Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

Egotheism, the Atheism of To-day

In the September number of the "Christian Examiner," article fifth, it is asserted that the Atheism which says "we only know phenomena" is the characteristic Atheism of the day; and it seems to be the entire object of the article to prove, to say the least, that the material is anterior to the spiritual; but it apologizes for undertaking a metaphysical examination of even that subject. Now we would protest against apologies for introducing a metaphysical examination of materialism. When the very definition of the word metaphysics is simply beyond physics, there seems to be an absurdity in the implication that the materialist theory can be examined without metaphysics. And, besides, we object in general to this going to meet with apologies the indolence of readers, instead of calling on them, with a generous trust in their desire for truth, to think with all their heart and mind and strength upon the great questions that are of life and death importance to their immortal life! The want of conscience as to the duty of thinking our way out of the delusions of material phenomena--which intrude into the very sanctuary of the mind through the senses, making their shadows into its idols -- is the moral cause of Materialistic Atheism, no less than of its parent, Idolatry or Pseudotheism; and the constituted public teachers of the day, among whom the "Christian Examiner" stands in a noble pre-eminence, should keep the tone of "one having authority" to call unto them all who thirst, that they may obtain living water.

And "The Examiner" underrates the New England reading public, in supposing any apology for metaphysics necessary. Though there is no doubt that certain naturalistic tendencies of the later times--which are the excess of a legitimate return towards nature, from the technicalities of scholastic theology--have somewhat weakened, they have not entirely or widely destroyed the masculine energy of the New England thinking power; and those very articles of the "Christian Examiner" which most task thought, such as the review of Agassiz' "System of Classification" and of Peirce's "Celestial Mechanics," are generally considered the most interesting and valuable. It is the absurd notion of some of our best thinkers, that they have a monopoly of the thinking power, which keeps down the intellectual character of the American periodicals to the standard of the daily newspaper, and leaves the aspiring mind of the generality undisciplined, and therefore liable to become the victim of every vagary offered, from either side of the grave. . . .

But, after all, the article is essentially imperfect, as a treatise upon Atheism, because it confines itself to a species of Atheism transpiring in minds at once spiritually poor and intellectually active. It leaves out all consideration of the characteristic Atheism of to-day, which is a far more subtle error, being the negative of that more spiritual, natural religion of to-day which has taken the place of the worship of matter and its abstractions.

For natural religion is not in all ages the same thing. The natural religion which Job repudiated was a stupid resting of the senses in the sun, moon, and stars, instead of an elevation of faith to the Lord of the spirit. But the natural religion to which St. Paul opposed the spiritual doctrine of Christ was of another character, --a worship of idols of the mind, the cabalistic expositions of the law of Moses; while the natural religion which the immediately past age has contended with is the deification of the letter of Christianity, nay, even of the letter of its record! The natural religion of age always involves the philosophy of the penultimate age, which, in its turn, has always absorbed all of spiritual religion that the common faith had appropriated and organized into literature, institutions, and customs. It is that religion which, without special personal effort and prayer, individuals imbibe from the social environment into which they are born, that which comes by the hearing of the ear, rather than by the intuition of the individual mind. It is the religion which men inherit and hold, "not doubting, yet without conviction" (if we may borrow a fine expression of Hallam's). Consequently, natural religion requires no effort of faith, but simply sympathy with man, and faith stagnates in it.

Now it is certainly true that the modern philosophy which is the real flower of the past age, and peculiar to the present time, is not materialistic, but spiritualistic. . . .

. . . [T]he modern philosophy makes "the sources of form" its special quarry, and affirms that they lie within the sphere of the common consciousness, --an affirmation implying that faith "which is the evidence of things unseen" is as much a function of human reason as sense. But when faith stagnates in the mere affirmation of the spiritual, men deify their own conceptions; i.e., they say that their conception of God is all that men can ever know of God. In short, faith commits suicide, as Cato did, at the summit of the moral life, and the next step to this is necessarily EGOTHEISM, which denies other self-consciousness to God than our own subjective consciousness; --not recognizing that there is, beyond our conception, inconceivable Power, Wisdom, and Love, --of the immanence of whose substantial being within us our best conception is but a transient form. Thus Egotheism, in the last analysis, is Atheism; and we find this "latest form of infidelity," as the understanding has rather blindly denominated it, -- though not without a degree of religious instinct, --in the science, philosophy, and politics of the age, --at once glorifying and saddening its poetry; --for man proves but a melancholy God.

Yet to consider man and nature as living organisms uniting subjectively was not an illegitimate effort of the human mind. It was a step in philosophy, a spiritual tendency. But instead of taking this tendency on its spiritual side, and accepting it as intimation of "the Spirit making all things new," thus seizing as science what the Christian feels as religion, faith has stagnated, and egotheistical poetry and philosophy have developed themselves; against which religious sentimentalism, when bigoted, has hurled the thunderbolts of ecclesiastical anathema, and when weakly and blindly loving set up a wail as hopeless, even if as beautiful, as the death-song of the swan. But reason calmly sits above the region where the storms of passion thunder and lighten over the plain where the understanding mouses; and perceiving that the error is to enthrone the abstraction of impersonality in the place of the living God (which is to make a production of the finite mind greater in our thought than positive being), it proceeds to break the ice of that wintry error, and bid the living truth stream forth anew, augmented by its momentary obstruction, which, as Coleridge has suggested, it converts into its own substance, as the rivers of the earth the obstructing ice, whose melting makes the freshets of the springtime.

It was progress for philosophy to become conscious that the spirit of man is a creature of quite another nature than matter, -- a creature communing with the Creator in the mystical union of love forgiving, and love grateful, the only union possible between finite and infinite, --a creature whose relation to matter is measurably the same as that of the Creator; and it is inevitable that, in arriving at this conception of the human spirit, there should ever and anon be the liability to lose the vision of the Divine Being, because our conceptions are subjects of memory, and the moment of memory is not the moment of faith, of which the Living God is the object. Faith takes the step into new knowledge of God, of which to make a new standpoint, whence to take a deeper insight and broader view and higher flight. The very nature of faith is aspiration. It must dare and dare, and evermore must dare, or there is no worship, no recognized God, but the created spirit doubles back upon itself, which is the origin of evil, and incipient Atheism. The Son of God says: "The Son can do nothing of himself; "Thy will, not mine, be done"; "My Father worketh hitherto, and to work."

It may be said that it is futile to quote the words of Jesus of Nazareth to an Egotheist, and a begging of the whole question to call him, par eminence, "Son of God." But, at the least, the above words are on human record: they came from the sublimest man of history, and they expressed facts of human consciousness, facts of a positive nature. They are so remarkable that they imply an individuality no less exceptional than the one whose memoirs are named GOSPEL. It takes a Transcendentalist, who stands on the fatal brink, and whose next step may be into the abyss of Egotheism, to appreciate the Christian doctrine of God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

But to appreciate the fact, and demonstrate the nature of our egotheistical philosophy, is no mere metaphysical amusement, --it is of the greatest practical import. Egotheisin could only appear in an age capable of great spiritual attainment,-- an age when great life is rushing into act. In this country, especially, it is no idle theory,-- a country where the overflow of activity in superficial change is confounded with deepening the channel and spreading the stream of human progress. The radical error of all those who propose new organization of human society ab imo, inheres in Egotheism. This new organization its disciples will all acknowledge to be a very different thing from reform, which is the making of outward arrangements conform more thoroughly with the principles of humanity acknowledged in the abstract by all human conscience in all ages, just in proportion as it has been freed by love of man from the sophisms of selfishness. To abolish chattel slavery, for instance, would be reform; for it would be making society spread the human rights and privileges implied in the duty of loving our neighbor as ourself over a race which conventional sin has put out of the pale of humanity in the most arbitrary manner. To abolish polygamy, and sanctify monogamy, would be to reform; because it would be merely extending to woman the conjugal rights which men have always asserted to the exclusive possession of the body of their conjugal partner. To organize labor on a kind of republican principle of intelligent co-operation, instead of blind competition, would be reform; because it would be merely applying that principle of organization to the arts of peace which is already applied to the arts of war, -- a modern army being, within itself, the most complete organization of human activity known, and consequently the most efficient for its special object, -- destruction. When shall we have millions voted by our Congress for educational and industrial purposes as easily as they are voted for war-frigates and armies, -- and schools of industry and science supported with the wealth and talent that are devoted to military and naval schools?

But all this reform, and much more analogous with it, falls far short of what is meant by radical socialists as new organization. This contemplates quite new human relations, with a quite new morality, and quite new religion. The religion is Egotheism, the morality egotism, including the so-called Free-Love in various specious forms, organizing free marriage, public possession of children, abolition of political law and family rights, with their included sentiments of patriotism, parental and filial obligation, to be superseded by more general sentiments, which it is believed will be developed from the reaction of the new relations of groups of labor and amusement, flowing from impulse of an inward attraction, re-established by a sort of divine fate, which is revealed in the tendency to universal unity, that comes out, they say, in due time, in every human being, as the master passion. (This is Fourierism.)

We have no purpose of saying any thing invidious, of raising any excitement of moral indignation and religious excommunication, against those persons who hold, consciously or unconsciously, the above views; though we would gladly arouse serious consideration to the tendency of them to substitute the most terrific egotism for the morality of loving one's neighbor as one's self, -- neighborhood being graduated according to providential nearness, first of physical, then of mental, relation; not entirely excluding any human being from the charity to all men which is the "bond of perfectness." There is a growing multitude in this country, as well as in Europe, who unite on this scheme of new organization as the only salvation from the terrible evils that the present civilized society unquestionably labors with, and who, instead of viewing these evils as the shortcomings of a growing race, that has not come to a sufficiently complete apprehension of the religion of humility and love, or is not faithful thereto, by continually reforming society according to it, do, in good faith, believe that the first principle is wrong, confound obedience to God with servility to conventional law, and raise self-respect to self-worship. That " blithe and guileless cheer, that sore perplexed the priest," at the shrift of Sir Pavon in the new "old ballad," is the despair of many a confessor that comes into contact with these Egotheists, who, because there are conventional marriages, tyrannical parents, and victimized children possible within our organization, call the time-honored morality immoral, the sacredness of all marriage laws impurity, the carefulness of all parental relations tyranny, and the devotion of all filial piety slavery. There is no refuge but to pray, with the Crucified, "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do!"

It is generally individual victims who are the originators of these extreme theories of change; and the experience of their suffering gives earnestness to their eloquence, and power to inoculate with their idea a class of minds that are brilliant by reason of a tendency to hasty generalization. In short, it is easy enough to get at the history of these various views of new organization, and to sympathize kindly and tenderly with multitudes who fall into them; but our present purpose is to assert that they all inhere in the highest natural religion of our day, which is Egotheism; and they can only be effectively opposed by grafting this into that worship of the Father in spirit and in truth, which, on the greatest height the soul is competent to gain, " counts itself not to have apprehended," and, strong in the principle of loving its neighbor like itself, feels secure of making no fatal mistake, in helping to establish the kingdom of heaven in the world, by the way, while rushing forward to the prize of complete manhood exhibited in Jesus Christ.

But Egotheism is not confined to those persons who have carried it out into socialistic plans and theories. When it fructifies so far, it speedily gets answered by the irrepealable laws of nature, who is "the most brilliant of wits" as well as the most inexorable of executioners, and who drives men at last into the arms of the Power above nature, whose love is commensurate with their need, and whose arms are ever open to the prodigal that has gone out of his Father's house, experimenting upon his own limited portion.

But philosophy, theoretical and practical, has a duty to do with respect to Egotheism: to appreciate the truth involved in it, and to apply it to the spiritualizing of life and religion. In proportion as any mind is liable to Egotheism, it is capable of spiritual communion with God. It is a great advance above the idols of the Protestant churches, that is to say, logical formulas, which were, after all, nothing more than statements of finite conceptions, in which faith might stagnant, through perhaps they were an advance upon

the idols of the Roman Catholic Church, which were not even works in any true sense of the word, but mere symbols of works, --ceremonies. The Egotheist sees that nothing man says or does is so great as himself, the sayer and doer. By this he rises to the mount of temptation where Jesus conquered, but where he will fall, no less than Adam did in Paradise, unless he makes a stepping-stone for faith of the stumbling-block of Egotheism which is the Devil offering to him material, moral, and spiritual power, on condition of the soul's "falling down and worshipping ME."

1. This fine expression of St. Paul contains a world of argument to those who think it possible for truth ever to be so manifested or experienced as to preclude progress. Even Paul " counted himself not to have apprehended."