Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic by Reinhold Niebuhr

Author:Reinhold Niebuhr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2015-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

1926

We were discussing the first commandment in the preparatory class today. The boys were trying to see whether “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me” meant anything in modern life. It is a constant source of surprise and delight to see with what profundity these boys and girls deal with the problems of life. They decided that anything that we loved more than God was in effect another god. But how do we love God, I asked. There were the usual answers which show how some children still identify religion with religious practices and customs, particularly Sunday observance. But one of the boys came through with this answer, “We love God by loving the best we know.” That seemed to me not bad at all.

Now we put on the blackboard all those interests which threatened to become gods to us: money, clothes (volunteered by a girl, of course), automobiles, eating, playing. We took up each one of these interests and tried to determine when they were in danger of becoming too central in life. On automobiles the boys didn’t have much conscience except that they thought one ought not to clean them on Sunday. They take the cult of the automobile for granted as everyone else. The girls had quite a time defining the place where clothes cease to be a legitimate interest and become an obsession. I was probably a poor one to lead them in that discussion.

On the matter of eating there was considerable difficulty. “We have to eat to grow,” said one of the boys. Correct answer. When then, is eating a form of idolatry? “When we eat all the time,” suggested another boy. That left Junior in a corner. “I like to eat most all the time,” he confessed ruefully. How can a hungry boy be anything but a sceptic about a philosophy of values which does not have eating at the center of it? Thus do the necessities of a robust organism defy the value schemes prompted by tradition or arrived at by reflection.

Junior just about stopped our discussion of comparative values by that confession, “I like to eat most all the time,” and I couldn’t help but think that my pedagogical impotence before this demand of natural life was closely akin to the impotence of the church before a youthful and vigorous national life, immersed in physical values and intent upon physical satisfactions. Our youthful nation is also declaring, “I love to eat most all the time”; and the error in its judgment is not easily overcome by preachment and precept until time and experience will show it the limits of animal satisfactions and teach it that man does not live by bread alone.

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