Religion from Tolstoy to Camus

By Dr. Walter Kaufmann

First published in 1961, this volume brings together basic writings and religious truths and morals from a wide range of sources.

Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Plus II, Leo XIII, Nietzsche, James, Royce, Wilde, Freud, Niemöller, Barth, Maritain, Tillich, Schweitzer, Buber, Camus, and others, all have sought the religious truth about man, and have in the last three quarters of our century made great contributions to religious thought, critical often of the accepted and fashionable religion of their day, but greatly concerned to purify religion as they understood it.

Dr. Waller Kaufman, of Princeton University, who has already written extensively on philosophy and religion, supplies an editorial and critical note for each of his subject, thus providing valuable continuity and evaluation.

Such a book as this deserves a place in all libraries, public and private, so that it will be possible to quote these men from knowledge, rather than hearsay many times removed from the original.

“The point is not to win friends for religion, or enemies, but to provoke greater thoughtfulness. Here are texts that deserve to be pondered and discussed. Some of them I have criticized in other volumes; in such cases, the references are given. But in the present book nothing is included merely to be disparaged, nor is anything offered only to be praised. The hope is that those who read this book will gain a deeper understanding of religion.”—Walter Kaufmann, Preface

• Language: English
• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Release date: Jul 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787207585

Dr. Walter Kaufmann

Walter Arnold Kaufmann (July 1, 1921 - September 4, 1980) was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet. A prolific author, he wrote extensively on a broad range of subjects, such as authenticity and death, moral philosophy and existentialism, theism and atheism, Christianity and Judaism, as well as philosophy and literature. He served for over 30 years as a professor at Princeton University. He is renowned as a scholar and translator of Friedrich Nietzsche. He also wrote a 1965 book on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and published a translation of Goethe’s Faust. Born in 1921 in Freiburg, Germany, Kaufmann was raised a Lutheran. At age 11, finding that he believed neither in the Trinity nor in the divinity of Jesus, he converted to Judaism. He subsequently discovered that his grandparents were all Jewish. He left Germany and emigrated to America in 1939 and began studying at Williams College, where he majored in philosophy and took many religion classes. Although he had the opportunity to move immediately into his graduate studies in philosophy, and despite advice not to do so by his professors, he ultimately joined the war effort against the Nazis by serving in U.S. intelligence. During World War II, he fought on the European front for 15 months. After the war, he completed a PhD in the philosophy of religion at Harvard University in only two years. His dissertation was titled “Nietzsche’s Theory of Values” and eventually became a chapter in his Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950). Kaufmann spent his entire career thereafter, from 1947 to 1980, teaching philosophy at Princeton University, where his students included the Nietzsche scholars Frithjof Bergmann, Richard Schacht, Alexander Nehamas, and Ivan Soll. Kaufmann became a naturalized citizen of the United States of America in 1960. He died in Princeton, New Jersey in 1980 at the age of 59.

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Text originally published in 1961 under the same title.

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RELIGION FROM TOLSTOY TO CAMUS

SELECTED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND PREFACES,

BY

WALTER KAUFMANN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR 4

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 5

DEDICATION 7

PREFACE 8

1—INTRODUCTION: RELIGION FROM TOLSTOY TO CAMUS 9

2—TOLSTOY 47

My Religion 47

The "Death of Ivan Ilyitch 66

How Much Land Does a Man Need? 115

A Reply to Synod’s Edict of Excommunication, and to Letters Received by Me Concerning It 128

3—DOSTOEVSKY 134

Rebellion 134

The Grand Inquisitor 140

4—PIUS IX 154

The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception 154

The Encyclical Quanta Cura (in part) 154

The Syllabus of Errors 155

The Dogma of ‘Papal Infallibility 163

5—LEO XIII 166

The Encyclical Aeterni Patris 166

6—NIETZSCHE 181

The Antichrist 181

7—CLIFFORD 190

The Ethics of Belief 190

8—JAMES 207

The Will to Believe 207

9—ROYCE 222

The Problem of Job 222

10—WILDE 238

The Doer of Good 238

The Master 239

The Nightingale and the Rose 239

A Letter on Prison Life 244

11—FREUD 251

The Future  of an Illusion 251

12—COHEN 257

The Dark Side of Religion 257

13—ENSLIN 273

The New Testament 273

14—NIEMÖLLER 291

The Wedding Garment 291

The Salt of the Earth 295

Gamaliel 300

15—HAY 306

Europe and the Jews 306

16—BARTH and BRUNNER 324

A Correspondence 324

17—PIUS XII 333

The Dogma of the Assumption 333

Humani Generis 333

18—MARITAIN 344

The Third Way 344

19—TILLICH 347

Symbols of Faith 347

20—WISDOM 354

Gods 354

21—SCHWEITZER 368

The Conception of the Kingdom of God in the Transformation of Eschatology 368

22—BUBER 384

The Way of Man According to the Teachings of Hasidism 384

23—CAMUS 399

Reflections on the Guillotine 399

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 406

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publishers for permission to use selections from the works indicated:

THE BEACON PRESS, BOSTON: Europe and the Jews, by Malcolm Hay, copyright 1950 by The Beacon Press under the title The Foot of Pride.

BENZIGER BROTHERS, INC., NEW YORK: Aeterni Patris by Leo XIII, in The "Summa Theologica" of St. Thomas Aquinas, 1911; copyright 1947 by Benziger Brothers, Inc.

BASIL BLACKWELL, OXFORD: Gods, in Philosophy and Psycho-analysis, by John Wisdom, 1957; copyright 1953 by Basil Blackwell. (Grateful acknowledgment is also made of Professor Wisdom’s permission.)

THE DEVIN-ADAIR COMPANY, NEW YORK: Dogmatic Canons and Decrees by Pius IX, 1912. GROVE PRESS, INC., NEW YORK: Reflections on the Guillotine, in Evergreen Review, Vol. I, No. 3, by Albert Camus, translated by Richard Howard, copyright 1957 by Grove Press, Inc. (Grateful acknowledgment is also made of permission by the French publisher, Calmann-Levy, Paris.)

HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK: Christian Beginnings, by Morton Scott Enslin, copyright 1938 by Harper & Brothers; Approaches to God, by Jacques Maritain, copyright 1954 by Jacques Maritain; Dynamics of Faith, by Paul Tillich, copyright 1957 by Harper & Brothers.

WILLIAM HODGE & CO., LTD., EDINBURGH: The Gestapo Defied, by Martin Niemöller, copyright 1941 by William Hodge & Co., Ltd.

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY, NEW YORK: The Dark Side of Religion, in The Faith of a Liberal, by Morris Cohen, copyright 1946 by Henry Holt and Company. (Grateful acknowledgment is also made of the permission of Harry N. Rosenfield, Executor of the Cohen Estate.)

LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION, NEW YORK, AND THE HOGARTH PRESS, LTD., LONDON: The Future of an Illusion, by Sigmund Freud, translated by W. D. Robson-Scott, Copyright 1928.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, NEW YORK: "The Conception of the Kingdom of God in the Transformation of Eschatology" by Albert Schweitzer, in The Theology of Albert Schweitzer by E. N. Mozley, copyright 1950 by A. & C. Black, Ltd., London.

MCGRAW-HILL BOOK CO., INC., NEW YORK: The Dark Side of Religion, by Morris Cohen, in Religion Today, A Challenging Enigma, copyright 1933 by Arthur L. Swift, Jr. (Grateful acknowledgment is also made of the permission of Harry N. Rosenfield. Executor of the Cohen Estate.)

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW YORK: A Reply to the Synod’s Edict of Excommunication, in On Life and Essays on Religion, by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Aylmer Maude (World Classics Edition, 1934).

ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL, LTD., LONDON: The Way of Man According to the Teachings of Hasidism, by Martin Buber, copyright 1950 by Martin Buber.

STUDENT CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT PRESS, LTD., LONDON: Against the Stream, by Karl Barth, 1954.

THE VIKING PRESS, INC., NEW YORK: The Antichrist in The Portable Nietzsche, by Friedrich Nietzsche, selected and translated by Walter Kaufmann, copyright 1954 by The Viking Press, Inc.

THE WESTON COLLEGE PRESS, WESTON, MASS.: Humani Generis by Pius XII, translated with commentary by A. C. Cotter, S.J., second edition 1952, copyright 1952 by The Weston College Press.

DEDICATION

TO HERMAN AND SARAH WOUK

WHO LED ME TO LOVE

ST. THOMAS, V. 1.

PREFACE

Most of the following selections are complete, whether they be short stories, fables, encyclicals, essays, fairy tales, poems in prose, sermons, letters, or even a short book. All deal with religion, some with its truth, some with its relation to morality and society.

The point is not to win friends for religion, or enemies, but to provoke greater thoughtfulness. Here are texts that deserve to be pondered and discussed. Some of them I have criticized in other volumes; in such cases, the references are given. But in the present book nothing is included merely to be disparaged, nor is anything offered only to be praised. The hope is that those who read this book will gain a deeper understanding of religion.

W. K.

1—INTRODUCTION: RELIGION FROM TOLSTOY TO CAMUS

The story of religion, whether in Biblical times or in the last three quarters of a century, is not reducible to the superficialities of the masses and the subtleties of priests and theologians. There are also poets and prophets, critics and martyrs.

It is widely recognized that one can discuss religious ideas in connection with works of literature, but exceedingly few poets and novelists have been movers and shakers of religion. Leo Tolstoy, who was just that, has not been given the attention he deserves from students of religion. With all due respect to twentieth-century poets and novelists who are more fashionable, it is doubtful that any of their works have the stature of Tolstoy’s Resurrection. This novel does not merely illustrate ideas one might like to discuss anyway but aims rather to revise our thinking about morals and religion. To say that Tolstoy was a very great writer, or even that his stature surpassed that of any twentieth-century theologian, may be very safe and trite. But a much bolder claim is worth considering: perhaps he is more important for the history of religion during the century covered in this volume than any theologian; perhaps he has contributed more of real importance and originality and issues a greater challenge to us. That is why his name appears in the title of this book, and why he has been given more space than anyone else.

Those who follow are a heterogeneous group, selected not to work toward some predetermined conclusion but to give a fair idea of the complexity of our story. The work of the theologians has been placed in perspective, no less than that of the literary figures, philosophers, and others who are not so easy to classify.

Almost all the men included were for religion, though not the popular religion which scarcely any great religious figure has ever admired. Like the prophets and Jesus, like the Buddha and Luther, these men were critical of much that was and is fashionable; but their point was for the most part to purify religion. Only three of the twenty-three represented here wrote as critics of religion without being motivated by an underlying sympathy: Nietzsche, Freud, and Morris Cohen.

No effort has been made to give proportional representation to various denominations. As it happens, Roman Catholicism and the Greek Orthodox church, Judaism, atheism, and various forms of Protestantism are all represented by at least one adherent; but with the exception of the popes, these are not spokesmen. The point is not to appease everybody but to provoke thought.

The men included disagree with one another on fundamental issues. Hence one cannot help disagreeing with most of them unless one refuses to think. These men did not aim to please but to make us better human beings. By wrestling with them we stand some chance of becoming more humane.

TOLSTOY

It is customary to think of Tolstoy as a very great novelist who wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but who then became immersed in religion and wrote tracts. His later concerns are generally deplored, and many readers and writers wish that instead he might have written another novel of the caliber of his masterpieces. A very few of his later works are excepted: chief among these is The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, which is acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of world literature. And some of those who have read the less well-known fable, How Much Land Does a Man Need? have said that it may well be the greatest short story ever written. But these are stories. Such direct communications as My Religion, with their unmistakable and inescapable challenge, one prefers to escape by not reading them. This makes it likely that most admirers of the stories, and even of Anna Karenina, come nowhere near understanding these works—a point amply borne out by the disquisitions of literary critics.

Lionel Trilling, as perceptive a critic as we have, has said that "every object...in Anna Karenina exists in the medium of what we must call the author’s love. But this love is so pervasive, it is so constant, and it is so equitable, that it created the illusion of objectivity....For Tolstoi everyone and everything has a saving grace....It is this moral quality, this quality of affection, that accounts for the unique illusion of reality that Tolstoi creates. It is when the novelist really loves his characters that he can show them in their completeness and contradiction, in their failures as well as in their great moments, in their triviality as well as in their charm. Three pages later: It is chiefly Tolstoi’s moral vision that accounts for the happiness with which we respond to Anna Karenina."

Happiness indeed! Love, saving grace, and affection! Surely, the opposite of all this would be truer than that! After such a reading, it is not surprising that the critic has to say, near the end of his essay on Anna Karenina (reprinted in The Opposing Self): "Why is it a great novel? Only the finger of admiration can answer: because of this moment, or this, or this...The point is not that Trilling has slipped for once, but that Anna Karenina is generally misread—even by the best of critics.

Any reader who responds with happiness to this novel, instead of being disturbed to the depths, must, of course, find a sharp reversal in Tolstoy’s later work which is so patently designed to shock us, to dislodge our way of looking at the world, and to make us see ourselves and others in a new, glaring and uncomfortable, light. Even if we confine ourselves to Anna Karenina, I know of no other great writer in the whole nineteenth century, perhaps even in the whole of world literature, to whom I respond with less happiness and with a more profound sense that I am on trial and found wanting, unless it were Søren Kierkegaard.

Far from finding that Tolstoy’s figures are bathed in his love and, without exception, have a saving grace, I find, on the contrary, that he loves almost none and that he tells us in so many words that what grace or charm they have is not enough to save them.

Instead of first characterizing an apparently repulsive character and then exhibiting his hidden virtues or, like Dostoevsky, forcing the reader to identify himself with murderers, Tolstoy generally starts with characters toward whom we are inclined to be well disposed, and then, with ruthless honesty, brings out their hidden failings and their self-deceptions and often makes them look ridiculous. Why is it a great novel? Not on account of this detail or that, but because Tolstoy’s penetration and perception have never been excelled; because love and affection never blunt his honesty; and because in inviting us to sit in judgment, Tolstoy calls on us to judge ourselves. Finding that most of the characters deceive themselves, the reader is meant to infer that he is probably himself guilty of self-deception; that his graces, too, are far from saving; that his charm, too, does not keep him from being ridiculous—and that it will never do to resign himself to this.

The persistent preoccupation with self-deception and with an appeal to the reader to abandon his inauthenticity links Anna Karenina with The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, whose influence on existentialism is obvious. But in Anna Karenina the centrality of this motif has not generally been noticed.

It is introduced ironically on the third page of the novel, in the second sentence of Chapter II: He was incapable of deceiving himself. To trace it all the way through the novel would take a book; a few characteristic passages, chosen almost at random, will have to suffice. He did not realize it, because it was too terrible to him to realize his actual position....[He] did not want to think at all about his wife’s behavior, and he actually succeeded in not thinking about it at all....He did not want to see, and did not see....He did not want to understand, and did not understand....He did not allow himself to think about it, and he did not think about it; but all the same, though he never admitted it to himself...in the bottom of his heart he knew.... (Modern Library ed., 238 ff.) Kitty answered perfectly truly. She did not know the reason Anna Pavlovna had changed to her, but she guessed it. She guessed at something which she could not tell her mother, which she did not put into words to herself. It was one of those things which one knows but which one can never speak of even to oneself.... (268) She became aware that she had deceived herself... (279) He did not acknowledge this feeling, but at the bottom of his heart...." (334)

Here is a passage in which bad faith is specifically related to religion: Though in passing through these difficult moments he had not once thought of seeking guidance in religion, yet now, when his conclusion corresponded, as it seemed to him, with the requirements of religion, this religious sanction to his decision gave him complete satisfaction, and to some extent restored his peace of mind. He was pleased to think that, even in such an important crisis in life, no one would be able to say that he had not acted in accordance with the principles of that religion whose banner he had always held aloft amid the general coolness and indifference. (335)

Later, to be sure, Anna’s husband becomes religious in a deeper sense; but as soon as the reader feels that Tolstoy’s cutting irony is giving way to affection and that the man has a saving grace, Tolstoy, with unfailing honesty, probes the man’s religion and makes him, if possible, more ridiculous than he had seemed before. And the same is done with Varenka: she is not presented as a hypocrite with a saving grace but as a saint—until she is looked at more closely.

Inauthenticity is not always signaled by the vocabulary of self-deception. Sometimes Tolstoy’s irony works differently: Vronsky’s life was particularly happy in that he had a code of principles, which defined with unfailing certitude what he ought and what he ought not to do....These principles laid down as invariable rules: that one must pay a cardsharper, but need not pay a tailor; that one must never tell a lie to a man, but one may to a woman; that one must never cheat anyone, but one may a husband; that one must never pardon an insult, but one may give one, and so on. These principles were possibly not reasonable and not good, but they were of unfailing certainty, and so long as he adhered to them, Vronsky felt that his heart was at peace and he could hold his head up. (361) Here, too, we encounter a refusal to think about uncomfortable matters. Here, too, as in the passage about religion, it is not just one character who is on trial but a civilization; and while the reader is encouraged to pass judgment, he is surely expected to realize that his judgment will apply pre-eminently to himself.

Such passages are not reducible, in Trilling’s words, to this moment, or this, or this. The motifs of deception of oneself and others are absolutely central in Anna Karenina. Exoterically, the topic is unfaithfulness, but the really fundamental theme is bad faith.

Exoterically, the novel presents a story of two marriages, one good and one bad, but what makes it such a great novel is that the author is far above any simplistic black and white, good and bad, and really deals with the ubiquity of dishonesty and inauthenticity, and with the Promethean, the Faustian, or, to be precise, the Tolstoyan struggle against them.

Exoterically, the novel contains everything: a wedding, a near death, a real death, a birth, a hunt, a horse race, legitimate and illegitimate love, and legitimate and illegitimate lack of love. Unlike lesser writers, who deal with avowedly very interesting characters but ask us in effect to take their word for it that these men are very interesting, Tolstoy immerses us compellingly in the professional experiences and interests of his characters. The sketch of Karenina working in his study, for example (Part III, Chapter XIV), is no mere virtuoso piece. It is a cadenza in which the author’s irony is carried to dazzling heights, but it is also an acid study of inauthenticity.

When Tolstoy speaks of death—I had forgotten—death (413; cf. 444)—and, later, gives a detailed account of the death of Levin’s brother (571-93), this is not something to which one may refer as this moment, or this, or this, nor merely a remarkable anticipation of The Death of Ivan Ilyitch: it is another essential element in Tolstoy’s attack on inauthenticity. What in Anna Karenina, a novel of about one thousand pages, is one crucial element, becomes in The Death of Ivan Ilyitch the device for focusing the author’s central message in a short story. And confronted with this briefer treatment of the same themes, no reader is likely to miss the point and to respond with happiness.

All the passages cited so far from Anna Karenina come from the first half of the book, and they could easily be multiplied without going any further. Or, turning to Part V, one could point to the many references to dread and boredom, which, in the twentieth century, are widely associated with existentialism, and which become more and more important as the novel progresses. Or one could trace overt references to self-deception through the rest of the book: continually deceived himself with the theory... (562); this self-deception (587); deceived him and themselves and each other (590); and so forth. Or one could enumerate other anticipations of existentialism, like the following brief statement which summarizes pages and pages of Jaspers on extreme situations (Grenzsituationen): that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it. (831 f.) Instead, let us turn to the end of the novel.

Now for the first time Anna turned that glaring light in which she was seeing everything on to her relations with him, which she had hitherto avoided thinking about. (887) Thus begins her final, desperate struggle for honesty. On her way to her death she thinks that we are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. (892) Yet Tolstoy’s irony is relentless—much more savage, cruel, and hurtful than that of Shaw, who deals with ideas or types rather than with individual human beings. Tolstoy has often been compared with Homer—by Trilling among many others—but Homer’s heroes are granted a moment of truth as they die; they even see into the future. Not Anna, though numerous critics have accused the author of loving her too much—so much that it allegedly destroys the balance of the novel. Does he really love her at all? What she sees distinctly in the piercing light (888) is wrong; she deceives herself until the very end and, instead of recognizing the conscience that hounds her, projects attitudes into Vronsky that in fact he does not have. Like most readers, she does not understand what drives her to death, and at the very last moment, when it is too late, she tried to get up, to drop backwards; but something huge and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her back.

Did Tolstoy love her as much as Shakespeare loved Cleopatra, when he lavished all the majesty and beauty he commanded on her suicide? Anna’s death quite pointedly lacks the dignity with which Shakespeare allows even Macbeth to die. She is a posthumous sister of Goethe’s Gretchen, squashed by the way of some Faust or Levin, a Goethe or a Tolstoy. Her death, like Gretchen’s, is infinitely pathetic; in spite of her transgression she was clearly better than the society that condemned her; but what matters ultimately is neither Gretchen nor Anna but that in a world in which such cruelty abounds Faust and Levin should persist in their darkling aspiration.

Their aspirations, however, are different. Faust’s has little to do with society or honesty; his concern is pre-eminently with self-realization. Any social criticism implicit in the Gretchen tragedy is incidental. Tolstoy, on the other hand, was quite determined to attack society and bad faith, and when he found that people missed the point in Anna Karenina he resorted to other means. But there are passages in Anna Karenina that yield to nothing he wrote later, even in explicitness.

Here is a passage that comes after Anna’s death. It deals with Levin. She knew what worried her husband. It was his unbelief. Although, if she had been asked whether she supposed that in the future life, if he did not believe, he would be damned, she would have had to admit that he would be damned, his unbelief did not cause her unhappiness. And she, confessing that for an unbeliever there can be no salvation, and loving her husband’s soul more than anything in the world, thought with a smile of his unbelief, and told herself that he was absurd. (912)

Tolstoy’s interest in indicting bad faith does not abate with Anna’s death: it is extended to Kitty’s religion and to Russian patriotism. But in the end Levin’s unbelief is modified without any abandonment of the quest for honesty. He briefly went through, mentally, the whole course of his ideas during the last two years, the beginning of which was the clear confronting of death at the sight of his dear brother hopelessly ill. (926) And then his outlook is changed, but not, as some critics have said, into the effacing of the intellect in a cloud of happy mysticism (Encyclopaedia Britannic a, 11th ed.); far from it. The religious position intimated here is articulated with full force in the works reprinted in the present volume. Neither here nor there can I find any effacing of the intellect nor even what Trilling, at the end of his essay, calls the energy of animal intelligence that marks Tolstoi as a novelist. What awes me is perhaps the highest, most comprehensive, and most penetrating human intelligence to be found in any great creative writer anywhere.

These remarks about Anna Karenina should suffice to relate The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, How Much Land Does A Man Need?, My Religion, and Tolstoy’s reply to his excommunication, to his previous work. They show that he was not a great writer who suddenly abandoned art for tracts, and they may furnish what little explanation the writings reprinted here require. The world has been exceedingly kind to the author of War and Peace, but it has not taken kindly to the later Tolstoy. The attitude of most readers and critics to Tolstoy’s later prose is well summarized by some of our quotations from Anna Karenina: He did not want to see, and did not see....He did not want to understand, and did not understand....He did not allow himself to think about it, and he did not think about it....

What is true of most readers is not true of all. The exceptions include, above all, Mahatma Gandhi, whose gospel of nonviolence was flatly opposed to the most sacred traditions of his own religion. The Bhagavad-Gita, often called the New Testament of India, consists of Krishna’s admonition of Aryuna, who wants to forswear war when his army is ready for battle; and Krishna, a god incarnate, insists that Aryuna should join the battle, and that every man should do his duty, with his mind on Krishna and the transitoriness of all the things of the world and not on the consequences of his actions. The soldier should soldier, realizing that, ultimately, this world is illusory and he who thinks he slays does not really slay. It would be a gross understatement to say that Gandhi owed more to Tolstoy than he did to Hinduism.

Among philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose influence on British and American philosophy after World War II far exceeded that of any other thinker, had the profoundest admiration for Tolstoy; and when he inherited his father’s fortune, he gave it away to live simply and austerely. But his philosophy and his academic influence do not reflect Tolstoy’s impact.

Martin Heidegger, on the other hand, owes much of his influence to what he has done with Tolstoy. The central section of his main work, Being and Time, deals at length with death. It contains a footnote (original ed., 1927, p. 254): "L. N. Tolstoy, in his story, The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, has presented the phenomenon of the shattering and the collapse of this ‘one dies.’ One dies refers to the attitude of those who admit that one dies, but who do not seriously confront the fact that they themselves will die. In the chapter on Death" in my The Faith of a Heretic I have tried to show in some detail how "Heidegger on death is for the most part an unacknowledged commentary on The Death of Ivan Ilyitch"; also how Tolstoy’s story is far superior to Heidegger’s commentary. And one of the mottos of my book comes from Tolstoy’s Reply to the Synod’s Edict of Excommunication.

This Reply is relevant to the misleading suggestion that Anna Karenina is a Christian tragedy. First of all, Anna Karenina is not a tragedy. Not only is it a novel in form; it is essentially not a tragedy that ends in a catastrophe but an epic story that continues fittingly after Anna’s death to end with Levin’s achievement of more insight. Secondly, it is rather odd to hold up as an example of what is possible within Christianity a man formally excommunicated, a writer whose views have not been accepted by any Christian denomination—a heretic.

Tolstoy drew his inspiration in large measure from the Gospels. His intelligence and sensitivity were of the highest order. And whether we classify him as a Christian or a heretic, his late writings remain to challenge every reader who is honestly concerned with the New Testament or, generally, with religion. We shall return to Tolstoy again and again in the following pages. Other writers one can take or leave, read and forget. To ignore Tolstoy means impoverishing one’s own mind; and to read and forget him is hardly possible.

DOSTOEVSKY

Asked to name the two greatest novelists of all time, most writers would probably choose Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. They were contemporaries, Russian to the core, at home in English, French, and German literature, and deeply concerned with Christianity. But their interpretations of Christianity were as different as their temperaments and their artistic techniques.

Tolstoy thought the Christian message involved a radical criticism of society, and his conception of the gospel was social. Dostoevsky’s novels, on the other hand, urge the individual to repent of his sins; to accept social injustice because, no matter how harshly we may be treated, in view of our sinfulness and guilt we deserve no better; and not to pin our faith on social reforms. This message is particularly central in his last and greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Mitya, the victim of a miscarriage of justice, accepts his sentence willingly as a welcome penance. And his brother Ivan, though also legally innocent, considers himself no less guilty than the murderer.

Unlike Anna Karenina and Resurrection and most great novels, The Brothers Karamazov contains a sequence of two chapters which, though an integral part of the work, can also be read separately without doing an injustice either to this fragment or to the novel: the conversation between Ivan and Alyosha in which Ivan tells his story of the Grand Inquisitor. These chapters help to characterize the two brothers, and the views of the Grand Inquisitor are emphatically not the views of Dostoevsky: on the contrary, what is intended is an indictment of the Roman Catholic church—and probably also of such men as Jefferson and Mill and of the ideal of the pursuit of happiness.

When The Grand Inquisitor is read out of context, the immediately preceding chapter is generally ignored; but the story is more likely to be understood as it was meant to be by the author, if one includes the conversation that leads up to it. Moreover, Ivan’s vivid sketches of the sufferings of children deserve attention in their own right, and they help to place Royce’s attempt to solve the problem of suffering, reproduced later in this volume, in perspective. Oscar Wilde, too, will be found to develop some of the themes introduced here.

What makes the story of the Grand Inquisitor one of the greatest pieces of world literature is, first of all, that outside the Bible it would be hard to find another story of equal brevity that says so much so forcefully. Moreover, the story challenges some of the most confident convictions of Western Christians.

Reading the story merely as a diatribe against the Roman Catholic church and supposing that it stands or falls with its applicability to one religion is almost as foolish as supposing that the Inquisitor speaks the author’s mind. What is presented to us, backed up by powerful though not conclusive arguments, is one of the most important theories of all time, for which it would be good to have a name. I shall call it benevolent totalitarianism.

By totalitarianism I mean a theory which holds that the government may regulate the lives of the citizens in their totality. Whether this is feasible at the moment is not essential. For political reasons or owing to technological backwardness, a totalitarian government may not actually regulate the citizens’ lives in their totality: what matters is whether the government believes that it has the right to do this whenever it seems feasible.

In this sense, the governments of Hitler and Stalin were totalitarian; and their conduct explains, but does not justify, the popular assumption that totalitarianism is necessarily malignant. Ivan Karamazov submits that a man might honestly believe that, in the hands of wise rulers, totalitarianism would make men happier than any other form of government. The point is of crucial importance: what is at stake is the dogmatic and naive self-righteousness of Western statesmen who simply take for granted their own good faith, benevolence, and virtue and the lack of all these qualities in statesmen from totalitarian countries.

Dostoevsky’s point is not altogether new: the first book on political philosophy, written more than two thousand years ago—Plato’s Republic—presents a lengthy defense of benevolent totalitarianism. Some writers balk at calling it totalitarianism, mainly because they associate the word with malignancy. Others, seeing clearly that the doctrine of the Republic is totalitarian, have charged Plato with malignancy. A reading of Dostoevsky’s tale shows us at a glance where both camps have gone wrong.

Plato, moreover, develops his arguments over roughly three hundred pages, introducing a great wealth of other material, while the Grand Inquisitor takes less than twenty. This chapter, then, is one of the most important documents of social philosophy ever penned, and any partisan of civil liberties might well say, as John Stuart Mill did in his essay On Liberty: If there are any persons who contest a received opinion,...let us thank them for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoice that there is someone to do for us what we otherwise ought, if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality of our convictions, to do with much greater labor for ourselves.

Still, it may not be at all clear how the tale, if it is aimed at the Vatican, could also be aimed at Mill and Jefferson; and how, if it does not stand or fall with its applicability to Catholicism, it is important for religion. Both points depend on Dostoevsky’s repudiation of the pursuit of happiness.

The ideal of the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number—which, though this formulation is British, is nothing less than the American dream—seemed to Dostoevsky to justify benevolent totalitarianism. He thought we had to choose between Christ and this world, between freedom and happiness.

Dostoevsky might have echoed Luther’s words: Even if the government does injustice...yet God would have it obeyed....We are to regard that which St. Peter bids us regard, namely, that its power, whether it do right or wrong, cannot harm the soul....To suffer wrong destroys no one’s soul, nay, it improves the soul.{1} Or this quotation, also from Luther: There is to be no bondage because Christ has freed us all? What is all this? This would make Christian freedom fleshly!...Read St. Paul and see what he teaches about bondsmen....A bondsman can be a Christian and have Christian freedom, even as a prisoner and a sick man can be Christians, even though they are not free. This claim aims to make all men equal and to make a worldly, external kingdom of the spiritual kingdom of Christ. And this is impossible. For a worldly kingdom cannot exist unless there is inequality among men, so that some are free and others captive.{2}

In his politics, Dostoevsky, like Luther, was a radical authoritarian and an opponent of social reforms. His Christianity is concerned with the individual soul and its salvation; it is metaphysical, brooding, and preoccupied with guilt; it is otherworldly and content to give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. While Tolstoy wants to prepare the kingdom of God on earth, Dostoevsky seeks the kingdom only in the hearts of men. The tale of the Grand Inquisitor is meant as an indictment of all who would make Christian freedom fleshly.

Tolstoy staked his message on his reading of the New Testament, and his interpretations and assumptions are answered to some extent by various later writers in this volume, especially Enslin and Schweitzer. Dostoevsky’s bland assumption, on the other hand, that the pursuit of happiness must lead to totalitarianism, and that his Inquisitor is the nemesis of democracy, is not criticized by any of the other writers in this book and should therefore be questioned briefly at this point.

If democracy meant majority rule pure and simple, it would be compatible with totalitarianism. For democracy so understood, the men who framed the American Constitution held no brief, any more than Mill did. They were afraid of the possible tyranny of majorities and, to guard against that, devised an intricate system of checks and balances, a Constitution, and, amending that, a Bill of Rights. The whole point of the Bill of Rights is that the government may not regulate the lives of the citizens in their totality—not even if the majority should favor this. It might be objected that the Bill of Rights could be repealed. But that could be done only if the overwhelming majority of the people, and not those in one part of the country only, should insist on it over a long period of time; and in that case, of course, no framer of a constitution could prevent a revolutionary change. Any change of that sort, however, was made as difficult as possible.

What is incompatible with totalitarianism is not majority rule but belief in the overruling importance of civil liberties or human rights. You can have majority rule without civil liberties. Indeed, no country with effective guarantees of free speech and a free press is ever likely to accord its government the kind of majority endorsement which is characteristic of countries without free speech and a free press, from Hitler’s Germany to Nasser’s Egypt, with their 99 per cent votes for the Leader. But it may well be the case that, conversely, you cannot long protect the people’s civil liberties without introducing checks and balances including popular participation.

With this in mind, two answers could be given to Dostoevsky’s tale. First, human nature may be different from the Inquisitor’s conception of it. Three quarters of a century after the story first appeared, the people in West Germany were happier than those in East Germany. Freedom and happiness are compatible, and loss of liberty is likely to entail a great deal of unhappiness. Suffice it here to say that this is arguable—and that there has been a disturbing lack of argument. On the whole, democrats have considered this answer to the Inquisitor to be self-evident. Reading the tale again may convince at least some readers that it is not, and that much might be gained, even internationally, by developing this answer carefully instead of merely reiterating it dogmatically.

Second, one might answer, at least partly in Dostoevsky’s spirit: If a choice had to be made between freedom and happiness, we should choose freedom. But precisely for that reason I cannot agree with Dostoevsky’s and Luther’s authoritarian politics. I believe that freedom and happiness are compatible, but I should not base the case for freedom on this point. If a vicar of Christ or a secular Caesar or a drug discoverer found a way to give men happiness conjoined with imbecility and slavery, I should hold out for liberty.

Instead of saying that such an attitude would make Christian freedom fleshly, one might argue that in the New Testament Jewish freedom is made otherworldly; and it is noteworthy that both Luther and Calvin associated any attempt to realize freedom in this world with Moses and Judaism. For quotations and discussion, see The Faith of a Heretic.

PIUS IX AND LEO XIII

At just about the time when Dostoevsky penned Ivan Karamazov’s great attack on the Catholic church—the complete novel appeared in 1880—Pope Leo XIII issued one of the most important encyclicals of modern times, Aeterni Patris (1879). A revival of interest in St. Thomas Aquinas was under way even then, here and there, and the Pope decided to put the full weight of his enormous authority behind it. St. Thomas, incidentally, had supported the Inquisition with arguments, but emphatically not with the reasons of Ivan Karamazov’s Grand Inquisitor; rather, to save souls from perdition.

Leo XIII became pope in 1878, and this encyclical was one of his first. It has to be understood against the background of some of the momentous proclamations made during the papacy of his predecessor; and Ivan’s attack, too, may be understood more fully in this perspective.

When Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti became pope in 1846 and assumed the name of Pius IX, his temporal dominion reached from Terracina, roughly halfway from Rome to Naples, in the south, to the banks of the Po river in the north. He was the ruler not only of Rome but also of Ferrara and Bologna, Urbino and Rimini, Spoleto and Civitavecchia, to name only a few of the towns in this area. When he died in 1878, his temporal power was gone, and the lands over which he ruled had become part of the new kingdom of Italy, very much against his will. But even as he lost Rome, in 1870, the Vatican Council, which he had convened—the first church council since the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century—proclaimed the pope’s infallibility.

It is widely agreed that Mastai-Ferretti was a liberal when elected pope. At that time, Venetia and Lombardy were part of the Austrian empire, Tuscany was governed by a Hapsburg, the kingdom of Naples, comprising all of Italy south of the pope’s state, was all but an Austrian protectorate, and Metternich, Austria’s great arch-conservative statesman, used to guiding the temporal policies of the papacy, was appalled at the accession of a liberal. But the new Pope’s outlook changed quickly. In March 1848, there were popular uprisings in Milan, Venice, and Rome; and Austria’s troops were expelled from the first two cities. A provisional government was set up. The king of Sardinia marched into Lombardy and was hailed as the liberator of Italy. On April 8, the Sardinian army defeated the Austrians at Toito. On April 29, the Pope proclaimed his neutrality. On the following day the Sardinians won another battle, at Pastrengo. Then the tide turned: the Austrians triumphed at Vincenza and Custozza, an armistice was signed August 9, and Lombardy and Venetia were restored to Austria. Italian resentment against the Pope, however, mounted; Count de Rossi, who was trying to develop a moderately liberal policy for the Pope’s government, was assassinated; a radically democratic ministry was forced on the Pope; his Swiss guard was disbanded; and his protection was entrusted to the civil militia. Disguised as an ordinary priest, the Pope fled to Gaeta, in the kingdom of Naples, in November, and appealed from there for foreign intervention. The French sent troops into Italy. At first, they were defeated by Garibaldi; but in July 1849 the French were able to announce the restoration of the pontifical dominion, and in 1850 the Pope returned to Rome, no longer a liberal. The idea of Italian unity, of course, was far from dead; the fight continued; in 1860 the Pope was deprived of most of his state, and in 1870 he lost the rest. Yet this loss of territory and temporal power was not accompanied by any corresponding loss of spiritual power and influence; and this was largely due to Pius IX, who plucked victory from defeat, vastly increasing the prestige of the papacy.

This increase is not adequately reflected in the concordats negotiated by Pius IX. One concluded with Spain in 1851 proclaimed Roman Catholicism the sole religion of the Spanish people, to the exclusion of every other creed; another, signed with Ecuador in 1862, was similar; a third, with Austria, signed in 1855, abolished all kinds of previous reforms and entrusted the supervision of schools and the censorship of literature to the Catholic clergy; and concordats were also concluded with various German states. But some of these agreements were soon revoked by the countries concerned.

The permanent importance of Pius IX is tied to his proclamation of the dogma of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary (1854), to the Syllabus of Errors (1864), and to the doctrine of the pope’s infallibility "when he speaks ex cathedra defining a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the universal Church" (1870). These documents are offered here, along with the encyclical Aeterni Patris, issued by Leo XIII.

Many Catholic scholars have taken pains to point out that papal encyclicals are not necessarily infallible. Neither are they just ordinary human pronouncements. Father Thomas Peguès explained the matter in an article in Revue Thomiste (1904) which is quoted by Anne Fremantle in her edition of The Papal Encyclicals in Their Historical Context (1956): "‘The authority of the encyclicals is not at all the same as that of the solemn definitions ex cathedra. These demand an assent without reservations and make a formal act of faith obligatory.’ He insists, however, that the authority of the encyclicals is undoubtedly great: ‘It is, in a sense, sovereign. It is the teaching of the supreme pastor and teacher of the Church. Hence the faithful have a strict obligation to receive this teaching with infinite respect. A man must not be content simply to not contradict it openly...an internal mental assent is demanded." In sum, while a formal act of faith is not obligatory, an internal mental assent is demanded.

Etienne Gilson, widely considered the leading Thomist scholar of the twentieth century, tells us How to Read the Encyclicals (in The Church Speaks to the Modern World: The Social Teachings of Leo XIII): When a Pope writes such a document...he knows very well that each and every sentence, word, noun, epithet, verb, and adverb found in his written text is going to be weighed, searched, and submitted to the most careful scrutiny by a crowd of countless readers scattered over the surface of the earth. And not only this, but the same anxious study of his pronouncements will be carried on by still many more readers, including his own successors, for generation after generation. This thought should be to us an invitation to approach these texts in a spirit of reverence and of intellectual modesty....When it seems to us that an encyclical cannot possibly say what it says, the first thing to do is to make a new effort to understand exactly what it does actually say. Most of the time it will then be seen that we had missed...[something crucial]....When one of us objects to the pretention [sic] avowed by the Popes to state, with full authority, what is true and what is false, or what is right and what is wrong, he is pitting his own personal judgment, not against the personal judgment of another man, but against the whole ordinary teaching of the Catholic Church as well as against her entire tradition....The Church alone represents the point of view of a moral and spiritual authority free from all prejudices.

Not only most non-Catholics but also millions of Catholics think of papal pronouncements and of the positions of the church as more monolithic and far simpler than they generally turn out to be on close examination. In the encyclical Aeterni Patris, reprinted here, the reader should not overlook that the Pope qualifies his call to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas by explaining: We say the wisdom of St. Thomas; for it is not by any means in our mind to set before this age, as a standard, those things which may have been inquired into by Scholastic Doctors with too great subtlety; or anything taught by them with too little consideration, not agreeing with the investigations of a later age; or, lastly, anything that is not probable.

The pervasiveness of this difficulty, that texts do not necessarily mean what they seem to say at first glance, is well illustrated by an issue that engendered controversy in the twentieth century. All the principal beliefs of Catholicism are summed up in the Profession of Faith which is made by converts on their entrance into the Catholic Church and by all candidates for the priesthood before ordination. It is a fitting conclusion for this book, says John Walsh, S.J., before reprinting it at the end of This is Catholicism (1959). The profession comprises less than three whole pages, but is very compact and rich in content, as the following sentence may show: I hold unswervingly that purgatory exists and that the souls there detained are aided by the intercessory prayers of the faithful; also that the saints who reign with Christ are to be venerated and invoked; that they offer prayers to God for us; and that their relics are to be venerated. The final paragraph begins: This true Catholic faith, outside of which no one can be saved.... A little earlier in the book, on page 359, we are similarly assured that membership in the Catholic Church, the mystical body of Christ, is the solitary means of salvation. Apart from the Church, exclusive of it, independently of it, there exists absolutely no possibility of attaining heaven. But immediately after these seemingly unequivocal assurances, the question is raised, Does this signify that all who are not actually members of the Catholic Church will be lost? and the answer is: Certainly not.

The difficulty is promptly explained: One does not contradict the other. When a person...makes an act of perfect contrition, he must simultaneously determine, as we saw, to accomplish everything which he judges necessary to attain salvation. Now since the Catholic Church is, in fact, the sole means of salvation, a non-Catholic’s resolve to do everything needful to gain heaven is, objectively considered, exactly equivalent to a resolve to belong to the Catholic Church. The two resolves automatically merge; one coincides with the other. A non-Catholic is unaware, certainly, of the identity of the two....He may never have heard of the Catholic Church. Or he may...be quite indifferent to it. Or...he may be quite hostile to it and consequently would indignantly deny that his desire to please God coalesced in any way, shape, or fashion with a desire to join Catholicism. Such subjective misapprehensions on his part would not alter the objective fact, however. A sincere desire for salvation coincides necessarily with a desire to belong to the Catholic Church....Strange as it may seem, therefore, a non-Catholic who sincerely yearns to do everything necessary for salvation (even when he believes that one of the requisites for salvation is to condemn Catholicism!) (Jn. 16:2) is, all unconsciously, longing to be a Catholic. Now this unconscious longing God recognizes as a substitute for belonging...as the equivalent of real membership....The answer..., then, still stands: outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation.

It is not only the Imprimatur at the beginning of Walsh’s book that assures us that this is not contrary to the doctrines of the church. When Leonard Feeney, S.J., insisted that there was literally no salvation outside the church, and that only Catholics could be saved, and he persisted, Archbishop Cushing of Boston suspended him from the priesthood in April 1949, and the Jesuits expelled him in October 1949. And when he did not follow a summons to the Vatican, he was excommunicated in February 1953.

By assembling excerpts from official pronouncements, one is quite apt to mislead the reader seriously. Even when we read entire encyclicals, we have to keep in mind that they must be studied with uncommon care, and that they have given rise to a large exegetic literature. Nor do the commentators always agree.

These cautions apply also to the Syllabus of Errors, issued in 1864. Details of interpretation may be arguable, but the documents offered here indicate at the very least the direction in which Pius IX and Leo XIII sought to influence the church of their time, and it is doubtful whether any later pope has equaled their influence.

Critics of the Roman Catholic church have called these documents symptoms of reaction. In the literal, non-pejorative sense, they certainly represent a reaction to much that is modern and the emphatic advice to ponder the attainments of a former age. But if this is called reaction, Protestant theology in the twentieth century has also been marked by reaction. If, on the other hand, the Protestant theologians are called neo-orthodox, it might be fairer to say that the Roman Catholic church spearheaded neo-orthodoxy.

There are in the twentieth century many Catholic theologians who emphatically do not consider themselves Thomists. There is a good deal of discussion, and not all of it is concerned with matters of exegesis, though most of it is. But the kind of radical re-examination of century-old traditions for which Tolstoy called has been altogether ruled out.

NIETZSCHE

With Friedrich Nietzsche we suddenly encounter an altogether different atmosphere: instead of criticizing Christendom, he attacks Christianity itself; and he does this with less inhibitions and greater passion than any major writer before him. For all that, his Antichrist, written in 1888 and first published in 1895, shows the influence of both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

Not only the content of the following remark (§29) but also the image of the key recalls Tolstoy’s My Religion: ‘resist not evil’—the most profound word of the Gospels, their key in a certain sense. But this saying is not interpreted as Tolstoy interpreted it, as a social programme. On the contrary, Nietzsche’s conception of Jesus is derived from Dostoevsky, of whom Nietzsche said in his Twilight of the Idols, completed just before The Antichrist, that he was the only psychologist, by the way, from whom I have learned something. (§45) Nietzsche pictured Jesus in the image of Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, the hero of The Idiot—one of the most lovable and saintly characters of world literature, albeit deeply pathological.

Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity is so detailed and complex that no brief selection can give any adequate idea of it; but one cannot for that reason omit him altogether. For he strikes a new and epoch-making note.

A detailed analysis of Nietzsche’s Repudiation of Christ will be found in Chapter 12 of my Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. My own views of Jesus and Paul, which differ sharply from Nietzsche’s, are developed in Chapter 8 of The Faith of a Heretic. Here it may suffice to remark that Nietzsche’s conception of Jesus seems to me highly implausible, but that I should say as much of most reconstructions of Jesus’ character. At least, Nietzsche’s is more thought-provoking than most. But if I had to pick a single section from The Antichrist to give some idea of Nietzsche’s importance as a critic of Christianity, I should select section 45, the last one of those reprinted here. No thoughtful reader will accept all of the points Nietzsche makes, any more than most readers will accept all of Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s points; but here Nietzsche raises questions which are raised all too rarely.

JAMES AND CLIFFORD

With the possible exception of John Dewey, no American philosopher is better known than William James. Many people who are interested in religion are uneasy about Dewey, who was clearly a humanist, while they like James. Unlike Dewey, he is even forgiven his pragmatism; and his Principles of Psychology (2 vols., 1890) and his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) are often praised extravagantly. That he was a fine human being, there seems to be no doubt; but whether he was a great thinker is another question, and most philosophers would probably agree that he fell short, of being first-rate.

Of his essays on religion, none has attracted more attention and discussion than The Will to Believe. It represents an attempt to defend against the inroads of agnosticism what James later wished he might have called the right to believe. He himself did not happen to believe in the God of Christianity but rather, as he explained in A Pluralistic Universe (1909), in a finite god—a force for good that lacks omnipotence, omniscience, and perfection.

In the section on Faith, evidence, and James (§37) in my Critique, I have tried to show by way of a detailed analysis that James’ essay on ‘The Will to Believe’ is an unwitting compendium of common fallacies and a manual of self-deception. The reason for nevertheless including the essay here is that it raises some of the most interesting problems about religious beliefs, and anyone who cares to give himself an account of the demands of intellectual integrity can hardly do better than to reflect critically on James’ argument.

To include the essay only in order to tear it down would not be in keeping with the spirit of this volume. But what is entirely in keeping with that spirit is to include the essay that prompted James’ attack: William Kingdon Clifford’s article on The Ethics of Belief. That way, the reader gets two different views of the same problem and is led to ask himself: which, if either, of these men is right—and what do I myself think?

James’ essay has often been reprinted; but though he explicitly refers to Clifford’s piece, few indeed have read that; and it is not easy to find unless one has ready access to a large library. Here, for once, the two essays are offered together.

ROYCE

Josiah Royce was James’ younger colleague in the Harvard Philosophy Department, and it was characteristic of James that he brought Royce to Harvard, knowing that Royce’s position differed markedly from his own. Royce was an Idealist, in the tradition of Hegel; and the butt of many of James’ attacks on Hegel was really his friend Royce. In fact, Royce was no out-and-out Hegelian, and his interpretations of Hegel are often questionable if not clearly wrong. James criticizing Hegel is sometimes closer to the real Hegel than Royce was.

In his time, around the turn of the century, Royce was extremely influential as a member of the dominant school of American philosophy. While Idealism was then no longer in fashion in Germany, it was the philosophy of the age in England and the United States. But before long, a reaction set in, spearheaded by G. E. Moore’s paper, The Refutation of Idealism, published in England in 1903; and by the middle of the twentieth century hardly any English-speaking Idealists were left.

The problem of suffering is one of the most important and interesting issues of religious thought. It is powerfully presented by Ivan Karamazov in our selection from Dostoevsky. Royce’s critical survey of unacceptable solutions is certainly impressive. His own attempt at a solution is typical of the manner in which many Idealists sought a holy alliance with Christianity and invites comparison with the procedure of many theologians: instead of openly repudiating Christian theism and embracing pantheism, Royce, when denying that God is separate from this world, assures us that this denial is the immortal soul of the doctrine of the divine atonement.

Like most people, Royce did not read the Book of Job very carefully; and when he claims that Job’s problem is, upon Job’s presuppositions, simply and absolutely insoluble, Royce is surely mistaken. He assumes falsely that God’s justice and moral perfection are among Job’s presuppositions. In fact, Job emphatically denies both, and the Lord in the