The new castle; reaching for the ultimate by Martin Malachi

Author:Martin, Malachi [Martin, Malachi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religions, Civilization, Modern
Publisher: New York, Dutton
Published: 1974-06-15T07:00:00+00:00

Already in 1642, Lord Herbert had proposed in his De Veritate that there had always existed "a natural religion shared by all wise men and women from time immemorial." hi the same century, Locke taught that we can use unaided reason to arrive at a natural religion. In the eighteenth century: a Boston preacher, Jonathan Mayhew, proposed to examine the Bible with reason alone; Hume set out to establish that all concepts of a god and of man are derived uniquely from our human sensation; Descartes held that reliable human knowledge comes only in "clear and distinct ideas"—by reason and logic only, therefore; the French Encyclopedists maintained that all human knowledge is ultimately self-explanatory; and Immanuel Kant redefined religion as a closed ethical system over which presided human reason.

These new strains of European intellectualism with their emphasis on reason, on personal experience, and on man's isolation in his universe, were joined to Newtonian physics and harnessed to the continuing discoveries of science as it catalogued the vitals of the physical world. Archeology, linguistics, and anthropology—not only unrestrained by any authoritarian guide but in pointed revolt against any restraint—probed the Bible and Christianity's beginnings. With Voltaire and Rousseau as its voluble and crackling spokesmen, there was on its way a comfortable and defensible mental attitude for all reasonable mortals.

There emerged, therefore, in Protestant Europe and in America from the eighteenth century onward, a transmuted form of the Wittenberg vision which has been called Deism. Many Americans who were vital to the country's formation and to the definition of its future course were Deists: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, James Madison. Deism, the seasoning if not the broth of the American melting pot, had and still has one basic, unproven, and unprovable assumption: any divine revelation—if it is genuinely divine—must demonstrate to human reason in clear and distinct ideas that it is, indeed, divine. With the strong emergence of Deism, and in the name of total freedom of reason and the complete personalization of conscience, the objects of knowledge came to be as strictly defined as they had been in earlier times, but with another emphasis. Now they consisted only of notions which would submit to a rational explanation in clear and distinct ideas, and only facts, that could be demonstrated scientifically by the objective means of quantitative measure. All else must, by objective definition, be irrational, arational, superstitious, unnecessary, and ultimately unworthy of a human being.

This, of course, meant that human reason was the measure of all things. Nature was the only real living gospel for men. The aim of human life was that one should be "good." "But," added the Deist humorously, if grimly, "be not righteous overmuch!"

Other transforming agents awaited the Wittenberg vision. Two giants of the nineteenth century forced its inheritors farther on down the road to where they would one day face a life-or-death choice. Charles Darwin had convinced European and American intellectuals, by 1860, that evolution was a fact of history. Fifty

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