We are told over and over again by professors of theology and by ecclesiastics that the values prized by liberal and humane minds cannot survive without a survival or revival of the religious beliefs current in the Western world for the last two thousand years of the Christian and over five thousand years of the Hebrew tradition. There is a tendency to assume that those who believe that moral ideals or generous intentions may exist in men not committed to the supernatural are at the very least foolish and probably scoundrels and totalitarians to boot. This is not the place to argue the complex foundations of religious belief. But there are certain secular aspects of the nature of spirit and the spiritual life that it is needful to consider, and these can be briefly stated in any current discussion of religious literature.

There is no question that religious literature has a very wide public today, and the notion that religious interests are vanishing is a hangover of the complacent intellectualism of the nineteenth century. There is, further, no question that there has been a collapse of secular hopes, an uneasiness about the human future, a shattering of naive enthusiasms for the progress possible through the latter-day magic of science. There is an enormous concern (even among those not especially religious) with a basic reconsideration of the meaning of their own lives, the source and validity of moral values, the ultimate nature of the universe. Many have fled to mystical cults of the West and of the East. Others have sought a way out of the current chaos in the fixed authority of a rigid theology. In one way or another, millions have sought "peace of mind," if only in a book that under that title seemed to promise nirvana or its facsimile. It is clear that there is a very convincing case made by those who say some faith is necessary if life is to endure at all--or to be endurable. Life itself is an act of faith; the assumption even of the next day, the next moment is a gesture of confidence, the assertion of a hope, the substance of an expectation. It is a patent, too, that there are all sorts of reasons for despair, grounds for lack of reliance on the general human future and credence in the old securities, in the radiant prospect of science for human welfare, confidence in human nature itself, or in human beings in groups. Science seems to have led us into an impasse; the fruit of our subtlest technical skills may be the widest destruction. There is a chance even that the whole planet may be blown up.

The democratic faith which was so devout during the nineteenth century seems to be less secure now. The voice of the people does not always seem to be the voice of God. Parliamentary governments, where they still persist, are weak and vacillating, and in many parts of the world they have disappeared. And the old-fashioned liberal assurance of the teachable and touchable generosities of human nature seems to have vanished, too. Psychiatry has taught us too much about ourselves, and not only the psychiatrists have taught us the hidden rottennesses in the psyche; crime commissions and the daily headlines have shown how public and rife our corruption is. It is no wonder that it is easy to agree with the gloomier theologians that there is no health in us. It is tempting to turn with them for comfort to a world elsewhere. It is not surprising that we have been told, and often agree, that we must choose between belief in the supernatural or a despairing acceptance of the natural, for in the world within or without about us there is no ground for comfort, no sustenance for hope.

There have been ages before ours that have given up faith and hope in the world, eras in which many have felt that man could be saved only by those vistas of a world beyond the world, by the supernatural as revealed in sacred writings and established churches. I do not propose to argue here with those who share this conviction. I intend simply to try to restate and reaffirm what one may call the faith of the humanist and to insist that there are thousands, nay millions, in our country and in the world (even among those attached to churches and synagogues) who at heart are humanists too, and whose faith has every right to be called spiritual, and whose conviction can only by malice be called "grossly materialistic." There is a dedication, humane and liberal, that cherishes precisely those values which have been the heart and substance of traditional religions. Indeed, for the humanist, prophetic Judaism and early Christianity are permanent contributions to Western civilization precisely because they enshrine in dramatic myths and metaphors what ultimately counts, what basically justifies human existence and gives expression to its heights, its depths, its glories, and terrors. The Old Testament contains both Ecclesiastes and the Psalms themselves which range from rapture to despair. What, then, are the articles, if so strict a term may be used, for a religion so flexible, and one that goes further than inquiry warrants?

In the light of the current spread of despair and disillusion, it is worth reaffirming the contours of the liberal belief tethered always to what disciplined inquiry can make credible. There is, first, faith in nature itself, that creative urgency and dynamic energy which is not the dead matter of the billiard-ball physics of the nineteenth century, but the vitality that generates new planets, new lives, new creations in art and philosophy and thought. There is such a thing as "cosmic piety" that comes not from any conventional assumption of a power beyond the natural, but reverence such as a poet might have for the splendors of the sea and the brightness of the stars, the miracle of childbirth and of growth, the renewal of life in the midst of death, the forms of art that outlast the artist and his audience. Even mortality is not a cause for sorrow, for regeneration is as much a part of nature as is death itself; and as for civilization as a whole, ours must end; others, so fertile is the energy of matter, will take its place, different inevitably and not impossibly better.

Pessimists have too hastily written off faith in human nature. The Greek dramatists two thousand years ago had a profound awareness of the horrors lurking within human nature, but a profound sense, too, of the dignity of human aspiration, and the reaching, however blocked or misdirected, toward the just and the good--themselves creative visions of the mind. With all the monstrosities of which nature is capable, highlighted by twenty years of brutalitarianism, the last twenty years have revealed, too, the courage and the generosities to which under the worst pressures, the best of men bear witness. Nor is it time yet by any means to lose that faith in the generality of men which animated Lincoln and Emerson and Whitman in America, and such a quiet saint of liberalism as John Stuart Mill in England in the nineteenth century. The faith in what man may make of man is not vanquished, and all the macabre predictions of what science may do to destroy us cannot blind us to what knowledge can do when allied to the liberated good will of men. The humanist whose credo is resolutely restrained to those conditions of existence which knowledge can disclose, is not without hope, nor can be called faithless. Like the theologian, he knows man is mortal, that man is frail, that he is erring, that at times he is tragically helpless. He knows too that masses of men can be brutally enslaved, or what is worse, brutally misled. He knows that nature, so gigantic in power, can be and is ruthless to human good. But he knows, too, that nature is often benign and is the source of all we hope and all we are. He persists in the conviction that sound knowledge allied to shared experience will sustain and justify faith in man, in nature, and in all things that knowledge discloses for our discipline, our joy and our salvation.

--Irwin Edman, Ph.D.
Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University