Books: Preface to Androcles and the Lion
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GEORGE BERNARD SHAW >> Preface to Androcles and the Lion
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JUDGE NOT.
In dealing with crime and the family, modern thought and
experience have thrown no fresh light on the views of Jesus. When
Swift had occasion to illustrate the corruption of our
civilization by making a catalogue of the types of scoundrels it
produces, he always gave judges a conspicuous place alongside of
them they judged. And he seems to have done this not as a
restatement of the doctrine of Jesus, but as the outcome of his
own observation and judgment. One of Mr. Gilbert Chesterton's
stories has for its hero a judge who, whilst trying a criminal
case, is so overwhelmed by the absurdity of his position and the
wickedness of the things it forces him to do, that he throws off
the ermine there and then, and goes out into the world to live
the life of an honest man instead of that of a cruel idol. There
has also been a propaganda of a soulless stupidity called
Determinism, representing man as a dead object driven hither and
thither by his environment, antecedents, circumstances, and so
forth, which nevertheless does remind us that there are limits to
the number of cubits an individual can add to his stature morally
or physically, and that it is silly as well as cruel to torment a
man five feet high for not being able to pluck fruit that is
within the reach of men of average height. I have known a case of
an unfortunate child being beaten for not being able to tell the
time after receiving an elaborate explanation of the figures on a
clock dial, the fact being that she was short-sighted and
could not see them. This is a typical illustration of the
absurdities and cruelties into which we are led by the
counter-stupidity to Determinism: the doctrine of Free Will. The
notion that people can be good if they like, and that you should
give them a powerful additional motive for goodness by tormenting
them when they do evil, would soon reduce itself to absurdity if
its application were not kept within the limits which nature sets
to the self-control of most of us. Nobody supposes that a man
with no ear for music or no mathematical faculty could be
compelled on pain of death, however cruelly inflicted, to hum all
the themes of Beethoven's symphonies or to complete Newton's work
on fluxions.
LIMITS TO FREE WILL.
Consequently such of our laws as are not merely the intimidations
by which tyrannies are maintained under pretext of law, can be
obeyed through the exercise of a quite common degree of reasoning
power and self-control. Most men and women can endure the
ordinary annoyances and disappointments of life without
committing murderous assaults. They conclude therefore that any
person can refrain from such assaults if he or she chooses to,
and proceed to reinforce self-control by threats of severe
punishment. But in this they are mistaken. There are people, some
of them possessing considerable powers of mind and body, who can
no more restrain the fury into which a trifling mishap throws
them than a dog can restrain himself from snapping if he is
suddenly and painfully pinched. People fling knives and lighted
paraffin lamps at one another in a dispute over a dinner-table.
Men who have suffered several long sentences of penal servitude
for murderous assaults will, the very day after they are
released, seize their wives and cast them under drays at an
irritating word. We have not only people who cannot resist an
opportunity of stealing for the sake of satisfying their wants,
but even people who have a specific mania for stealing, and do it
when they are in no need of the things they steal. Burglary
fascinates some men as sailoring fascinates some boys. Among
respectable people how many are there who can be restrained by
the warnings of their doctors and the lessons of experience from
eating and drinking more than is good for them? It is true that
between self-controlled people and ungovernable people there is a
narrow margin of moral malingerers who can be made to behave
themselves by the fear of consequences; but it is not worth while
maintaining an abominable system of malicious, deliberate, costly
and degrading ill-treatment of criminals for the sake of these
marginal cases. For practical dealing with crime, Determinism or
Predestination is quite a good working rule. People without
self-control enough for social purposes may be killed, or may be
kept in asylums with a view to studying their condition and
ascertaining whether it is curable. To torture them and give
ourselves virtuous airs at their expense is ridiculous and
barbarous; and the desire to do it is vindictive and cruel. And
though vindictiveness and cruelty are at least human qualities
when they are frankly proclaimed and indulged, they are loathsome
when they assume the robes of Justice. Which, I take it, is why
Shakespear's Isabella gave such a dressing-down to Judge Angelo,
and why Swift reserved the hottest corner of his hell for judges.
Also, of course, why Jesus said "Judge not that ye be not judged"
and "If any man hear my words and believe not, I judge him not"
because "he hath one that judgeth him": namely, the Father who is
one with him.
When we are robbed we generally appeal to the criminal law, not
considering that if the criminal law were effective we should not
have been robbed. That convicts us of vengeance.
I need not elaborate the argument further. I have dealt with it
sufficiently elsewhere. I have only to point out that we have
been judging and punishing ever since Jesus told us not to; and I
defy anyone to make out a convincing case for believing that the
world has been any better than it would have been if there had
never been a judge, a prison, or a gallows in it all that time.
We have simply added the misery of punishment to the misery of
crime, and the cruelty of the judge to the cruelty of the
criminal. We have taken the bad man, and made him worse by
torture and degradation, incidentally making ourselves worse in
the process. It does not seem very sensible, does it? It would
have been far easier to kill him as kindly as possible, or to
label him and leave him to his conscience, or to treat him as an
invalid or a lunatic is now treated (it is only of late years, by
the way, that madmen have been delivered from the whip, the
chain, and the cage; and this, I presume, is the form in which
the teaching of Jesus could have been put into practice.)
JESUS ON MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY.
When we come to marriage and the family, we find Jesus making the
same objection to that individual appropriation of human beings
which is the essence of matrimony as to the individual
appropriation of wealth. A married man, he said, will try to
please his wife, and a married woman to please her husband,
instead of doing the work of God. This is another version of
"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Eighteen
hundred years later we find a very different person from Jesus,
Talleyrand to wit, saying the same thing. A married man with a
family, said Talleyrand, will do anything for money. Now this,
though not a scientifically precise statement, is true enough to
be a moral objection to marriage. As long as a man has a right to
risk his life or his livelihood for his ideas he needs only
courage and conviction to make his integrity unassailable. But he
forfeits that right when he marries. It took a revolution to
rescue Wagner from his Court appointment at Dresden; and his wife
never forgave him for being glad and feeling free when he lost it
and threw her back into poverty. Millet might have gone on
painting potboiling nudes to the end of his life if his wife had
not been of a heroic turn herself. Women, for the sake of their
children and parents, submit to slaveries and prostitutions that
no unattached woman would endure.
This was the beginning and the end of the objection of Jesus to
marriage and family ties, and the explanation of his conception
of heaven as a place where there should be neither marrying nor
giving in marriage. Now there is no reason to suppose that when
he said this he did not mean it. He did not, as St. Paul did
afterwards in his name, propose celibacy as a rule of life; for
he was not a fool, nor, when he denounced marriage, had he yet
come to believe, as St. Paul did, that the end of the world was
at hand and there was therefore no more need to replenish the
earth. He must have meant that the race should be continued
without dividing with women and men the allegiance the individual
owes to God within him. This raises the practical problem of how
we are to secure the spiritual freedom and integrity of the
priest and the nun without their barrenness and uncompleted
experience. Luther the priest did not solve the problem by
marrying a nun: he only testified in the most convincing and
practical way to the fact that celibacy was a worse failure than
marriage.
WHY JESUS DID NOT MARRY.
To all appearance the problem oppresses only a few exceptional
people. Thoroughly conventional women married to thoroughly
conventional men should not be conscious of any restriction: the
chain not only leaves them free to do whatever they want to do,
but greatly facilitates their doing it. To them an attack on
marriage is not a blow struck in defence of their freedom but at
their rights and privileges. One would expect that they would not
only demur vehemently to the teachings of Jesus in this matter,
but object strongly to his not having been a married man himself.
Even those who regard him as a god descended from his throne in
heaven to take on humanity for a time might reasonably declare
that the assumption of humanity must have been incomplete at its
most vital point if he were a celibate. But the facts are flatly
contrary. The mere thought of Jesus as a married man is felt to
be blasphemous by the most conventional believers; and even those
of us to whom Jesus is no supernatural personage, but a prophet
only as Mahomet was a prophet, feel that there was something more
dignified in the bachelordom of Jesus than in the spectacle of
Mahomet lying distracted on the floor of his harem whilst his
wives stormed and squabbled and henpecked round him. We are not
surprised that when Jesus called the sons of Zebedee to follow
him, he did not call their father, and that the disciples, like
Jesus himself, were all men without family entanglements. It is
evident from his impatience when people excused themselves from
following him because of their family funerals, or when they
assumed that his first duty was to his mother, that he had found
family ties and domestic affections in his way at every turn, and
had become persuaded at last that no man could follow his inner
light until he was free from their compulsion. The absence of any
protest against this tempts us to declare on this question of
marriage there are no conventional people; and that everyone of
us is at heart a good Christian sexually.
INCONSISTENCY OF THE SEX INSTINCT.
But the question is not so simple as that. Sex is an exceedingly
subtle and complicated instinct; and the mass of mankind neither
know nor care much about freedom of conscience, which is what
Jesus was thinking about, and are concerned almost to obsession
with sex, as to which Jesus said nothing. In our sexual natures
we are torn by an irresistible attraction and an overwhelming
repugnance and disgust. We have two tyrannous physical passions:
concupiscence and chastity. We become mad in pursuit of sex: we
become equally mad in the persecution of that pursuit. Unless we
gratify our desire the race is lost: unless we restrain it we
destroy ourselves. We are thus led to devise marriage
institutions which will at the same time secure opportunities for
the gratification of sex and raise up innumerable obstacles to
it; which will sanctify it and brand it as infamous; which will
identify it with virtue and with sin simultaneously. Obviously it
is useless to look for any consistency in such institutions; and
it is only by continual reform and readjustment, and by a
considerable elasticity in their enforcement, that a tolerable
result can be arrived at. I need not repeat here the long and
elaborate examination of them that I prefixed to my play entitled
Getting Married. Here I am concerned only with the views of Jesus
on the question; and it is necessary, in order to understand the
attitude of the world towards them, that we should not attribute
the general approval of the decision of Jesus to remain unmarried
as an endorsement of his views. We are simply in a state of
confusion on the subject; but it is part of the confusion that we
should conclude that Jesus was a celibate, and shrink even from
the idea that his birth was a natural one, yet cling with
ferocity to the sacredness of the institution which provides a
refuge from celibacy.
FOR BETTER OR WORSE.
Jesus, however, did not express a complicated view of marriage.
His objection to it was quite simple, as we have seen. He
perceived that nobody could live the higher life unless money and
sexual love were obtainable without sacrificing it; and he saw
that the effect of marriage as it existed among the Jews (and as
it still exists among ourselves) was to make the couples
sacrifice every higher consideration until they had fed and
pleased one another. The worst of it is that this dangerous
preposterousness in marriage, instead of improving as the general
conduct of married couples improves, becomes much worse. The
selfish man to whom his wife is nothing but a slave, the selfish
woman to whom her husband is nothing but a scapegoat and a
breadwinner, are not held back from spiritual or any other
adventures by fear of their effect on the welfare of their mates.
Their wives do not make recreants and cowards of them: their
husbands do not chain them to the cradle and the cooking range
when their feet should be beautiful on the mountains. It is
precisely as people become more kindly, more conscientious, more
ready to shoulder the heavier part of the burden (which means
that the strong shall give way to the weak and the slow hold back
the swift), that marriage becomes an intolerable obstacle to
individual evolution. And that is why the revolt against marriage
of which Jesus was an exponent always recurs when civilization
raises the standard of marital duty and affection, and at the
same time produces a greater need for individual freedom in
pursuit of a higher evolution. This, fortunately, is only one
side of marriage; and the question arises, can it not be
eliminated? The reply is reassuring: of course it can. There is
no mortal reason in the nature of things why a married couple
should be economically dependent on one another. The Communism
advocated by Jesus, which we have seen to be entirely
practicable, and indeed inevitable if our civilization is to be
saved from collapse, gets rid of that difficulty completely. And
with the economic dependence will go the force of the outrageous
claims that derive their real sanction from the economic pressure
behind them. When a man allows his wife to turn him from the best
work he is capable of doing, and to sell his soul at the highest
commercial prices obtainable; when he allows her to entangle him
in a social routine that is wearisome and debilitating to him, or
tie him to her apron strings when he needs that occasional
solitude which is one of the most sacred of human rights, he does
so because he has no right to impose eccentric standards of
expenditure and unsocial habits on her, and because these
conditions have produced by their pressure so general a custom of
chaining wedded couples to one another that married people are
coarsely derided when their partners break the chain. And when a
woman is condemned by her parents to wait in genteel idleness and
uselessness for a husband when all her healthy social instincts
call her to acquire a profession and work, it is again her
economic dependence on them that makes their tyranny effective.
THE CASE FOR MARRIAGE.
Thus, though it would be too much to say that everything that is
obnoxious in marriage and family life will be cured by Communism,
yet it can be said that it will cure what Jesus objected to in
these institutions. He made no comprehensive study of them: he
only expressed his own grievance with an overwhelming sense that
it is a grievance so deep that all the considerations on the
other side are as dust in the balance. Obviously there are such
considerations, and very weighty ones too. When Talleyrand said
that a married man with a family is capable of anything, he meant
anything evil; but an optimist may declare, with equal half
truth, that a married man is capable of anything good; that
marriage turns vagabonds into steady citizens; and that men and
women will, for love of their mates and children, practise
virtues that unattached individuals are incapable of. It is true
that too much of this domestic virtue is self-denial, which is
not a virtue at all; but then the following of the inner light at
all costs is largely self-indulgence, which is just as suicidal,
just as weak, just as cowardly as self-denial. Ibsen, who takes
us into the matter far more resolutely than Jesus, is unable to
find any golden rule: both Brand and Peer Gynt come to a bad end;
and though Brand does not do as much mischief as Peer, the
mischief he does do is of extraordinary intensity.
CELIBACY NO REMEDY.
We must, I think, regard the protest of Jesus against marriage
and family ties as the claim of a particular kind of individual
to be free from them because they hamper his own work
intolerably. When he said that if we are to follow him in the
sense of taking up his work we must give up our family ties, he
was simply stating a fact; and to this day the Roman Catholic
priest, the Buddhist lama, and the fakirs of all the eastern
denominations accept the saying. It is also accepted by the
physically enterprising, the explorers, the restlessly energetic
of all kinds, in short, by the adventurous. The greatest
sacrifice in marriage is the sacrifice of the adventurous
attitude towards life: the being settled. Those who are born
tired may crave for settlement; but to fresher and stronger
spirits it is a form of suicide. Now to say of any institution
that it is incompatible with both the contemplative and
adventurous life is to disgrace it so vitally that all the
moralizings of all the Deans and Chapters cannot reconcile our
souls to its slavery. The unmarried Jesus and the unmarried
Beethoven, the unmarried Joan of Arc, Clare, Teresa, Florence
Nightingale seem as they should be; and the saying that there is
always something ridiculous about a married philosopher becomes
inevitable. And yet the celibate is still more ridiculous than
the married man: the priest, in accepting the alternative of
celibacy, disables himself; and the best priests are those who
have been men of this world before they became men of the world
to come. But as the taking of vows does not annul an existing
marriage, and a married man cannot become a priest, we are again
confronted with the absurdity that the best priest is a reformed
rake. Thus does marriage, itself intolerable, thrust us upon
intolerable alternatives. The practical solution is to make the
individual economically independent of marriage and the family,
and to make marriage as easily dissoluble as any other
partnership: in other words, to accept the conclusions to which
experience is slowly driving both our sociologists and our
legislators. This will not instantly cure all the evils of
marriage, nor root up at one stroke its detestable tradition of
property in human bodies. But it will leave Nature free to effect
a cure; and in free soil the root may wither and perish.
This disposes of all the opinions and teachings of Jesus which are
still matters of controversy. They are all in line with the best
modern thought. He told us what we have to do; and we have had to
find the way to do it. Most of us are still, as most were in his
own time, extremely recalcitrant, and are being forced along that
way by painful pressure of circumstances, protesting at every
step that nothing will induce us to go; that it is a ridiculous
way, a disgraceful way, a socialistic way, an atheistic way, an
immoral way, and that the vanguard ought to be ashamed of
themselves and must be made to turn back at once. But they find
that they have to follow the vanguard all the same if their lives
are to be worth living.
AFTER THE CRUCIFIXION.
Let us now return to the New Testament narrative; for what
happened after the disappearance of Jesus is instructive.
Unfortunately, the crucifixion was a complete political success.
I remember that when I described it in these terms once before, I
greatly shocked a most respectable newspaper in my native town,
the Dublin Daily Express, because my journalistic phrase showed
that I was treating it as an ordinary event like Home Rule or the
Insurance Act: that is (though this did not occur to the editor),
as a real event which had really happened, instead of a portion
of the Church service. I can only repeat, assuming as I am that
it was a real event and did actually happen, that it was as
complete a success as any in history. Christianity as a specific
doctrine was slain with Jesus, suddenly and utterly. He was
hardly cold in his grave, or high in his heaven (as you please),
before the apostles dragged the tradition of him down to the
level of the thing it has remained ever since. And that thing
the intelligent heathen may study, if they would be instructed in
it by modern books, in Samuel Butler's novel, The Way of All
Flesh.
THE VINDICTIVE MIRACLES AND THE STONING OF STEPHEN.
Take, for example, the miracles. Of Jesus alone of all the
Christian miracle workers there is no record, except in certain
gospels that all men reject, of a malicious or destructive
miracle. A barren fig-tree was the only victim of his anger.
Every one of his miracles on sentient subjects was an act of
kindness. John declares that he healed the wound of the man whose
ear was cut off (by Peter, John says) at the arrest in the
garden. One of the first things the apostles did with their
miraculous power was to strike dead a wretched man and his wife
who had defrauded them by holding back some money from the common
stock. They struck people blind or dead without remorse, judging
because they had been judged. They healed the sick and raised the
dead apparently in a spirit of pure display and advertisement.
Their doctrine did not contain a ray of that light which reveals
Jesus as one of the redeemers of men from folly and error. They
cancelled him, and went back straight to John the Baptist and his
formula of securing remission of sins by repentance and the rite
of baptism (being born again of water and the spirit). Peter's
first harangue softens us by the human touch of its exordium,
which was a quaint assurance to his hearers that they must
believe him to be sober because it was too early in the day to
get drunk; but of Jesus he had nothing to say except that he was
the Christ foretold by the prophets as coming from the seed of
David, and that they must believe this and be baptized. To this
the other apostles added incessant denunciations of the Jews for
having crucified him, and threats of the destruction that would
overtake them if they did not repent: that is, if they did not
join the sect which the apostles were now forming. A quite
intolerable young speaker named Stephen delivered an oration to
the council, in which he first inflicted on them a tedious sketch
of the history of Israel, with which they were presumably as well
acquainted as he, and then reviled them in the most insulting
terms as "stiffnecked and uncircumcized." Finally, after boring
and annoying them to the utmost bearable extremity, he looked up
and declared that he saw the heavens open, and Christ standing on
the right hand of God. This was too much: they threw him out of
the city and stoned him to death. It was a severe way of
suppressing a tactless and conceited bore; but it was pardonable
and human in comparison to the slaughter of poor Ananias and
Sapphira.
PAUL.
Suddenly a man of genius, Paul, violently anti-Christian, enters
on the scene, holding the clothes of the men who are stoning
Stephen. He persecutes the Christians with great vigor, a sport
which he combines with the business of a tentmaker. This
temperamental hatred of Jesus, whom he has never seen, is a
pathological symptom of that particular sort of conscience and
nervous constitution which brings its victims under the tyranny
of two delirious terrors: the terror of sin and the terror of
death, which may be called also the terror of sex and the terror
of life. Now Jesus, with his healthy conscience on his higher
plane, was free from these terrors. He consorted freely with
sinners, and was never concerned for a moment, as far as we know,
about whether his conduct was sinful or not; so that he has
forced us to accept him as the man without sin. Even if we reckon
his last days as the days of his delusion, he none the less gave
a fairly convincing exhibition of superiority to the fear of
death. This must have both fascinated and horrified Paul, or
Saul, as he was first called. The horror accounts for his fierce
persecution of the Christians. The fascination accounts for the
strangest of his fancies: the fancy for attaching the name of
Jesus Christ to the great idea which flashed upon him on the road
to Damascus, the idea that he could not only make a religion of
his two terrors, but that the movement started by Jesus offered
him the nucleus for his new Church. It was a monstrous idea; and
the shocks of it, as he afterwards declared, struck him blind for
days. He heard Jesus calling to him from the clouds, "Why
persecute me?" His natural hatred of the teacher for whom Sin and
Death had no terrors turned into a wild personal worship of him
which has the ghastliness of a beautiful thing seen in a false
light.
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