Books: Preface to Androcles and the Lion
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GEORGE BERNARD SHAW >> Preface to Androcles and the Lion
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BELIEF IN PERSONAL IMMORTALITY NO CRITERION.
Nor is belief in individual immortality any criterion.
Theosophists, rejecting vicarious atonement so sternly that they
insist that the smallest of our sins brings its Karma, also
insist on individual immortality and metempsychosis in order to
provide an unlimited field for Karma to be worked out by the
unredeemed sinner. The belief in the prolongation of individual
life beyond the grave is far more real and vivid among
table-rapping Spiritualists than among conventional Christians.
The notion that those who reject the Christian (or any other)
scheme of salvation by atonement must reject also belief in
personal immortality and in miracles is as baseless as the notion
that if a man is an atheist he will steal your watch.
I could multiply these instances to weariness. The main
difference that set Gladstone and Huxley by the ears is not one
between belief in supernatural persons or miraculous events and
the sternest view of such belief as a breach of intellectual
integrity: it is the difference between belief in the efficacy of
the crucifixion as an infallible cure for guilt, and a congenital
incapacity for believing this, or (the same thing) desiring to
believe it.
THE SECULAR VIEW NATURAL, NOT RATIONAL, THEREFORE INEVITABLE.
It must therefore be taken as a flat fundamental modern fact,
whether we like it or not, that whilst many of us cannot believe
that Jesus got his curious grip of our souls by mere
sentimentality, neither can we believe that he was John
Barleycorn. The more our reason and study lead us to believe that
Jesus was talking the most penetrating good sense when he
preached Communism; when he declared that the reality behind the
popular belief in God was a creative spirit in ourselves, called
by him the Heavenly Father and by us Evolution, Elan Vital, Life
Force and other names; when he protested against the claims of
marriage and the family to appropriate that high part of our
energy that was meant for the service of his Father, the more
impossible it becomes for us to believe that he was talking
equally good sense when he so suddenly announced that he was
himself a visible concrete God; that his flesh and blood were
miraculous food for us; that he must be tortured and slain in the
traditional manner and would rise from the dead after three days;
and that at his second coming the stars would fall from heaven
and he become king of an earthly paradise. But it is easy and
reasonable to believe that an overwrought preacher at last went
mad as Swift and Ruskin and Nietzsche went mad. Every asylum has
in it a patient suffering from the delusion that he is a god, yet
otherwise sane enough. These patients do not nowadays declare
that they will be barbarously slain and will rise from the dead,
because they have lost that tradition of the destiny of godhead;
but they claim everything appertaining to divinity that is within
their knowledge.
Thus the gospels as memoirs and suggestive statements of
sociological and biological doctrine, highly relevant to modern
civilization, though ending in the history of a psycopathic
delusion, are quite credible, intelligible, and interesting to
modern thinkers. In any other light they are neither credible,
intelligible, nor interesting except to people upon whom the
delusion imposes.
"THE HIGHER CRITICISM."
Historical research and paleographic criticism will no doubt
continue their demonstrations that the New Testament, like the
Old, seldom tells a single story or expounds a single doctrine,
and gives us often an accretion and conglomeration of widely
discrete and even unrelated traditions and doctrines. But these
disintegrations, though technically interesting to scholars, and
gratifying or exasperating, as the case may be, to people who are
merely defending or attacking the paper fortifications of the
infallibility of the Bible, have hardly anything to do with the
purpose of these pages. I have mentioned the fact that most of
the authorities are now agreed (for the moment) that the date of
the birth of Jesus may be placed at about 7 B.C.; but they do not
therefore date their letters 1923, nor, I presume, do they expect
me to do so. What I am engaged in is a criticism (in the Kantian
sense) of an established body of belief which has become an
actual part of the mental fabric of my readers; and I should be
the most exasperating of triflers and pedants if I were to
digress into a criticism of some other belief or no-belief which
my readers might conceivably profess if they were erudite
Scriptural paleographers and historians, in which case, by the
way, they would have to change their views so frequently that the
gospel they received in their childhood would dominate them after
all by its superior persistency. The chaos of mere facts in which
the Sermon on the Mount and the Ode to Charity suggest nothing
but disputes as to whether they are interpolations or not, in
which Jesus becomes nothing but a name suspected of belonging to
ten different prophets or executed persons, in which Paul is only
the man who could not possibly have written the epistles
attributed to him, in which Chinese sages, Greek philosophers,
Latin authors, and writers of ancient anonymous inscriptions are
thrown at our heads as the sources of this or that scrap of the
Bible, is neither a religion nor a criticism of religion: one
does not offer the fact that a good deal of the medieval building
in Peterborough Cathedral was found to be flagrant jerry-building
as a criticism of the Dean's sermons. For good or evil, we have
made a synthesis out of the literature we call the Bible; and
though the discovery that there is a good deal of jerry-building
in the Bible is interesting in its way, because everything about
the Bible is interesting, it does not alter the synthesis very
materially even for the paleographers, and does not alter it at
all for those who know no more about modern paleography than
Archbishop Ussher did. I have therefore indicated little more of
the discoveries than Archbishop Ussher might have guessed for
himself if he had read the Bible without prepossessions.
For the rest, I have taken the synthesis as it really lives and
works in men. After all, a synthesis is what you want: it is the
case you have to judge brought to an apprehensible issue for you.
Even if you have little more respect for synthetic biography than
for synthetic rubber, synthetic milk, and the still unachieved
synthetic protoplasm which is to enable us to make different
sorts of men as a pastry cook makes different sorts of tarts, the
practical issue still lies as plainly before you as before the
most credulous votaries of what pontificates as the Higher
Criticism.
THE PERILS OF SALVATIONISM.
The secular view of Jesus is powerfully reinforced by the
increase in our day of the number of people who have had the
means of educating and training themselves to the point at which
they are not afraid to look facts in the face, even such
terrifying facts as sin and death. The result is greater
sternness in modern thought. The conviction is spreading that to
encourage a man to believe that though his sins be as scarlet he
can be made whiter than snow by an easy exercise of self-conceit,
is to encourage him to be a rascal. It did not work so badly when
you could also conscientiously assure him that if he let himself
be caught napping in the matter of faith by death, a red-hot hell
would roast him alive to all eternity. In those days a sudden
death--the most enviable of all deaths--was regarded as the most
frightful calamity. It was classed with plague, pestilence, and
famine, battle and murder, in our prayers. But belief in that
hell is fast vanishing. All the leaders of thought have lost it;
and even for the rank and file it has fled to those parts of
Ireland and Scotland which are still in the XVII century. Even
there, it is tacitly reserved for the other fellow.
THE IMPORTANCE OF HELL IN THE SALVATION SCHEME.
The seriousness of throwing over hell whilst still clinging to
the Atonement is obvious. If there is no punishment for sin there
can be no self-forgiveness for it. If Christ paid our score, and
if there is no hell and therefore no chance of our getting into
trouble by forgetting the obligation, then we can be as wicked as
we like with impunity inside the secular law, even from
self-reproach, which becomes mere ingratitude to the Savior. On
the other hand, if Christ did not pay our score, it still stands
against us; and such debts make us extremely uncomfortable. The
drive of evolution, which we call conscience and honor, seizes on
such slips, and shames us to the dust for being so low in the
scale as to be capable of them. The "saved" thief experiences an
ecstatic happiness which can never come to the honest atheist: he
is tempted to steal again to repeat the glorious sensation. But
if the atheist steals he has no such happiness. He is a thief and
knows that he is a thief. Nothing can rub that off him. He may
try to sooth his shame by some sort of restitution or equivalent
act of benevolence; but that does not alter the fact that he did
steal; and his conscience will not be easy until he has conquered
his will to steal and changed himself into an honest man by
developing that divine spark within him which Jesus insisted on
as the everyday reality of what the atheist denies.
Now though the state of the believers in the atonement may thus
be the happier, it is most certainly not more desirable from the
point of view of the community. The fact that a believer is
happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that
a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of
credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by
no means a necessity of life. Whether Socrates got as much
happiness out of life as Wesley is an unanswerable question; but
a nation of Socrateses would be much safer and happier than a
nation of Wesleys; and its individuals would be higher in the
evolutionary scale. At all events it is in the Socratic man and
not in the Wesleyan that our hope lies now.
THE RIGHT TO REFUSE ATONEMENT.
Consequently, even if it were mentally possible for all of us to
believe in the Atonement, we should have to cry off it, as we
evidently have a right to do. Every man to whom salvation is
offered has an inalienable natural right to say "No, thank you: I
prefer to retain my full moral responsibility: it is not good for
me to be able to load a scapegoat with my sins: I should be less
careful how I committed them if I knew they would cost me
nothing." Then, too, there is the attitude of Ibsen: that iron
moralist to whom the whole scheme of salvation was only an
ignoble attempt to cheat God; to get into heaven without paying
the price. To be let off, to beg for and accept eternal life as a
present instead of earning it, would be mean enough even if we
accepted the contempt of the Power on whose pity we were trading;
but to bargain for a crown of glory as well! that was too much
for Ibsen: it provoked him to exclaim, "Your God is an old man
whom you cheat," and to lash the deadened conscience of the XIX
century back to life with a whip of scorpions.
THE TEACHING OF CHRISTIANITY.
And there I must leave the matter to such choice as your nature
allows you. The honest teacher who has to make known to a novice
the facts about Christianity cannot in any essential regard, I
think, put the facts otherwise than as I have put them. If
children are to be delivered from the proselytizing atheist on
the one hand, and the proselytizing nun in the convent school on
the other, with all the other proselytizers that lie between
them, they must not be burdened with idle controversies as to
whether there was ever such a person as Jesus or not. When Hume
said that Joshua's campaigns were impossible, Whately did not
wrangle about it: he proved, on the same lines, that the
campaigns of Napoleon were impossible. Only fictitious characters
will stand Hume's sort of examination: nothing will ever make
Edward the Confessor and St. Louis as real to us as Don Quixote
and Mr. Pickwick. We must cut the controversy short by declaring
that there is the same evidence for the existence of Jesus as for
that of any other person of his time; and the fact that you may
not believe everything Matthew tells you no more disproves the
existence of Jesus than the fact that you do not believe
everything Macaulay tells you disproves the existence of William
III. The gospel narratives in the main give you a biography which
is quite credible and accountable on purely secular grounds when
you have trimmed off everything that Hume or Grimm or Rousseau or
Huxley or any modern bishop could reject as fanciful. Without
going further than this, you can become a follower of Jesus just
as you can become a follower of Confucius or Lao Tse, and may
therefore call yourself a Jesuist, or even a Christian, if you
hold, as the strictest Secularist quite legitimately may, that
all prophets are inspired, and all men with a mission, Christs.
The teacher of Christianity has then to make known to the child,
first the song of John Barleycorn, with the fields and seasons as
witness to its eternal truth. Then, as the child's mind matures,
it can learn, as historical and psychological phenomena, the
tradition of the scapegoat, the Redeemer, the Atonement, the
Resurrection, the Second Coming, and how, in a world saturated
with this tradition, Jesus has been largely accepted as the long
expected and often prophesied Redeemer, the Messiah, the Christ.
It is open to the child also to accept him. If the child is built
like Gladstone, he will accept Jesus as his Savior, and Peter and
John the Baptist as the Savior's revealer and forerunner
respectively. If he is built like Huxley, he will take the
secular view, in spite of all that a pious family can do to
prevent him. The important thing now is that the Gladstones and
Huxleys should no longer waste their time irrelevantly and
ridiculously wrangling about the Gadarene swine, and that they
should make up their minds as to the soundness of the secular
doctrines of Jesus; for it is about these that they may come to
blows in our own time.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE.
Finally, let us ask why it is that the old superstitions have so
suddenly lost countenance that although, to the utter disgrace of
the nation's leaders and rulers, the laws by which persecutors
can destroy or gag all freedom of thought and speech in these
matters are still unrepealed and ready to the hand of our bigots
and fanatics (quite recently a respectable shopkeeper was
convicted of "blasphemy" for saying that if a modern girl
accounted for an illicit pregnancy by saying she had conceived of
the Holy Ghost, we should know what to think: a remark which
would never have occurred to him had he been properly taught how
the story was grafted on the gospel), yet somehow they are used
only against poor men, and that only in a half-hearted way. When
we consider that from the time when the first scholar ventured to
whisper as a professional secret that the Pentateuch could not
possibly have been written by Moses to the time within my own
recollection when Bishop Colenso, for saying the same thing
openly, was inhibited from preaching and actually excommunicated,
eight centuries elapsed (the point at issue, though technically
interesting to paleographers and historians, having no more
bearing on human welfare than the controversy as to whether
uncial or cursive is the older form of writing); yet now, within
fifty years of Colenso's heresy, there is not a Churchman of any
authority living, or an educated layman, who could without
ridicule declare that Moses wrote the Pentateuch as Pascal wrote
his Thoughts or D'Aubigny his History of the Reformation, or that
St. Jerome wrote the passage about the three witnesses in the
Vulgate, or that there are less than three different accounts of
the creation jumbled together in the book of Genesis. Now the
maddest Progressive will hardly contend that our growth in wisdom
and liberality has been greater in the last half century than in
the sixteen half centuries preceding: indeed it would be easier
to sustain the thesis that the last fifty years have witnessed a
distinct reaction from Victorian Liberalism to Collectivism which
has perceptibly strengthened the State Churches. Yet the fact
remains that whereas Byron's Cain, published a century ago, is a
leading case on the point that there is no copyright in a
blasphemous book, the Salvation Army might now include it among
its publications without shocking anyone.
I suggest that the causes which have produced this sudden
clearing of the air include the transformation of many modern
States, notably the old self-contained French Republic and the
tight little Island of Britain, into empires which overflow the
frontiers of all the Churches. In India, for example, there are
less than four million Christians out of a population of three
hundred and sixteen and a half millions. The King of England is
the defender of the faith; but what faith is now THE faith? The
inhabitants of this island would, within the memory of persons
still living, have claimed that their faith is surely the faith
of God, and that all others are heathen. But we islanders are
only forty-five millions; and if we count ourselves all as
Christians, there are still seventy-seven and a quarter million
Mahometans in the Empire. Add to these the Hindoos and Buddhists,
Sikhs and Jains, whom I was taught in my childhood, by way of
religious instruction, to regard as gross idolators consigned to
eternal perdition, but whose faith I can now be punished for
disparaging by a provocative word, and you have a total of over
three hundred and forty-two and a quarter million heretics to
swamp our forty-five million Britons, of whom, by the way, only
six thousand call themselves distinctively "disciples of Christ,"
the rest being members of the Church of England and other
denominations whose discipleship is less emphatically affirmed.
In short, the Englishman of today, instead of being, like the
forefathers whose ideas he clings to, a subject of a State
practically wholly Christian, is now crowded, and indeed
considerably overcrowded, into a corner of an Empire in which the
Christians are a mere eleven per cent of the population; so that
the Nonconformist who allows his umbrella stand to be sold up
rather than pay rates towards the support of a Church of England
school, finds himself paying taxes not only to endow the Church
of Rome in Malta, but to send Christians to prison for the
blasphemy of offering Bibles for sale in the streets of Khartoum.
Turn to France, a country ten times more insular in its
pre-occupation with its own language, its own history, its own
character, than we, who have always been explorers and colonizers
and grumblers. This once self-centred nation is forty millions
strong. The total population of the French Republic is about one
hundred and fourteen millions. The French are not in our hopeless
Christian minority of eleven per cent; but they are in a minority
of thirty-five per cent, which is fairly conclusive. And, being a
more logical people than we, they have officially abandoned
Christianity and declared that the French State has no specific
religion.
Neither has the British State, though it does not say so. No
doubt there are many innocent people in England who take
Charlemagne's view, and would, as a matter of course, offer our
eighty-nine per cent of "pagans, I regret to say" the alternative
of death or Christianity but for a vague impression that these
lost ones are all being converted gradually by the missionaries.
But no statesman can entertain such ludicrously parochial
delusions. No English king or French president can possibly
govern on the assumption that the theology of Peter and Paul,
Luther and Calvin, has any objective validity, or that the Christ
is more than the Buddha, or Jehovah more than Krishna, or Jesus
more or less human than Mahomet or Zoroaster or Confucius. He is
actually compelled, in so far as he makes laws against blasphemy
at all, to treat all the religions, including Christianity, as
blasphemous, when paraded before people who are not accustomed to
them and do not want them. And even that is a concession to a
mischievous intolerance which an empire should use its control of
education to eradicate.
On the other hand, Governments cannot really divest themselves of
religion, or even of dogma. When Jesus said that people should
not only live but live more abundantly, he was dogmatizing; and
many Pessimist sages, including Shakespear, whose hero begged his
friend to refrain from suicide in the words "Absent thee from
felicity awhile," would say dogmatizing very perniciously. Indeed
many preachers and saints declare, some of them in the name of
Jesus himself, that this world is a vale of tears, and that our
lives had better be passed in sorrow and even in torment, as a
preparation for a better life to come. Make these sad people
comfortable; and they baffle you by putting on hair shirts.
None the less, governments must proceed on dogmatic assumptions,
whether they call them dogmas or not; and they must clearly be
assumptions common enough to stamp those who reject them as
eccentrics or lunatics. And the greater and more heterogeneous
the population the commoner the assumptions must be. A Trappist
monastery can be conducted on assumptions which would in
twenty-fours hours provoke the village at its gates to
insurrection. That is because the monastery selects its people;
and if a Trappist does not like it he can leave it. But a subject
of the British Empire or the French Republic is not selected; and
if he does not like it he must lump it; for emigration is
practicable only within narrow limits, and seldom provides an
effective remedy, all civilizations being now much alike.
To anyone capable of comprehending government at all it must be
evident without argument that the set of fundamental assumptions
drawn up in the thirty-nine articles or in the Westminster
Confession are wildly impossible as political constitutions for
modern empires. A personal profession of them by any person
disposed to take such professions seriously would practically
disqualify him for high imperial office. A Calvinist Viceroy of
India and a Particular Baptist Secretary of State for Foreign
Affairs would wreck the empire. The Stuarts wrecked even the
tight little island which was the nucleus of the empire by their
Scottish logic and theological dogma; and it may be sustained
very plausibly that the alleged aptitude of the English for
self-government, which is contradicted by every chapter of their
history, is really only an incurable inaptitude for theology, and
indeed for co-ordinated thought in any direction, which makes
them equally impatient of systematic despotism and systematic
good government: their history being that of a badly governed and
accidentally free people (comparatively). Thus our success in
colonizing, as far as it has not been produced by exterminating
the natives, has been due to our indifference to the salvation of
our subjects. Ireland is the exception which proves the rule; for
Ireland, the standing instance of the inability of the English to
colonize without extermination of natives, is also the one
country under British rule in which the conquerors and colonizers
proceeded on the assumption that their business was to establish
Protestantism as well as to make money and thereby secure at
least the lives of the unfortunate inhabitants out of whose labor
it could be made. At this moment Ulster is refusing to accept
fellowcitizenship with the other Irish provinces because the
south believes in St. Peter and Bossuet, and the north in St.
Paul and Calvin. Imagine the effect of trying to govern India or
Egypt from Belfast or from the Vatican!
The position is perhaps graver for France than for England,
because the sixty-five per cent of French subjects who are
neither French nor Christian nor Modernist includes some thirty
millions of negroes who are susceptible, and indeed highly
susceptible, of conversion to those salvationist forms of
pseudo-Christianity which have produced all the persecutions and
religious wars of the last fifteen hundred years. When the late
explorer Sir Henry Stanley told me of the emotional grip which
Christianity had over the Baganda tribes, and read me their
letters, which were exactly like medieval letters in their
literal faith and everpresent piety, I said "Can these men handle
a rifle?" To which Stanley replied with some scorn "Of course
they can, as well as any white man." Now at this moment (1915) a
vast European war is being waged, in which the French are using
Senegalese soldiers. I ask the French Government, which, like our
own Government, is deliberately leaving the religious instruction
of these negroes in the hands of missions of Petrine Catholics
and Pauline Calvinists, whether they have considered the
possibility of a new series of crusades, by ardent African
Salvationists, to rescue Paris from the grip of the modern
scientific "infidel," and to raise the cry of "Back to the
Apostles: back to Charlemagne!"
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