By Alfred North Whitehead
In the gradual emergence of mankind from absorption in the habits of its animal ancestors, thought extended itself beyond immediate animal necessities and animal affections. It generalized itself and answered subconscious questions about the world. In this way cosmology was developed, in every tribe and race. The answers were clearer than the questions. They consisted in attributing a wide significance to immediate experience. What men did to each other, the powers of the world were doing to them. The answer came first. It required incipient civilization to frame the question: it required a more advanced civilization to criticize the pre-existing answer which was rooted in immemorial habit of thought and action.
‘The mind of Latin Christendom’ in the age of Augustine was a brilliant culmination of this critical process, as it developed in the civilizations between India and the Atlantic Ocean. No religion develops in a vacuum. Its growth is a re-adjustment of ideas already active. Every New Testament is based upon an Old Testament. Religion is the action and reaction between cosmological thought, and emotion, and purposeful activity. We must not divide human experience into three separated facts. Thought, emotion, and activity are three aspects of the one concrete fact of human experience. The Thought and activity are two aspects of the external relation of the experience to the world beyond. Emotion is the internal experience of worth, which gives its meaning to thought and its purpose to activity, and which receives its own content from thought and activity. The uprise of human nature is due to that mutual enhancement of content and definition, which each of these factors obtains from its vivid interplay with the other two. This enhancement is the advance of revelation. In this sense, the uprise of humanity is the outcome of religion, and religion belongs to those who enjoy that direct sense of value which may be termed revelation. In the animal phases of life, the notions of thought and purpose must be replaced by simpler notions of reception and transmission. But we are discussing the higher phase.
Revelation is not the final stage of religious experience. Criticism arises. This critical stage is partly destructive and partly constructive, and in either character can be good or evil. This phase is produced when consciousness penetrates downwards to the primary origin of experience, namely, to the bare facts of reception and transmission. It is the comparison of religion with fact.
The phase of criticism is contentious and unpopular. In the Hebrew legend Satan was the first critic, and in the Hellenic epic Thersites performs the same service. In both legends the critic creates the evils which he criticizes. So far as our direct experience is concerned, the maladjustments of nature precede the criticism. Socrates did not produce the evils of Athenian life.
Religion has been purified by this final phase, — on the whole. All the civilized religions are the outcome of criticism; and the delicacies of moral judgment have been thereby introduced.
Every advance intensifies some characteristic evil. The purification of religion by criticism has brought into the foreground hatred. For example, Christianity which originated as a religion of love has introduced into its popularised expression the lower forms of hatred. In later history Christian officials hate their adversaries, and torment them. The practice of the religion is thus suffused with the horrors of hatred. In reading ecclesiastical history one longs for the Athenian pagans who removed their finest moralist by the kindly device of a cup of hemlock.
The repulsion from evil which is a necessary characteristic of any civilized conception of God is expressed in terms of those lower forms of emotional feeling characteristic of earthly tyrants.
The moral dangers attendant upon the intensification of moral feeling have not been sufficiently explored. Highly intellectual people are peculiarly liable to attacks of hatred when their moral natures have reached an excitable level. Two sources of annoyance coalesce. There is the intellectual annoyance at intellectual error. All people whose profession is teaching must have felt the necessity of guarding themselves against an ill-tempered reaction to the errors of pupils. Even if we are not aware of our own lapses in this direction,. we all can observe these lapses in our colleagues: — ‘Conscious as we are of each others’ deficiencies’ was once proposed as the opening phrase of an address to the Crown by the English judges of the High Court. It applies to Faculties of Universities, and to Theologians.
The second source of hatred is the moral reaction against evil. This is the most dangerous source, because it is so unguarded. Precautions seem unnecessary, so that people let themselves go so far as emotion is concerned. It appears so obvious that our reaction against evil cannot be excessive. This belief is quite justified; but it presupposes one condition — namely, that the source and character of the evil be exactly defined amidst the confused factors of human experience. Perhaps this difficulty is the reason for the restrained moral in the Parable of ‘The Wheat and the Tares’ — ‘Let both grow tog ether until the harvest’.
This perversion of moral feeling into unguarded hatred has had two distinct unfortunate effects on the development of the Christian religion. One of the effects is concerned with theology; the other is concerned with activities promoted by the influence of the Church. The two effects are not wholly independent; but it is better to consider them separately, with occasional references to their interaction. The development of religious thought towards a coherent theology has been a slow gradual process, coeval with the uprise of human mentality from its primitive brutality. The Old Testament, the New Testament, and the records of Christian Theology up to the present day constitute a wonderful record of this process within the races of the Western world.
Here the phrase ‘Western World’ means the lands and populations lying westward from Mesopotamia across Europe, populations lying westward from Mesopotamia across Europe, across the Atlantic Ocean, and across America to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. It also stretches in time from about 1000 B.C. to the present day.
In addition to this uprise of delicate moral feeling there are three other factors to be noticed as surviving throughout these records. These factors are, first the survival of inherited brutality of thought, second the sense of inherited treasure to be preserved, and third the sense of attainment of clear finality respecting some limited objectives of thought.
Thus the history of western religion is to be understood in terms of these four characterizations, namely, vivid moral feelings liable to pass into hatred, the survival of ancestral brutality, the sense of priceless value, and the sense of finality of understanding respecting definite objectives. The delicate beauty of the religious life is derived from the sense of value and understanding. Its historical exemplification is closely entwined with the evil characters of hatred and brutality. The brutality is a survival from the primitive level of animal life. There is no reason to believe that the tiger hates the animal as he tears it to pieces. He enjoys its emotional reactions to his own energy. This is brutality, not hatred. It is the enjoyment of dominance amid servitude, where the servitude is made evident by the pain endured. Brutality can be cruelty without hatred.
It is unfortunate that our need of food depends on the destruction of lower forms of life; although having regard to the comparative lack of foresight among animals, this destruction is not necessarily cruel. But it is apt to foster the survival of brutality. We can comfort ourselves by the thought that, if the lives of sheep and lambs in the springtime are good elements in the universe, there is more of it in the world by reason of our habit of eating mutton.
In any case there is the fact of primitive brutality always in the background, ready to emerge.
Hatred is a high-grade feeling, the product of civilization. In the origins of civilized life, it intensifies brutality by introducing an intellectual justification. The gods of primitive civilization exhibit brutality intensified by hatred. The result is the boastful exultation of horrid power, enjoyed alike by kings, despots and gods.
In the changeful evolution of living things, there are stages of stability, each stage being marked by a species of living things exhibiting analogies characteristic of the stage. Thus in certain stages of human nature a fusion of brutality, hatred, and animal vigour, issues into a boastful enjoyment which is favourable to preservation of a social system at that level. But it halts progress by stifling the delicacies of higher intuition. The drums and trumpets drown the violin and the nightingale. Certain types of art, especially of music and poetry, are characteristic of this stage.
Hatred, in the vicious sense of the term, is the emotional reaction to the recognition of antagonistic forms of existence, when that recognition is unrestrained by adequate definition of the grounds of antagonism. In other words, hatred arises when limited intelligence perceives antagonism without recognition of its own limitations.
When this recognition of limitation is present vicious hatred is reduced to ‘repulsion’. This use of terms is somewhat arbitrary because language is very naïve in its treatment of this topic. Self-preservation of the excellencies of a form of life repels factors which are inconsistent with it. But it can also recognize that in other environments those factors can produce other excellencies. Thus hatred is the emotion of repulsion devoid of its proper qualifications. The difficulty is to preserve an adequate activity of repulsion, devoid of vicious hatred.
It is now time to apply these ideas to the history of religious thought in its gradual emergence in Syria and Greece, and its diffusion throughout the Mediterranean region and thence into Western Europe, as it gradually separates from the Eastern life.
The Bible contains the history of the gradual civilization of religion throughout Syria and the Aegean region. Of course, the Old Testament is ancient history written up from a later point of view. It evidently embodies traditions more ancient than the period o:f the writers.
There are two ways of considering this book. The critical historian seeks exactly what happened. He would be glad to know the number of pieces into which Agag was divided. This is ‘pure history’. The social psychologists wonder how people felt; how their formulated ideas interpreted their emotions, and how their emotions spurred on the creation of ideas. We are concerned with the latter point of view — namely, the interplay of emotion and idea. Indeed, this is the centre of interest in the whole story as it culminates in the Gospels. The facts have the significance of parables, and parables are immortal facts alive today. The incidents of the journey from Jerusalem to Jericho, which never happened, might have happened yesterday probably they did happen yesterday on exactly the same route. Also the wedding feast, however it actually happened, is for us a Platonic myth, namely, a parable of continual relevance. The essential interest throughout these narratives is the interplay of emotion and idea.
In this respect the importance of an idea is that it should purify emotion, and the importance of emotion is that it should vivify ideas. For this reason, according to the Gospels, women of the town who· have retained the delicacies of this interplay are, from the religious point of view, superior to Scribes and Pharisees.
But ‘Scribes and Pharisees.’ have their essential function in the uprise of humanity. They are the learned people who reason from premises understood with apparent clarity. This Pharisaic function is illustrated by the influence of mathematics in the uprise of modern. science. No sensible person can deny its importance. It is the process of rationalization. This process has two aspects. In one aspect it is the exposition of clear notions, mutually consistent. This aspect may be termed ‘clarification’. These notions are derived from the welter of comparatively vague experience produced by the primary interplay of emotion and idea. Until the development of ‘clarification’ this interplay is judged aesthetically — good or bad. This is the type of judgment predominating in those portions of the Bible which retain a modern appeal. Clarification introduces the notions of accuracy, and of truth and falsehood as accurately tested. It bases itself upon a narrow selection from the primary welter of human experience.
A secondary function of Rationalism then arises. Deductive Logic discloses the details of pattern hidden in the vague notion of the coordinate validity of a group of clarified concepts. Thus Rationalism is based on the notions of exact clarification, of coordinate validity and of deductions disclosing the details of pattern involved in their coordination. This is the rationalistic development of experience.
We have thus discriminated two modes for the development of experience. One mode is by the esthetic and moral interplay of emotion and idea. The other mode is by the coordination of exact concepts, the objective of the one mode is ‘value’, and of the other mode is ‘truth’
Also ‘value’ is enhanced by ‘truth’, and ‘truth’ is futile without ‘value. ‘
The history of the religious evolution which issued in the Christian Religion illustrates this sketch of the relevant psychology.
The Old Testament depicts the gradual rise of religious insight. At first the animal brutality of primitive man seems to be enhanced by the justification of religion. But gradually the purification due to the interplay of emotion with aesthetic and moral insight makes itself felt. The sheer brutality is in the background. Human sacrifice is replaced by symbolism; although God is conceived as capable of occasionally demanding it. But on the whole the type of religious feeling based upon value receives beautiful expression in the poetry, the prophetic books, and the history of the Old Testament. And yet some of the Psalms are unfit for religious worship; and some of the prophets, and some of the historic narratives exhibit the surviving brutality. Gradually learning makes itself felt. Its secondary stage of deductive reasoning is strangely absent. But its primary stage of the collection of ideas, exactly stated and mutually consistent, is prominent. In this way, the Hebrew religion attains its final civilization. It is also tainted with the moral pitfall of civilized thought, namely hatred and contempt. The weakness of science and of religion purified by scientific method is the phase of dogmatic self-satisfaction. The history of thought should expose the folly of this state of mind. But each succeeding age recognizes thin folly in its ancestry; and for itself plunges into the same pitfall of self-satisfaction.
The New Testament is concerned wit h a culmination of Hebrew Religion in which the two modes of developing experience, namely, the aesthetic and the analytic, are combined in a fortunate manner. Great periods in human development depend on such fortunate combinations. Such periods are transitory because the conditions for their production belong to the accidents of history.
It is obvious that vividness, intensity, and variety of value-experience, with the minimum of frustration, is the ideal. Frustration — however vivid, intense, and various — is evil. Indeed it is evil· in proportion to its realization of these three characteristics. If this definition of Ideal Aim be accepted, it is obvious that the aesthetic mode of development of experience, involving fortunate interplay of emotion and idea, represents the dominant objective. The second mode of analytic coordination, which includes science and the pursuit of analytic understanding, is a secondary proceedure [sic] with its justification in its services to the former mode. For example, any one who defends the importance of science by reference to its practical applications is admitting this point of view. For he is appealing to the increased variety of aesthetic experience thereby attained. Also science for its own sake is the satisfaction of’ curiosity by the increase of detailed analysis.
Thus a great period arises when knowledge is passing fortunately into aesthetic experience. When knowledge represents merely a dry complexity of thought divorced from aesthetic (including, moral) reaction, — at such times civilization is in decay, not reaping its proper reward. Thus when learning overwhelms the variety of aesthetic enjoyments, including religion and moral impulse, life becomes futile. There is a proper moderation to learning dictated by its services to the ends of human life.
The great periods in history arise when this fortunate moderation is attained. For example in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this balance was sporadically obtained in Western Europe. Such men as Erasmus, and Sir Thomas More and Milton, balanced their learning with aesthetic enjoyment; and such men as Cervantes and Shakespeare developed their aesthetic activity with learning sufficient to supply an adequacy of differentiation. On the other hand the English scholar Bentley illustrates the deadness of mere learning. Of course, Dante and Leonardo Da Vinci are outstanding examples of the fusion of Learning with Aesthetic Experience. They illustrate the meaning of the word ‘Revelation’. The merit of religious or artistic ages is that they restrain the excessive emphasis on learning; and the merit of learned ages is that they undermine feeble repetitions of religion or art. In great ages there is a fortunate balance. Such a fortunate balance is exhibited by the period of Jewish History with which the New Testament is concerned. Jerusalem was the seat of a learned class, the Scribes and Pharisees. They were analysing the ideas inherent in their religious literature and expressing them in coherent phraseology. They embodied learning, deficient in stimulation for the more delicate aesthetic and moral modes of experience.
Galilee was the home of a peasantry stimulated by its traditional literature and fortunately enlightened by the analysis of ideas derived from the learning of Jerusalem. The state of mind of this peasantry was analogous to that of Shakespeare in his relation to the learning of the later Renaissance. It is quite unnecessary for my present purpose to decide between the various shades of orthodoxy and liberalism in the interpretation of the issue of this state of affairs.
It is also unnecessary to discriminate between actual history and parable. It is sufficient to note that the Gospels exhibit an astounding beauty of moral feeling, and of delicate sensibility. It is the tale of the victory of love over brutality and hatred. It stretches from the Babe in a Manger, to the Man wandering homeless, to the Man on the Cross. It expresses his victory over brute force.
However you may construe it, this narrative is the foundation from which the Christian Religion arose. It was a revelation of the religious ideal, respecting the action and re-action between cosmological thought, and emotion, and purposeful activity. It discarded brutality, and was untouched by hatred. The first intellectual analysis of the verbal tradition, namely that tradition from which in later years the written Gospels were derived, was undertaken by a converted Pharisee, Paul who was previously termed Saul. In his hands the wrathful God ominously balances the loving God and the sorrowing God. In the subsequent history of Christianity clashes of hatred loom large. Unless your verbal doctrine is accurate, without doubt you will perish everlastingly. The first period of intellectual analysis was centered in Syria and Egypt. For example, during the crisis in which this period culminated Arius and Athanasius are residents of Egypt, and Eusebius of Caesarea lived in North Palestine. The Egyptians were men with exact formulae; while Eusebius clung to the vaguer statements of the previous age, and only reluctantly adopted the clear-cut phrases of Athansius.
This attitude of Eusebius as contrasted with that of the two Egyptians illustrates a curious cleavage in the Church of the Roman Empire. Egypt, North Africa, and in final period Spain, provided the soil from which exact statements emanated. Whereas the countries bordering on the northern shore of the Mediterranean were hesitant in their enforcement of such exactness. For the Africans, exactness of verbal statement seemed to be an end in itself. For the Northern section of the Church, verbal statements seem to be conceived as secondary means for the aesthetic realization of religious experience. Eusebius only anticipated the dominant attitude of the Papacy through many generations.
Along the southern shores of the Mediterranean, from Egypt to Hippo, from Hippo to Spain, we pass through cities and districts which in the course of five hundred years produced accurate thinkers, heretical and orthodox. On the whole they subordinated love to accuracy. This subordination-fostered hate. It was assumed that God preferred exact verbal expression to loving kindliness. In the result, the strife of theologians became a debasing element to moral level of the religion. On the northern shores of the Mediterranean a more kindly spirit seems to have survived with a flickering vitality. The Papacy steered a middle course. It was orthodox with a tendency towards adjustments of compromise. At a later period, Ambrose seems to have hesitated in respect to the persecution of heretics. Martin of Tours was shocked at their execution. In distant Britain, Pelagius conceived the Deity as with kindly thoughts towards all mankind.
The southerners were the abler men. The danger of such thinkers, with a keen sense of the importance of truth, is that they exaggerate the value of the tools of their profession. A mathematician cherishes his symbols. He dotes on their accuracy of expression. A logician tends to see nothing beyond his clear sentences and his necessary deductions. An unbalanced emphasis on accuracies of expression is the result of narrow vision. It betokens inability to discriminate factors in experience as yet imperfectly analysed, andas yet unexpressed in words. The genius of poetry is the expression of such factors, hitherto unsymbolised. The vagueness of poetry results from the fact that the analysis of this initial expression again requires generations of experience before it attains adequate verbal expression of detail. The prose of thought lags behind the insight of aesthetic experience. The Poetry is where the common symbolism of language first touches that inward revelation by which human nature embraces the majesty of the Universe.
The trust in adequacy of verbal expression is a measure of narrowness of conscious experience. Verbal learning, divorced from direct experience, is the perpetual danger of civilization. In saying this, I am merely recalling the attitude of the Gospel narrative toward little children — ‘Of such is the Kingdom of heaven’. Augustine was primarily a North African, born in Numidia. His exact racial inheritance may be doubtful. But the social atmosphere surrounding him was beyond doubt African. However during a few critical years in his early thirties, he lived in North Italy. These few years included the crisis of his conversion, under the influence of St. Ambrose, and of his mother. Thus the impress of his Christianity was largely northern.· But his subsequent life was again African. These well-known facts are here mentioned, because by reason of his personal genius Augustine was a figure on whom in many ways the subsequent development of Western Christianity depended. Apart from special doctrine, Christian learning of the first epoch culminated in him, and Christian learning of the Western mediaeval revival derived from him. In considering the psychology of Christians as derived from their learning, what was the influence of Augustine? He was the culminating point on which the whole development balanced.
Augustine wavered. He was conscious of his own struggles during the first five and thirty years of his life. Probably any doctrine as to the relation of learning to religious experience can be deduced by a judicious selection of his sayings. But in fact his final influence for posterity was on the side of a narrow orthodoxy and the forcible suppression of heretics. He approved of their execution. It seems that Ambrose had hesitated on this point, and St. Martin of Tours was shocked. At an earlier period even Athanasius had put aside such notions. But at the critical moment Augustine with his enormous influence took the other side. Christianity developed as the religion tainted with hatred derived from the self-confidence of analytic learning Fanatics conceived the end of the Christian life to be adherence to the right formula. Many lapses of conduct could be condoned by adherence to a rigid orthodoxy. The truly religious use of formulae, as one subordinate means of stimulating delicacies of emotion inspiring purpose, was thrust into the background. If Augustine had taken the other side, the horrors of later Christian persecutions might have been restrained. Perhaps they were inevitable. And yet, to all appearance, Augustine had his chance and missed it. He bequeathed to the future a concept of the Deity as tinged with human hatred. Perhaps this was not the dominant state of mind in which his own personal life was passed. But it was his legacy to the future. The Pharisaic spirit dominated over the Gospel message.
At the present moment there is a widespread relapse into the worst mixture of primitive brutality and hatred. And yet these are grounds for hope. At no other time in the life of the western peoples have various religious influences, derived from leaders and popular response, exhibited so close a likeness to the Galilee of Gospel History. In this new spirit the last flicker of decaying religion as it fades out of human life! Or, Is it the first sign of a new epoch of vigorous revival?
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The original document, in it’s typewritten and handwritten form, can be found on the website of the Whitehead Research Project (WRP). I copied the PDF, transcribed what handwriting there was, and formatted the document for presentation on this site.
According to Victor Lowe, in his book Understanding Whitehead (Chapter 4), the date of this paper is 30 March 1939.
—HyC