Criticism and Faith
The Fall of the Idols. By William Ralph Inge. (Putnam. 8s. 6d.) To one who was a colleague in those quiet days when St. Paul's had finished with its reconditioning, and had not begun to dream of the coming of the bombs, it is a delight to reach out a hand to an Editor and say of Dr. Inge's latest book, as Cyprian of the works of Tertullian, Da Magistrum. He will do this even when he has his reservations to make, as Cyprian must have had when he turned some of Tertullian's pages. Anyone who disagrees with Dr. Inge on anything will find such reservations necessary here. For this is the genuine decanal brand; the old marks of wide learmng, felicitous quotation, pungent criticism, and—may one add?—praejudicia that would be the better for criticism, are all well represented. As to the contents, the chapter headings display those subjects to which Dr. Inge has devoted so much thought, Progress, Democracy, Economism, Pacifism, Humanism, Religion. It is to the first three that the general title specifically applies; in the last three he turns from perishable idols to the things which cannot be shaken, to the spirit of peace, to the "objective values," such as justice and truth, principles of the good life possessing a right to command man which they could not have if they were not natural to him. Finally he passes to a consideration of true
religion, that " highest religion of the Spirit," with which men come face to face in the teaching and Person of Christ.
Dr. Inge's attitude towards such matters as the value of the argument from miracle, the creeds, and the prospects of the Church in the world, are too well known for description, while comment to be useful would need to be lengthy. But I would draw attention to his affirmation of the need to return to tradi- tional theology in respect of the belief in evil spirits. " Evil," he insists, " is not negative but positive," and in recent events he sees an outbreak of " real Satanism." This goes well with his transference in the introduction of Livy's very unfair words about Hannibal, inhumana crudelitas, perfidia plus quam Punica, to " all that the world sees in Hitlerian Germany," but less well with the suggestion, in answer to a criticism of Dr. Delisle Burns', that " Mr. Shaw and I might have kept the country out of two disastrous wars." For if that had happened in 1939 Hitler and his Nazis would now be tyrannising over a large part of Europe without let or hindrance, or fear of a future reckoning The chapter on pacifism does not seem to me really satisfactory; for though Dr. Inge is not a pacifist in the accepted sense of the term, a kind of pacifistic emotion stands in the way of a coherent intellectual doctrine. Dr. Inge holds it to be "certain" that no good can ever come out of war. Past history does nor endorse this certainty; but I would go further and claim that it is not unreasonable to believe that good will come out of the present war. Let it be granted that the forecast on the gloomiest page of the book is correct, and that some of our old traditions will vanish. Yet it is not impossible—and this I believe to be much of an understatement—that things which do not belong to the excellence of those traditions will be driven out of our national life as patently incompatible with ordinary decency and morality. It is not sentimentality nor a mere echo of Left Wing opinion to say that the way in which numbers of people live is in- tolerable, and need not be tolerated, and that there is an awakening of conscience as to the right way of dealing with social and industrial problems which cuts right across party divisions.
For a hopeful outlook there is more of support in the implica- tions of the last two chapters than there is of discouragement in the first three. Beneath the imperfections and even stupidities of optimistic tributes to progress and democracy there lives a faith, even if its nature is not always recognised, in life as pos- sessed of real meaning, and in the value of human personality. From that faith there springs more of a reasonable hope for a better ordering of man's earthly life than Dr. Inge does in so many words allow. But his deepest convictions about the Spirit of God and the spirit of man forbid the conclusion that such hope is subject to the despairing verdict of Ecclesiastes upon human life, " Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."
J. K. MOZLEY.
Previous page
