The Humanist And The Theist
Resolution Of A Great Debate
The Humanist And The Theist
Resolution Of A Great Debate
by Alvin Boyd Kuhn
* Electronically typed and edited by Juan Schoch for educational research purposes from New Outlook, circa 1950s. This notice is not to be removed.
The history of the age-old controversy between the humanistic and the theistic philosophies dates back no doubt to the dawn of human reflection. Broadly, the debate has been the sword that cut between two modes of thinking, dividing mankind into two parties, the humanists on the one hand and theists on the other. The great debate continues today. All the while the great philosophical systems of Greece and Egypt, perhaps also of Persia, not to mention the universal semantic intimations of natural analogy, held the rational knowledge that would at any time have contributed the principles of understanding on which the complete harmonious resolution of the everlasting controversy could have been achieved.
The resolving theses prove to be so astonishingly simple that it seems incredible the secret of full harmonization should never in all the centuries have come out into the light and been applied. The whole battle proves in the denouement to have been due entirely to that same cause which has brought about confusion in most philosophical arguments – the failure to agree on a uniform definition of terms, and then the ignorance on both sides, of the basic philosophy of the religio-spiritual elements whose activity is the bone of contention between the two schools of thought.
Both sides perhaps are right in principle, but wrong in the application of the principle. Both are right in asserting that man, initially ignorant, must look to some higher power to save him in his ignorance and his blundering in the dark. They simply differ, not so much – astonishing as this seems – on the nature of this saving power as on the source-spring from which man is to draw it. The theist, bound by centuries of a pious religious tradition, asserts that it is a power operating in a realm of consciousness transcending man’s reach, a power exercised by the omnipotent and omniscient Creator of the universe, and a power only to be evoked by man’s humble appeal to that Creator’s beneficent will.
On the other side the humanist regards this as unnatural and untenable and asserts that the power effective for man’s salvation is a superior genius that is as yet locked up in the undevelopment of man’s own potential, but capable of development to a degree adequate to elevate humanity to a higher level of nobility and happiness. The theist thus holds that God alone can deliver the human race from its barbarity; the humanist contends that man must evoke the genius of his own nature to effect that transformation. It requires no exceptional knowledge to affirm that both are right in asserting the need of human salvation from the vestigial crudities of our heritage of animal viciousness and the predatory instinct. They simply differ as to the precise nature of the salvaging power and the manner, rationale and locale of its existence.
Both agree, that the search for, the discovery, study and technical application of a science of psychic integration by which man may, to use a religious term, make himself whole and blessed, is the chief objective of human endeavor. The religiously minded say that for this transfiguring operation man must turn and pray to God, since of himself he is a weakling, sinning and unworthy and wholly incapable of self-salvation. The humanist stoutly asserts that if man will not arise off his knees and effectuate the work of redemption himself, it will not be accomplished.
The theist is perfectly right in asserting that man can not effectuate his regeneration without the help of a superior divine power. Yet the humanist is certainly as right in insisting that man must do the work unaided by the supernatural magic of a cosmic deity outside himself. The theist is correct in claiming that only a divine power can save man; but the humanist is likewise right in denying that man’s salvation can be achieved only by God, as “God” is traditionally conceived by orthodox theologies.
Theism stands on defensible grounds in holding that a divine nature must come to the aid of the human nature. But it is tragically in error in holding that this divine element of salvation is that power presiding over the life of the cosmic universe, which has been symbolized by the name and held under the general conceptions embodied in the word “God.” To bring the opposing views into some degree of reconciliation, the humanist must bend to the acceptance of the divine influence as necessary for salvation; and the theist must on his part bend to the correction of the doctrine that this divine efficacy is that mighty cosmic power which he conceives and expresses by the freely-used term “God.”
The crux of the debate pivots on the distinction between the two terms “God” and “gods.” As humanism contends, it is inadmissible to predicate the intervention of the cosmic God in man’s life in any sense save the most remote and allegorical form of reference. Yet, as the sublime humanistic philosophy of the Greeks conceived it, powers known to them as “gods,” or a power known as “a god,” exercised immediate and decisive function in the life of man and in the business of his salvation. Man, they humbly postulated, has no contact in person with “God”; but he does sustain a most real and vital relationship with “a god,” and on his development of that relationship his salvation depends. For – and here is the whole nub of the whole question – the divine power accessible to him is, in a proper use of the term, a “god” within the complex of his own nature and constitution. (It is most pertinent, in passing, to mention that all modern “spiritual cultism” is the outcome of this affirmation.)
It follows that it is not, as theism believes, the power of the cosmic God of the religions that elevates man, but – and humanists must see this – it is a subordinate ray of the power of that cosmic deity, properly to be defined and designated as a god-power in nature and intelligence, which, not from some remote source outside himself, but from the inner mystical depths of his own constitution, must assert its influence to exalt man from beast to sage. Let the theist be admonished that he occupies an untenable position in holding that man must look outside and remotely beyond himself for help to lift him in the scale of being. Man must manipulate his own salvation – the humanist is right. But let him, too, be admonished that man, as he stands at the level of his purely animal-human nature, must look for and find and give full function to a power distinct from his natural endowment, which is quite appropriately to be classified as, not human, but divine. Yes, as all esoteric wisdom of the past – the wisdom that dictated the Scriptures – undeviatingly asserts, at the inner core of man’s being there dwells a divine potentiality that we make no mistake in calling “a god.” In Pauline Christianity it is the “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” “Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is within you” shouts the Apostle; a question which, with most apt reference in two directions, might be put now to both humanists and theists. “God in man is now residing,” runs a line in one of our Christmas hymns. What can the Incarnation mean if not that deity has taken lodgment in man’s nature? What can Christmas mean if not that a Christ child has been born in man’s constitution?
If the theist knew that the only “God” that can save man is this “god” within us, our own Immanuel, he would see the sanity in the humanist position. If, on the other hand, the humanist would recognize that the saving potential within man is not merely an element of our distinctly human nature, since this, coming from the beast will drag or hold us down, but an actual ray of universal deific power, implanted as a seed in the soil of man’s purely human heritage, and when cultivated in the garden of strenuous earthly existence, evolves its divine faculties for the redemption of man animal, to man, the god in the becoming, he would see that it is after all a god that saves us.
It needs only this seemingly minor readjustment in stating the terms of the problem to make the humanist’s position the correct one. His view and approach has always been more rational, better grounded in reality than the theist’s. But it fell short of full adequacy merely through his failure to discern that the saving help for man, while it is within the confines of his own province of being, is quite distinctly divine and not human in the philosophical sense. The knowledge that the divine potential in man was implanted as a seed of the cosmic God-life in the physical organism of man is one of those items of ancient esoteric science that was lost in the debacle of all such things in the fateful third century of Christian history. It was the Christly gift sent from heaven, or the world of higher dimensional consciousness. It is a sound theology which insists that we can not look to our Adamic nature to exalt us, but that we must evoke from deep within ourselves the growth of the seed of deific lineage to save us from the Adamic heritage. The ancient wisdom-teaching of the divine-human polarity within the constitution of man has been lost.
The humanist has been more nearly right than the theist, because he was working at the focal point where the effort for salvation must be localized. The theist has been right only in maintaining that the saving agent must be a divine power. But he grossly and hurtfully erred in mislocating the divine agency outside man’s nature in the cosmic heavens. Yes, deity must save man, but man must know that he already entertains that deity within himself, and needs but to release its miraculous potential within his own sphere of life.