And with those words, one reaches the self-contradictory heart of Harvard unbelief--as also in the atheist admiration of Jesus and the agnostic appreciation of the Church. The undergraduate skeptic seems to have forgotten what was the rock on which the Western moral structure has rested for two millenia, forgotten from what book his ethical principles originally sprang, in Whose name meaning and purpose have overtly or covertly been found in life since time immortal, and by Whose will good and evil were first thought to be distinguished and have been held in rigid antithesis ever since.
The typical Harvard non-believer evidently thinks the enormous temple of his values can stand without trembling though the old granite foundation has utterly crumbled. He is deluding himself. Either the edifice must be abandoned for a new structure that we cannot as yet even dream of, or else the old building must be bolstered by new materials almost inconceivable.
Jarring Needed
Like a good liberal nineteenth-century free thinker, he doodles with arguments about an entity named God as if this merely happened to be a nondescript question that struck his fancy. Instead of being made more complacent by Hume and Freud, he needs to be jarred by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche into the realization that the religious question is the questions of questions, that the problem of God is not whether an entity exists or does not exist--about which a cautious skepticism might make sense--but whether the spiritual dynamo of an entire civilization is still running or not, whether the creative force of over twenty centuries can still be felt, whether an awesome Person is dead or alive. Here a decision one way or the other must be made; one "merely for practical purposes" is not "mere," for with postulates so fundamental as this
In the future one hopes that the ominous cries of Cambridge's colored prophetess will remind hurried passers-by of Nietzsche's allegory of the madman who was met with the laughter of the unbelieving populace when he rushed to the marketplace with a lantern in the early morning hours seeking God:
"... 'Whither is God,' he cried. 'I shall tell you. We have killed him--you and I. All of us are his murderers But how have we done this? God is dead. What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Is not the greatest of this deed too great for us? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever will be born after us--for the sake of this deed he will be part of a higher history than all history hither to.'" But Nietzsche's madman, like Nietzsche himself, despaired. "At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke and went out. 'I come too early,' he said then; 'my time has not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering--it has not yet reached the ears of men. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars--and yet they have done it themselves.'"
* * *
Perhaps the most appalling fact revealed by the poll--as well as one of its least dubious findings--is the overwhelming preference among the Harvard-Radcliffe young intellectuals for war rather than surrender "if the United States should find itself in such a position that all other alternatives were closed, save a world war with the Soviet Union or surrender to the Soviet Union." All of those responding to the poll must have been aware that such a conflict could mean nothing less than a nuclear holcaust thaat would annihilate Western civilization, if not our the very species, and in which "victory" would become a word utterly without meaning. Even as did Congress in its frightening patriotic circus last year over a smiliar question--though with even less excuse--the Cambridge undergraduates have shown themselves alarmingly insensitive to what a global, nuclear war would entail.
They have betrayed a disturbing moral insularity and lack of social imagination in identifying the survival of a North American state with the good of higher culture every-where and for all time--a provincialism that should be unthinkable to anyone who has passed no more than his required General Education survey courses. The society for which the highly educated are responsible can comprise nothing short of the globe's entire population--regardless, of course, of what proportion the U.S. State Department may currently choose to recognize.
And on this crucial question a correlation between religious conviction and political policy is dimly suggested which, if it can be trusted, is of the very first philosophical importance. There are two statistical facts 1.) that among the godless, American surrender as the proper alternative in the face of an otherwise inevitable world war with the Soviet Union was outvoted by less than two-to-one, whereas the general vote against surrender ran close to three-to-one 2.) the group of 215 who chose war include over fourfifths of those who were also willing to affirm a belief in the immortality of the soul (all but fourteen persons), while 35 per cent of the non-believers took the opposite stand in favor of surrender.
George Orwell once observed that the death of the soul, Western civilization's renunciation of the belief in immortality, makes the fate of this world immensely the more serious; it could be a spur to a radicalism almost frenetic, hysterical, insane--though Nietzsche's phrase seems more appropriate here: "a higher history than all history hitherto." Yet the orthodox often talk as though the death of the soul would trivialize or vitiate the worth of life altogether. Quite to the contrary, must be the nonbeliever's reply: eternity is only "shortened," as it were--the fate of one's soul, one's hopes for "eternal happiness," for salvation, in short, remain at least as intense and pressing and imperative as ever. It's just that now we only have one world to work with instead of two.
For it may well be wondered if anyone longing for salvation has ever really been drawn by the prospect of continuing to subsist through an infinite temporal series--no one thirsted for "eternal happiness," I suspect, in a literal sense. It would be an insipid life of everlasting borerom, as wits like Shaw have often pointed out. Indeed, it is the fact of death that gives value to life; only the certainty that the temporal series is finite imports any worth to a given point or segment. An immortal man would not be a man; like an unshakeably secure God, he would lack the tragic perspective of the mortal and the limited in which alone value appears. Water has no value to a fish in the ocean--but in a desert: ultimate and absolute. Thus the longing for "eternal happiness" seems rather a fierce hunger for the actualization of value, for the full incarnation of the summum bonumin reality, existence. It's not that the saints are pictured as consciously enduring beyond their bodies' last heartbeats--not just that they can go on cognizing--but that afterwards they are beatified.
And so, in one sense, a socialist lecturing to atheists on political economy is every bit as much preaching to them about the salvation of their souls--propter nos homines at propter nostram salutem--as a priest addressing the faithful about the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. The aim is not heaven, however, but utopia--and a false utopia will no more do than a tinsel paradise would have sufficed for the martyres and the prophets. To atheists, politics is religion; rival schemes of wordly order, are, literally, conflicting eschatologies; and the contemporary sense of individual political impotence is as awful a burden as Luther's overwhelming sense of guilt and sin, of total depravity--"the dark night of the soul"--before he discovered hope in the unmerited gift of Divine Grace.
Like Iscariot, we are prostrated by a weight too oppressive for us to bear, and it is anything but an accident that, as Niebuhr and Tillich and Dawson have shown us, religious language provides the most adequate metaphors for conveying our thoughts and feelings on this subject. But it is of the first importance to remember what the distinguished theologians themselves sometimes forget, that these are only metaphors. Only religious discourse has evolved expressions powerful enough to convey how pressing political concerns have become today because the latter alone today speaks meaningfully of what once the former alone could speak of: that is, the "salvation" of the human "soul."
We have surrendered the belief in heaven and in the resurrection of the dead--but nevertheless, no concern is to the non-believer more vital, urgent, and intimate than that with vitam venturi saeculi--the life of the world to come