Thomas Henry Huxley - Lectures and Essays

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But if the primitive Nazarenes of whom the Acts speaks were orthodox
Jews, what sort of probability can there be that Jesus was anything
else? How can he have founded the universal religion which was not heard
of till twenty years after his death?[53] That Jesus possessed, in a
rare degree, the gift of attaching men to his person and to his
fortunes; that he was the author of many a striking saying, and the
advocate of equity, of love, and of humility; that he may have
disregarded the subtleties of the bigots for legal observance, and
appealed rather to those noble conceptions of religion which constituted
the pith and kernel of the teaching of the great prophets of his nation
seven hundred years earlier; and that, in the last scenes of his career,
he may have embodied the ideal sufferer of Isaiah, may be, as I think it
is, extremely probable. But all this involves not a step beyond the
borders of orthodox Judaism. Again, who is to say whether Jesus
proclaimed himself the veritable Messiah, expected by his nation since
the appearance of the pseudo-prophetic work of Daniel, a century and a
half before his time; or whether the enthusiasm of his followers
gradually forced him to assume that position?

But one thing is quite certain: if that belief in the speedy second
coming of the Messiah which was shared by all parties in the primitive
Church, whether Nazarene or Pauline; which Jesus is made to prophesy,
over and over again in the Synoptic gospels; and which dominated the
life of Christians during the first century after the crucifixion;--if
he believed and taught that, then assuredly he was under an illusion,
and he is responsible for that which the mere effluxion of time has
demonstrated to be a prodigious error.

AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY

Nemo ergo ex me scire quaerat, quod me nescire scio, nisi forte ut
nescire discat.--AUGUSTINUS. _De Civ. Dei_, xii. 7.

The people who call themselves "Agnostics" have been charged with doing
so because they have not the courage to declare themselves "Infidels."
It has been insinuated that they have adopted a new name in order to
escape the unpleasantness which attaches to their proper denomination.
To this wholly erroneous imputation, I have replied by showing that the
term "Agnostic" did, as a matter of fact, arise in a manner which
negatives it; and my statement has not been, and cannot be, refuted.
Moreover, speaking for myself, and without impugning the right of any
other person to use the term in another sense, I further say that
Agnosticism is not properly described as a "negative" creed, nor indeed
as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith
in the validity of a principle, which is as much ethical as
intellectual. This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all
amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of
the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence
which logically justifies that certainty. This is what Agnosticism
asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism.
That which Agnostics deny and repudiate, as immoral, is the contrary
doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe,
without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to
attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported
propositions. The justification of the Agnostic principle lies in the
success which follows upon its application, whether in the field of
natural, or in that of civil, history; and in the fact that, so far as
these topics are concerned, no sane man thinks of denying its validity.

Still speaking for myself, I add, that though Agnosticism is not, and
cannot be, a creed, except in so far as its general principle is
concerned; yet that the application of that principle results in the
denial of, or the suspension of judgment concerning, a number of
propositions respecting which our contemporary ecclesiastical "gnostics"
profess entire certainty. And, in so far as these ecclesiastical persons
can be justified in their old-established custom (which many nowadays
think more honoured in the breach than the observance) of using
opprobrious names to those who differ from them, I fully admit their
right to call me and those who think with me "Infidels"; all I have
ventured to urge is that they must not expect us to speak of ourselves
by that title.

The extent of the region of the uncertain, the number of the problems
the investigation of which ends in a verdict of not proven, will vary
according to the knowledge and the intellectual habits of the individual
Agnostic. I do not very much care to speak of anything as "unknowable."
[54] What I am sure about is that there are many topics about which I
know nothing; and which, so far as I can see, are out of reach of my
faculties. But whether these things are knowable by any one else is
exactly one of those matters which is beyond my knowledge, though I may
have a tolerably strong opinion as to the probabilities of the case.
Relatively to myself, I am quite sure that the region of
uncertainty--the nebulous country in which words play the part of
realities--is far more extensive than I could wish. Materialism and
Idealism; Theism and Atheism; the doctrine of the soul and its mortality
or immortality--appear in the history of philosophy like the shades of
Scandinavian heroes, eternally slaying one another and eternally coming
to life again in a metaphysical "Nifelheim." It is getting on for
twenty-five centuries, at least, since mankind began seriously to give
their minds to these topics. Generation after generation, philosophy has
been doomed to roll the stone uphill; and, just as all the world swore
it was at the top, down it has rolled to the bottom again. All this is
written in innumerable books; and he who will toil through them will
discover that the stone is just where it was when the work began. Hume
saw this; Kant saw it; since their time, more and more eyes have been
cleansed of the films which prevented them from seeing it; until now the
weight and number of those who refuse to be the prey of verbal
mystifications has begun to tell in practical life.

It was inevitable that a conflict should arise between Agnosticism and
Theology; or, rather, I ought to say, between Agnosticism and
Ecclesiasticism. For Theology, the science, is one thing; and
Ecclesiasticism, the championship of a foregone conclusion[55] as to the
truth of a particular form of Theology, is another. With scientific
Theology, Agnosticism has no quarrel. On the contrary, the Agnostic,
knowing too well the influence of prejudice and idiosyncrasy, even on
those who desire most earnestly to be impartial, can wish for nothing
more urgently than that the scientific theologian should not only be at
perfect liberty to thresh out the matter in his own fashion; but that he
should, if he can, find flaws in the Agnostic position; and, even if
demonstration is not to be had, that he should put, in their full force,
the grounds of the conclusions he thinks probable. The scientific
theologian admits the Agnostic principle, however widely his results may
differ from those reached by the majority of Agnostics.

But, as between Agnosticism and Ecclesiasticism, or, as our neighbours
across the Channel call it, Clericalism, there can be neither peace nor
truce. The Cleric asserts that it is morally wrong not to believe
certain propositions, whatever the results of a strict scientific
investigation of the evidence of these propositions. He tells us "that
religious error is, in itself, of an immoral nature." [56] He declares
that he has prejudged certain conclusions, and looks upon those who show
cause for arrest of judgment as emissaries of Satan. It necessarily
follows that, for him, the attainment of faith, not the ascertainment of
truth, is the highest aim of mental life. And, on careful analysis of
the nature of this faith, it will too often be found to be, not the
mystic process of unity with the Divine, understood by the religious
enthusiast; but that which the candid simplicity of a Sunday scholar
once defined it to be. "Faith," said this unconscious plagiarist of
Tertullian, "is the power of saying you believe things which are
incredible."

Now I, and many other Agnostics, believe that faith, in this sense, is
an abomination; and though we do not indulge in the luxury of
self-righteousness so far as to call those who are not of our way of
thinking hard names, we do feel that the disagreement between ourselves
and those who hold this doctrine is even more moral than intellectual.
It is desirable there should be an end of any mistakes on this topic. If
our clerical opponents were clearly aware of the real state of the case,
there would be an end of the curious delusion, which often appears
between the lines of their writings, that those whom they are so fond of
calling "Infidels" are people who not only ought to be, but in their
hearts are, ashamed of themselves. It would be discourteous to do more
than hint the antipodal opposition of this pleasant dream of theirs to
facts.

The clerics and their lay allies commonly tell us, that if we refuse to
admit that there is good ground for expressing definite convictions
about certain topics, the bonds of human society will dissolve and
mankind lapse into savagery. There are several answers to this
assertion. One is that the bonds of human society were formed without
the aid of their theology; and, in the opinion of not a few competent
judges, have been weakened rather than strengthened by a good deal of
it. Greek science, Greek art, the ethics of old Israel, the social
organisation of old Rome, contrived to come into being, without the help
of any on who believed in a single distinctive article of the simplest
of the Christian creeds. The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the
chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out
of those of Greece and Rome--not by favour of, but in the teeth of the
fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and
any serious occupation with the things of this world, were alike
despicable.

Again, all that is best in the ethics of the modern world, in so far as
it has not grown out of Greek thought, or Barbarian manhood, is the
direct development of the ethics of old Israel. There is no code of
legislation, ancient or modern, at once so just and so merciful, so
tender to the weak and poor, as the Jewish law; and, if the Gospels are
to be trusted, Jesus of Nazareth himself declared that he taught nothing
but that which lay implicitly, or explicitly, in the religious and
ethical system of his people.

And the scribe said unto him, Of a truth, Teacher, thou hast well
said that he is one; and there is none other but he, and to love
him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with
all the strength, and to love his neighbour as himself, is much
more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices. (Mark xii. 32,
33.)

Here is the briefest of summaries of the teaching of the prophets of
Israel of the eighth century; does the Teacher, whose doctrine is thus
set forth in his presence, repudiate the exposition? Nay; we are told,
on the contrary, that Jesus saw that he "answered discreetly," and
replied, "Thou art not far from the kingdom of God."

So that I think that even if the creeds, from the so-called "Apostles"
to the so-called "Athanasian," were swept into oblivion; and even if the
human race should arrive at the conclusion that, whether a bishop washes
a cup or leaves it unwashed, is not a matter of the least consequence,
it will get on very well. The causes which have led to the development
of morality in mankind, which have guided or impelled us all the way
from the savage to the civilised state, will not cease to operate
because a number of ecclesiastical hypotheses turn out to be baseless.
And, even if the absurd notion that morality is more the child of
speculation than of practical necessity and inherited instinct, had any
foundation; if all the world is going to thieve, murder, and otherwise
misconduct itself as soon as it discovers that certain portions of
ancient history are mythical; what is the relevance of such arguments to
any one who holds by the Agnostic principle?

Surely, the attempt to cast out Beelzebub by the aid of Beelzebub is a
hopeful procedure as compared to that of preserving morality by the aid
of immorality. For I suppose it is admitted that an Agnostic may be
perfectly sincere, may be competent, and have studied the question at
issue with as much care as his clerical opponents. But, if the Agnostic
really believes what he says, the "dreadful consequence" argufier
(consistently, I admit, with his own principles) virtually asks him to
abstain from telling the truth, or to say what he believes to be untrue,
because of the supposed injurious consequences to morality.

"Beloved brethren, that we may be spotlessly moral, before all things
let us lie," is the sum total of many an exhortation addressed to the
"Infidel." Now, as I have already pointed out, we cannot oblige our
exhorters. We leave the practical application of the convenient
doctrines of "Reserve" and "Non-natural interpretation" to those who
invented them.

I trust that I have now made amends for any ambiguity, or want of
fulness, in my previous exposition of that which I hold to be the
essence of the Agnostic doctrine. Henceforward, I might hope to hear no
more of the assertion that we are necessarily Materialists, Idealists,
Atheists, Theists, or any other _ists_, if experience had led me to
think that the proved falsity of a statement was any guarantee against
its repetition. And those who appreciate the nature of our position will
see, at once, that when Ecclesiasticism declares that we ought to
believe this, that, and the other, and are very wicked if we don't, it
is impossible for us to give any answer but this: We have not the
slightest objection to believe anything you like, if you will give us
good grounds for belief; but, if you cannot, we must respectfully
refuse, even if that refusal should wreck morality and insure our own
damnation several times over. We are quite content to leave that to the
decision of the future. The course of the past has impressed us with the
firm conviction that no good ever comes of falsehood, and we feel
warranted in refusing even to experiment in that direction.

In the course of the present discussion it has been asserted that the
"Sermon on the Mount" and the "Lord's Prayer" furnish a summary and
condensed view of the essentials of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth,
set forth by himself. Now this supposed _Summa_ of Nazarene theology
distinctly affirms the existence of a spiritual world, of a Heaven, and
of a Hell of fire; it teaches the Fatherhood of God and the malignity of
the Devil; it declares the superintending providence of the former and
our need of deliverance from the machinations of the latter; it affirms
the fact of demoniac possession and the power of casting out devils by
the faithful. And, from these premises, the conclusion is drawn, that
those Agnostics who deny that there is any evidence of such a character
as to justify certainty, respecting the existence and the nature of the
spiritual world, contradict the express declarations of Jesus. I have
replied to this argumentation by showing that there is strong reason to
doubt the historical accuracy of the attribution to Jesus of either the
"Sermon on the Mount" or the "Lord's Prayer "; and, therefore, that the
conclusion in question is not warranted, at any rate, on the grounds set
forth.

But, whether the Gospels contain trustworthy statements about this and
other alleged historical facts or not, it is quite certain that from
them, taken together with the other books of the New Testament, we may
collect a pretty complete exposition of that theory of the spiritual
world which was held by both Nazarenes and Christians; and which was
undoubtedly supposed by them to be fully sanctioned by Jesus, though it
is just as clear that they did not imagine it contained any revelation
by him of something heretofore unknown. If the pneumatological doctrine
which pervades the whole New Testament is nowhere systematically stated,
it is everywhere assumed. The writers of the Gospels and of the Acts
take it for granted, as a matter of common knowledge; and it is easy to
gather from these sources a series of propositions, which only need
arrangement to form a complete system.

In this system, Man is considered to be a duality formed of a spiritual
element, the soul; and a corporeal[57] element, the body. And this
duality is repeated in the Universe, which consists of a corporeal world
embraced and interpenetrated by a spiritual world. The former consists
of the earth, as its principal and central constituent, with the
subsidiary sun, planets, and stars. Above the earth is the air, and
below is the watery abyss. Whether the heaven, which is conceived to be
above the air, and the hell in, or below, the subterranean deeps, are to
be taken as corporeal or incorporeal is not clear. However this may be,
the heaven and the air, the earth and the abyss, are peopled by
innumerable beings analogous in nature to the spiritual element in man,
and these spirits are of two kinds, good and bad. The chief of the good
spirits, infinitely superior to all the others, and their creator, as
well as the creator of the corporeal world and of the bad spirits, is
God. His residence is heaven, where he is surrounded by the ordered
hosts of good spirits; his angels, or messengers, and the executors of
his will throughout the universe.

On the other hand, the chief of the bad spirits is Satan, _the_ devil
_par excellence_. He and his company of demons are free to roam through
all parts of the universe, except the heaven. These bad spirits are far
superior to man in power and subtlety; and their whole energies are
devoted to bringing physical and moral evils upon him, and to thwarting,
so far as their power goes, the benevolent intentions of the Supreme
Being. In fact, the souls and bodies of men form both the theatre and
the prize of an incessant warfare between the good and the evil
spirits--the powers of light and the powers of darkness. By leading Eve
astray, Satan brought sin and death upon mankind. As the gods of the
heathen, the demons are the founders and maintainers of idolatry; as the
"powers of the air" they afflict mankind with pestilence and famine; as
"unclean spirits" they cause disease of mind and body.

The significance of the appearance of Jesus, in the capacity of the
Messiah, or Christ, is the reversal of the satanic work by putting an
end to both sin and death. He announces that the kingdom of God is at
hand, when the "Prince of this world" shall be finally "cast out" (John
xii, 31) from the cosmos, as Jesus, during his earthly career, cast him
out from individuals. Then will Satan and all his devilry, along with
the wicked whom they have seduced to their destruction, be hurled into
the abyss of unquenchable fire--there to endure continual torture,
without a hope of winning pardon from the merciful God, their Father; or
of moving the glorified Messiah to one more act of pitiful intercession;
or even of interrupting, by a momentary sympathy with their
wretchedness, the harmonious psalmody of their brother angels and men,
eternally lapped in bliss unspeakable.

The straitest Protestant, who refuses to admit the existence of any
source of Divine truth, except the Bible, will not deny that every point
of the pneumatological theory here set forth has ample scriptural
warranty. The Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, and the Apocalypse assert
the existence of the devil, of his demons and of Hell, as plainly as
they do that of God and his angels and Heaven. It is plain that the
Messianic and the Satanic conceptions of the writers of these books are
the obverse and the reverse of the same intellectual coinage. If we turn
from Scripture to the traditions of the Fathers and the confessions of
the Churches, it will appear that, in this one particular, at any rate,
time has brought about no important deviation from primitive belief.
From Justin onwards, it may often be a fair question whether God, or the
devil, occupies a larger share of the attention of the Fathers. It is
the devil who instigates the Roman authorities to persecute; the gods
and goddesses of paganism are devils, and idolatry itself is an
invention of Satan; if a saint falls away from grace, it is by the
seduction of the demon; if heresy arises, the devil has suggested it;
and some of the Fathers[58] go so far as to challenge the pagans to a
sort of exorcising match, by way of testing the truth of Christianity.
Mediaeval Christianity is at one with patristic, on this head. The
masses, the clergy, the theologians, and the philosophers alike, live
and move and have their being in a world full of demons, in which
sorcery and possession are everyday occurrences. Nor did the Reformation
make any difference. Whatever else Luther assailed, he left the
traditional demonology untouched; nor could any one have entertained a
more hearty and uncompromising belief in the devil, than he and, at a
later period, the Calvinistic fanatics of New England did. Finally, in
these last years of the nineteenth century, the demonological hypotheses
of the first century are, explicitly or implicitly, held and
occasionally acted upon by the immense majority of Christians of all
confessions.

Only here and there has the progress of scientific thought, outside the
ecclesiastical world, so far affected Christians, that they and their
teachers fight shy of the demonology of their creed. They are fain to
conceal their real disbelief in one half of Christian doctrine by
judicious silence about it; or by flight to those refuges for the
logically destitute, accommodation or allegory. But the faithful who fly
to allegory in order to escape absurdity resemble nothing so much as the
sheep in the fable who--to save their lives--jumped into the pit. The
allegory pit is too commodious, is ready to swallow up so much more than
one wants to put into it. If the story of the temptation is an allegory;
if the early recognition of Jesus as the Son of God by the demons is an
allegory; if the plain declaration of the writer of the first Epistle of
John (iii. 8), "To this end was the Son of God manifested, that He might
destroy the works of the devil," is allegorical, then the Pauline
version of the Fall may be allegorical, and still more the words of
consecration of the Eucharist, or the promise of the second coming; in
fact, there is not a dogma of ecclesiastical Christianity the scriptural
basis of which may not be whittled away by a similar process.

As to accommodation, let any honest man who can read the New Testament
ask himself whether Jesus and his immediate friends and disciples can be
dishonoured more grossly than by the supposition that they said and did
that which is attributed to them; while, in reality, they disbelieved in
Satan and his demons, in possession and in exorcism?[59]

An eminent theologian has justly observed that we have no right to look
at the propositions of the Christian faith with one eye open and the
other shut. (Tract 85, p. 29.) It really is not permissible to see, with
one eye, that Jesus is affirmed to declare the personality and the
Fatherhood of God, His loving providence and His accessibility to
prayer; and to shut the other to the no less definite teaching ascribed
to Jesus, in regard to the personality and the misanthropy of the devil,
his malignant watchfulness, and his subjection to exorcistic formulae and
rites. Jesus is made to say that the devil "was a murderer from the
beginning" (John viii. 44) by the same authority as that upon which we
depend for his asserted declaration that God is a spirit" (John iv. 24).

To those who admit the authority of the famous Vincentian dictum that
the doctrine which has been held "always, everywhere, and by all" is to
be received as authoritative, the demonology must possess a higher
sanction than any other Christian dogma, except, perhaps, those of the
Resurrection and of the Messiahship of Jesus; for it would be difficult
to name any other points of doctrine on which the Nazarene does not
differ from the Christian, and the different historical stages and
contemporary subdivisions of Christianity from one another. And, if the
demonology is accepted, there can be no reason for rejecting all those
miracles in which demons play a part. The Gadarene story fits into the
general scheme of Christianity; and the evidence for "Legion" and their
doings is just as good as any other in the New Testament for the
doctrine which the story illustrates.

It was with the purpose of bringing this great fact into prominence; of
getting people to open both their eyes when they look at
Ecclesiasticism; that I devoted so much space to that miraculous story
which happens to be one of the best types of its class. And I could not
wish for a better justification of the course I have adopted, than the
fact that my heroically consistent adversary has declared his implicit
belief in the Gadarene story and (by necessary consequence) in the
Christian demonology as a whole. It must be obvious, by this time, that,
if the account of the spiritual world given in the New Testament,
professedly on the authority of Jesus, is true, then the demonological
half of that account must be just as true as the other half. And,
therefore, those who question the demonology, or try to explain it away,
deny the truth of what Jesus said, and are, in ecclesiastical
terminology, "Infidels" just as much as those who deny the spirituality
of God. This is as plain as anything can well be, and the dilemma for my
opponent was either to assert that the Gadarene pig-bedevilment actually
occurred, or to write himself down an "Infidel." As was to be expected,
he chose the former alternative; and I may express my great satisfaction
at finding that there is one spot of common ground on which both he and
I stand. So far as I can judge, we are agreed to state one of the broad
issues between the consequences of agnostic principles (as I draw them),
and the consequences of ecclesiastical dogmatism (as he accepts it), as
follows.

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