¶23" Faith " is perhaps the wrong word to apply to an attitude which combines bland assurance about fundamental values with an almost complete agnosticism about the universe at large. My conviction is really not a faith for a certainty, the one cherished and enheartening certainty of a mind that is resolutely sceptical.
¶42Perhaps the best way of beginning to appreciate the change of heart that we need, is to contemplate the difference between the collapse of France under Nazi attack and the truly epoch-making resistance of Russia. The French collapsed because their leaders let them down, because they were not made to feel themselves to be instruments of a great cause. Contrast Russia. The world's greatest social experiment had been in progress for over twenty years. For the first time a society had been consciously planned and constructed with the deliberate aim of producing the greatest possible well-being for all its members, not merely for a privileged minority. No doubt the new order had many faults. Enemies of the régime were treated ruthlessly. Civil liberties were not secured. But the new Russia was on the whole a triumphant expression of a new and great idea. To-day, the Russian people are fighting a titanic battle against an efficient, well-equipped, and ruthless enemy. All the world is amazed at their resistance. All the world is beginning to realize that there must be something of supreme value and something immensely tough in the new Russian society. Otherwise such heroism could not be displayed in its defence. No doubt, the Russians are fighting for self-preservation; but so were the French. The difference is that the Russians are fighting for something which to them is sacred, something which hosts of them do actually value more than life itself. At a later stage of this book I shall have occasion to criticize the fundamental values of Communism ; but here at the outset I had better say that, whatever the faults of Communist doctrine, I salute with heart-felt respect the feeling, the quickened and disciplined feeling, the generous passion for true community, which inspired the Russian Revolution and now inspires the Russian resistance to attack. This is by far the most glorious and most hopeful thing in the modern world.
¶56He gave a feeling of the power which the Roman Church has for the *best* of its members. The commoner sort, I knew, were held simply by the belief that by obeying the Church they would avoid eternal damnation. They surrendered conscience and intelligence into the hands of the priests, hoping thereby to gain bliss after death. I now had to recognize another sort of Roman Catholic.
¶90But the theoretical attack on religion might well have led not to irreligion but to a further purifying and strengthening of the essential loyalty to the spirit, had it not been for the blinding influence of commercialism. It is quite true that the theoretical trappings of religion have been torn to pieces by criticism derived from the new scientific temper. The virgin birth, the remission of sins, the resurrection, trans-substantiation, the Bible story of creation, can only be believed in a very metaphorical sense, if at all, by those who have come under the influence of science. Personal immortality is now, to say the least, very doubtful. “God”, the almighty and all-loving person, source and goal of all existence, is no longer an ever-present reality in men’s minds. For many men the word “God” is reduced to an almost meaningless noise. At most it calls up an outworn fantasy bred of wishful thinking. Nevertheless, all these intellectual formulations, even “God”, could have been sacrificed without harm if only men could have retained the inarticulate *feeling* of the reality and beauty of the spirit, the sense of the absolute rightness of a certain mode or temper of experience and conduct.
¶169It takes a certain courage for anyone like me to use this word. As I have said, it is so misleading, so debased, so dirtied with cant and hypocrisy. For the word " spirit " has been fouled over and over again by those who have no real perception of the spirit. The whole language of religion, formerly significant, has degenerated into a mere jargon. Recently it was at least a smart though already shabby overcoat covering sins ; to-day it is in tatters. We cannot help seeing through it to a peculiarly horrible corruption, to a disease of the spirit, a fatal addiction to self-deception, an irreparable lack of precision in feeling and in thought, an incapacity for sincere action. The great and bloody crime of the churches has been that they have so often and so subtly murdered the spirit in men, while affirming their loyalty to it. Lest one should seem to be an accomplice in this crime, it is necessary to protest against it before daring to use any of the old terms again. Modern scepticism, however superficial and trivial its little cleverness, at least sprang from a wholesome revulsion against something far worse; sprang, in fact, from unwitting loyalty to the spirit.
¶191Similarly with the spirit. The way of the spirit is the way of supreme personal well-being not because, through it, the ordinary personal self can gratify its will to be an integrated and harmonious personality, but because, or in so far as, the ordinary self has been possessed and transformed by awareness of the spirit, so that it has come to prize the spirit more than its dearest personal ends.
¶192Even so, there will be shattering conflict within the self, conflict between the old self and the new self which has accepted the spirit. Only a self that has become wholly, utterly, possessed by the spirit could be entirely freed from that conflict.
¶195What do we need for personal well-being? Since we are all members of one biological species, well-being is at bottom the same for us all. But since our species is human, and our fundamental identity blossoms out into rich diversity of individual character, well-being varies greatly from individual to individual. What is food for one is poison for another. It is the privilege of the human species that its individuals differ from one another far more than the individuals of any other natural species, in native equipment and still more in acquired character. And it is the glory of man at his best that the immense differences between human beings may lead not to mere hate and conflict but to mutual enrichment and mutual responsibility. And this is the way to the spirit. Indeed, since to be human involves being incipiently superhuman, all of us are alike in that we need for true well-being to be sensitive to the spirit and to behave according to the spirit, so far as in us lies.
¶199For all-round personal well-being a man needs activity upon all these three planes, the sub-human, the average human, the incipiently super-human, if I may so call it. Probably all of us who are above the moron level have some latent capacity for the incipiently super-human activities.
¶233This is a mistake. Something else does occur in religious conversion, something which does not involve doubtful theories about the universe and man’s place in it, and is not simply a product of suppressed primitive cravings. This something also plays a part in experiences which are not ordinarily called religious and are not expressed in the language of religion, but are in fact essentially identical with the essential core of religious experience. For the essential thing in religious experience is the discovery of the spirit, or the discovery of the supreme rightness and beauty of the way of life which is called the way of the spirit, the discovery not merely that the way of the spirit is the way of true personal well-being but that this way of living is what persons are *for*, that they are essentially instruments for the expressing, manifesting, actualising of the spirit in concrete living, just as wings are for flying and violins for music. Oh, yes, I know that this is intellectually a very doubtful statement, but for the moment I am merely describing a state of mind, not defending a theory.
¶235Here it is necessary to say something about the sense of sin, which has played so great a part in religion and is so unfashionable a feeling in our own day. It is generally regarded by average modernistic minds as a symptom of mental disorder. There is, indeed, a kind of sin-consciousness which is morbid, and poisonous to the spirit, but there is another which is salutary. The unwholesome kind is simply a haunting fear of the unpleasant consequences of an act believed to be evil. Such is a murderer's fear of punishment, in which there is no genuine repentance. Such is the objectless dread that a neurotic may feel as a result of some repressed violation of parental taboo. But there is another guiltiness which arises from the true sense of *sin*, the sense of having betrayed values which one holds sacred. The former is a guiltiness rooted simply in fear for one's own personal well-being ; the other is guiltiness rooted in disinterested love. Fear-guilt is merely cramping and poisoning ; love-guilt is an inevitable and wholesome consequence of disloyalty to the thing loved. The true sense of sin is love-guilt on account of the spirit. Without it no one can begin to live according to the dictates of the spirit.
¶238But while a man actually is under the spell of the spirit, all that he does will be done fundamentally for the spirit's sake. This, I take it, is the essence of what the religious people mean when they speak of doing things "for the glory of God". Every little act can be done with consciousness of its bearing upon the spirit. Every person encountered will be seen as an instrument and manifestation of the spirit, however weak an instrument and distorted a manifestation. Consequently in all dealings which affect other persons, even in conflict with them, there will be an underlying respect for them as "vessels of the spirit", and an indefatigable disposition toward friendliness. The will for the spirit cannot be clear or at all sincere unless it expresses itself in treating people always as persons, never as things or cattle, or as vermin. And this will to treat people as persons must obviously extend far beyond the limits of personal contact. Under the spell of the spirit I will that *all* human beings shall be treated with full respect for their personality, and I will to do my best to secure that they shall in fact be so treated. This means that they shall be given adequate conditions of living, adequate sexual freedom, adequate food, adequate medical attention, adequate recreation, adequate education, no matter what the difficulty of organizing all this in the teeth of vested interests and snobbishness. To treat people with respect for their personality when one is in personal contact with them is not too difficult for us; but to insist that they shall be so treated universally is desperately difficult. To do so in our present social order involves heroic action, and most of us are not heroes.
¶265Probably every human being feels at one time or another, though he may not be able to express his feeling, the urge to "live more fully", to transcend his actual self and to become a more "vital", more sensitive, more lucid, more coherent, more creative self. This urge toward the more awakened "self-that-might-be" is in conflict with the normal impulses of the actual self. It is at bottom a *disinterested* passion, not to be derived solely from any kind of self-regard or any primitive impulse. It cannot be adequately explained by any kind of conditioning of primitive impulses alone. Mere conditioning cannot create qualitatively new impulses; it can only attach old impulses to new stimuli. The desire for the spirit springs simply from the vision of the spirit as intrinsically good, the perception that the more sensitive, coherent and creative life is intrinsically right, is "what one is for".
¶266This disinterested urge of the actual self to destroy itself, so as to make way for a more awakened "self-that-might-be", that is alien to it, and not *itself*, is the miracle which the pure sceptic can neither explain nor even adequately perceive. This disinterested passion for the spirit, for sensitive and intelligent awareness, for love, for creative action, is the root of all genuine morality. Any seemingly moral behaviour which is purely the result of the conditioning of primitive impulse is not really moral at all. Between the normal impulses of the actual self and the urge toward the “ self-that-might-be ”, or toward the incipient life of the spirit, there may be a desperate conflict. The fundamental miracle consists in the fact that the actual self may have a vision of the spirit as something different from and lovelier than itself, something alien, yet compelling service and worship ; and that it may have this vision long before it can effectively force itself to die away for the spirit and give place to the “ self-that-might-be ”. It is as though the caterpillar, whose life is given over to eating, should consciously will the complete dissolution that awaits it in the chrysalis ; as though it should desire to kill itself in order to give place to a wholly new creature, the butterfly, whose interest is not in pedestrian nutrition but in flight and sex.
¶285When we are sufficiently awake, and not perverted either by our cravings or by false theory, we know that the relationship of true community between persons is right absolutely. We know also that the effort for community, even when it fails through the indifference or enmity of the other or others, is right absolutely ; provided that it is genuine, sincere, self-respecting and other-respecting, and not merely a self-deceiving attempt to use others for one's own salvation. And we know that in living in the way of love, in the effort for true community with our fellows, we not only fulfil our own deepest nature ; we feel ourselves to be in some way instruments of something far greater than ourselves, namely the spirit.
¶286All this is ancient truth, and of the first importance ; but this central experience of Christianity must be complemented by the central emotional experience of the best scientific minds, namely the sense of the intrinsic rightness and beauty of intellectual integrity, of dispassionate observation and reasoning. Not love alone but intellectual integrity also is demanded in the life of the spirit. And in pursuit of intellectual integrity we must reject all the wishful and doubtful intellectual doctrines that have been added to the central Christian experience. Thus we are left with no support whatever but the one unfailing support, namely the perception of the goodness and beauty of the spirit, and the rightness of the way of the spirit. We may, if we desire, indulge in tentative speculations about the part played by the spirit in the universe. Indeed, it is right that we should do this, for it is involved in the way of the spirit. But intellectual integrity forbids that we should allow the findings of such speculations ever to become articles of faith. Our sole "faith" must be our supreme perceived certainty, namely our perception of the spirit as intrinsically good and the way of the spirit as intrinsically right, and of ourselves as essentially instruments of the spirit. In perceiving this certainty, and allowing it due weight in our lives, we do not violate scientific intellectual integrity ; on the contrary, it is the scientific materialist who, by denying this patent fact, violates his own canons.
¶288The antithesis between exaggerated individualism and the exaggerated cult of society is itself to be solved only in the light of the spirit. Those who are at all clearly aware of the spirit will not fall into either of these errors. For the spirit is not simply " in " individuals, nor simply " in " society. The spirit manifests itself solely in personality-in-community. It inheres in the mutual cherishing and mutual enriching of self-aware and other-aware individuals. Realising this, we shall never make the mistakes typical either of nineteenth-century individualism or of twentieth-century totalitarianism. We shall always recognise that both individual and society are abstractions, and that neither can exist without the other. No doubt there might, theoretically, be a human individual completely isolated from society, but he would grow up an imbecile, not a person. Personality involves society ; and for its full expression it involves true community.
¶296Worship in the old days was devotion to a divine person, conceived as all-knowing, all-loving and all-creating, and a very present help in trouble. For modern man this devotion is no longer possible. Nor, if he is truly modern, does he desire it. But let us not too lightly dismiss the contention of the religious people that man needs " faith " to keep him straight and to call out the best in him. He needs to know, they say, that in behaving in the way of the spirit he is behaving in accordance with something superhuman, something universal. They insist that sheer humanism, the devotion to the fullest possible development of man's nature just because it is man's, is not enough. What truth is there in this claim that faith in some universal power for good is necessary for calling out the best in men ? The answer is that faith in the spirit is indeed necessary, or rather perception of the spirit ; but that beliefs about the constitution of the universe are not necessary, and may be harmful.
¶301This mere feeling, this intuition, of the underlying identity of all instruments and manifestations of the spirit should be very sceptically regarded by the intellect ; but pragmatically it is valuable, for it can be a great source of strength and courage. And it is part of the activity which I call worship of the spirit. For to worship is to feel at once other than the object worshipped and yet essentially one with it ; to feel alien, inferior, speechless with adoration, and yet also to feel at heart identical with it. Worship begins with the actual sin-conscious self's feeling for the self-that-might-be ; but it goes on to the conception of an idealized and divine self-that-might-be, which the actual self cannot in fact ever be. And this ideal divine self is *felt* to be somehow actual in the universe. This feeling may, but need not, issue in belief. It should not be allowed to do so. Even worship must be agnostic.
¶304Toward those whom one recognizes as superiors in the vast hierarchy of the spirit one may feel, in virtue of the unity of the spirit, admiration untinged by jealousy. For their achievement is the spirit's achievement in them ; and in oneself lesser things are achieved by the same spirit. The left hand need not be jealous of the right hand's cunning.
¶305Contemplating one's own shortcomings and triumphs in the way of the spirit, and the triumphs of the most awakened human beings, one may imaginatively glimpse something of the unfulfilled possibilities of the spirit, in man and in other conceivable creatures. This exercise cannot give any precise truth about the spirit in its non-human and sometimes superhuman reaches, but it can free us from the limitations of complacent humanism, and fill us with a proper sense of the infinite and glorious potentiality of the spirit. Moreover, whatever the alien wealth and diverse splendour of the spirit in unknown worlds scattered among the galaxies, whatever manifestations of it lie wholly beyond the confines of the cosmos, we feel with certainty the spirit's underlying unity and identity. We ourselves, in our tortured but vital human world, are one with it, even in its remotest and most austere forms.
¶306Another aspect of our experience must be recorded. The spirit, so far as it is recognizable by us, is that which expresses itself in sensitive, intelligent awareness, love and creative action, in no matter what modes or ranks of being ; but the universe seems in one of its aspects utterly alien and hostile to the spirit. The frail instruments of the spirit are destroyed in millions by natural disasters, by earthquakes and eruptions, by floods and storms and plagues, and even more devastatingly through the consequences of their own baser nature, which leads them to indulge in economic exploitation and war. Many a world may well have been shattered by physical catastrophe or ruined by the folly of its inhabitants. Apart from these occasional apocalyptic disasters, there is the perennial mutual torture which the instruments of the spirit inflict on one another in the intimate sphere of personal relations, not only by their conflicts and hates but even by their very loves. And how often are the more awakened beings tortured or destroyed by the less awakened! Creatures on every evolutionary plane may be devoured by parasites less developed than themselves. There are microbes, gangsters, speculators, demagogues, dictators.
¶307We react to all this horror in one or other of two ways. We may think of the spirit simply as the source of all sensitive and intelligent awareness, all love and creative action, and as a factor *within* an indifferent universe. In this case we give our allegiance wholly to the spirit as it is revealed to us, and the horror we regard as wholly alien to the spirit. Our passion is one of moral fervour for the way of the spirit, and for the triumph of the spirit in its struggle to awake. Whatever seems to prevent its victory is simply evil. But there is another possible mood. Knowing in our own lives that the more awakened often appears alien and hostile to the less awakened, knowing too that the actual self has often to die in order to make way for a better self-that-might-be, we may regard the whole tragic drama of the universe from this point of view. Then, contemplating all the frustration and horror, we may feel that in some obscure way even this must be a manifestation of spirit, but on a plane beyond our comprehension. This conviction we may come to entertain not merely as an intellectual theory ; we may *feel* the presence of an overwhelming, terrible beauty, careless of us, yet compelling our adoration. In fear and worship we abase ourselves before it. In this mood, though we accept in terror, we also welcome with strange joy. And then, inevitably personifying, we may say to the spirit thus conceived, " Use me, break me ; but let my breaking be a part of your dread beauty. Use and break this human species, this human world. Destroy it with fire or frost, or through the consequence of its own folly and half-heartedness, like the countless other lovely, tortured worlds that you have so gloriously conceived and coldly discarded. But let the breaking of this human instrument somehow contribute to your music."
¶308These two moods, though logically in conflict with one another, are the alternating moods of worship. The one is the mood of uncompromising moral protest for the spirit in its recognizable struggle to waken ; the other is the mood which accepts and welcomes the final defeat of all recognizable spirit as somehow involved in the rightness of things, involved in the perfection of the universal spirit itself. In some situations and for some persons the one intuition, but in other situations and for other persons the other, is the mainstay. Either, or both together, may be clung to as a " faith ". But if a " faith " is an explicit intellectual conviction about the universe, it is not permissable.
¶309What the truth is about the part of the spirit in the universe, we cannot know. Out of loyalty to the spirit itself we must refrain from persuading ourselves that we do know. The two conflicting feelings which constitute worship of the spirit must be simply felt ; we must not build any explicit " faith " or belief upon them.
¶310Both these feelings may have a far-reaching and awakening effect on our lives, making us at once more resolute and more temperate. This is all to the good, so long as we can refrain from intellectual beliefs about the universe. We must not, for instance, believe that the spirit in the universe is a personal God, loving us as actual selves. Nor must we believe that spirit is somehow the essence and reality of all things, and that the seeming opposition to it is illusion, terrible to the finite mind, yet all " within the picture ". While emotionally we worship the spirit with one or other of the two religious feelings, or both at once, we must at the same time, for the spirit's own sake, remain intellectually agnostic. Indeed, for very loyalty to the spirit itself we must see that our piety remains always agnostic piety.