who sang of Brother Sun; that those who rapaciously grasped only for prosperity and more prosperity were strangely attracted to God’s little poor man who founded an order dedicated to poverty and simplicity. By the same token our age has accorded the highest respect to Albert Schweitzer. In an age of specialism, he combines brilliance in music, medicine, with the single dedication to lifting the life of the humblest of humanity, the African. We are attracted by what contradicts us most. But this is only half the truth.
The other half is that we are condemned by what contradicts us most. St. Francis, Dr. Schweitzer, and supremely their Lord and ours, shame us, humble us, and reveal the easy compromises and complacencies that hitherto satisfied us. A bland poet cried: “We needs must love the highest when we see it.” But they crucified the highest when they saw him.
If there are saints that fascinate and contradict us, there are also saints that seem nearer to us, more like us, who mirror our problems: lesser saints who can lead us to the higher saints, and to the King of Saints, Christ. Such is Doubting Thomas; for, as we look at him, we see ourselves. I do not think that any age has had to contend with such religious difficulties as our own: I do not think any of the Christian centuries needs Thomas as badly as we do. The tremendous and rightful advance of the natural sciences, and the applications of the techniques of natural science to the social sciences, have made faith another word for credulity and love only the crude satisfaction of a biological need. “Take nothing on trust” say our new masters the scientists; it is the refusal to accept old hypotheses and the demand for demonstrative proof that brought progress through Newton and through Einstein. It is the very spirit of Thomas. “This theory of the Resurrection of my crucified leader is all very well” he might say say in our language, “but I want visual proof, and tactile demonstration. Let me just put my finger in the wounds and the nail-prints to be sure that this is really Jesus. I want reality, not rumor.” That is the scientific spirit. And that is why for a scientific time, faith is so very difficult.
Of course there are many answers to this problem, which I can only mention in passing.
(1) The scientist also has his faith, his underlying unproven and unprovable assumptions to his entire enterprise. He assumes the rationality of the universe, that his mind and other human minds are part of the order which he finds in the world, and which alone make his descriptions and predictions and experiments possible. This might be a uniform illusion; it might equally be truth. There’s no way of proving or disproving it. It has to be assumed. That is faith.
(2) Secondly, I might point out that the scientist accepts as true and important aspects of reality factors in our human life which cannot be measured in any accurate quantitative way. Take the very quest for knowledge: for some it is a raging, unquenchable thirst; for others it is a merely nominal thing. There is no index of the thirst for knowledge. Take those emotions that play such a large part in our life: love and hate, anxiety and assurance. Love ranges from the sheer Himalayan heights of the Incarnation where sacrifice flings itself down for the utterly undeserving’s sake, to the wallowing pig’s trough of lust, with some many intermediate stages. Hate ranges all the way from self-disgust to the calculated genocide of which Ann Frank was a cruel victim. Anxiety stretches from a foolish worry about, let us say, whether we look respectable at a social function, to the neurotic obsession of a Governor Long that the whole of the administration of the State of Louisiana is in league against him. Assurance ranges from the certainty of love to the intolerable cockiness of the self-made man who worships his maker. These cannot be measured, cannot be predicted but they are really there, grandly real or sordidly real. The belief in God and the balance of faith and the direction they give are every bit as genuine a part of the human enterprise as space satellites.
What I want to concentrate our thoughts on is not just that the scientist has faith or even that his impressive picture of the world is only part of it. It is rather that there are two kinds of skepticism, which I shall call dishonest and honest doubt. I think every man who calls himself an agnostic, that is, one who isn’t sure about God, ought to inquire very seriously whether his doubts are motivated by a desire to know God and serve him (that, I call honest doubt) or whether he secretly hopes that he will find convincing arguments to disprove God, to laugh at other Christians as fools, and thus be left alone to make hay while the sun shines (that, I call dishonest doubt).
I believe that the plague of our age is doubting for doubting’s sake. I would like to quote the words of Katherine Mansfield, an imaginative genius who died young, written in a letter shortly before her death:
I am so sick of all this modern seeking which ends in seeking. Seek by all means. But the text goes on “and ye shall find.” Of course there can be no ultimate finding. There is a kind of ultimate finding by the way which is enough, is sufficient. But these seekers in the looking-glass, these half-female frightened writers of today—you know, they remind me of the green-fly in roses, they are a kind of blight.
The novelist was right: there is a kind of blight in the world of thought which is sentiment, dramatizing oneself as a superior kind of person who prefers wandering and wondering to finding and believing. It was another genius, and scientist, Blaise Pascal who said:
There are only two kinds of people who can be called reasonable: those who serve God with all their hearts because they know Him; and those who seek Him with all their hearts because they do not know Him yet.
The difference between dishonest and honest doubt has been superbly dramatised in two novels that appeared about seventy years ago, when the struggle between revelation and scientific reason was at its height. The first is the American novelist, Harold Frederic and his book The damnation of Theron Ware, or Illumination. Its subtitle might be Dishonest Doubt. The hero or villain of the story is a Methodist minister of good intelligence, poor education, and a searing ambition, put down in a backwoods parish among a group of sincere but narrow Christians. The novelist contrasts the venerable elders of Methodism, those giants of the frontier who were men of faith and courage, who lived the frugal, compassionate lives of their Master, and did not know where to lay their heads, circuit riders of Christ. He contrasts them with the conceit and vanity of this ministerial puppy. He finds the morning newspaper more important than the Bible; he eagerly devours the latest rationalist literature and prides himself on his superiority to his unlearned congregation.
As his faith weakens, so does his sense of obligation. It is now his wife who is unworthy of him and he throws her off in a rude approach to Celia, a Titianesque female, who gabbles about the higher “gospel” of the Greeks, which she interprets as the life of the senses, of unrestrained freedom, actually license. I will not “trouble” you with the stages of his fall nor with the irony that it is simple-hearted Methodist layfolk who rescue him from degradation. But when the book ends, we see him taking a train for the State of Washington, imaging the crowds spellbound by the speeches of the future Senator for Washington, arrogant to the last peroration!
The moral is clear: let a man cultivate doubts for their own sake, and however noble his calling, released from the ultimate commitment to God and his neighbor, he is only an intelligent beast. The only point in having a mind, like having a mouth, is to close it on something solid: the meat of the Gospel.
The other novelist, Mrs. Humphry Ward, wrote Robert Elsmere, out of a profound belief that faith becomes firmly based after undergoing the purification of honest doubt. She gives the agonising story of how an Oxford don leaves his college to become the Vicar of a Southern English church, and there, although no man is more assiduous in caring for his parishioners, educating their children, fighting their landlord for improved housing, and praying for them in their sorrows. Yet he finds it impossible to repeat the creed of the church because he cannot accept it or many parts of it. In the end, like the honest man he is, he looks for a church with the image of the purely human Christ, not the eternal Son of God, but the son of man, the model and mirror of compassion. He links himself with a group of Unitarians who are engaged in settlement work in the teeming slums of industrial London. He organizes a new society, a new Company of Jesus.
