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 immemorial, and at Whose omnipotent behest good and evil were first thought to be distinguished and have been held in rigid antithesis ever since.
Doodles with God
Like a good liberal nineteenth-century freethinker, the typical Harvard non-believer 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 Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, Pascal and Dostoyevski, into the realization that the religious question is the question 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 ancient foundation of an entire moral system has been eroded away, whether an awesome Person is alive or dead. 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, all purposes are momentously practical.
For as any unsophisticated outsider could tell you--who had not become mesemrized by the tripartite division of the Harvard course catalogue--the conclusions you reach on certain subjects in "Hum" are basic to your whole outlook even in "Soc Sci." Dropping God from one's metaphysical inventory does not leave everything else neatly in place; enormous reverberations are set up which it would be perilous to ignore.
That the questions are sweeping does not make them any the less real: If the Biblical mythology has crumbled for most of the population, what heroic archetypes are left to summon men to greatness? are there to be no images of human possibility commonly available to men beyond the mediocre range afforded by popular literature and the mass media? If the light of the Godhead has gone out, what is to save us from an everlasting night of spiritual squalor, timidity, and sloth? What remains to command human loyalty and aspiration beyond the interests of one's particular generation and narrow milieu?
Beyond Providence
If neither the history of the race nor the biography of the individual is any longer thought to be an obedient unfolding of some fixed omnipotent Will, how can man be awakened to the enormous task that has therefore devolved upon him of infusing both these things with his own will, of becoming his own Law-Giver and Providence, bearing absolute freedom and responsibility for all that occurs? or is the whole process of human life now to be surrendered to blind chance and accident, habit, stupidity, and chaos?--or worse still, allowed to lapse into the control of elites with stunted souls who can count on the despairing resignation of everyone else to manipulate or intimidate the species into a cheerful, comfortable serfdom? The only trouble with most atheists and agnostics is that, deep down, in their bones, they still feel the future of the world couldn't possibly be ghastly, that Jesus loves them, and that they're never actually going to die; in short, they still believe in God.
World War or Surrender?
But the poll also unearthed a couple of statistical correlations which may faintly suggest the first dim stirrings of full self-consciousness in the unbelievers' souls. Both were connected with the highly hypothetical but heuristically significant choice between war and American 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." Among the godless, American surrender as the proper alternative was outvoted by less than two-to-one, whereas the general vote against surrender ran close to three-to-one. And the group of 215 who chose war included over four-fifths 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.
Possibly all this indicates a more alert awareness on the part of the latter group of the nuclear holocaust such a conflict would almost certainly entail--as well as a greater reluctance to identify the survival of a North American nation-state with the good of higher culture everywhere and for all time. If so, a deeper moral concern with the fate of this world may be adumbrated here--as well as a strikingly universal sense of direct ethical responsibility.
The Death of the Soul
George Orwell once observed that the death of the soul, Western civilization's renunciation of the belief in immortality, makes politics immensely the more serious; it could be the spur to a radicalism almost frenetic, hysterical, insane--though Nietzsche's phrase seems more appropriate: "a higher history than all history hitherto." The orthodox have always talked as if losing the hope of immortality would trivialize or vitiate the worth of life altogether. But their opponents might well reply that quite the opposite is true: eternity is only "shortened," as it were--the fate of one's soul, one's hopes for "eternal happiness," for salvation, that is to say, remain at least as pressing 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 redemption 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 boredom, 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 imparts any worth to a given point or segment.
Immortality Insipid
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 bonum in 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 et 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 martyrs and the saints. To atheists, politics is religion; rival schemes of worldly order, are, literally, conflicting eschatologies; and the contemporary sense of individual political impotence is as awful a burden as Luther's over-whelming 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.
Salvation through Statecraft
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 intense political concerns have become today because the latter alone deals meaningfully today with 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