Religion and Progress
The Belief in Progress.
by John Baillie.
Scribner’s. 235 pp. $2.75.
When J. B. Bury published his Idea of Progress just thirty years ago, he noted the “prevalent feeling that a social or political theory or programme is hardly tenable if it cannot claim that it harmonizes with this controlling idea—progress.” One wonders whether that was exactly true in the heyday of Spengler. Still, a good deal of the pre-1914 spirit must have persisted in the post-1918 world, especially the English-speaking world. The spirit of a period never dies entirely, suddenly, everywhere. Even today, some of the positivism and optimism Bury represented is still alive. But, to understate the case, less of it than in 1921. A treatise on the belief in progress will no longer start like Bury’s by saluting it as the beneficent god of the age.
On the contrary, it will start by saying that the belief has collapsed. This they all say who in recent years have written about the problems of the philosophy of history, on both sides of the Atlantic: Collingwood and Reinhold Niebuhr and Loewith and Jaspers and Alfred Weber and Sorokin, and innumerable others. Concerning the breakdown of progress, there is such a consensus that the mere statement has become trivial. Actually, it may by now be more urgent to try to save what can be saved of a creed that has done useful duty for some hundred years. That we can no longer believe in progress as the total, perpetual movement of the race in an absolutely desirable direction—that much we know. There are so many things that we know we can no longer believe in. The question is: what can we believe, what can we hope, what can help us to live, if not in peace and harmony, at least without the permanent threat of ultimate disaster?
In a certain sense, Professor Baillie’s study is an attempt to rescue the belief in progress by reducing it or guiding it back to its original source, Christian Biblical faith. But this positive effort is not the strongest side of his work. To this Scottish divine, Christian progress means the Christianization of the earth, partly at least, in the literal sense of an ever increasing success of the foreign missions. The belief in progress must be once again this hope, the inspiration of this activity, or it can be nothing. The votaries of merely secular progress, the positivists, the liberal materialists, will raise strident tries against this interpretation of progress; but, Baillie asks, what do they have to offer?
Not much, perhaps. Progress, Baillie points out in an irrefutable passage, was an influential but always inarticulate idol, not capable of precise definition. It could have been destroyed by the power of theoretical analysis long before it was destroyed by the force of facts. So much the worse for those who still cling to it. But if facts are not such as to warrant the belief in progress, they are, clearly, not such as to warrant the belief in this particular progress, the replacement of the other world religions and ideologies by Christianity.
However, there is no intrinsic need for such a parochial interpretation. Baillie shows convincingly that the belief in progress was a “Christian heresy,” a by-product of the Jewish and Christian understanding of history. It is this origin, the sense of the new, the unique, the earnest, of the freedom of things historical, that can be saved from the wreck of secular optimism. In order to do one’s best in time and for society, to be immune to the various brands of pessimistic naturalism, fatalism, cynicism, nothing is needed but to take the creations of time seriously; which will always mean at the same time to doubt and have good will, to fear and to hope.
That the core of Biblical faith, inasmuch as it has to do with history, is human freedom, which involves the possibility of evil, is brought out by Professor Baillie himself, and even more clearly in a book which parallels Baillie’s in a striking fashion: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Faith and History. Both works were written in the same year, and independently of each other, although Baillie knows Dr. Niebuhr’s earlier publications. Both authors deal with the same problems and quote the same sources. They see three basic notions of history: the classical and naturalist, the Judeo-Christian, and the modern rationalist and optimist. They refute in much the same manner the rationalist hope that man’s fate will one day be planned scientifically and that evil is nothing but lack of knowledge. They stress the difference between natural evolution and historical progress, calling the same prosecution witness, T. H. Huxley, to the stand. They make much of the distinction between technical progress, which is a fact, and “general” progress, which is a pseudo-religion. (Baillie: “Observed progress is mainly technical, whereas believed progress is mainly spiritual.”) Both offer the same plain, good, and obvious solution of the pseudo-conflict between science and religion: namely, that religion in conflict with science is not religion but bad science, and that science in conflict with religion is not science but bad religion. Yet while they agree in all this and a good deal more, the nuances by which they differ are not without interest.
Baillie rather plainly rejects 18th-century rationalism as too optimistic: “The hindrance now is not that we do not know enough but that we are not good enough. . . .” There, Niebuhr offers an extremely sophisticated inquiry into the identity of mind and self, the dialectics of man as the creator and creature of history. Baillie is wont to think that Arnold Toynbee may after all be right when he fancies all fallen civilizations as wheels on which the chariot of religion mounts higher and higher towards Heaven. Niebuhr rejects this speculation as quite unconfirmed by history. Baillie notes regretfully, “how slowly and how faultily” Christian civilization has advanced. Niebuhr denies any advance at all and would, if I understand him correctly, deny the very notion of Christian civilization; to him, there are no absolutes in the realm of civilization and politics. Niebuhr, in short, is the more radical of the two, and one may as well add that he is the richer and profounder mind. His analysis of our aberrations and illusions often recalls that of the more solid existentialists, Jaspers above all. He has the existentialists’ contempt for positivism, that scientific superstition; their keen sense for the historically unique character of our age; also for evil; also for eternally recurrent human sins like self-righteousness and hubris. If none of these aspects is absent in Baillie, they are not forced upon us with the same intensity.
Since both books, of about equal length, were written in the same year on the same subjects by two Protestant theologians, it has been impossible not to draw this comparison. It should, however, not be regarded as detracting from the value of The Belief in Progress. Baillie is more complete and systematic in his historical survey. Besides, he is kinder to his readers. There is in his writing an edifying element which may do good to some; there is also an element of hopefulness and warm-heartedness that will do good to many. Both works are fine examples of what Protestant Christian philosophy at its best can offer today to the thinking layman.
_____________
