Religion: Knowing by Faith

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The last president of Harvard to take part in an exercise of the Harvard Divinity School was crusty Unitarian Charles William Eliot, in 1909. For this week's convocation of the Divinity School, Harvard's brand-new president, Episcopalian Nathan M. Pusey (TIME, June 8), composed a speech that would surely have made the muttonchops of the father of the Five-Foot Shelf bristle with shocked surprise.

The subject of President Eliot's 1909 discourse was "The Religion of the Future." "The new religion," Eliot predicted, "will foster powerfully a virtue which is comparatively new in the world —the love of truth and the passion for seeking it. And the truth will progressively make men free . . . When dwellers in a slum suffer the familiar evils caused by overcrowding, impure food and cheerless labor, the modern true believers contend against the sources of such misery by providing public baths, playgrounds, wider and cleaner streets, better dwellings and more effective schools—that is, they attack the sources of physical and moral evil."

So Much Twaddle? Paying his respects to the wisdom and sincerity of his illustrious predecessor, President Pusey decided to state the problem baldly: "This faith will no longer do."

The events of the 20th century, says Pusey, have made the easy optimism of Eliot's day unpalatable. "It is not that we do not have faith, or at least want to have faith, but that certainty escapes us, and that all things have been brought into doubt, and that fearing to be victimized we are inclined not to believe at all. We simply are not the 'true believers' of whom President Eliot spoke, and this suggests that his was not a religion for the future, but that something was left out of it which has now gone a long way toward vitiating his position, and which we must get hold of again in the midst of our present difficulties if we are to get on.

"For President Eliot, the enemies to his true faith were churches, creeds, priests, anything supernatural, any concern for a life after death, anything that professed to be sacramental. I suspect, for example —though I do not know this—that he would have considered the doctrine central to generations of believers—that Christ came into the world to save sinners—as so much twaddle. His was to be a 'simple and rational faith,' and there was to be no place in it for 'metaphysical complexities or magical rites . . .' This is where President Eliot may have been wrong, at least wrong for our time, for it has now become frighteningly clear that if you try to ignore metaphysical considerations—I would say consideration of ultimate things—or cover them up in bursts of energy, they will rise up in perverted and distorted forms to mock one's thus too-circumscribed efforts . . .

"Personal religion, and understanding of and participation in the work of the Church, could apparently in many earlier generations be taken for granted. Latterly, they have tended to ebb away in the all but universal adoration of the state, and in almost idolatrous preoccupation with the secular order, the accumulation of knowledge, and with good works. There is not and cannot be a quarrel with any of these things in themselves, but only with the notion that they are independently sufficient goods."