here. In 191 2, for example, Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, published Four Stages of Greek Religion (the insertion of another chapter in the second edition, in 1925, made it Five Stages), and Ernst Troeltsch in Germany published his monumental study of The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches. Both works were of great significance. Troeltsch showed in an enormous tome (two volumes in the English translation) that one could not properly speak of the social message of Christianity, or of the lack of any such message, but only of the social teachings, in the plural, of the Christian churches, again in the plural. Taking up separately the Gospels and the Epistles of the New Testament and proceeding hence historically through the Middle Ages to Luther and to Calvin and to the modern world, Troeltsch gave a painstaking and exciting account of something that turned out to be far more intricate than almost anybody, including Tolstoy, had supposed. Troeltsch's great work is more widely respected than read, especially in the English-speaking world. In theory, it is generally accepted as a major classic; but its radical conclusions are by no means a commonplace. It is symptomatic that the title of the English version (now also available in paperback, in two Harper Torchbooks) is The Social Teaching [singular!! of the Christian Churches. In the Gospels Troeltsch found "unlimited and unconditional individual- ism" and no thought whatever of "an ideal for mankind [Menschheitsideal] ." (39) "Any program of social renovation is lacking." (48) In Paul, "the idea of predestination breaks the nerve of the idea of absolute and abstract equality"; in his Epistles Troeltsch saw "the opposite of any idea of equality based on natural law and rationality." (64) "Inequalities ... are accepted into the basic sociological scheme of the value of personality," and what is advocated is a "type of Christian patriarchalism." (66 f.) That is only the beginning of Troeltsch's long and exceedingly well-informed and careful history. Of course, people still speak of "the message of the New Testa- Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 21 merit" and even of "the Biblical view" and "the Christian view." But since Troeltsch this is scarcely excusable. Gilbert Murray seemingly dealt with classical antiquity only. Yet his study of the origins of Greek reKgion and the belief in the Olympian gods may throw light on the origins of religion and of theism in general. And occasionally he offered some overt comparisons, marked by great restraint in form, but hardly less thought-provoking for that. Speaking of some of the great philosophers and dramatists of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., for example, Murray comments: "Indeed a metaphysician might hold that their theology is far deeper than that to which we are accustomed, since they seem not to make any particular difference between ot Scot [the gods] and 6 Seo's [god] or TO Setov [the divine]. They do not instinctively suppose that the human distinctions between 'he' and 'it,' or between 'one' and 'many,' apply to the divine." (Anchor Books ed., 67) One is reminded of the story of the man who reports, in a state of shock, that he has seen God— "and she is black!" Or consider this remark, on the next page: ". . . the religious thought of later antiquity for the most part took refuge in a sort of apotheosis of go'od taste, in which the great care was not to hurt other people's feelings. . . ." Even when the comparisons are not made explicitly, the discerning reader can hardly help making them for himself. Or, another three pages later: "There is, in one sense, far more faith in some hideous miracle-working icon which sends out starving peasants to massacre Jews than in the Athena of Phidias. Yet . . . there is religion in Athena also. Athena is an ideal, an ideal and a mystery; the ideal of wisdom, of incessant labour, of almost terrifying purity, seen through the light of some mystic and spiritual devotion like, but transcending, the love of man for woman." Toward the end of the chapter entitled "The Failure of Nerve," Murray described how the recrudescence of superstition was accompanied by the rise of theologians who tried to salvage ancient myths by giving allegorical interpretations. And in the final chapter of his little book, he related how the last of the pagans thought that all the great sages had been "trying to say the same ineffable thing; all lifting mankind towards the knowledge of God." Only the Christians and a few Cynics and, of course, the Epicureans "had committed the cardinal sin; they had denied the gods. They are some- times lumped together as Atheoi. . . . The religious emotion itself becomes the thing to live for. . . . Every shrine where men have worshipped in truth of heart is thereby a house of God. The worship may be mixed up with all sorts of folly, all sorts of unedifying practice. Such things must be purged away, or, still better, must be properly understood. For the pure all things are pure; and the myths that shock the vulgar are noble allegories to the wise and reverent." But the Christians would not accept allegorical defenses Introduction: Religion pom Tolstoy to Camus 22 of ancient myths; they rejected the ancient gods. After World War I, the Christian theologians began to embark on a similar salvage program; symbol became the war cry now, not allegory; and those who would not accept the ancient beliefs even so, were abhorred as atheists. Besides Troeltsch and Murray, there were large numbers of other classicists and sociologists who made contributions of comparable im- portance; also, anthropologists who explored little-known religions, histo- rians, hosts of Bible critics, and many, many others. It was a period of great scholarship, and some time passed before significant attempts were made to appraise the implications. World War I shattered the complacency that had become more and more characteristic of the beginning of the century. Scholars, including the- ologians, felt a new urgency to relate their work to the big questions of hu- man existence. The "Alexandrianism" which the young Nietzsche had mocked for its remoteness from life gave way to neo-orthodoxy and existen- tialism. But not only Gilbert Murray wondered whether this development was not essentially parallel to "the failure of nerve" which had followed upon the original Alexandrian age of scholarship. Sigmund Freud's thought had been formed before the war. The book which he considered his masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams, had appeared in the closing days of the nineteenth century, though the publisher had preferred to put the date of 1900 on the title page. Even if Freud had stopped writing when World War I broke out, his lasting importance would still have been assured. And like Tolstoy's, Dostoevsky's, and Nietzsche's, it is not confined to the realm of religion: like few men in any age, Freud has centrally affected man's thinking about man. Still, it was the war that led Freud to apply his ideas to contemporary civilization. He himself emphasized often that psychoanalysis does not stand or fall with these applications and admitted that there was something personal about them. He also realized that his late books on religion were not among his best books; and Moses and Monotheism, though brilliantly written, may well be his worst book. Even more than his previous writings on religion, it suffers from its reliance on some nineteenth-century anthro- pology which Freud accepted too uncritically; and it is heartening to learn from Ernest Jones' highly instructive three-volume biography that Freud occasionally referred to his Moses as a historical novel. For all its faults. The Future of an Illusion is a book of very great signifi- cance; and the heart of it is presented here. In these pages a man of genius deals with an extremely important subject; he attacks not merely Christen- Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 2^ dom, nor only Christianity, but religion in general; and his treatment has been highly influential. One may perhaps wonder how applicable some of Freud's remarks are to early Buddhism, and one may note that he is thinking primarily of ancient Greece, Judaism, and Christianity. Moreover, he does not perhaps distinguish sufficiently between the causes that originally brought a belief into being and the motives that prompt those who maintain it centuries, or even thousands of years, later. But again and again Freud says beautifully and clearly what many others, coming later, have said less well at greater length. "Am I to be obliged to believe every absurdity? And if not, why just this one? There is no appeal beyond reason." Or: "Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. . . ." Indeed, that whole paragraph — the penultimate one in our selection — bears pondering. While I have criticized Freud's views in my Critique (§§42 and 96 ff.), and cited his own, extremely humble estimates of his books on religion in my ¥ro7n Shakespeare to Existentialis?n (Anchor Books ed., 327 f.), the pages here reprinted rank with the best written on religion in the twentieth century. COHEN Even as Royce's discussion condenses centuries of reflection on the problem of suff^ering into a few pages, Morris Cohen's "The Dark Side of Religion" offers in unusually compact and forceful form what critics of religion might say and have said. A psychologist of reKgion, James Leuba, once catalogued and classified forty-eight definitions of reKgion, distinguishing intellectualistic, afFectivistic, and moral or practical definitions, depending on which facet of religion they emphasize especially. Cohen presses his attack on all three fronts. To give a single example, he does not merely catalogue past clashes between religion and science, but he tries to show how religion instills and develops mental attitudes which are antithetical to those bred by scientific training. Like Nietzsche and Freud before him, he raises questions that most apologists for religion simply refuse to recognize. ENSLIN Another form of criticism has probably affected modern thinking about religion at least as much as any novelist, philosopher, historian, or psycholo- gist: Bible criticism. It can be traced back to Jean Astruc, in the eighteenth century, and beyond that to Spinoza, in the seventeenth; but it did not Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Cajmis 24 really come into its own and gain wide influence until the latter part of the nineteenth century. After the Bible had been read for centuries as no other book was read — as God's own revelation which was above criticism — an effort was made at long last to read the Bible critically and scientifically, like other books. Like many an overdue effort, this one, too, overshot its mark in its initial phases; and I have tried to show in detail in my Critique, Chapter 10, how the so- called Higher Critics, who tried to assign the verses of the Books of Moses to various supposed sources, actually read the Old Testament more mistrust- fully and destructively than any other classic; how their methods were essentially unscientific and unsound; and how they failed to examine their methods critically. But not all Bible criticism claims to reconstruct the alleged sources from which some ancient editor is then said to have patched together his book with scissors and paste. New Testament criticism has re- mained largely free of this taint, except for the assumption of many critics that material common to Matthew and Luke but not found in Mark, whose Gospel is generally considered earlier and the primary source for the two others, must be assigned to a hypothetical source called "Q" (for Quelle, the German word for "source"). Morton Scott Enslin has been president of both the Society for Biblical Literature and Exegesis and the American Theological Society, and his study of the New Testament, written in the nineteen-thirties, is dis- tinguished by a rare sobriety and plausibility, and free of the excesses of the late nineteenth century. He dispenses with "Q" and the hunt for hypothet- ical sources. His results, including his repudiation of the hypothetical "Q," are controversial — like almost everything in this book. But his manner is representative of Bible criticism at its best, and the reader need not doubt that he confronts a scholar of unquestionable integrity. The relevance of his discussion of the Gospels to Tolstoy's My Religion is surely obvious. Aylmer Maude, who knew Tolstoy personally and translated many of his works, relates how Tolstoy himself reacted to Bible criticism in a con- versation: "They are attacking the last of the outworks, and if they carry it, and demonstrate that Christ was never born, it will be all the more evi- dent that the fortress of religion is impregnable. Take away the Church, the traditions, the Bible, and even Christ himself: the ultimate fact of man's knowledge of goodness, i.e. of God, directly through reason and con- science, will be as clear and certain as ever, and it will be seen that we are dealing with truths that can never perish — truths that humanity can never afford to part with."^ To a work like Tolstoy's My Religion, however, Bible criticism is cer- tainly profoundly relevant. The implications of what Tolstoy said in the ^ Tolstoy, On Life and Essays on Religion, translated with an Introduction by Aylmer Maude, Oxford University Press, World's Qasslcs, p. xv. Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 25 conversation just cited, on the other hand, lead away from reliance on ex- egesis and from appeal to Christ. If the appeal to "reason and conscience" is pressed, we are led from religion to philosophy, unless "reason and conscience" is nothing but a euphemism for what seems obvious to the speaker, though very different ideas may seem no less obvious to others. We have no right to assume that, unless Christ's teachings conformed perfectly to our own personal conscience, "Christ was never born." Bible criticism opens up the disturbing possibility that there may be excellent evidence that Jesus lived — and taught what our reason and our conscience do not happen to approve. In a short essay on "How to Read the Gospels and What is Essential in Them" Tolstoy insisted that "from what is clear we must form our idea of the drift and spirit of the whole work." We should underline, "say with a blue pencil," all that strikes us as "quite plain, clear, and comprehensible." But what is plain is perhaps what we can easily assent to, while what seems outrageous to us is not "comprehensible." If so, Tolstoy would actually be exhorting us to construe everything in such a manner that it will conform to what we especially like. This is indeed what most interpreters have always done; but this also accounts in large measure for their fateful dis- agreements, and in some cases for the origins of different denominations. The modern reader who approaches the Gospels in Tolstoy's fashion is likely to let his image of Jesus be formed in very large measure by two sayings: "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her" (John 8:7) and "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). There may be no better way of bringing out the full significance of Bible criticism than to mention that both of these sayings are missing in most ancient manuscripts — a point duly noted not only by Enslin but also in the Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible. NIEMOLLER, SCHNEIDER, and HAY Few events have been as important for the history of religion during the last century as Hitler's rise to power in Germany and his conquest of large parts of Europe. But it is exceedingly difficult to evaluate the ways in which religious people responded. One might say that the general trend exemplified by Nietzsche, Freud, Cohen, and the Bible critics suffered an enormous setback: it was compro- mised by the Nazis' attack on religion. Confronted with Martin NiemoUer's sermons, Enslin's arguments to the effect that the events in Scripture which the preacher cites could not have happened historically, are apt to appear academic: you cannot disprove guts. Neither, however, can a man's courage create even a small presumption that his views are true or even plausible. Scholarship cannot refute courage; neither can courage refute scholarship. Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 26 What Niemoller's heroic sermons during the weeks before his arrest by the Gestapo prove is not that neo-orthodoxy is true or that liberalism is false, but only that neo-orthodoxy, like Nazism and Communism, was capable of inspiring martyrdom. His sermons also show by way of contrast how inane most sermons are: here is preaching at its best; every time one reads "The Salt of the Earth," one's skin creeps. The man who speaks here is not a would-be professor or politician, not a pubUc speaker who has pre- viously announced a topical title with wide appeal, but a minister of the word of God who considers nothing more important than to let the Bible speak to us — and who never fails to let long familiar verses speak to us as if we had never heard them before. In an important sense, religion flourished under Hitler, in spite of Hitler. Measured against the revival of religion during that period, the mid-century revival in the United States seems shallow indeed. One may well ask whether religion does not often gain intensity and depth in times of persecution, while it loses both in ages of prosperity. Certainly, many Old Testament writers thought so. An intensity that permeates a man's whole being is always impressive; but the question of content remains. And if one pauses to reflect on Nie- moUer's message, one notes a striking lack of content. Transposed into a diff^erent setting where there is no persecution, his challenge evaporates and becomes trivial. Words that chilled the spine lose significance. The call to come to church and to profess allegiance to Christ and the Bible, and to obey the orders of one's church council, regardless of the consequences, is charged with meaning and daring in Berlin in 1937, but scarcely exciting in New York or London or West Berlin a quarter of ^ century later. For that matter, Niemoller's message was not the same in 1937 and in 1952. He had been a U-boat commander during World War I; and after his imprisonment in a concentration camp in 1937 it was said widely that, though defiantly unwilling to accept Gestapo censorship of his sermons, he would have been willing to serve again as a submarine commander, if re- leased. Whether these reports were true or not, about 1952 Niemoller be- came a Christian pacifist. And according to an interview, printed in The Christian Century, March i, 1 961, he made the following statements: "Mili- tary training is training for a criminal profession." "As a Christian, I cannot take a life." "No man can sacrifice any man other than himself for any higher purpose." Still, there was no complete discontinuity between the sermons of 1937 and the pacifism of 1961: expediency and any careful reflection on the probable consequences of alternative courses of action had no place in Niemoller's outlook either in the thirties or in the sixties. In the interview he said: "If I follow Christ's way, I don't know what God will make of it. Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 27 God's creation defies the inferences of human reason." This is of a piece with the heroism of his great sermon on the salt of the earth. To evaluate Niemoller's stand in 1937, we should ask ourselves how Tolstoy's or Dostoevsky's messages would have met Hitler's challenge, or how the Catholic Church met it. The fact that the Nazis were opposed to all of them, no less than to psychoanalysis or liberalism, does not prove that all of them were right. After all. Hitler made war on psychoanalysts, liber- als, socialists, and Jews long before he openly attacked the churches — at a time, in fact, when few Protestant ministers opposed him and when Pope Pius XI, through his Secretary of State, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who later succeeded him as Pope Pius XII, negotiated a concordat with Hitler which greatly enhanced Hitler's international prestige. In a book on The Catholic Church in the Modern World, which bears the Imprimatur of Cardinal Spellman, E. E. Y. Hale says: "Ever since 1920, as nuncio first at Munich [where Hitler first tried to take over the government by force] and then at Berlin, Pacelli had striven to secure a concordat with the Weimar Republic. . . . The new concordat with Hitler's Germany, so rapidly concluded, seemed a happy augury. It secured freedom for the Church in Germany to administer its own affairs, the State retaining the right of veto over episcopal appointments and requiring an oath of loyalty to the Fiihrer. There was to be freedom of communications with Rome, freedom for the religious orders, permission to establish Cath- olic theological faculties at the universities, and Catholic public primary education. . . . And although the papal Secretary of State [the future Pope Pius XII] already knew only too much about Hitler, he had also to consider that the Catholic vice-chancellor, von Papen, was pressing the negotiations, that Hindenburg was still Head of the State, and that the [Catholic] Centre party had given its support to the new government." Hardly a Catholic or Protestant took a stand against Hitler until Hitler, in defiance of explicit promises that he had made to them, began to meddle in church affairs. At that point. Pope Pius XI as well as a few prominent Cathohcs inside Germany and Pastor Niemoller and the members of the Protestant Confessing Church spoke out — against Hitler's interference in their own affairs. The controversial record of the papacy and of the churches in Germany has to be considered in the perspective of the attitudes of Christians and non-Christians outside Germany and the policies of the Western governments. In his book on Europe and the Jews, Malcolm Hay, a Catholic layman and a fine historian, relates something that is relevant to any charge that Christianity failed in the face of Hitler. He shows how the Western gov- ernments knew of Hitler's wholesale liquidation of Jews during World War II and actually stood a good chance of stopping it by depositing a relatively small amount of money — less than ten dollars per life — to German Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 28 accounts in Switzerland, with safeguards that the Germans could not get the money until after the end of the war. But the British Foreign Office thought it would be frightfully inconvenient "if the Germans should offer to dump a million Jews on us"; and the American State Department "sup- pressed information about atrocities in order to prevent an outraged public opinion from forcing their hands." When the Nazis finally went ahead with their unprecedented mass murder, they had reason "to believe that their own method of dealing with the Jewish problem met with the secret approval of humanity. These fragments of a people, despised and hated everywhere for a thousand years, were not wanted by anyone." (304) If Christians failed, it may be said, not only Christians failed. But what makes Hay's book one of the most important in the story of religion during the past hundred years is his compelKng and persuasive attempt to show that Hitler's mass murders must be charged, to a very large extent, to Christianity — not just to the weaknesses of men who called themselves Christians but to the teachings of the churches and the preaching of some of the greatest saints, popes, and leaders of Protestantism. When Hitler came to power, liberalism had lost heart and neo-ortho- doxy had disengaged Christianity from culture, politics, humanity, and this world. The churches were concerned about their autonomy: the govern- ment must not interfere with their witness to Christ and the Bible. It is often supposed that liberalism cannot offer any positive program as an alternative to Communism or Nazism while Christianity, of course, can. But the Protestant churches did not meet Hitler with any program what- ever— a point that comes out clearly in Niemoller's stirring sermon on the salt of the earth. The issue became simply one of courage: to bear or not to bear witness; to speak softly and be prudent or to speak loudly and let one's light shine boldly — not for any conceivable purpose, but simply be- cause it was one's duty. When the issue was defined that way, nothing else could be expected than that a mere handful of martyrs would defy the government, without a hope in this world, while the mass of Christians would join with Hitler. One figure symbolizes the issue even more dramatically than Niemoller: Pastor Paul Schneider. Unlike Niemoller, he is not at all famous; but like Niemoller he deserves to be.^ At seventeen, Schneider volunteered in World War I, was wounded and decorated for bravery, and commissioned a second lieutenant in 191 8. Al- though he had previously planned to become a physician, he studied theol- ogy after the War; and after taking his first examination in 1922, he worked ^ The following sketch is based on, or quoted from, the final section, "Paul Schneider zum Gedachtnis," of Deutsche Kirchen-dokumente: Die Haltung der Bekennenden Kirche iin Dritten Reich, dargestellt von W. Jannasch, Evangelischer Verlag A.G., Zollikon-Ziirich 1946. Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 2p for four months at a blast furnace. Later he worried whether he ought not to have stayed among the laborers. He was ordained in 1925, and took over his father's parish a year later. He married, in 1926, the daughter of a minister. They had six children. In 1934, a little over a year after Hitler had come to power, Schneider was conducting a church funeral for a boy when someone remarked that the boy had now entered Horst Wessel's troup. Horst Wessel, a storm trooper who had been killed, was considered the Nazi martyr par excellence. Schneider immediately proclaimed: "Whether there is a troup of Horst Wessel in eternity, I do not know. But may the Lord God bless your de- parture from time and your entry into eternity. Now let us go in peace to the house of the Lord and remember the dead before God and His Holy Word." Someone shouted: "Comrade X, you have still been accepted into Horst Wessel's troup!" Schneider announced: "I protest. This is a church function, and I, as an evangelical pastor, am responsible for the pure doc- trine of the Holy Scriptures." Consequently, he was imprisoned for five days. In 1937, Schneider invoked church discipline, in accordance with the Heidelberg Catechism. For a long time, contempt and blasphemy had never occurred and church discipline had been invoked mainly when the church community took offense at the sexual conduct of people. But now "Chris- tian parents kept their children away from church instruction and from children's services, instruction in school opened up a cleft between parish and school, a new kind of Christmas celebration emerged, and pastor and presbytery were mocked. Thus confusion invaded the parish, and intimida- tion and thoughtless propaganda increased it. Also, signatures were being collected to obtain [a preacher with] a different message for the commu- nity. Presbytery and pastor were unanimously determined to fight this de- struction of the parish, to issue a warning, and also to invoke church discipline. The address by pastor Schneider to the parish of Womrath before the proclamation of church discipline, and a letter to those concerned show that this ecclesiastic measure of the presbytery was prompted by a sense of responsibility for men's souls; by no means was the intention to 'boycott' the three members of the parish against whom church discipline was invoked. These three members, however, reported the incident, and pastor Schneider was taken into protective custody on May 31, 1937." In July he was released, on condition that he leave the province. He did not accept this condition and was taken to Wiesbaden, outside the province, to be set free there. The following day, he returned to preach to his parish, but then took a leave to recuperate outside the province, and instead of re- turning accepted a position with another parish late in August. Toward the end of September, however, his Presbytery sent him back to his old parish "that you may resume your office in God's name." Since he had left, candi- Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 50 dates for confirmation had received no further instruction, and the young had not been confronted with Christian doctrine. The sick had not been visited, and the holy communion had been omitted twice. After explaining his decision in detail in letters to the government — including letters to the ojffices of the Secretary of the Interior and even of Hitler himself — Schneider returned, but was immediately arrested, October 3, 1937. On November 27, he was moved to the concentration camp at Buchenwald, and his wife was allowed one last visit. A fellow prisoner, who survived the concentration camp, has reported Schneider's behavior during his last two years. "He tried, by means of Chris- tian words, admonitions, requests, and active help to win his fellow prisoners for Christ. ... It was customary . . . for the prisoners to salute the SS flag by removing their caps whenever they walked past it. This 'show of honor' Schneider refused as idolatry. . . . With this began the passion of pastor Schneider. First, he received twenty-five blows with a stick . . . and was given confinement in the dark. . . . There he professed the Christian faith to the SS, without fear. In such candor he may have had no equal in Germany. He called the devils by name: murderers, adulterers, unjust men, monsters. For this profession, which he constantly contrasted with the grace of Christ, calling for repentance, Schneider was exposed to harsh physical tortures and anxieties. The physical tortures consisted in hard blows, being hanged from the window by his backward-twisted arms . . . denial of food, prevention of sleep . . . surrounded by the screams of anxiety and suffering from nearby cells. Such times of agony alternated with relatively good times, . . . full food rations, a chance for sleep, etc. . . . When two men who had tried to escape were apprehended and murdered, Schneider called out at reveille: 'In the name of Jesus Christ I bear witness of the murder of the prisoners.' Any continuation was stifled with blows. The worst time for Schneider was prob- ably the early summer of 1939 when he always had to remain in a half- crouching position. In the summer of 1939, presumably owing to increasing weakening of the heart, a grape sugar cure was begun with strophantin. During one of the injections, Schneider died of heart failure." His wife received a telegram: "18 July 1939. Paul Schneider bom 8-29-97 died today at 10. Corpse movable at your expense if desired. Reply within 24 hours to funeral office Weimar otherwise cremation. Camp Commander Buchenwald." The widow came in person for the body. A service was held in his old church, and the minister spoke on the verse which Schneider had selected for his confirmation; from John 18:37: "For this I was bom, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice." It is scarcely possible to read this story without being moved to the depths. Nothing can detract, however slightly, from the courage of this Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 5/ pastor. Neither can his martyrdom answer the criticisms of Christianity voiced by philosophers, philologists, psychologists, and others. In the context of Schneider's life, the verse from John chills the blood. But the very next verse reads: "Pilate said to him, 'What is truth?' " And Nietzsche at his most vitriolic wrote in The Antichrist (§46): "The noble scorn of a Roman, confronted with an impudent abuse of the word 'truth,' has enriched the New Testament with the only saying that has value — one which is its criticism, even its annihilation: 'What is truth?' " Surely, one should respond emotionally to Schneider's fight; but not only emotionally. Invoking church discipline in the face of the Nazi dicta- torship was an act of heroism. But we have only to picture a different situa- tion, in which the church has the backing of the government and the people, to feel quite differently about the matter. Perhaps parents who do not like the message of a preacher have the right to keep their children away from his instruction and from children's services; perhaps it is questionable whether a new kind of Christmas celebration ought to be suppressed. And when we are told that the pastor and his presbytery were merely "prompted by a sense of responsibility for men's souls," it is well to recall that this was also true of the Salem witch hunters and the inquisitors. The point transcends Pastor Schneider. When we read in Second Mac- cabees how a mother and her seven sons allowed themselves to be tortured to death rather than eat pork, we are deeply moved. But if we think of an orthodox Jewish government or rabbinate imposing traditional dietary laws by force or sanctions, that is quite another matter. To put the point still differently: the Nazis also persecuted Communists; does the heroic martyrdom of individual Communists prove the truth of Communism? Or does the martyrdom of Nazis at Stalin's hands establish the doctrines of Nazism? If one feels like criticizing the papacy for signing a concordat with Hitler that included a loyalty oath to Hitler on the part of the German Catholic bishops, or if one feels profoundly disappointed that most Protes- tant and Catholic preachers did not take a strong stand against Hitler until he began to interfere in church affairs, what should one make of the passages in the New Testament that Luther and Calvin liked to quote? Two of Luther's dicta have been discussed in connection with Dostoevsky, above. Here is another: "In the New Testament Moses counts for nothing, but there stands our Master Christ and casts us with body and possessions under the Kaiser's and worldly law when he says, 'Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar's.' "^ And Calvin insisted that Paul had taught plainly "that spiritual liberty is perfectly compatible with civil servitude"; and he argued that "Those who domineer unjustly and tyrannically are raised up by him to punish the people for their iniquity," and "Even an individual of the worst ^Werke, Weimar ed., XVIII, 358. Cf., above all, Romans 13:1-2. Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 32 character, one most unworthy of all honor, if invested with public authority, receives that illustrious divine power" and must be obeyed and honored even "as the best of kings."^ Schneider and Niemoller demand our admiration be- cause they drew the Une at some point so fearlessly. But did they draw it at the right point? One way of bringing out forcefully what remains problematic about Niemoller's sermons is to follow them up with the first chapter of Malcolm Hay's book on Europe and the Jeivs. The importance of this work has al- ready been pointed out. It might be said to be at least threefold in the present context. First, if one finds that Hitler posed a singular challenge for Christians, hardly anyone has demonstrated so well what part of this challenge was. Then, Hay shows how the problem of the Christians' proper attitude toward Jews far antedated Hitler; how it was there from the time of the Gospels; how it has been a perennial issue. Finally, we see how a historian can affect our attitudes and thoughts about religion quite as much as a phi- losopher, a theologian, or a novelist. In all three respects, the whole of Hay's book is supremely relevant. Since it is available as a Beacon paperback, it may be hoped that, after reading the first chapter, many will go on to read the entire volume. BARTH AND BRUNNER It was Karl Barth who at the end of World War I issued the call for neo-orthodoxy in Protestantism. Reacting against the liberal Protestantism of the preceding hundred years, which had tried to assimilate Christianity to the culture of the time and to the latest results of science and scholarship, Barth counted culture among the things that are Caesar's and associated faith in man, reason, and progress with idolatry. He took seriously the ancient doctrine of original sin and preached that there is no salvation but through Christ. The preacher of God's word should not be anxious about being up-to-date concerning the most recent human achievements; rather he should immerse himself in the word of God, which we possess in the Bible. Der Romerbrief, Barth's commentary on Paul's Epistle to the Romans, was published in Bern, Switzerland, in 19 19, and began: "Paul, as the son of his time, spoke to his contemporaries. But much more important than this truth is another: as a prophet and apostle of God's kingdom he speaks to all men of all times. The differences between then and now, there and here, want to be noted. But the point of noting them can only be the realiza- tion that these differences have essentially no significance. The historical- critical method of studying the Bible is justifiable: it indicates a preparation for understanding, and this is never superfluous. But if I had to choose be- ^ Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV, 20: i and 25. Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 55 tween this and the old doctrine of inspiration, I should resolutely reach for the latter: It has a greater, deeper, more important right, because it indicates the work of understanding itself, and without that all preparation is worth- less. . . . What was serious once is still serious today; and what is serious today, and no mere accident or fancy, that is also immediately related to what was serious once. Our questions are, if only we understand ourselves right, the questions of Paul, and Paul's answers must be, if their light shines for us, our answers." It has become customary to explain Earth's ideas, and it is plausible to explain his influence, in terms of the devastating impact of World War I, which shook men's faith in reason, progress, and humanity. The world was ready once again to be told about sin and salvation. It has also become a commonplace to associate Earth with Kierkegaard. While this makes sense as far as it goes, another perspective is perhaps equally illuminating: with Earth, tendencies that had become prominent much earlier in the Greek Orthodox church and in the Roman Catholic church emerged in Protestant- ism, too. Still, there is one crucial difference between Karl Earth and his counter- parts in other churches: by temperament. Earth is less of an organization man and more of a gadfly than perhaps any other theologian. Although he has strong reservations about Luther and occasionally stresses his own Cal- vinism, his prose has some of the qualities of Luther's; and I have translated the passage just cited myself, in an attempt to bring out the virility and the highly individual quality of Earth's style. His theological magnum opus fills bulging tome upon bulging tome, and in sheer bulk invites comparison with St. Thomas' Summa Theologica; but on the side he has published a steady stream of short pieces, often, like Luther's, in pamphlet form. One of these bears the wholly characteristic and admirable title: Neinf (No/) That particular pamphlet was directed at Emil Erunner, another Swiss theologian, who is widely associated with Earth — an association that makes Earth unhappy. Earth has not founded a school, and least of all wants to be considered a Protestant pope or the spokesman of neo-orthodoxy. More than perhaps any other theologian, he has the temperament of a prophet as well as a sense of humor. To excerpt Earth's commentary on Romans or his huge Dogmatics would hardly be helpful. A chapter from one of his shorter works would hardly be much better. The exchange of letters with Emil Erunner that is reprinted here naturally is no summary of two divergent, highly complex theologies; but it tells us a great deal about both men and sets forth their attitudes toward Nazism and Communism. It is taken from a collection of Earth's "Shorter Post- War Writings 1946-52" that bears the fitting title, Against the Stream. This phrase occurs in Earth's letter to Erunner. Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 5^ ?1US XII Karl Earth's divergent stances vis-a-vis Nazism and Communism differ de- liberately from those of the Vatican, as he himself notes. The attitude of Pope Pius XII toward the Nazi government has been discussed briefly above, in connection with Niemoller's. After the War, the Pope took a far stronger stand against Communism than he had ever taken against Nazism. In 1946, for example, he excommunicated Marshal Tito, after the trial and conviction of Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac in Yugoslavia; and in 1949 he announced that any Catholic who became a Communist was automatically excommunicated. No such action had been taken against Hitler, Goebbels, and other leading Nazis who were nominal Catholics. Indeed, as noted be- fore, as papal Secretary of State, before he became Pope Pius XII, Cardinal Pacelli had negotiated a concordat with Hitler which required Catholic priests in Germany to swear loyalty to Hitler; and this concordat went far toward making the young Nazi government internationally respectable — ^if only temporarily. In 1950, Pope Pius XII defined a new dogma, reprinted here, and issued the encyclical Humani Generis which, among other things, proscribes existentialism. Prior to that, Gabriel Marcel had allowed himself to be called an existentialist, and the two foremost neo-Thomists had argued that St. Thomas Aquinas had been truly an existentialist. It may be argued that the point here is more one of strategy and definitions than of doctrine: certainly, Gilson and Maritain had not attributed to St. Thomas the views which the Pope found reprehensible and false in existentialism. Section 8 of Humani Generis presumably refers to Earth and Erunner, and it is noteworthy that the Pope suggests that "their mutual disagree- ments in matters of doctrine . . . bear unwilling witness to the necessity of a living Magisterium." MARITAIN Jacques Maritain, like Etienne Gilson, enjoys international prestige and has won a world-wide audience for the attempt "to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas." His very subtle and intricate philosophy cannot be sum- marized in a few pages; but in a late book. Approaches to God (1954), he has undertaken a defense of St. Thomas' "five ways" of proving God's existence, adding a sixth way of his own. Since his sixth way has not won wide acceptance, it might be inappropriate to reproduce it here. Eut the five ways are still generally accepted by Catholics, though they are generally repudiated by Protestants, Jews, and infidels; and it may be of some interest how perhaps the greatest Catholic philosopher in the middle of the twentieth century defends one of them. Etienne Gilson and another highly compe- Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 55 tent Catholic historian and philosopher, Frederick Copleston, have defended the five ways, too, and Copleston says that many modern Thomists consider the third proof especially fundamental. Maritain's version of "the third way" is reprinted here. My criticism of the five ways may be found in §45 of my Critique; here the point is to offer Maritain's defense. TILLICH AND BULTMANN As we have seen, Gilbert Murray noted in his discussion of "The Failure of Nerve" during the decline of classical antiquity, how the ancient theo- logians tried to salvage their religious traditions: "the myths that shock the vulgar are noble allegories to the wise and reverent." In this manner, all the old beliefs and stories about Zeus and Aphrodite and the other gods could be maintained, and the cult could be justified, if only it was "properly understood." Few Christians, if any, would quarrel with this description of pagan theology. Is it equally applicable to some modern Christian theologians? That is one of the questions one has to ask oneself when reading Paul Tillich, the most influential practitioner of symbolic interpretation. Tillich, like Niemoller and Schneider, was born in Germany; but unlike them he was a Christian socialist, and when Hitler came to power, he ac- cepted a professorship at Union Theological Seminary in New York, though at that time he did not yet speak English. His impressive personality and his exertions for his fellow men have helped to win him respect and admiration, but both his Systematic Theology and his shorter works are profoundly problematic. Questions very similar to those raised by Tillich have been discussed in continental Europe in connection with Rudolf Bultmann's challenge to "demythologize" Christianity. Bultmann, who stayed in Germany, at the University of Marburg, has much in common with Tillich; but he speaks less of "symbols" and more of "myth." He started one of the greatest con- troversies in modern Protestant theology with his essay, "New Testament and Mythology: The Problem of Demythologizing the Proclamation of the New Testament." Originally published in 1941, it was reprinted in 1948 together with some of the polemical articles it provoked; and six years later this collection was issued in English as Kerygma and Myth. If it were not for the fact that this book was issued in paperback as a Harper Torchbook in the spring of 1961, Bultmann's long essay would have been included here; but now it is readily accessible, and it does not seem right to excerpt it, since Bultmann claims that most of his critics have misread him. Only his full statement can serve as an adequate basis for discussion of his ideas. His general outlook is similar to Tillich's, and most English and American read- ers will find Tillich's statement, reprinted here, far clearer. Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 36 I have offered detailed criticisms of both men in Chapter VI of my Critique and in the chapter on theology in The Faith of a Heretic. The latter deals at length with Tillich's Dynamics of Faith y of which the central chapter is offered here. WISDOM Since World War II no other philosophic movement is as influential in the English-speaking world as that associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889- 195 1 ), who, though bom in Austria, became a professor of philosophy at Cambridge University in England. When it spread to Oxford, this move- ment came to be known as ordinary language philosophy or analytic philos- ophy; and within a few years after Wittgenstein's death it had become much more widespread at American universities than pragmatism, not to speak of Idealism. Most of the philosophers working in this tradition have concentrated on relatively academic problems, particularly on questions in the theory of knowledge; and some have studied linguistic uses without apparent reference to any philosophic problem whatsoever. Several have written on meta-ethics, and a few on philosophy of religion, but none of the essays on religion is as noteworthy as John Wisdom's essay "Gods," which is a minor classic. Wisdom, unlike most of the Oxford philosophers, was personally close to Wittgenstein for a long period and, a few years after the latter's death, succeeded to his chair at Cambridge. Wisdom's style is highly original and at times exceedingly elusive. While James' "The Will to Believe" is a popular piece that does not stand up under analysis. Wisdom's "Gods" is a dehcacy for thinkers, and concentrates on a crucial matter which is ignored altogether in James' essay: the question of meaning. James had written as if one could object to religious beliefs only on the ground that there was insufKcient evidence for them; and he had not even bothered to distinguish between not altogether conclusive evidence and no evidence at all. In "The Will to Believe" he failed to recognize that one might be honestly puzzled about the meaning of a religious belief — a failure that is doubly serious because careful readers are likely indeed to be thoroughly perplexed about the meaning of what he himself calls "the re- ligious hypothesis." Now this is precisely the point on which Wisdom fastens. If you picture gods as young or old men and women who dwell on a mountain or above the clouds, it is clear what you mean, though few thoughtful men would accept your belief. But when you begin to qualify your beliefs to dissociate them from superstitions, it may become less and less clear just what you do in fact believe and, to come to the point, what it is that theists afRrm and atheists deny. Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus ^j Wisdom's conciliatory, if elusive, conclusion may be meant to suggest what he has occasionally affirmed more clearly in seminars and lectures: that he thinks religious beliefs, including theism, have some meaning, even though he is unsure as to what that might be. Wisdom's problem is a fitting sequel to the preceding selection. SCHWEITZER Albert Schweitzer is widely hailed as one of the greatest human beings of the twentieth century, and some consider him and St. Francis the two true Christians after Christ. Others, annoyed at what strikes them as sheer extravagance, have said that Schweitzer believes that all men are brothers, but that some men are older brothers; and one encounters divergent esti- mates of his attitude toward the African Negroes among whom he has spent most of his adult life as a medical missionary. But what is relevant in the present context is not his personality any more than that of the popes, philosophers, psychologists, and novelists considered here, but his writings on religion. Schweitzer is one of the great New Testament scholars of the century. His work on The Quest of the Historical Jesus helped to undermine liberal Protestantism by showing that the popular assumption that Jesus was, in effect, a liberal Protestant, if not a Reform Jew, was highly implausible on historical grounds. Schweitzer argued carefully — and many scholars think, cogently — that Jesus had believed in the impending end of the world. As for Jesus' ethic, Schweitzer, unlike Tolstoy, considered it inapplicable and im- practicable, not only today but even in Jesus' time: it was an "interim ethic" which would have been practicable only if the end of the world had really been at hand. But Jesus was in error. In the essay reprinted here, Schweitzer tries to explain how he himself is a Christian, though he believes that Jesus' central doctrines were mis- taken, and that Paul, the church fathers, the Catholic church both in the Middle Ages and in modern times, and Luther as well as Calvin were all fundamentally wrong. His answer is, in effect, that he, like Jesus, puts the idea of the kingdom of God in the center, although he does not mean by this phrase what Jesus meant by it. Indeed, he means something this- worldly which Jesus disparaged altogether. In The Faith of a Heretic, I have argued at length that Schweitzer's con- ception of the kingdom is much closer to the Hebrew prophets than to Jesus; that he is mistaken in crediting the influence of Stoicism with ideas that are really much more indebted to the Old Testament; and that he himself might have seen this if only he had not omitted Calvinism from his account. Surely, Milton, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, and Woodrow Wilson Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus ^8 did not take their inspiration from Stoicism: they quoted the Old Testa- ment. Perhaps this point concerns not merely the history of ideas but our whole conception of Christianity and its social and moral relevance. BUBER Most of the men considered so far wrote as Christians; Nietzsche, as a critic of Christianity; a few of the others, without placing themselves in any particular religious tradition. With only two exceptions, even those in the last category came from a Christian background and derived their con- ception of religion mainly from Christianity. Only Sigmund Freud and Morris Cohen were born Jews and wrote as critics of religion generally. In spite of the vast increase in international travel and the growing num- ber of translations, no Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist seems to belong in the story of "Religion from Tolstoy to Camus": the stories of these religions are still separate stories. What is even more astonishing is that though there has been no dearth of Jewish thinkers, writing in Western languages in the context of Western cultures, hardly any of them have had any appreciable influence on Christian thought. It is as if Christians had read only other Christians or critics of religion, but not champions of Islam and Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism. Of course, many Christian writers have read in these other traditions, but apparently without receiving any decisive im- pulses. Martin Buber is an exception. He has breached this barrier, possibly aided by the fact that he is not a rabbi nor a spokesman for any denomina- tion. His 7 and Thou — a short book that appeared in 1923, the same year that saw the publication of Freud's The Ego and the Id (the German titles are, respectively, Ich und Du and Das Ich u?id das Es) — has profoundly in- fluenced Protestant theology. Rhapsodically written, more like a poem than a philosophic treatise, the book does not lend itself to excerpting. And it is debatable whether it is really Buber's greatest work, though this opinion is held very widely. To form some estimate of Buber's significance, it may be well to divide his works into four categories. To the first, one might assign 7 and Thou, as well as Between Man and Man — a collection of short works that develop some of the same themes — and his other philosophic writings. Secondly, one should note that Buber has never sought refuge in an ivory tower, and that for over half a century he has written about the problems confronting him and his fellow men, from religion to politics, from sociology to Zionism, from psychology to literature. Between them, these two categories comprise a very large body of work. But two central concerns remain: the Bible and Hasidism. Buber's most monumental achievement in the Biblical field is his Ger- Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 5P man translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, begun in collaboration with his friend, Franz Rosenzweig, continued after Rosenzweig's death in 1929, and more than three-quarters completed when Buber left Germany for Jerusa- lem in 1938. After World War II, Buber resumed work on his translation, revised the previously published portions for new editions, and went on to render the remaining books into German. This translation, completed in manuscript early in 1961, constitutes a milestone not only in the understand- ing of the Hebrew Bible but also in the art of translation. His work on the Bible has brought other fruit, too, Buber's and Rosenzweig's essays on Die Schrift und ihre Verdeutschung (1936, On Scripture and Its Translation into German; not available in English) are of immense interest for students of the Bible and for translators generally. His many books on Biblical themes deal mainly with the Old Testament, but Two Types of Faith in- cludes detailed discussions of Jesus and Paul. No other work of Buber's, however, seems as firmly assured of a lasting place in world literature as his collection of The Tales of the Hasidim, the climactic achievement of a lifetime. After many previous collections, the dejSnitive German edition was issued by the Manesse Verlag in Switzerland in 1949, under the title, Die Erzahlunge?i der Chassidim. An English trans- lation in two volumes is now available in paperback (Schocken Books). Buber's essays on Hasidism are numerous. I heartily agree with Maurice Friedman, Buber's foremost interpreter, that The Way of Man according to the Teachings of Hasidism — reprinted complete in this volume — "is far more than a mere interpretation or summary of Hasidic teaching. No other of Buber's works gives us so much of his own simple wisdom as this re- markable distillation." CAMUS Albert Camus, like some of the other men included here, was not primarily concerned with religion. His rank is subject to debate. Few philosophers think very highly of his philosophic efforts. But when he received the Nobel Prize for literature, there was relatively little of the indignation that so often meets these awards: Camus had established a place for himself. Surely, he received the Nobel Prize in part because existentialism seemed to deserve recognition; and Sartre's poHtics had made him persona non grata, while Camus' profound humanity and sensitive conscience had made him one of the most attractive figures of modern literature. Still, that is far from the whole story; and the perspective provided by this book and sum- marized in its title. Religion from Tolstoy to Camus, may illuminate the phenomenon of Camus. What is so remarkable about Camus is, as much as anything, that he had the courage to accept the heritage of Tolstoy, when no one else had dared to stand before the world as Tolstoy's heir. Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 40 Camus lacked Tolstoy's almost superhuman gifts: that makes it doubly appropriate to speak of courage. He was not one of the world's great writers, nor even one of the most talented of the past hundred years. But he attempted great things and was motivated by a sense of obligation to humanity. His inspiration was moral, not the wish to entertain or to achieve fame. Camus' The Plague is the posthumous child of The Death of Ivan Ilyitch. The theme is the same: the confrontation with death. Camus, like Tol- stoy, attempts a parable about the human condition, an attack on the un- thinking inauthenticity of most men's lives, and an appeal to conscience. The Plague may not be a great book by the highest standards; but it is an important book because its theme is of the utmost significance: it is a novel in the great tradition, inviting comparisons with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Ivan Karamazov's great plea against the suffering of children is taken up in a central section of The Plague (192 ff.); and though Camus' treatment is sentimental, and he suffers from juxtapositions with the two great Russian novelists, many intelligent readers prefer him to the theologians and philos- ophers who have written on the problem of suffering. Confronted with the enormity of the outrages of our time, the voice of The Plague is a still small voice, and I find the message of Malcolm Hay, in Europe and the Jews, more impressive and disturbing. But it has been the voice of Camus, and not that of Hay or any other historian, that has reached the conscience of a generation. Camus' debt to Tolstoy is great. In Tarrou's long narration {The Plague , 222-28), there are important echoes of Tolstoy's Resurrection: "The great change of heart about which I want to tell you" came about when "my father asked me to come to hear him speak in court," and Tarrou discovered that the criminal "was a living human being." His father's mouth, however, "spewed out long, turgid phrases like an endless stream of snakes. I realized he was clamoring for the prisoner's death"; indeed, he demanded "that the man should have his head cut off." To excerpt The Plague would be as bad as reprinting selected passages from Anna Karenina. But Camus, like Tolstoy, has returned to the relevant themes elsewhere; not only in The Rebel, which is long and turgid, but also in Reflections on the Guillotine, a brief and pointed essay — and especially in the last part of these Reflections, which is reprinted here. These Reflections are not one of Camus' major works, but the concerns around which they revolve are central in Camus' thought. Not only Tar- rou's narrative abounds in parallels to the Reflections; the crux of The Plague and of The Rebel, too, is also the core of the shorter work: man's attitude toward the death of his fellow men. If there is one phrase in The Plague that crystallizes this common concern pre-eminently, it is probably the Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus ^i suggestion that "the most incorrigible vice" is "that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill." (I20f.) The way Camus leads up to this thought is profoundly Tolstoyan: "The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good inten- tions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill." Camus dissociates himself from the fashionable revival of the notion of original sin. On the last page of The Plague he proclaims it to be one of the central purposes and lessons of his book "that there are more things to admire in men than to despise." It is precisely for that reason that he con- siders it a duty to bear witness of "the injustice and outrage done them" — not by their fellow men but by the plague. Seeking a parable of the in- justice and outrage inflicted on humanity in our time, Camus does not indict man's inhumanity to man; he does not at all indict man: he accuses what, if he believed in God, he would call God. But he does not believe in God. Many people believe that disbelief in God disqualifies a man for any position of public trust, because morality seems to them to stand or fall with religion, and only theists can be humane. With his soft and engaging voice, Camus argues that "capital punishment, in fact, throughout history has always been a religious punishment," and he finds it incompatible with atheism and agnosticism. He finds humanism more humane than theism. Both The Stranger and The Fall end with powerful attacks on Chris- tianity. In the former work, "the stranger" speaks directly to a priest and tells him what he thinks of him and his religion. In The Fall, the outlook of the believers in original sin who make a point of their own guiltiness is in- dicted more subtly but nonetheless surely. Indeed, Camus' critique of this particular form of inhumanity is the heart of The Fall. In 1 96 1, a year after Camus' death, some shorter pieces that he himself had selected from the three volumes of his Actuelles were published in the United States under the title. Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. One of these pieces contains Camus' reflections on "The Unbeliever and Christians." Here Camus says: "What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear. . . ." He gives expression to his disap- pointment that Christianity has failed in our time in this respect; he ex- plains that he did not hear it speak out at all, but that he was referred by others to papal encyclicals; and he voices his irritation at the form of the encyclical, which does not strike him as sufficiently forthright. "The group- ing we need is a grouping of men resolved to speak out clearly and to pay Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 42 up personally. When a Spanish bishop blesses political executions ... he is a dog." Camus goes on to say that Christianity may "insist on losing once and for all the virtue of revolt and indignation. ... In that case Christians will live and Christianity will die." ANY MORAL? Any claim that the selections offered here point clearly to some definite con- clusion would amount to an admission that they had been tailored. For the development of religion during the past hundred years, or four thousand years, cannot rid us of the onus of making our own choices. This was one of Kierkegaard's great insights: those who believe that history, development, and survival show us what, as a matter of fact, is superior, deceive them- selves. What Kierkegaard failed to appreciate is that those who have studied history, read widely, and reflected on a variety of views, are in a far better position than other men to make an informed, intelligent, and responsible choice. If a demon came to me and offered me, without exacting any price, that all of mankind might accept my faith, my views, my standards, I should not even be tempted. Demon, I might say, I have no wish for mankind to con- form to any single faith or set of views or standards; but if you are intent on granting me such a great favor, make men's disagreements more respon- sible and more humane. Cure their brutal want of intellectual imagination; give them more curiosity about the feelings, thoughts, and sufferings of their fellow men. Increase their humbition (the rare fusion of ambition with humility and humor) and their courage, love, and honesty. Then, in- stead of accepting my views, they will point out my mistakes to me, while also learning from me about some of their errors, and we shall all become better men. Suppose the demon tempted me and asked: But what is your conclusion? and my begging off and pointing out that I had developed my conclusions elsewhere did not satisfy him. Suppose he persisted: Your conclusions may provoke your readers to develop their own answers in reply to yours; if you refuse to point a moral, most of them will beg off, too, and think less. In that spirit one might after all venture a suggestion. With extremely few exceptions, religion is most moving in the form of stories — stories that challenge the way we live. That is true not only of the Old and New Testaments but also of Tolstoy and Buber. Religion should not be discussed solely on the basis of the writings of the theologians: the best religious stories are so much better than the best the theologians have to offer. But what happens when one concentrates on religious stories? They can be read as a species of literature, along with the plays of Shake- speare and Sophocles: not as mere entertainment but as a source of profound Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus ^5 experiences that help, or can help, to make us more humane. Most religious beliefs I should class with ritual: at best, beautiful; more often, superstitious. I can imagine Isaiah returning today and proclaiming (changing but a few words in Isaiah i): What to me is the multitude of your tracts? says the Lord; I have had enough of theological speculations and fat tomes; I do not delight in allegories, symbols, or proofs. When you come to appear before me, who requires of you this crowding of my churches? Bring no more vain prayers; sermons are an abomination to me. Christmas and Easter and sabbaths— I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly. Your Christmases and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you recount your beliefs, , ■' I will hide my eyes from you; tvtn though you make many prayers ■ I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow. There is much talk of a revival of religion. But this prophetic note is conspicuously absent. Attendance at services has gone up, no less than in Isaiah's day. One cannot imagine that he or Amos, Kierkegaard or Tolstoy would have liked twentieth-century religion any better than the religion they attacked with so much passion. Schweitzer has at least come close to sounding the prophetic note; but he has failed in at least two ways. First, his own scholarship, his very honesty, has undermined his challenge: for he has shown that the prophetic concern was abandoned by Jesus, and that Jesus' ethic, predicated on his false belief Introduction: Religion from Tolstoy to Camus 44 in the impending end of the world, was really impracticable in his own time and cannot be our standard now. Schweitzer's ethic is, on his own showing, neither Jesus' nor Paul's, nor that of the Catholic church, nor that of Luther. A Christian can consistently repudiate it, and a non-Christian accept it. Secondly, Schweitzer's noble example is not strikingly relevant for most of us. One wonders whether there was really more to be done in Africa, where he went, than in Germany, which he left. The point is not to ac- cuse him: few men have done as much as he. Still, his example has given little guidance to those who wrestled with the problems of the Weimar Republic and Hitler Germany, of Communist occupation and war and peace. He got away from these problems and did not deal with them, while Camus, for example, has at least tried to deal with them. Indeed, in i960, if not before, it became painfully obvious that there had been enormous and alarmingly acute problems in Africa; but for all his nobility, Albert Schweit- zer does not seem to have contributed to their solution though he lived in their midst and commanded a singularly wide hearing. The story of religion from Tolstoy to Camus is to a large extent the story of a manifold refusal to face the responsibilities Tolstoy faced. He asked at least a few of the right questions, though subsequent scholarship and re- flection have made his answers doubtful. But much of the most renowned religious literature since his time is a form of escape literature. Camus is no Tolstoy, but his fame has filled a vacuum left by the retreat of religion. A volume this size could have been filled with social preaching. But would that have given a fairer picture of religion during the period from Tolstoy to Camus? One could also have included William Jennings Bryan, Norman Vincent Peale, and Billy Graham; Protestants and Catholics who blessed Hitler and collaborated; fundamentalists and anthropologists; and many more critics of religion. The picture given in these pages is prompted not by ill will, but by concern. To speak of religion without disturbing men is to be a false prophet. To deal at length with the history of the past hundred years without disturbing men is also to be a false prophet. In a book on Religion from Tolstoy to Camus one must beware doubly of crying peace, peace, when there is no peace. roLsroT Leo Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Poly ana, Russia, in 1828. War and Peace (1864-69) and Anna Karenina (iSjyj6) are his two most celebrated and ambi- tious works and certain of inclusion in almost any list of the greatest novels of all time. While writing the latter, Tolstoy became more and more concerned with religion, and during the second half of his life he devoted himself almost wholly to writing on moral and religious subjects. His later works include es- says, plays, stories, and another great novel. Resurrection (1899). In 1901, the Orthodox church excommunicated him. He died in 19 10 at Astapovo, Russia. Four of his works follow. My Religion was completed January 22, 1884. The book has also been translated under the title, What I Believe. It contains twelve chapters; but the last nine are omitted here. The Death of Ivan llyitch first appeared in 1886; How Much Land Does A Man Need? in 1885; his Reply to the Synod's Edict of Excommunication, in 1901. All three are offered here complete.