Joad in Jeopardy
God and Evil. By C. E. M. Joad. (Faber. Ss. 6d.) THERE are twz themes in this book: the general problem of God and Evil and the personal development of Dr. Joad. Though it can scarcely be claimed, even by the most enthusiastic devotee of the Brains Trust, that these topics are of equal importance, it must be owned that they are woven together with skill and that much of the interest of the book arises from this combination of the auto- biographical with the dialectical. After all, there is good precedent for such a method of exposition. I doubt very much whether Dr. Joad's contribution to the philosophy of religion will prove to have much permanent value, but it may well happen that his description of the growth of religious conviction in his own mind, under the stress of the gigantic evils of these days, will be a source of under- standing of the men of today for later and, we may hope, happier generations.
It is difficult to sum up the argument of this book. In fact there is a paradox at the heart of it. Dr. Joad, so far as I can see, holds as firmly as ever that evil in all its forms, and more particularly suffering, is intellectually an almost insuperable objection to theism. What has happened to him is that the fact of evil, more particularly of moral evil, has come home to him with overwhelming force. " The obtrusiveness of evil " which, considered in the abstract, makes against faith becomes, in experience, the great motive-force of faith. Of course this paradox is not invented by Joad, it is inherent in religion itself. The purpose of religion is to provide, as some say, an "escape" or, as others say, " redemption " from evil—in either case to deal with it in some manner which transcends " common sense." A Christian would say that Dr. Joad has faced for the first time the reality of sin and has discovered that it can neither be accounted for nor overcome by the application of more science or more reason to the understanding of human affairs. "Evil," he writes, " is not merely a by-product of unfavourable circumstances ; it is too widespread and too deep-seated to admit of any such explanation ; so widespread, so deep-seated that one can only con- clude that what the religious have always thought is true, and that evil is endemic in the heart of man."
The religious experience, particularly in its mystical form, has impressed Dr. Joad's mind as an experience of reality. He deals
faithfully with " attempts to explain religion away " represented by Julian Huxley and other subjectivists. This is the best chapter in the book. Perhaps it is unfortunate that Dr. load has concentrated attention so much on the mystical type of religion, which is essentially personal, because it leads him to give insufficient weight to the development of religion as a whole, an aspect of the evolution of man which plays a permanent part in Dr. Whitehead's philosophy of civilisation.
The book concludes with a chapter on " the Christian Claim," which makes it quite clear that Dr. Joad is not a Christian. There have been complaints that he, along with other eminent critics of the faith, are imperfectly acquainted with the nature of what they criticise. This author has taken precautions against the charge and there is internal evidence that he has spent at least six shillings on the study of the Christian religion. His two authorities appear to be Dr. Edwyn Bevan's Christianity and C. S. Lewis's Problem of Pain ; both of these are admirable books but even together they do not cover the ground. A curious example of the misunderstanding into which able but impatient persons fall is the following state- ment: " The second claim is that Christ is unique among human beings precisely because He is not wholly a human being, but partly a God, being in fact God's Son." Dr. Joad has evidently read the Athanasian Creed, because he expresses dislike of it, but he has not apparently discovered that the creed says, with almost excessive emphasis, that what Christian orthodoxy claims for Christ is precisely not what Dr. Joad supposes. It is tempting to dwell upon other topics, such as the author's interesting reaction to a reading of the Gospels, but space forbids. This is a book which is easy to read
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